Exploring life, death, and the afterlife in Mesopotamia, Alhena Gadotti and Alexandra Kleinerman examine how life and death experiences continually developed over the course of nearly three millennia of Mesopotamian history. To achieve this, the book follows the life cycle of the people of the Tigris and Euphrates River valleys from 3000 BCE to 300 BCE, from birth, through death, and beyond.
This book is the first to interrogate the relationships between living and dying through case studies and primary evidence. Including letters written by both women and men, the book allows readers to enter the minds of the ancients.

First, the authors focus on life through topics such as the rituals surrounding birth, marriage, and religion. The authors then examine the common causes of death, the rituals associated with death, and the Mesopotamian views of the netherworld, its gods, and inhabitants. Concepts of gender fluidity, both in life and death, are considered alongside evidence from epigraphic data.

Illustrating daily life as a multifaceted subject affected by time, space, location, socioeconomics, and gender, this book creates a window into the conditions and concerns of the Mesopotamian people.

Responding to the profound challenges of our times, this book provides a comparative and cross-cultural exploration of the role of religion in war in a long historical perspective, from the second millennium BCE, and even earlier, up to early modernity.

Individual chapters focus on the ancient Near East, the Mediterranean basin, Europe and North Africa. Widely diverse case studies explore the historic link between the conduct of war and the growing complexity of human society conditioned by the ownership of ideological authority. The book explores how in most historical societies this authority was religious.

Written by experts from different disciplinary perspectives, the volume challenges common assumptions about the historical relationship between religion and war and extends our understanding of the dangers and complexities of today's world.

This volume explores a broad range of perceptions, receptions and constructions of the soldierly body in the ancient world, putting the notion of embodiment at the forefront of its engagement with ancient warfare. The 10 chapters presented here respond directly to the question of how war was embodied in antiquity by drawing on detailed case studies to examine the sensory and bodily experience of combat across wide-ranging time periods and geographies, from classical Greece and Rome to Roman Britain and Persia. Together they illustrate how the body in war is a vital universal element that unites these vastly different contexts.

Although the centrality of the human body in war-making was recognized in antiquity, a body-centric approach to combat has yet to be widely adopted in modern Classical Studies. This collection brings together new research in ancient history, classical literature, material culture, bioarchaeology and art history within a theoretical framework drawn from recent developments in War Studies that places the body front and centre. The new perspectives it offers on brutality in battle, the physical expression of warrior identity, and post-combat remembrance and recovery challenge readers to re-assess and expand their existing ideas as part of a broader ongoing 'call to arms' to revolutionize the study of ancient warfare in the 21st century.

Examining the identity and belonging of native and non-native speakers of Greek during the time of the High Roman Empire, Eleni Bozia closely studies grammarians, lexicographers and literary writers who used Attic Greek.

Bozia argues that transculturalism and translingualism created a new space for both the naturalised and native citizenry. In the act of imitating, emulating and recreating Attic Greek, speakers formed a socio-politically distinct and nuanced mode of expression in the social echelons of the Roman world.

Additionally, this is the first book to explore Greek and Latin texts from both a philological and a computational linguistics perspective. The result is a consideration of how imitation and innovation affect the social positioning of native and bilingual speakers. As such, this combined reading of data derived from classical studies in conjunction with computational linguistics, offers the context of how to serve a new interpretation of our understanding and appreciation of identity.

Why does antisemitic messaging strike a chord in certain communities without Jews but fall flat in neighboring communities equally without Jews? This book focuses on antipathy towards Jews - expressed through successful electoral campaigns where a candidate or political party championed antisemitism - in communities located in three different nations where the Jewish population had virtually no history of interaction with the resident majority population of non-Jews. The cases are: the election of antisemitic deputies in the 1893 German Reichstag Elections from eastern Saxony; the election of a slate of antisemitic deputies to the French Chamber in 1898 from the southwestern French department of the Gers; and the significant proportion of votes for the antisemitic campaign of Gerald B. Winrod in the U.S. Senate Republican Party primary election in 1938 in Kansas. Each of these examples illustrates the existence of heightened levels of antisemitism in cases where few, if any, Jews had engagement with the majority population.

