Ghaus Mohiuddin Ansari was born in Lucknow, India. He was educated at Lucknow University, University of London, and University of Vienna where he earned his Ph.D. in anthropology in 1957. He served in research and teaching positions at universities in Baghdad, Libya, Kuwait, and Vienna, where he was appointed professor emeritus. He was the founding chairman of the IAUES Commission on urban anthropology. After retirement he lived in Calpe, Spain and Vienna, where he died in 2012.

Memoir of an Indian academic, recounting his life from graduate school till his retirement, in locations in the Middle East and Europe, while maintaining his Indian roots. People interested in anthropology, life of an Indian immigrant in Europe, the politics of oil and the Middle East. It has been more or less a year since ‘Transience of Life’ volume 1 was published. It is cause for much reassurance that serious-minded Urdu readers, some venerable magazines, and a few dedicated friends and associates have praised the memoir in appropriate words and raised my confidence. Otherwise, in the last half a century, all my books and articles on topics in anthropology that were published are in English, the language that became the tool of my teaching and academic employment. Reading and writing in Urdu had been left behind in Lucknow half a century ago.

In this meditation on religion and science, Lightman explores the tension between our yearning for permanence and certainty, and the modern scientific discoveries that demonstrate the impermanent and uncertain nature of the world. As a physicist, he has always held a scientific view of the world. But one summer evening, while looking at the stars from a small boat at sea he was overcome by the sensation that he was merging with a grand and eternal unity, a hint of something absolute and immaterial. This is his exploration of these seemingly contradictory impulses, and the journey along the different paths of religion and science that become part of his quest. -- adapted from publisher info.

The story of filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki's life and work, including his significant impact on Japan and the world A thirtieth-century toxic jungle, a bathhouse for tired gods, a red-haired fish girl, and a furry woodland spirit—what do these have in common? They all spring from the mind of Hayao Miyazaki, one of the greatest living animators, known worldwide for films such as My Neighbor Totoro, Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle, and The Wind Rises. Japanese culture and animation scholar Susan Napier explores the life and art of this extraordinary Japanese filmmaker to provide a definitive account of his oeuvre. Napier insightfully illuminates the multiple themes crisscrossing his work, from empowered women to environmental nightmares to utopian dreams, creating an unforgettable portrait of a man whose art challenged Hollywood dominance and ushered in a new chapter of global popular culture.

Coping with Transience is a delightful study of Ecclesiastes that interprets its most significant themes on the basis of its keyword hebel. 'Vanity', 'irony', and 'the absurd' are either the traditional or latest meanings thought to be behind Ecclesiates' hebel, yet each in its own way renders the contradictory or confusing. A more natural, yet still biblical meaning of the word is 'the temporary'. This is the term Eccesiates uses for his advice on how to cope with the brevity of life. Once the word 'temporary' is understood, the book becomes immediately consistant within itself, and supportive of much of the biblical worldview. Coping with Transience interprets Ecclesiates from a biblical and ancient Near Eastern perspective, without the impositions of modern existentialism, or extra-biblical redefinitions of hebel.

Ghaus Mohiuddin Ansari was born in Lucknow, India. He was educated at Lucknow University, University of London, and University of Vienna where he earned his Ph.D. in anthropology in 1957. He served in research and teaching positions at universities in Baghdad, Libya, Kuwait, and Vienna, where he was appointed professor emeritus. He was the founding chairman of the IAUES Commission on urban anthropology. After retirement he lived in Calpe, Spain and Vienna, where he died in 2012.

Popular music artists, as performers in the public eye, offer a privileged site for the witnessing and analysis of ageing and its mediation. The Late Voice will undertake such an analysis by considering issues of time, memory, innocence and experience in modern Anglophone popular song and the use by singers and songwriters of a 'late voice'. Lateness here refers to five primary issues: chronology (the stage in an artist's career); the vocal act (the ability to convincingly portray experience); afterlife (posthumous careers made possible by recorded sound); retrospection (how voices 'look back' or anticipate looking back); and the writing of age, experience, lateness and loss into song texts. There has been recent growth in research on ageing and the experience of later stages of life, focussing on physical health, lifestyle and psychology, with work in the latter field intersecting with the field of memory studies. The Late Voice seeks to connect age, experience and lateness with particular performers and performance traditions via the identification and analysis of a late voice in singers and songwriters of mid-late twentieth century popular music.

Abstract:

Time's mysteries seem to resist comprehension and what remains, once the familiar metaphors are stripped away, can stretch even the most profound philosopher. In Of Time and Lamentation, Raymond Tallis rises to this challenge and explores the nature and meaning of time and how best to understand it. The culmination of some twenty years of thinking, writing and wondering about (and within) time, it is a bold, original, and thought-provoking work. With characteristic fearlessness, Tallis seeks to reclaim time from the jaws of physics. For most of us, time is composed of mornings, afternoons, and evenings and expressed in hurry, hope, longing, waiting, enduring, planning, joyful expectation, and grief. Thinking about it is to meditate on our own mortality. Yet, physics has little or nothing to say about this time, the time as it is lived. The story told by caesium clocks, quantum theory, and Lorentz coordinates, Tallis argues, needs to be supplemented by one of moss on rocks, tears on faces, and the long narratives of our human journey. Our temporal lives deserve a richer attention than is afforded by the equations of mathematical physics. The first part of the book, "Killing Time" is a formidable critique of the spatialized and mathematized account of time arising from physical science. Part 2, "Human Time" examines tensed time, the reality of time as it is lived: what we mean by "now", how we make sense of past and future events, and the idea of eternity.

This book offers an understanding of the transient migration experience in the Asia-Pacific through the lens of communication and entertainment media. It examines the role played by digital technologies and uncovers how the combined wider field of entertainment media (films, television shows and music) are vital and helpful platforms that positively aid migrants through self and communal empowerment. This book specifically looks at the upwardly mobile middle class transient migrants studying and working in two of the Asia-Pacific’s most desirable transient migration destinations – Australia and Singapore – providing a cutting edge study of the identities transient migrants create and maintain while overseas and the strategies they use to cope with life in transience.