Nicholas B Dirks's Books

Castes of Mind

Colonialism and the Making of Modern India

By: Nicholas B. Dirks

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Castes of Mind

Colonialism and the Making of Modern India

By: Nicholas B. Dirks

When thinking of India, it is hard not to think of caste. In academic and common parlance alike, caste has become a central symbol for India, marking it as fundamentally different from other places while expressing its essence. Nicholas Dirks argues that caste is, in fact, neither an unchanged survival of ancient India nor a single system that reflects a core cultural value. Rather than a basic expression of Indian tradition, caste is a modern phenomenon--the product of a concrete historical encounter between India and British colonial rule. Dirks does not contend that caste was invented by the British. But under British domination caste did become a single term capable of naming and above all subsuming India's diverse forms of social identity and organization. Dirks traces the career of caste from the medieval kingdoms of southern India to the textual traces of early colonial archives; from the commentaries of an eighteenth-century Jesuit to the enumerative obsessions of the late-nineteenth-century census; from the ethnographic writings of colonial administrators to those of twentieth-century Indian scholars seeking to rescue ethnography from its colonial legacy. The book also surveys the rise of caste politics in the twentieth century, focusing in particular on the emergence of caste-based movements that have threatened nationalist consensus. Castes of Mind is an ambitious book, written by an accomplished scholar with a rare mastery of centuries of Indian history and anthropology. It uses the idea of caste as the basis for a magisterial history of modern India. And in making a powerful case that the colonial past continues to haunt the Indian present, it makes an important contribution to current postcolonial theory and scholarship on contemporary Indian politics.

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386

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Princeton University Press

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ISBN 10

1400840945

ISBN 13

9781400840946

Colonialism and Culture

By: Nicholas B. Dirks

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Colonialism and Culture

By: Nicholas B. Dirks

Provides new and important perspectives on the complex character of colonial history

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420

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University of Michigan Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0472064347

ISBN 13

9780472064342

Autobiography of an Archive

A Scholar's Passage to India

By: Nicholas B. Dirks

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Autobiography of an Archive

A Scholar's Passage to India

By: Nicholas B. Dirks

The decades between 1970 and the end of the twentieth century saw the disciplines of history and anthropology draw closer together, with historians paying more attention to social and cultural factors and the significance of everyday experience in the study of the past. The people, rather than elite actors, became the focus of their inquiry, and anthropological insights into agriculture, kinship, ritual, and folk customs enabled historians to develop richer and more representative narratives. The intersection of these two disciplines also helped scholars reframe the legacies of empire and the roots of colonial knowledge. In this collection of essays and lectures, history's turn from high politics and formal intellectual history toward ordinary lives and cultural rhythms is vividly reflected in a scholar's intellectual journey to India. Nicholas B. Dirks recounts his early study of kingship in India, the rise of the caste system, the emergence of English imperial interest in controlling markets and India's political regimes, and the development of a crisis in sovereignty that led to an extraordinary nationalist struggle. He shares his personal encounters with archives that provided the sources and boundaries for research on these subjects, ultimately revealing the limits of colonial knowledge and single disciplinary perspectives. Drawing parallels to the way American universities balance the liberal arts and specialized research today, Dirks, who has occupied senior administrative positions and now leads the University of California at Berkeley, encourages scholars to continue to apply multiple approaches to their research and build a more global and ethical archive.

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401

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Columbia University Press

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ISBN 10

0231538510

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9780231538510

Colonialism and Culture

By: Nicholas B. Dirks

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Colonialism and Culture

By: Nicholas B. Dirks

Provides new and important perspectives on the complex character of colonial history

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420

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University of Michigan Press

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0472064347

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9780472064342

City of Intellect

The Uses and Abuses of the University

By: Nicholas B. Dirks

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City of Intellect

The Uses and Abuses of the University

By: Nicholas B. Dirks

This gripping account of university life puts a candid, personal perspective on clashes and crises around the true cost and value of higher education, the governance of public universities, free speech and academic freedom debates, the politicization of the college campus, and the future of the humanities and liberal arts.

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389

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Cambridge University Press

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1009394444

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9781009394444

Autobiography of an Archive

A Scholar's Passage to India

By: Nicholas B. Dirks

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Autobiography of an Archive

A Scholar's Passage to India

By: Nicholas B. Dirks

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401

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Columbia University Press

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0231538510

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9780231538510

The Hollow Crown

Ethnohistory of an Indian Kingdom

By: Nicholas B. Dirks

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The Hollow Crown

Ethnohistory of an Indian Kingdom

By: Nicholas B. Dirks

A groundbreaking work that challenged conventional wisdom and set the standard for the study of Indian society

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486

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University of Michigan Press

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047208187X

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9780472081875

Domesticating a Religious Import

The Jesuits and the Inculturation of the Catholic Church in Zimbabwe, 1879-1980

By: Nicholas M. Creary

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Domesticating a Religious Import