Through the analysis of 10 oral witness testimonies of local residents and a previously undocumented letter correspondence between a Jewish Holocaust survivor and her gentile friend, The Jewish Purging of a Small German Town provides new insights into how the Nazi persecution of the Jewish people unfolded in small towns and communities around Germany. Incorporating her own personal reflections on growing up in Salmuenster, Maria R. Boes uncovers the truth about the Jewish residents who lived there and what happened to them after the Nazis came to power in 1933 - a story which has been silenced and suppressed.

Boes charts the town's unsettling trajectory from a harmonious pre-Nazi local community to an environment where, after initial protracted local resistance, Jewish persecution escalated from the boycotting of stores to physical, fiscal and emotional acts against Jewish residents. The book reveals how this culminated in Jewish residents being purged from the town by 1937 without any paramilitary intervention or outside physical force, prior to the 1938 Kristallnacht and long before similar ousters occurred in big cities throughout the country. It also shows how Salmuenster, like other neighbouring towns, continued to deny the rightful historical belonging of its Jewish residents long after the war was over and the Nazis had been defeated.

This microhistory is an illuminating study of the momentous spectre of Germany's small towns being at the forefront of successfully fulfilling Nazi aims to remove Jewish residents - driving them out of their homes with the ultimate goal of driving them out of existence.

Focussing on the ways in which cannabis has been demonized, sacralized and normalized, Christopher Partridge analyses the complex and often difficult relationship Western societies have had with the plant since the nineteenth century.

After an introduction to cannabis and its uses, the book discusses how and why it was constructed as a profane influence and a marker of deviance. It then examines the emergence of medicinal cannabis, showing how this has contributed to its normalization and even its sacralization. Finally, there is a discussion of sacred cannabis, which looks at its use within modern occultism, Rastafari and several cannabis churches.

Overall, the book provides a cultural history of cannabis in the modern world, which exposes the underlying reasons for the various and changing attitudes to this popular psychoactive substance.

This textbook provides a detail guide to the use of Attachment Centred-Therapy (ACT), a model designed over the course of three decades which enables future and present therapists to co-construct a more coherent narrative of a person's life, an essential indicator of one's emotional and mental health. This book provides students and practitioners undergoing professional development with a detailed and applicable guide to using the model, written by the man who designed and developed the therapy. As such, this book is based on real world experience of the implementation of therapy, considering theory and research, and demonstrates how ACT can be used in applications across a wide range of clinical contexts.

The purpose of ACT is to help those undergoing therapy equip themselves with new resources which can assist in dealing with their predominate issues by changing how they process information about the past in the present, to achieve a better outcome in the future. ACT is a growth-oriented psychotherapy, designed using Maslow's Modified Hierarchy of Needs as a guide, and is distinctive because it utilizes the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) as both an assessment instrument and as a vehicle for therapeutic intervention. Another of its benefits is that it's a collaborative treatment, with the therapist forming a team with the therapy's recipient, and then engaging together in a joint effort to create a more coherent narrative of the past, and to correct errors in information processing.

This textbook is made up of practical guidance on the application of ACT, with each concept brought to life with case-study examples, complete with sections of dialogue from sessions annotated to illustrate the methods. It will provide a valuable new teaching tool for teachers and students of systemic practice, family therapy, clinical psychology, counselling, and psychotherapy, alongside qualified practitioners, and practitioners in training.

This book places the contemporary fear of climate change in historical perspective, showing that throughout human history the dominant perspective on the future has been one of fear. Across a broad historical sweep, the book describes the varied means employed to predict and control the future: magic, religion, science, and technology. Future Fear traces fear of the future from prehistory to the present, culminating in the contemporary fear of imminent climate change catastrophe. Consideration is also given to hope in a more positive future, revealing that visions of the future have often been a mingling of fear and hope.

