Understanding Early Large Scale Collectives
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Understanding Early Large-Scale Collectives
This volume brings together perspectives from different parts of the world that showcase the wide variety of practices, institutions, and ideologies that allowed for shared identities and coordinated actions across broad collectives. It shows that there are many ways that people can work together. How did the world’s first large-scale collectives come into being? For much of our discipline’s history, the answer was the state. People learned how to be part of a larger community via political, economic, and social scaffolding that tended to build from earlier ways of living in a region. This scaffolding was often wobbly and always under construction—its flexibility often a design strength rather than a flaw. This book demonstrates that violence and rulers often played pivotal roles in large-scale collectives, but so did gender complementarity, markets, ritual centers, fictive kinship, and egalitarianism. Earlier evolutionary approaches tended to obscure both the variability and malleability of earlier political forms in a desire to find ideal types hidden beneath cross-cultural noise. This volume’s authors argue that this noise was politics-in-action and that there was no state, or other kind of polity, that was above the fray and divorced from the daily practices that brought people, animals, and other things together. A better understanding of early collective action strategies provides a richer understanding of past politics and, just as importantly, demonstrates governance alternatives for our contemporary society that struggles to address climate change, pandemics, and other pressing challenges. This book will interest archaeologists and historians, as well as anyone who is curious about other ways that we can work together to solve common problems.
Government for the Public Good
Author: Max Rashbrooke
language: en
Publisher: Bridget Williams Books
Release Date: 2018-09-26
In a time of global political ferment, established ideas are coming under renewed scrutiny. Chief among them is one of the dominant notions of our era: that we should entrust markets with many of the tasks previously carried out by government. In this wide-ranging book, Max Rashbrooke goes beyond anecdote and partisanship, delving deep into the latest research about the sweeping changes made to the public services that shape our collective lives. What he unearths is startling: it challenges established thinking on the effectiveness of market-based reforms and charts a new form of ‘deep’ democracy for the twenty-first century. Refreshing and far-sighted, this stimulating book offers New Zealanders a new way of thinking about government and how it can navigate the turbulent world ahead. The market is often not the solution to our problems. Markets have often been the problem. Max Rashbrooke makes the convincing case for models of government that work better, as well as those to be more wary of. Greater democracy can bring with it greater equality - but, Rashbrooke warns, democracy itself is imperilled by our current levels of inequality. Fast paced, globally informed and wittily written. – Professor Danny Dorling, Oxford University This book provides a wide range of excellent evidence-based arguments that help counter the oft-dominant small-government ideology of our times. Its defence of democracy, government and voter competence is a story that needs to be told more. – Laura O'Connell Rapira, Director of ActionStation
The Distribution of the Galaxies
Author: William C. Saslaw
language: en
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Release Date: 2000
This topical volume examines one of the leading problems in astronomy - how galaxies cluster in our Universe. This book, first published in 2000, describes gravitational theory, computer simulations and observations related to galaxy distribution functions. It embeds distribution functions in a broader astronomical context, including other exciting contemporary topics such as correlation functions, fractals, bound clusters, topology, percolation and minimal spanning trees. Key results are derived and the necessary gravitational physics provided to ensure the book is self-contained. Throughout the book, theory, computer simulation and observation are carefully interwoven and critically compared. The book also shows how future observations can test the theoretical models for the evolution of galaxy clustering at early times in our Universe. This clear and authoritative volume is written at a level suitable for graduate students, and will be of key interest to astronomers, cosmologists, physicists and applied statisticians.