The chapter addresses attentional distribution in conceptualisations of events. It argues that language directs attention over particular portions of an event-structure selecting certain elements for focal attention while conceptually backgrounding other elements. The ideological implications of attentional distribution are discussed with reference to mystification whereby either human agency in or the human impact of harmful social actions is obscured. Two case studies are presented. The first considers action-chain profiling in media coverage of fatalities on the Gaza border. It shows how attentional distributions evoked by intransitive, passive and agentless passive constructions as well as nominalisations conceptually background those responsible for the fatalities. It further shows the conceptual means by which the impact of violent actions may be mitigated. The second considers path-profiling in immigration discourse. It shows how different verb choices serve to highlight humanitarian motivations for migration versus the impact of migration on host countries and considers the role of metonymy in legitimating hostile immigration policies.

Abstract: This chapter explores the potential of mathematics education for the formation of critical democratic habits of open-mindedness, flexibility, and concern for understanding. It shows how different approaches to the teaching of math serve to model different conceptions of authority and analyzes the implications that these conceptions have for democratic engagement.

This chapter explores the particular significance of the present, and the ways in which anthropology has approached ‘presentism’ as a metaphysical claim, a sociological description, and a means of analysis. While recognising that an analysis of the conditions of presentism is crucial for understanding contemporary social life, the central argument here is that any attempt to embrace presentism as a methodological tool or even metaphysical truth risks distorting human activity in a disastrous way by abstracting it from the material environment that makes such activity possible. The chapter concludes with a reflection upon the relationship between time and mystification in order to understand temporal disjuncture: conditions of life which obscure – and at the same time are violently dissonant with – the temporality of the ecologies and geologies which make that life possible. The task for anthropology is to analyse the conditions of this extraction from deep time, not to replicate it.