The collective term used by the authors, "stress spectrum disorder", explains the major causal factors that determine and maintain symptoms of physical and psychological overload. Specific recommendations are given for those who suffer from symptoms or have already been diagnosed with a psychological disorder. Special attention is given to people in the public eye, such as managers or executives. The explanatory, conditional, disorder and maintenance model is based on phylogenetic patterns of people in general as well as individual biography-specific patterns. In addition to the explanation of the disorder models, concrete assistance is provided, be it phylogenetic-human or individual-biographical.

In this Open Access book, Katharina Merian discusses memories of Marielle Franco from the perspective of the concept of dangerous memory introduced by the political theologian Johann Baptist Metz. Franco was an Afro-Brazilian human-rights activist and city councilor of Rio de Janeiro who was assassinated on March 14, 2018. Her murder elicited worldwide protest and empathy. Today she is considered an international symbol in the fight for human, women, and LGBTQ+ rights. Based on the memories of people from Franco's inner circle, the study explores Franco's life, what it meant to the people around her, and how her image was transformed following her murder. By critically engaging with Metz's concept of dangerous memory, which concerns memories of suffering and unfulfilled hopes that challenge the present, Merian demonstrates that the memories of Franco represent a decolonial dangerous memory that sparks individual and collective self-empowerment among Black women, members of the LGBTQ+ community, and favela residents. This work not only contributes to a critical reappraisal of Franco's story and the meaning of her memory in the Brazilian and international context but also proposes a differentiated understanding of dangerous memory that highlights the relationship between solidarity and self-empowerment in a moment of existential danger and threat.

This book aims to provide a better understanding of the different practices of creativity and innovation under crisis situations. Drawing on theories and studies by scholars in psychology, education, and organizational behavior, this edited collection brings together renowned international experts to explore the active and reactive adaptations to the transformations caused by crises. It discusses how abrupt changes in personal, social, political, economic, or environmental affairs are an integral part of our individual and social lives, which drive people and organizations to adapt and change.

With flexibility, adaptability, and problem-solving at the core of its nature, creativity and innovation have the potential to help people cope with harsh and uncertain circumstances caused by crises. This book delves into the positive relationship between the experience of crisis and creativity and innovation, presenting theoretical inquiries, empirical studies, and their practical implications for a constructive shift in crisis management, coping mechanisms, and individual and societal wellbeing. A must read for researchers in psychology, philosophy, sociology, economy and politics, interested in crisis and disaster studies.

This book offers a new look at well-being from a multidisciplinary standpoint. Research from industry clearly indicates that factors such as creativity, critical awareness, well-being, interdisciplinary understanding of positive psychology, and the ability to form strong relationships will determine the viability of organizations as collectively we enter the second half of the twenty-first century. Thus, a sound understanding of how these facets become melded into entrepreneurship, the workplace environment, and creative innovation is a requirement for individuals in the workplace. With a dearth of information about these facets as individual components and as a collective whole, this book draws these elements of overall well-being into a multidisciplinary focus. Thus, with chapters covering diverse fields such as philosophy, education, economics, mathematics, and medicine, the book offers a fresh approach to how positive psychology impacts entrepreneurship.

This book sheds new light on labor and laboring in the Roman world. It starts with the individual laborer and works up, emphasizing their agency in navigating, transforming, and transcending the systems and structures around them. Taking advantage of the broad applicability of notions of work and labor to human lives at every rung of Roman society, the volume also offers numerous overlapping frameworks for thinking comparatively between many different kinds of work, whether in agriculture, craft, trade, politics, art, or literature. The book is organized around the 'typical' work-life experience of the modern 9-to-5 and provides a means of thinking in a rigorous way about how the working lives of scholars of Rome are caught up in ancient discourse and practices.

