This chapter explores the ways in which modern works of Fantasy remake longstanding cultural forms. It modifies John Clute’s notion of taproot texts by focusing on larger-scale modes of meaning-making rather than individual influential works, examining the ways in which Fantasy is deeply informed by myths and legends, epic and romance, folk and fairy tales, and religions. Any one of these could be the subject for a book in itself, so the chapter employs a selective approach, giving a sense of each mode’s larger patterns, exploring how these have been taken up in Fantasy and examining a small selection of case studies. The myths and legends section focuses on how recent Fantasy texts remake the story of Hades and Persephone, considering Anaïs Mitchell’s musical Hadestown, Supergiant’s game Hades and Rachel Smythe’s webtoon Lore Olympus. Other key works discussed include Avatar: The Last Airbender, Sofia Samatar’s The Winged Histories, Angela Carter’s ‘The Bloody Chamber’ and Kelly Link’s ‘Travels with the Snow Queen’.

Science always has occupied a special niche in society because of its perceived and proven truth value, which comes from its ostensibly unbiased, rigorous, accurate, precise, dispassionate, and metaphysical nature. After all, isn't science practiced in laboratories and universities quite apart from the "real world," the world of opinion, supposition, business, politics, and religion? But is it? As discussed in this chapter, the answer is "no," because science, in many senses, is a social endeavor, one subject to the vagaries of personal bias, the quest for recognition and funding, peer and social pressure, and tradition. Science may indeed be special relative to other endeavors, but this does not mean that its product – knowledge – should be accepted without question. Science can be wrong, but only temporarily, as it is a self-correcting enterprise that, in light of continual hypothesis testing, eventually fixes its own errors.

The Introduction situates the main theoretical framework and contextualises the book amid the institutional landscape of modern-day Germany. It analyses the productive albeit difficult relationship between anthropology and theatre, as well as the crucial intersections and failures to connect ethnography as a method and contemporary performance studies. The introduction outlines the role of theatre as a modern form of self-cultivation in Germany and introduces the book’s key concept of theatre as a scalar ethico-aesthetic tradition. It discusses the unique scope of anthropology to study both micro-level practices of institutionalised traditions, as well as to grasp wider cultural and historic patterns that have shaped the national traditions of German public theatre. The introduction also outlines the ethnographic accounts through which this book unfolds how such an anthropological study of contemporary German theatre renders intelligible the tensions and troubles of a self-proclaimed ‘state of the arts’.

Education and child development are intrinsically intertwined. For us, development is not a predetermined unmediated unfolding of moves toward maturity. Rather, development is seen in relation to cultural expectations recognizing the potential agency of the learner in relation to these expectations. Hedegaard’s Wholeness Approach with its three different perspectives, the societal, the institutional practices and the person’s perspective is central to how we understand children’s development. The societal perspective, gives the conditions that a society with it cultural traditions and values create for children’s participation in different institutional practices. The practice perspective focuses on children’s participation in the different activity settings that characterize a given institutional practice like the breakfast and leaving for school setting, and the homework setting in a family. The demands children meet through participation in these settings are the focus for understanding children’s interactions with caregivers and their social situations. The person perspective focuses on the children’s intentions, agency and motive orientations, which may be different for children in different age periods. We have argued that age periods and the demands children meet as they move through different societal practices are crucial for understanding their social situation of development. Vygotsky’s account of the neoformation of higher psychological functions is introduced and how their emergence in a child’s consciousness changes a child’s relation to their environment and in particular their emotional relation to their world.

Indigenous perspective on aging is different from what we are used to seeing in our current culture. In native culture, it is not only important to be respectful of your elders but responsible for caring for them. You learn very quickly that elders are a part of your life because they teach you what you need to know. Elders are the architects of the culture. They instill the traditions. Now we have the great distractions of technology—distractions that take us away from what our generations begore us gave to us. In Native communities, elders and young people are held in high esteem. Young people are the purpose for it all. That’s why elders have an obligation. Everyone must understand their obligation to the next generation, especially as we grow older . You always have the gift of youth inside you. But it’s up to you to rekindle it and to bring it back. It is our duty as elders to live, not just for ourselves, but for the generations of young people coming after us and for the earth.

Building on the work in Chapters 2 and 3 we now consider how we can take a broadly scientific approach, in Popper’s terms, to the study of language when we have demonstrated that linguistics does not fit easily within his framework. A key step in that process occurs in this chapter when we reconsider linguistics as a social science, though we also give consideration to its role in the digital humanities. Our conception of linguistics as a principally social science shows how we can take linguistics and deal with it in a way broadly in line with the framework specified in Chapters 2 and 3 while also dealing with those elements of it which do not easily fit a natural science framework.

The oldest cave paintings yet discovered are in a cave in Sulawesi, Indonesia. The paintings depict other animals in symbolic forms as participant agents, alongside early humans. Such conceptions of co-agency endured throughout human history in indigenous religions, particularly culturally isolated groups dwelling in deserts, forests, islands, and mountains. This ‘original’ ontology was taken up from indigenous religions into world religious traditions first in the Vedas and then in ‘axial age’ traditions including those of classical Greece, Judaism and, under their influence, Christianity. However in Latin Christianity the cultural imaginary of participation in a shared realm of being declined in favour of a new religious narrative focused on human souls. The subsequent rise of Enlightenment rationalism and personalism conferred on modern humans a sense of control and dominance in their agency of Earthly habitats in which they have progressively sought to eradicate the agency, and diversity, of the other beings. In this chapter I outline the original participative ontology in indigenous and world religious traditions; I examine the reasons for and impacts of its decline; and I discuss ways in which it may be recovered.

This chapter begins with a discussion of the Hegelian background to Marx’s thought and then attempts to situate him in the radical German emigration in Paris, Brussels and London, between 1843 and 1850. Until the summer of 1850, Marx continued to believe that a working-class uprising in France would provoke a revolutionary upheaval that would engulf Europe. In Class Struggles and The 18th Brumaire, Marx draws lessons for the German working class from the defeats of the French proletariat between 1848 and 1851. He does so by systematically contrasting the world of historical reality, the class struggle, and the realm of shadow and illusion in which historical actors fancy that their speeches and parliamentary manoeuvres make a difference. He explains brilliantly how Louis-Napoleon could have appeared as a saviour to the impoverished small peasantry. What is most striking about these essays is their rhetorical power – the literary skill with which Marx evokes the ghosts and shadows, the dreams, riddles and masquerades that constitute the realm of ideology and illusion. Marx’s essays on 1848–1851 give substance to his theories of ideology and false consciousness and do so in a way that fuses the spellbinding power of the imagery with the spell-banishing power of the historian.

We outline briefly the difference between naturalism and humanism before providing a summary of our key concepts of decentring, situated agency and plausible conjectures. In effect, we set the theoretical scene for the rest of the book and the underpinnings for comparative analysis based on dilemmas. We challenge the naturalist mantra of ‘different tools, shared standards’ and provide an alternative account of what constitutes valuable and rigorous interpretive research. We set out a new set of criteria by which interpretive comparative work should be assessed and towards which interpretive comparative researchers ought to strive. We focus on accuracy, openness and aesthetics. We show that not anything goes in comparative interpretive research.