The Jesuits and the Inculturation of the Catholic Church in Zimbabwe, 1879-1980

By: Nicholas M. Creary

Catholic theologians have developed the relatively new term "inculturation" to discuss the old problem of adapting the church universal to specific local cultures. Europeans needed a thousand years to inculturate Christianity from its Judaic roots. Africans' efforts to make the church their own followed a similar process but in less than a century. Until now, there has been no book-length examination of the Catholic church's pastoral mission in Zimbabwe or of African Christians' efforts to inculturate the church. Ranging over the century after Jesuit missionaries first settled in what is now Zimbabwe, this enlightening book reveals two simultaneous and intersecting processes: the Africanization of the Catholic Church by African Christians and the discourse of inculturation promulgated by the Church. With great attention to detail, it places the history of African Christianity within the broader context of the history of religion in Africa. This illuminating work will contribute to current debates about the Catholic Church in Zimbabwe and throughout Africa.

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374

Publisher

Fordham Univ Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0823233340

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9780823233342

The Scandal of Empire

India and the Creation of Imperial Britain

By: Nicholas B. Dirks

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The Scandal of Empire

India and the Creation of Imperial Britain

By: Nicholas B. Dirks

Many have told of the East India Company’s extraordinary excesses in eighteenth-century India, of the plunder that made its directors fabulously wealthy and able to buy British land and titles, but this is only a fraction of the story. When one of these men—Warren Hastings—was put on trial by Edmund Burke, it brought the Company’s exploits to the attention of the public. Through the trial and after, the British government transformed public understanding of the Company’s corrupt actions by creating an image of a vulnerable India that needed British assistance. Intrusive behavior was recast as a civilizing mission. In this fascinating, and devastating, account of the scandal that laid the foundation of the British Empire, Nicholas Dirks explains how this substitution of imperial authority for Company rule helped erase the dirty origins of empire and justify the British presence in India. The Scandal of Empire reveals that the conquests and exploitations of the East India Company were critical to England’s development in the eighteenth century and beyond. We see how mercantile trade was inextricably linked with imperial venture and scandalous excess and how these three things provided the ideological basis for far-flung British expansion. In this powerfully written and trenchant critique, Dirks shows how the empire projected its own scandalous behavior onto India itself. By returning to the moment when the scandal of empire became acceptable we gain a new understanding of the modern culture of the colonizer and the colonized and the manifold implications for Britain, India, and the world.

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413

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Harvard University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0674034260

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9780674034266

Castes of Mind

Colonialism and the Making of Modern India

By: Nicholas B. Dirks

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Castes of Mind

Colonialism and the Making of Modern India

By: Nicholas B. Dirks

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386

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Princeton University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1400840945

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9781400840946

Literature, Technology, and Modernity, 1860-2000

By: Nicholas Daly

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Literature, Technology, and Modernity, 1860-2000

By: Nicholas Daly

Industrial modernity takes it as self-evident that there is a difference between people and machines, but the corollary of this has been a recurring fantasy about the erasure of that difference. The central scenario in this fantasy is the crash, sometimes literal, sometimes metaphorical. Nicholas Daly considers the way human/machine encounters have been imagined from the 1860s on, arguing that such scenes dramatize the modernization of subjectivity. This book will be of interest to scholars of moderinism, literature and film.

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178

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Cambridge University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0521833922

ISBN 13

9780521833929

Contesting Bodies and Nation in Canadian History

By: Patrizia Gentile,Jane Nicholas

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Contesting Bodies and Nation in Canadian History

By: Patrizia Gentile,Jane Nicholas

From fur coats to nude paintings, and from sports to beauty contests, the body has been central to the literal and figurative fashioning of ourselves as individuals and as a nation. In this first collection on the history of the body in Canada, an interdisciplinary group of scholars explores the multiple ways the body has served as a site of contestation in Canadian history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Showcasing a variety of methodological approaches, Contesting Bodies and Nation in Canadian History includes essays on many themes that engage with the larger historical relationship between the body and nation: medicine and health, fashion and consumer culture, citizenship and work, and more. The contributors reflect on the intersections of bodies with the concept of nationhood, as well as how understandings of the body are historically contingent. The volume is capped off with a critical introductory chapter by the editors on the history of bodies and the development of the body as a category of analysis.

