Before the advent of radio, conceptions of the relationship between science and religion circulated through periodicals, journals, and books, influencing the worldviews of intellectuals and a wider public. In this volume, historians of science and religion examine that relationship through diverse mediums, geographic contexts, and religious traditions. Spanning within and beyond Europe and North America, chapters emphasize underexamined regions—New Zealand, Australia, India, Argentina, Sri Lanka, Egypt, and the Ottoman Empire—and major religions of the world, including Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Islam; interactions between those traditions; as well as atheism, monism, and agnosticism. As they focus on evolution and human origins, contributors draw attention to European scientists other than Darwin who played a significant role in the dissemination of evolutionary ideas; for some, those ideas provided the key to understanding every aspect of human culture, including religion. They also highlight central figures in national contexts, many of whom were not scientists, who appropriated scientific theories for their own purposes. Taking a local, national, transnational, and global approach to the study of science and religion, this volume begins to capture the complexity of cultural engagement with evolution and religion in the long nineteenth century.

This collection of essays stems from a John E. Sawyer Seminar on the Comparative Study of Cultures. Held over two years, the seminar investigated the effects and transformations of ideas, peoples, and institutions from the Atlantic World when carried into the Antipodes. The papers presented in this volume distil some of the key themes to emerge from discussion, each demonstrating the complexity with which discourses and practices operated in the Indo-Pacific oceanic region. Some had unexpected effects, others underwent profound transformation. Always they were changed by the ideas, peoples, and institutions of the Antipodes. Combined, the chapters underscore the ways in which both oceanic worlds were co-produced through a variety of intellectual and practical interactions over the modern period. Essays by leading Pacific scholars such as Margaret Jolly, Anita Herle, and Katerina Teaiwa are joined by essays from key scholars of various regions in the Atlantic World such as Simon Schaffer, Iain McCalman, Sheila Fitzpatrick, and Michael McDonnell, as well as interventions by the new transnationalist breed of Australian historians, led by Alison Bashford and Ann Curthoys.

How did Europeans view the unknown region at their antipodes in early times, before the explorations of Captain Cook and others made it well known? Throughout the ages it has evoked fantastic images which affected the arts and sciences, and the evolution of the novel in the century prior to the major discoveries was influenced in the same way. The eighteenth century was also a critical phase in European social history, a time when many modern patterns of economic life and international relations were formed. Distant explorations and discoveries bore implications for that process, which tended to be worked out in fictional voyages mingling fact with fiction. Images of the Antipodes asks what these can tell us about Europe's expansion to the limits of the New World - about the first contacts between cultures with very different worldviews, about the colonial relations that followed, and about the geopolitics of the region since then. They offer a perspective on cross- cultural relationships generally - nowhere more apparent than in their use of ancient images of the antipodes. This is the third part of a study on the intellectual history of travel fiction, and deals with the period from the 1720s to the 1790s, focusing on an issue that is as vital now as it was then: cultural or racial stereotyping, and the link between this and the differing politico-economic aspirations of peoples. It is a dual problem of exploitation, which has been associated with the antipodes since the beginnings of Western literature. The book discusses teratological fantasies, the literary background in utopias and Robinsonades, Gulliver's Travels and other travel fiction from mid-century onwards, the parallels between real and imaginary voyages, and the way the latter often prefigured the rise of modern anthropology and of colonial relationships in the austral regions. Particularly relevant was the odd blend of arcadianism and horror inspired by, or projected onto, these places in the later eighteenth century - as it had long been in the past. The works discussed are chiefly English and French, but include other European examples of the type.

Biogeography and Evolution in New Zealand provides the first in-depth treatment of the biogeography of New Zealand, a region that has been a place of long-enduring interest to ecologists, evolutionary scientists, geographers, geologists, and scientists in related disciplines. It serves as a key addition to the contemporary discussion on regionalization—how is New Zealand different from the rest of the world? With what other areas does it share its geology, history, and biota? Do new molecular phylogenies show that New Zealand may be seen as a biological ‘parallel universe’ within global evolution?

