This book examines how and why practitioners of nature religion--Western witches, druids, shamans--seek to relate spiritually with nature through magical consciousness. Greenwood develops a new theory of magical consciousness by arguing that magic ultimately has more to do with the workings of the human mind in terms of an expanded awareness than with socio-cultural explanations. She combines h…

In this work, Jeff Pratt argues for the need to set up a new analytical framework that examines all political movements from a rounded perspective that takes in both the class dimensions of identity politics and ethnographic analyses of economic and social processes.

This volume analyzes the remarkable ability of Buddhism to survive within a strong urban environment despite its renunciant nature. Early Buddhism flourished because it was able to take up the challenge represented by buoyant economic conditions and the need for cultural uniformity in the newly emergent states in northeastern India from the fifth century BCE onwards. In spite of the Buddhist as…

This is the first book to cover not only the economics of the fine arts and performing arts, but also public policy toward the arts at federal, state, and local levels in the United States. The second edition offers greater coverage of the international arts sector. The work will interest academic readers as a supplementary text on the sociology of the arts, as well as general readers seeking a…

Analyses the economic research that underlies politicians' growing preoccupation with measures of 'well-being'. This book finds that happiness research cannot be used to justify government intervention in the way its proponents suggest.

Traditionally, the effectiveness of medical treatments is attributed to specific elements, such as drugs or surgical procedures. However, many other factors can significantly effect the outcome. Drugs with nationally advertised names can work better than the same drug without the name. Inert drugs (placebos, dummies) often have dramatic effects on some patients and effects can vary greatly amon…

This book, with 15 chapters divided into 4 parts, is the product of the research programme on backpacking developed by the Backpacker Research Group (BRG) of the Association for Tourism and Leisure Education (ATLAS). The BRG was initiated in Hainan in October 2000 by a few ATLAS members who shared the general feeling that backpacker research was becoming an important field of enquiry, but that …

Conventional wisdom in international relations maintains that democracies are only peaceful when encountering other democracies. Using a variety of social scientific methods of investigation ranging from statistical studies and laboratory experiments to case studies and computer simulations, Rousseau challenges this conventional wisdom by demonstrating that democracies are less likely to initia…

A fixed destiny weighs on seduction. For religion seduction was a strategy of the devil, whether in the guise of witchcraft or love. It is always the seduction of evil - or of the world. It is the very artifice of the world . Its malediction has been unchanged in ethics and philosophy, and today it is maintained in psychoanalysis and the `liberation of desire.' Given the present-day promotion o…

Biological Influences on Criminal Behavior fundamentally questions the way most criminologists attempt to explain, let alone ameliorate the problem of human criminal behavior. Written by a respected expert in forensics, who also brings a much-needed biological background to the task, this resource champions contemporary biological theory by introducing criminologists to areas of research they m…