This chapter discusses how historical exchanges with Makassan and other seafaring peoples from beyond the Arafura Sea remain a profound influence on Yolŋu music and culture that endures to this day. We explore how Yolŋu people, through their enduring ceremonial traditions, elaborately integrate song, dance and design elements to recount exchanges with Makassan seafarers, the boats in which they sailed, and the goods they carried. We also discuss how, since the mid-1980s, this autonomous history of Yolŋu exchanges with foreigners has been remembered and continues to inspire new forms of Yolŋu cultural expression that overtly reach out across cultures. Our approach is informed by our long history of researching Yolŋu song in all its forms and working together to document the Yolŋu public ceremonial song tradition known as manikay. Garawirrtja’s expertise is further grounded in his extensive training and practice as a Yolŋu elder and ceremonial singer of the manikay tradition, who maintains hereditary songs that recount Yolŋu contact histories with Makassan and other seafarers.

Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony is an anglophone novel that aspires to heal the effects of conquest and colonization through a decolonial politics that accepts hybridity, recognizes the sensitive work involved in transitions, and embraces Indigenous knowledge. Even as Silko celebrates hybridization, transitions, and boundary-crossing, she recognizes that these processes have a dangerous side – specifically, the potentially world-destroying effects of the nuclear arms race. The novel shows that settler colonialism is one aspect of an unfolding pattern that denies limits and boundaries; with the invention of nuclear weapons, it threatens to destroy the world. Silko’s message echoes Vine Deloria, Jr.’s 1974 essay “Non-Violence in American Society,” commenting on the era’s social justice movements. Giving narrative form to Deloria’s message, in Ceremony the multiple strands of Silko’s political thought – the Native American Renaissance and decolonization, environmentalism, feminism, antiwar and anti-nuclear activism – are woven together in a story that is also a healing ceremony for readers. Ceremony aims to create a world where indigeneity emerges as the dominant force for a world at risk that is also a world in transition.

Chapter 2, ‘A Mathematical Culture: The Art of Setting Limits’ brings the reader directly into early modern metal mines. The birth of a vernacular culture of geometry is described, detailing the daily work of craftsmen and insisting on the materiality of measuring practices. Surveys, carried out in public during solemn ceremonies, were a keystone of mining laws. The chapter exposes a central hypothesis of this book: At the time, mathematical accuracy acquired a dual meaning. Measurements had to be precise enough to solve intricate technical problems, while at the same time respecting procedures codified in mining customs and laws. Far from being a mere tool, geometry was meant to ensure trust; it was ubiquitous and pervaded many aspects of a miner’s life. In the early years of the Protestant Reformation, Lutheran pastors actively fostered the rise of practical mathematics. Mathematical and religious rationality were equated, making subterranean geometry accurate in a third way, this time as an expression of divine will. The omnipresence of measurements, combined with their legal and religious recognition, ultimately conferred a higher status to the discipline.

Chapter 1, “The Politics of Shang Ritual under the Zhou” explores how the early Zhou repurposed ancestral-ritual techniques of Shang provenance to support their quest for legitimacy and lend focus to their efforts at building a new, shared identity.

Chapter 2, “The Ritual Figuration of the Zhou Kings” examines the surviving records of a few rare but important ritual techniques that posed symbolic arguments about the relationship of the Zhou king to the social order and the natural world. The details of their implementation, as the chapter shows, reveal an effort to refigure the Zhou kings as qualitatively different from their contemporaries, with a special relationship to the natural world and its products.

This chapter lays out the vibrant social networks and rich cultural activities of the elite residents of Ichijōdani, pushing back against the derivative claim that provincial capitals were mere “Little Kyotos.”

While Henry V is alive with religious echoes, its moral direction seems incoherent or unstable. Accordingly, the focus of this account is the way the play’s use of religion paradoxically intensifies and legitimates the pleasures of war. The chapter aims to explain not only how the sacral monarchy of England’s Plantagenet kings lives on in Shakespeare’s play but more importantly how in instrumentalizing it and its complex political theology, the prince outdoes his royal predecessors and the play aestheticizes war. It does this by enabling Henry to appropriate the dynamism and sheer agency imagined in Scripture’s representation of God’s freedom. The king comes out of a whirlwind and his army appears as Leviathan – all apparently in the service of the new national community. While Henry V is insistently skeptical about the value of war, its delight in the king’s virtù or violent agency complicates the irony and so denies the play any clear-cut moral critique.

Chapter four turns to the staging of justice, analyzing the design and setup of the post-reform court, the presentation of the monarchy and the principles of modesty and equality in the courtroom, the representation of minorities, and the effects of legal procedures on those present in court. An emphasis is put on the pedagogical message communicated by court performances, a message designed to turn the participants into “morally sound,” law-abiding citizens.