What are the origins of nationalism and why is it capable of arousing such intense emotions? In this major study, Azar Gat counters the prevailing fashionable theories according to which nations and nationalism are modern and contrived or 'invented'. He sweeps across history and around the globe to reveal that ethnicity has always been highly political and that nations and national states have existed since the beginning of statehood millennia ago. He traces the deep roots of ethnicity and nationalism in human nature, showing how culture fits into human evolution from as early as our aboriginal condition and, in conjunction with kinship, defines ethnicity and ethnic allegiances. From the rise of states and empires to the present day, this book sheds new light on the explosive nature of ethnicity and nationalism, as well as on their more liberating and altruistic roles in forging identity and solidarity.

The first of three volumes of essays by Quentin Skinner, one of the world's leading intellectual historians. This collection includes some of his most important philosophical and methodological statements written over the past four decades, each carefully revised for publication in this form. In a series of seminal essays Professor Skinner sets forth the intellectual principles that inform his work. Writing as a practising historian, he considers the theoretical difficulties inherent in the pursuit of knowledge and interpretation, and elucidates the methodology which finds its expression in his two successive volumes. All of Professor Skinner's work is characterised by philosophical power, limpid clarity, and elegance of exposition; these essays, many of which are now recognised classics, provide a fascinating and convenient digest of the development of his thought. Professor Skinner has been awarded the Balzan Prize Life Time Achievement Award for Political Thought, History and Theory. Full details of this award can be found at http://www.balzan.it/News_eng.aspx?ID=2474

For over twenty years, Claude Meillassoux has been concerned with the study of the different modes of production which existed in Africa prior to colonisation, and the ways in which they responded to colonisation. In this book Professor Meillassoux draws both on his extensive fieldwork in Africa and on the anthropological literature to provide a detailed theoretical analysis of the self-sustaining agricultural community and its articulation with capitalism through the process of colonisation. Using evidence from the usually separated disciplines of ethnology and economics, he explores the major contradiction created by the persistence within the heart of capitalism of the self-sustaining domestic community as a means of reproduction of labour power, and shows that in fact there is a logical connection between the kinship structures which control reproduction in such communities and the forms of exploitation of workers from groups dominated by imperialism. This book offers the elements both of an advanced theory of the domestic mode of production and of a radical critique of classical and structuralist anthropology. just as Professor Meillassoux's earlier work, L'Anthropologie iconomique des Gouro de Cote d'Ivoire was received as a 'turning point in the history of anthropology', this study, which goes beyond a discussion of concepts in an attempt to further the practical steps taken by Marx and Engels, represents a major contribution to the contemporary progress of historical materialism.

This seminal study explores the national, imperial and indigenous interests at stake in a major survey expedition undertaken by the German Schlagintweit brothers, while in the employ of the East India Company, through South and Central Asia in the 1850s. It argues that German scientists, lacking in this period a formal empire of their own, seized the opportunity presented by other imperial systems to observe, record, collect and loot manuscripts, maps, and museological artefacts that shaped European understandings of the East. Drawing on archival research in three continents, von Brescius vividly explores the dynamics and conflicts of transcultural exploration beyond colonial frontiers in Asia. Analysing the contested careers of these imperial outsiders, he reveals significant changes in the culture of gentlemanly science, the violent negotiation of scientific authority in a transnational arena, and the transition from Humboldtian enquiry to a new disciplinary order. This book offers a new understanding of German science and its role in shaping foreign empires, and provides a revisionist account of the questions of authority and of authenticity in reportage from distant sites.This seminal study explores the national, imperial and indigenous interests at stake in a major survey expedition undertaken by the German Schlagintweit brothers, while in the employ of the East India Company, through South and Central Asia in the 1850s. It argues that German scientists, lacking in this period a formal empire of their own, seized the opportunity presented by other imperial systems to observe, record, collect and loot manuscripts, maps, and museological artefacts that shaped European understandings of the East. Drawing on archival research in three continents, von Brescius vividly explores the dynamics and conflicts of transcultural exploration beyond colonial frontiers in Asia. Analysing the contested careers of these imperial outsiders, he reveals significant changes in the culture of gentlemanly science, the violent negotiation of scientific authority in a transnational arena, and the transition from Humboldtian enquiry to a new disciplinary order. This book offers a new understanding of German science and its role in shaping foreign empires, and provides a revisionist account of the questions of authority and of authenticity in reportage from distant sites.

Linguistic relativity is the claim that culture, through language, affects the way in which we think, and especially our classification of the experienced world. This book reexamines ideas about linguistic relativity in the light of new evidence and changes in theoretical climate. Parts I and II address the classical issues in the relation between thought and language, and the extent of linguistic and cultural universals. Parts III and IV show how changes in our understanding of meaning require that we look at how context enters into interpretation, and how context is constituted in social interaction. The editors have provided a substantial introduction which examines changes in thinking about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in the light of developments in anthropology, linguistics, and cognitive science; and also introductions to each section which will be of especial use to students.

