Land is a subject of great conflict and debate in India. Over the last decade, it has influenced electoral verdicts and political fortunes and remains one of the most persistent challenges facing the nation. This book argues that the focus on politics and land acquisition has deflected attention from the possibilities of market-oriented approaches that are becoming relevant because of booming, but diverse, land markets. It aims to nudge the discussion towards a better understanding of the complementary strengths of state- and market-led approaches to the many problems of land in rural and urban India. Featuring original essays from leading analysts, this book examines the agrarian crisis and urbanization, laws and policies, displacement and compensation, factories and housing, cooperation and conflict, and other vital issues affecting land at the regional and national level. These multiple lines of enquiry make this book a critical and objective commentary on contemporary India and its ongoing economic, socio-political, and legal struggles with land.

This book looks at both the Republican and the Democratic Party plans for Social Security, showing how each confronts significant ideological and political hurdles. David Koitz cuts through the partisan rhetoric that has made social Security one of the most debated programs on the U.S. political scene and looks at both the Republican and the Democratic plans for Social Security, showing important flaws in each.

An acclaimed book and widely acknowledged classic, The Middle Ground steps outside the simple stories of Indian-white relations - stories of conquest and assimilation and stories of cultural persistence. It is, instead, about a search for accommodation and common meaning. It tells how Europeans and Indians met, regarding each other as alien, as other, as virtually nonhuman, and how between 1650 and 1815 they constructed a common, mutually comprehensible world in the region around the Great Lakes that the French called pays d'en haut. Here the older worlds of the Algonquians and of various Europeans overlapped, and their mixture created new systems of meaning and of exchange. Finally, the book tells of the breakdown of accommodation and common meanings and the re-creation of the Indians as alien and exotic. First published in 1991, the 20th anniversary edition includes a new preface by the author examining the impact and legacy of this study.

This book tells the story of people in central Mindanao who, over time, developed a masterful capacity to borrow from the new without losing touch with the old, reimagining themselves not as willing Western clones or stubborn tribal traditionalists, but as virtuosos at articulating between multiple ways of being. Its central question is: How did they negotiate the middle ground in a world of swirling change? In answering that question, Dr. Edgerton provides a fascinating case study that will be invaluable to scholars everywhere who seek to understand how people with little power manage to articulate a changing sense of identity in the face of forces far more powerful than themselves.

This book explores the tradition of the "science of man" in French medicine of the era 1750-1850, focusing on controversies about the nature of the "physical-moral" relation and their effects on the role of medicine in French society. Its chief purpose is to recover the history of a holistic tradition in French medicine that has been neglected, because it lay outside the mainstream themes of modern medicine, which include experimental, reductionist, and localistic conceptions of health and disease. Professor Williams also challenges existing historiography, which holds that the "anthropological" approach to medicine was a short-term by-product of the leftist politics of the French Revolution. This work argues instead that the medical science of man long outlived the revolution, that it spanned traditional ideological divisions, and that it reflected the shared aim of French physicians, whatever their politics, to claim broad cultural authority in French society.

An engagingly contemporary approach to Buddhism—through the lens of an iconic film and its memorable characters Humorous yet spiritually rigorous in the tradition of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and The Tao of Pooh, drawing from pop culture and from personal experience, The Dharma of “The Princess Bride” teaches us how to understand and navigate our most important personal relationships from a twenty-first-century Buddhist perspective. Friendship. Romance. Family. These are the three areas Ethan Nichtern delves into, taking as departure points the indelible characters from Rob Reiner’s perennially popular film—Westley, Fezzik, Vizzini, Count Rugen, Princess Buttercup, and others—as he also draws lessons from his own life and his work as a meditation teacher. Nichtern devotes the first section of the book to exploring the dynamics of friendship. Why do people become friends? What can we learn from the sufferings of Inigo Montoya and Fezzik? Next, he leads us through all the phases of illusion and disillusion we encounter in our romantic pursuits, providing a healthy dose of lightheartedness along the way by sharing his own Princess Buttercup List and the vicissitudes of his dating life as he ponders how we idealize and objectify romantic love. Finally, Nichtern draws upon the demands of his own family history and the film’s character the Grandson to explore the dynamics of “the last frontier of awakening,” a reference to his teacher Chogyam Trungpa’s claim that it’s possible to be enlightened everywhere except around your family. With The Dharma of “The Princess Bride” in hand, we can set out on the path to contemporary Buddhist enlightenment with the most important relationships in our lives.

Everyday people experience everyday events. Some are good, exciting, and worth writing home about. Other things are difficult, sometimes tragic, and sometime unexplainable. Yet everyday experiences are real and folks go through all kinds of emotions and feelings to get to their understanding of who they are. Everyone experiences some sort of handicap and/or disability. How you accept this thought, deal with this thought, work with and through this possibility, and share yourself through your handicaps and/or disability is how others see you. “From Eagle To chicken And Back” is a journey of faith, life’s experiences, humor, and a vision of insight. Designed not to focus attention on the author’s life’s experiences with handicaps and disabilities but to help guide the reader into exploring their own personal experiences on their own life’s journeys. Through the use of short stories the author takes you through his experience of losing physical sight because of type I diabetes on a journey from brokenness to wholeness. His humor, wit, and spiritual insight opens doors of possibilities on how any person can find healing and wholeness despite the tragic adversities that life sometimes deals. There are no hidden promises or guarantees that the journey is easy, simply an exploration and sharing of how one person found wholeness and inner joy through faith and humor.

Liberation Ecologies elaborates a political-economic explanation of environmental crisis, drawing from the most recent advances in social theory.

Should you own a gun? -- Americans losing trust in each other and institutions -- Arms and the woman : a feminist reappraisal -- Guns are the tools by which we forge our liberty -- Gun control in American : a history of discimination against the poor and minorities -- Talk at Temple Beth Shir Shalom : Friday, April 30, 1993 -- Apocalypse now? -- They've had enough -- Author's call to arms gets answer -- The anti-enviro connection -- America's only realistic option : promoting responsible gun ownership -- What are the alternative? -- Lawsuit aims at gun industry -- Crime fighting's about-face -- Second thoughts on the Second Amendment -- Ten essential observations on guns in America.

It is a commonplace that while Asia is nondualistic, the West, because of its uncritical reliance on Greek-derived intellectual standards, is dualistic. Dualism is a deep-seated habit of thinking and acting in all spheres of life through the prism of binary opposites leads to paralyzing practical and theoretical difficulties. Asia can provide no assistance for the foreseeable future because the West finds Asian nondualism, especially that of Mahayana Buddhism, too alien and nihilistic. On the other hand, postmodern thought, which purports to deliver us from the dualisms embedded in modernity, turns out to be merely a pseudo-postmodernism. This book's novel idea is that the West already contains within one of its more marginalized roots, that of ancient Hebrew culture, a pre-philosophical form of nondualism which makes possible a new form of nondualism, one to which the West can subscribe. This new nondualism, inspired by Buddhism but not identical to it, is an epistemological, ontological, metaphysical, and praxical middle way both for the West and also between East and West.