This book explores the concept of 'Passion' as a strong motivational force that can increase well-being and quality of life. The authors focus on the importance of having passion in various areas of life, to increase well-being, life satisfaction, and promote meaning in life. They go on to present how we can find and increase passion, supported by various psychological theories and research. Finally, the authors connect passion to expertise. They argue that it is essential to maintain passion during the process that leads to expertise, which is characterized as a long and demanding process that can be associated with negative consequences.

This book argues that whenever we are talking about cancel culture, identity politics, political correctness, antisemitism, conspiracy theories, or the alt-Right, we are dealing with a culture war, which often pits two sides against each other in a split world of good and evil. These political representations rely on a set of unconscious processes best understand through psychoanalysis. As this book argues, if you want to comprehend the rhetoric of the Right, the Left, conservatives, and centrists, it is necessary to see how these ideologies rely on unacknowledged defense mechanisms, fantasies, fears, and desires. In fact, if we do not employ psychoanalytic concepts to examine our political investments, we will be unable to get to the root causes driving these social productions. Each chapter of this book looks at a specific writer's or politician's take on contemporary culture wars. One of the reoccurring themes concerns the way free speech has been weaponized by different ideological formations, and this battle over free expression is often centered on the role that universities play in balancing the demands among competing social interests. This book will not only clarify what universities should be, but it will also help us to move beyond our polarized political world.

This book studies the historiography of smoking in modern Britain, with a focus on the social, cultural, and emotional aspects of the practice.

Centring on four specific moments in modern British history; the turn of the 20th century, the Second World War, the 1980s, and the mid-2000s, An Atmospheric History of Smoking not only traces the history of tobacco use, but explores the cultural significance of - and attitudes toward - smoking. Markovic combines oral histories with archival research and artefact analysis, in order to evoke the unique social atmospheres surrounding smoking at each of these key periods within British history.

By analysing factors such as the encouragement of the practice as part of Home Front 'mood management' during the Second World War, or the impact of smoking on 1980s workplace relations, this book highlights how the role of smoking in public spheres has undergone significant change throughout the 20th century. Constructing the 2007 UK ban on smoking in public places as a turning point for the practice in the British cultural imagination, Markovic examines how smoking has both been deemed 'out of place', and yet still persists today.

This book provides, from a psychological perspective, a concise critical introduction to, and assessment of, three different approaches to managing diversity: multiculturalism, assimilation, and omniculturalism. This task is undertaken in global context and with reference to cutting edge empirical psychological research.

Historically, assimilation has been the dominant approach to managing diversity. However, since the late 1960s multiculturalism has gained favor and is now the most commonly adopted approach in most Western as well as in some non-Western societies. Both assimilation and multiculturalism rest on some central psychological assumptions that are not supported by empirical research. After critically reviewing the psychological foundations of assimilation and multiculturalism, it is argued that we need to explore new approaches to managing diversity in the twenty-first century. A number of contemporary research programs, such as those related to social identity theory and the common group identity model, point to omniculturalism as a more promising approach to managing diversity. Also, global warming, nuclear proliferation and other major challenges confronting humankind suggest that a diversity management approach that gives priority to human commonalities and universal rights is better suited to our contemporary needs.

This book analyses major discourses of cultural diversity and human rights. The chapters contained in this book examine critically major issues confronting cultural diversity and human rights, both locally and globally. They analyze the challenges that different societies are confronted with, as they attempt to implement, protect and defend cultural diversity and human rights in an ever-changing world, and culturally diverse environment. Topics covered include celebrating cultural diversity in sport, human rights legacies of the African slave trade and the long-term implications of colonialism, assessment of human rights and sports, effectiveness in intercultural dialogue in dominant discourses of cultural diversity and human rights, and the rising importance of cultural diversity and human rights in sport for children and youth.

This book will be helpful to readers to explore their own views and consider more broadly what may be in the best interests of a fair and just society, as envisioned in human rights treaties, human rights education in schools, and cultural diversity.