Although North America and Australasia occupy opposite ends of the earth, they have never been that far from each other conceptually. The United States and Australia both began as British colonies and mutual entanglements continue today, when contemporary cultures of globalization have brought them more closely into juxtaposition. Taking this transpacific kinship as his focus, Paul Giles presents a sweeping study that spans two continents and over three hundred years of literary history to consider the impact of Australia and New Zealand on the formation of U.S. literature. Early American writers such as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Joel Barlow and Charles Brockden Brown found the idea of antipodes to be a creative resource, but also an alarming reminder of Great Britain's increasing sway in the Pacific. The southern seas served as inspiration for narratives by Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, and Herman Melville. For African Americans such as Harriet Jacobs, Australia represented a haven from slavery during the gold rush era, while for E.D.E.N. Southworth its convict legacy offered an alternative perspective on the British class system. In the 1890s, Henry Adams and Mark Twain both came to Australasia to address questions of imperial rivalry and aesthetic topsy-turvyness. The second half of this study considers how Australia's political unification through Federation in 1901 significantly altered its relationship to the United States. New modes of transport and communication drew American visitors, including novelist Jack London. At the same time, Americans associated Australia and New Zealand with various kinds of utopian social reform, particularly in relation to gender politics, a theme Giles explores in William Dean Howells, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Miles Franklin. He also considers how American modernism in New York was inflected by the Australasian perspectives of Lola Ridge and Christina Stead, and how Australian modernism was in turn shaped by American styles of iconoclasm. After World War II, Giles examines how the poetry of Karl Shapiro, Louis Simpson, Yusef Komunyakaa, and others was influenced by their direct experience of Australia. He then shifts to post-1945 fiction, where the focus extends from Irish-American cultural politics (Raymond Chandler, Thomas Keneally) to the paradoxes of exile (Shirley Hazzard, Peter Carey) and the structural inversions of postmodernism and posthumanism (Salman Rushdie, Donna Haraway). Ranging from figures like John Ledyard to John Ashbery, from Emily Dickinson to Patricia Piccinini and J. M. Coetzee, Antipodean America is a truly epic work of transnational literary history.

Avant-garde poetry in the Antipodes causes all sorts of trouble for literary history. It is an avant-garde that seems to arrive too late and yet right on time. In 1897, Christopher Brennan made his own version of Un Coup de Des, the same year Mallarme published it in Cosmopolis. In the 1940s, the same period avant-gardism was declared dead or fatally injured due to the Ern Malley affair, Harry Hooton began writing a significant body of experimental poetry. From the 1950s to the 1970s, Australian Dada emerged 'belatedly' through figures like Jas H. Duke (Tristan Tzara had previously sung Aboriginal songs at the Cabaret Voltaire in 1916). First Nations and Migrant poets then began reinventing avant-garde poetry in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This book maintains that such a confounding literary history poses a distinct challenge to the theories of the avant-gardes we have become accustomed to and changes our perspective of avant-garde time.

This is a study of the phenomenology of the special state of mind induced by Ayahuasca, a plant-based Amazonian psychotropic brew. The author's research is based both on extensive firsthand experiences with Ayahuasca, and on interviews conducted with a large number of informants.

Evolution and the Big Questions “David N. Stamos’s Evolution and the Big Questions delivers what its title promises—you get to look at all of the issues, such as race and ethics and religion, that make the study of evolution so interesting, and more than just a science. The book is written in a clear and friendly manner and deserves a very wide readership.” Michael Ruse, Florida State University This provocative text considers whether evolutionary explanations can be used to clarify some of life’s biggest questions. It offers a lively, informative, and timely look at a wide variety of key issues facing all of us today—including questions of race, sex, gender, the nature of language, religion, ethics, knowledge, consciousness, and, ultimately, thc meaning of life. Some of the questions examined are: Did evolution make men and women fundamentally different? Is the concept of race merely a social construction? Is morality, including universal human rights, a mass delusion? Can religion and evolution really be harmonized? Docs evolution render life meaningless? Designed for students and anyone with an interest in the relationship between evolutionary heritage and human nature, the text takes an interdisciplinary approach and offers direction for further reading and research. Each chapter presents a main topic, together with discussion of related ideas and arguments from various perspectives. Along the way, it poses life’s biggest questions, pulling no punches, and presenting a challenge to thinkers on all levels.

This book explores the emergence of 'Australasia' as a way of thinking about the culture and geography of this region. Although it is frequently understood to apply only to Australia and New Zealand, the concept has a longer and more complicated history. 'Australasia' emerged in the mid-18th century in both French and British writing as European empires extended their reach into Asia and the Pacific, and initially held strong links to the Asian continent. The book shows that interpretations and understandings of 'Australasia' shifted away from Asia in light of British imperial interests in the 19th century, and the concept was adapted by varying political agendas and cultural visions in order to reach into the Pacific or towards Antarctica. The Making and Remaking of Australasia offers a number of rich case studies which highlight how the idea itself was adapted and moulded by people and texts both in the southern hemisphere and the imperial metropole where a range of competing actors articulated divergent visions of this part of the British Empire. An important contribution to the cultural history of the British Empire, Australia, New Zealand and Pacific Studies, this collection shows how 'Australasia' has had multiple, often contrasting, meanings.

Bernard Smith is widely recognised as one of Australia's leading intellectuals. Yet the recognition of his work has been partial, focused on art history and anthropology. Peter Beilharz argues that Smith's work also contains a social theory, or a way of thinking about Australian culture and identity in the world system. Smith enables us to think matters of place and cultural imperialism through the image of being not Australian so much as antipodean. Australian identities are constructed by the relationship between core and periphery, making them both European and Other at the same time. This 1997 work is a book-length analysis of Bernard Smith's work and is the result of careful and systematic research into Smith's published works and his private papers. It is both an introduction to Smith's thinking and an important interpretive argument about imperialism and the antipodes.