A rapid development of religious popular cultures and lifestyles can be observed across the globe. This book provides unique case studies from Asia and Europe illustrating new religious practices, forms of articulation and mass mediatization, all of which render religious traditions significant for contemporary issues and concerns. The essays examine experiences of spirituality in combination with commercialization and expressive performative practices as well as everyday politics of identity. Based on innovative theoretical reflections, the essays take into consideration what the transcultural negotiation of religion, tradition and the popular signifies in different places and social contexts. With contributions by Anthony Reid, Hubert Knoblauch, Ariel Heryanto, Stefanie von Schnurbein and others.

This is an open access book. ABTR 2022 is the first international conference on Academia-Based Tourism Revival initiated to generate a sort of a hybrid method proposed and tested in relation to the tourism revival process in Indonesia, especially in Banyumas, Central Java following the covid-19. This conference aims to generate collective ideas of researchers, practitioners and policy makers on the sound and strategic solutions to reinvent and revive the tourism sector in the post Covid-19 era in Banyumas, Central Java, Indonesia. This international conference is supported by experts from various universities: Mae Fah Luang University (Thailand), Lomonosov Moscow State University (Rusia), Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (Malaysia), Mariano Marcos State University (Philipines), Jamal Mohamed College (India). These universities have confirmed to send their delegations to participate in this conference as presenters.

Do you like being scared? Maybe not in real life, but do you like to occasionally read scary stories and watch movies that can send shivers up and down your spine? If so, you are not alone. Author Frank Simmons's The Monkey That Had No Tree to Climb is a scary story. At least it is to the animal characters whose adventures he shares. Sam the monkey and his friends are riding to the next city in their circus train when it crashes. The animals escape the crash -- including the meanest lion in the world. Like the other animals, he's hungry and eyeing Sam and his friends as his next meal. And because much of their surroundings have been destroyed by fires, there's little for them to eat and few places to hide. The Monkey That Had No Tree to Climb is an entertaining story that encourages young readers to expand their vocabularies. But it is also a cautionary tale of how humans can put animals at risk when they're not careful in the animals' home territory.

Ned Kelly's tin helmet looms large over Australia's bushranging past, but what about all the unsung outlaws of the Australian bush? What about Black Caesar, who escaped his tyrannous British overlords four times and indeed invented the great Australian tradition of bushranging? Or Mad Dog Morgan who set out to write his name in blood on history's ledger, the dynamic Captain Thunderbolt and his loyal wife Mary Ann Bugg, bushranging's greatest queen, and Matthew Brady, the gentleman bushranger, who showed us all the cilivised side of armed robbery? In Mad Dogs and Thunderbolts Ben Pobjie celebrates the derring-do and revolutionary passion of all the wild colonial boys and girls who raided our towns and stole our hearts, all while wearing sensible headgear.

Chinese President Xi Jinping launched the Silk Road Economic Belt component of the One Belt One Road (OBOR) initiative at Kazakhstan in 2013. OBOR is a development strategy and framework that focuses on connectivity and cooperation among countries primarily in Eurasia. It consists of two main components, the land-based 'Silk Road Economic Belt' (SREB) and ocean-going 'Maritime Silk Road' (MSR). This book studies the equilibrium or balance between overland and maritime trade routes of OBOR.This book has two major sections. The interpretive section examines contemporary media narratives related to the OBOR initiative and how contemporary commentators appropriate narratives about historical events related to the maritime Silk Road to interpret current policy agendas and legitimize diplomatic or economic exchanges. In terms of institutional studies, the chapters related to Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) will look at the issues facing the Bank in its quest in forming a new world platform for multilateral development financing.The other section, the empirical case study of the publication highlights the fact that Euro-China High Speed Rail (HSR) and Central Asia-China HSR are not viable at the moment as passenger volume is not sufficient to justify the HSR line. This section examines the overland route of the OBOR and looks at recent Chinese HSR history and conventional sub-high speed rail technology development, and identifies technical & economic criteria determining the appropriate technology for a certain line. The chapter in this section will use the developed criteria to analyze the various rail linkage projects currently under study in the OBOR framework, highlight the economic, bureaucratic and geo-political challenges that these projects likely face and lay down conditions that will determine the outcome of these projects.

In this respect, visual culture emerges from the need to bridge and explore the gap between the diversely rich visual experience in postmodern culture, and the ability to understand it. What kind of visual experience meant in this relation to postmodernism? It is the visual experience of the consumers (rather than the producers) shaped by “complex, overlapping and disjunctive order” of understanding the visualized everyday life events.

This book provides a lively and accessible account of Australia’s most prominent crimes and criminals of the nineteenth and twentieth century and offers an informative background for those seeking to understand crimes committed today. A History of Crime in Australia examines the imposition of English law on this ancient continent, and how its operation affected both transported offenders from Great Britain and Ireland, and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples whose own systems of Law were overlaid. Drawing upon cutting-edge research in the field, original work by the author, and essays from leading crime history researchers, it addresses the question of whether there was an Australian underworld. In doing so, it provides background for well known offenders including bushranger Ned Kelly and the razor gangs of the 1920s and for sensational crimes like the Mount Rennie Outrage, the Pyjama Girl Mystery and the Shark Arm Murder and the miscarriage of justice following the disappearance of Azaria Chamberlain at Uluru in 1980. Through these case studies, the book draws out points of tension and cohesion within Australian society, exposing the enduring anxiety around those who were considered to be outsiders, and how the criminal justice system was used to manage these concerns. This book includes a guide to conducting research in the field of Australian crime history and sources for further study. Designed as an introductory text for students, this book will be of interest to those studying criminology and crime history, and anyone who would like to deepen their understanding of crime’s place in Australia’s social and cultural history.