In The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages , Geraldine Heng questions the common assumption that the concepts of race and racisms only began in the modern era. Examining Europe's encounters with Jews, Muslims, Africans, Native Americans, Mongols, and the Romani ('Gypsies'), from the 12th through 15th centuries, she shows how racial thinking, racial law, racial practices, and racial phenomena existed in medieval Europe before a recognizable vocabulary of race emerged in the West.

Analysing sources in a variety of media, including stories, maps, statuary, illustrations, architectural features, history, saints' lives, religious commentary, laws, political and social institutions, and literature, she argues that religion - so much in play again today - enabled the positing of fundamental differences among humans that created strategic essentialisms to mark off human groups and populations for racialized treatment. Her ground-breaking study also shows how race figured in the emergence of homo europaeus and the identity of Western Europe in this time.

High-dimensional probability offers insight into the behavior of random vectors, random matrices, random subspaces, and objects used to quantify uncertainty in high dimensions. Drawing on ideas from probability, analysis, and geometry, it lends itself to applications in mathematics, statistics, theoretical computer science, signal processing, optimization, and more. It is the first to integrate theory, key tools, and modern applications of high-dimensional probability. Concentration inequalities form the core, and it covers both classical results such as Hoeffding's and Chernoff's inequalities and modern developments such as the matrix Bernstein's inequality. It then introduces the powerful methods based on stochastic processes, including such tools as Slepian's, Sudakov's, and Dudley's inequalities, as well as generic chaining and bounds based on VC dimension. A broad range of illustrations is embedded throughout, including classical and modern results for covariance estimation, clustering, networks, semidefinite programming, coding, dimension reduction, matrix completion, machine learning, compressed sensing, and sparse regression.

Recent years have witnessed an explosion in the volume and variety of data collected in all scientific disciplines and industrial settings. Such massive data sets present a number of challenges to researchers in statistics and machine learning. This book provides a self-contained introduction to the area of high-dimensional statistics, aimed at the first-year graduate level. It includes chapters that are focused on core methodology and theory - including tail bounds, concentration inequalities, uniform laws and empirical process, and random matrices - as well as chapters devoted to in-depth exploration of particular model classes - including sparse linear models, matrix models with rank constraints, graphical models, and various types of non-parametric models. With hundreds of worked examples and exercises, this text is intended both for courses and for self-study by graduate students and researchers in statistics, machine learning, and related fields who must understand, apply, and adapt modern statistical methods suited to large-scale data.

The importance of writing as a means of communication in a society formerly without it, or where writing has been confined to particular groups, is enormous. It objectifies speech, provides language with a material correlative, and in this material form speech can be transmitted over space and preserved over time. In this book the contributors discuss cultures at different levels of sophistication and literacy and examine the importance of writing on the development of these societies. All the articles except the first were specially written for this book and the extensive introduction unites and synthesizes the material.

'Language attrition' describes the loss of, or changes to, grammatical and other features of a language as a result of declining use by speakers who have changed their linguistic environment and language habits. In such a situation there may, for example, be simplification in the tense system or in certain properties of subordinate clauses; some vocabulary items might fall into disuse and phonetic features may be restructured. These changes can be affected by features of the speaker's environment, but also by his or her attitudes and processes of identification. This book provides a detailed and up-to-date introduction to the way in which language attrition can affect language, as well as to the extra- and sociolinguistic features involved. It also familiarizes the reader with experimental approaches to attrition and data analysis techniques and provides hands-on guidelines on how to apply them.

"The nervous system is made up of a large number of interacting elements. To understand how such a complex system functions requires the construction and analysis of computational models at many different levels. This book provides a step-by-step account of how to model the neuron and neural circuitry to understand the nervous system at all levels, from ion channels to networks. Starting with a simple model of the neuron as an electrical circuit, gradually more details are added to include the effects of neuronal morphology, synapses, ion channels and intracellular signaling. The principle of abstraction is explained through chapters on simplifying models, and how simplified models can be used in networks. This theme is continued in a final chapter on modeling the development of the nervous system. Requiring an elementary background in neuroscience and some high school mathematics, this textbook is an ideal basis for a course on computational neuroscience." (Amazon)
"This is a wonderful, clear and compelling text on mathematically-minded computational modelling in neuroscience. It is beautifully aimed at those engaged in capturing quantitatively, and thus simulating, complex neural phenomena at multiple spatial and temporal scales, from intracellular calcium dynamics and stochastic ion channels, through compartmental modelling, all the way to aspects of development. It takes particular care to define the processes, potential outputs and even some pitfalls of modelling; and can be recommended for containing the key lessons and pointers for people seeking to build their own computational models. By eschewing issues of coding and information processing, it largely hews to concrete biological data, and it nicely avoids sacrificing depth for breadth. It is very suitably pitched as a Master's level text, and its two appendices, on mathematical methods and software resources, will rapidly become dog-eared."
Peter Dayan, University College London

Cognitive linguists are bound by the cognitive commitment, which is the commitment to providing a characterization of the general principles governing all aspects of human language, in a way that is informed by, and accords with, what is known about the brain and mind from other disciplines. But what do we know about aspects of cognition that are relevant for theories of language? Which insights can help us build cognitive reality into our descriptive practice and move linguistic theorizing forward? This unique study integrates research findings from across the cognitive sciences to generate insights that challenge the way in which frequency has been interpreted in usage-based linguistics. It answers the fundamental questions of why frequency of experience has the effect it has on language development, structure and representation, and what role psychological and neurological explorations of core cognitive processes can play in developing a cognitively more accurate theoretical account of language.
Explains how frequency of occurrence made its way into linguistics language over the past century and spells out how the findings have changed the field
Bridges the divide between cognitive linguistics and the cognitive sciences by explicitly linking work on learning, attention and memory to a usage-based analysis of linguistic complexity
Assigns a prominent role to learning, which was longed exiled form the linguistics scene and has only recently made a comeback

The linguist and philologist Jacob Grimm (1785-1863) is best remembered as co-editor, with his brother Wilhelm, of Grimm's Fairy Tales, though their great Deutsches Wörterbuch remains an influential etymological reference work. Grimm's exhaustive study in comparative mythology and religion, Deutsche Mythologie, was first published in German in 1835: this English translation, published between 1880 and 1888, is of the posthumous fourth German edition of 1875. Drawing on his broad knowledge of language and world mythology, Grimm outlines a wide variety of themes in Germanic folklore (such as time, creation, destiny and the soul), comparing them to classical and oriental tales as well as charting the influence of Christianity on legends and on Pagan religion. The first three volumes contain Grimm's account of the myths and legends, while the fourth contains supplementary material and three appendices. This is an invaluable resource for scholars of mythology, religion and German cultural history.

Sir John Edwin Sandys (1844-1922) was a leading Cambridge classicist and a Fellow of St. John's College. His most famous work is this three-volume History of Classical Scholarship, published between 1903 and 1908, which remains the only large-scale work on the subject to span the entire period from the sixth century BCE to the end of the nineteenth century. The history of classical studies was a popular topic during the nineteenth century, particularly in Germany, but Sandys stands out for the ambitious scope of his work, even though much of it was based on earlier scholarship. His chronological account is subdivided by genre and region, with some chapters devoted to particularly influential individuals. Volume 2 covers the period from the Renaissance to the eighteenth century.

Gottlob Frege (1848-1925) is one of the founding figures of analytic philosophy, whose contributions to logic, philosophical semantics, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mathematics set the agenda for future generations of theorists in these and related areas. Dale Jacquette's lively and incisive biography charts Frege's life from its beginnings in small-town north Germany, through his student days in Jena, to his development as an enduringly influential thinker. Along the way Jacquette considers Frege's ground-breaking Begriffschrift (1879), in which he formulated his 'ideal logical language', his magisterial Grundgesetze der Arithmetik (1893 and 1903), and his complex relation to thinkers including Husserl and especially Russell, whose Paradox had such drastic implications for Frege's logicism. Jacquette concludes with a thoughtful assessment of Frege's legacy. His rich and informative biography will appeal to all who are interested in Frege's philosophy.

The Cambridge History of Iran is a multi-volume survey of Iranian history and culture, and its contribution to the civilization of the world. All aspects of the religious, philosophical, political, economic, scientific and artistic elements in Iranian civilization are studied, with some emphasis on the geographical and ecological factors that have contributed to that civilization's special character. The aim is to provide a collection of readable essays rather than a catalogue of information. The volumes offer scope for the publication of new ideas as well as providing summaries of established facts. It is hoped that the volumes will act as a stimulus to specialists, but they are primarily concerned with answering the sort of questions about the past and present of Iran that are asked by the non-specialist.

The vast expansion of Indian culture by Buddhists who penetrated through Bactria into the region of modern Kashghar, Yarkand, Khotan, Maralbashi, Kucha and Loulan has been disclosed by the results of expeditions sent out in the first decade of this century. Among the numerous documents was a considerable number written in Ancient Khotan, but in a dialect of the Sakas, or Indo-Scythians, who from the first century BC to the third century AD were dominant in North-western India. Volume I of Khotanese Texts was published in 1946, Volume II in 1954 and Volume III, which completed the publication of the longer texts in 1956. Volume IV containing the Saka Texts from the Hedin Collection appeared in 1961. The fifth volume completed the printing of the texts. When it was published in 1963, it contained a large number of fragments and other pieces published for the first time, as well as the Hoernle Collection, the Samguata-Sutra folios and the Karma Text.