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449

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University of Toronto Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1442663162

ISBN 13

9781442663169

South African Literary Cultural Nationalism—Abalobi beSizwe eMzansi—1918-45

Returning to the Source

By: Nicholas M. Creary

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South African Literary Cultural Nationalism—Abalobi beSizwe eMzansi—1918-45

Returning to the Source

By: Nicholas M. Creary

This book is an intellectual history that uses Amílcar Cabral’s theory of the “return to the source,” to examine Sol Plaatje’s Mhudi, B.W. Vilakazi’s poetry, and A.C. Jordan’s The Wrath of the Ancestors within the broader context of African cultural nationalisms in the early twentieth century African Atlantic World. It shows the development of the idea of African equality with Whites in the face of prevailing ideas of White supremacy during Union-era South Africa. These authors were part of the New African Movement, which was one of eight literary movements among Africans and peoples of African descent in the Americas between 1915 and 1945, including the Harlem Renaissance, Négritude, Claridade in Cape Verde, and similar movements in Cuba, Haiti, Brazil, and Belize. The text presents new models for interpreting Union-era African literature, and recasts understanding of the nature of interactions between Africans and Europeans, including Western Syphilization, Chiral Interdiscursivity, and the relationship between history and memory informed by a neurobiological analysis of memory.

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212

Publisher

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published Date

ISBN 10

1527510433

ISBN 13

9781527510432

Colonialism's Culture

Anthropology, Travel, and Government

By: Nicholas Thomas

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Colonialism's Culture

Anthropology, Travel, and Government

By: Nicholas Thomas

Arguing against general analyses of colonialism, he proposes that a historicized, ethnographic investigation of colonialism would best lead to a fruitful discussion of its continued effects.

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250

Publisher

Princeton University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0691037310

ISBN 13

9780691037318

A History of Modern Oman

By: Jeremy Jones,Nicholas Ridout

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A History of Modern Oman

By: Jeremy Jones,Nicholas Ridout

The ideal introduction to the history of modern Oman from the eighteenth century to the present, this book combines the most recent scholarship on Omani history with insights drawn from a close analysis of the politics and international relations of contemporary Oman. Jeremy Jones and Nicholas Ridout offer a distinctive new approach to Omani history, building on post-colonial thought and integrating the study of politics and culture. The book addresses key topics including Oman's historical cosmopolitanism, the distinctive role of Omani Islam in the country's social and political life, Oman's role in the global economy of the nineteenth century, insurrection and revolution in the twentieth century, the role of Sultan Qaboos in the era of oil and Oman's unique regional and diplomatic perspective on contemporary issues.

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305

Publisher

Cambridge University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1107009405

ISBN 13

9781107009400

Florence in the Early Modern World

New Perspectives

By: Nicholas Scott Baker,Brian J. Maxson

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Florence in the Early Modern World

New Perspectives

By: Nicholas Scott Baker,Brian J. Maxson

Florence in the Early Modern World offers new perspectives on this important city by exploring the broader global context of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, within which the experience of Florence remains unique. By exploring the city’s relationship to its close and distant neighbours, this collection of interdisciplinary essays reveals the transnational history of Florence. The chapters orient the lenses of the most recent historiographical turns perfected in studies on Venice, Rome, Bologna, Naples, and elsewhere towards Florence. New techniques, such as digital mapping, alongside new comparisons of architectural theory and merchants in Eurasia, provide the latest perspectives about Florence’s cultural and political importance before, during, and after the Renaissance. From Florentine merchants in Egypt and India, through actual and idealized military ambitions in the sixteenth-century Mediterranean, to Tuscan humanists in late medieval England, the contributors to this interdisciplinary volume reveal the connections Florence held to early modern cities across the globe. This book steers away from the historical narrative of an insular Renaissance Europe and instead identifies the significance of other global influences. By using Florence as a case study to trace these connections, this volume of essays provides essential reading for students and scholars of early modern cities and the Renaissance.

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460

Publisher

Routledge

Published Date

ISBN 10

042985546X

ISBN 13

9780429855467

Blood Waters

War, Disease and Race in the Eighteenth-Century British Caribbean

By: Nicholas Rogers

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Blood Waters

War, Disease and Race in the Eighteenth-Century British Caribbean

By: Nicholas Rogers

Far from the romanticised image of the swashbuckling genre of maritime history, the eighteenth-century Caribbean was a 'marchlands' in which violence was a way of life and where solidarities were transitory and highly volatile.

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243

Publisher

Boydell & Brewer

Published Date

ISBN 10

1783276231

ISBN 13

9781783276233

Modernism, Romance and the Fin de Siècle

Popular Fiction and British Culture

By: Nicholas Daly

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Modernism, Romance and the Fin de Siècle

Popular Fiction and British Culture

By: Nicholas Daly

In Modernism, Romance and the Fin de Siècle Nicholas Daly explores the popular fiction of the 'romance revival' of the late Victorian and Edwardian years, focusing on the work of such authors as Bram Stoker, H. Rider Haggard and Arthur Conan Doyle. Rather than treating these stories as Victorian Gothic, Daly locates them as part of a 'popular modernism'. Drawing on work in cultural studies, this book argues that the vampires, mummies and treasure hunts of these adventure narratives provided a form of narrative theory of cultural change, at a time when Britain was trying to accommodate the 'new imperialism', the rise of professionalism, and the expansion of consumerist culture. Daly's wide-ranging study argues that the presence of a genre such as romance within modernism should force a questioning of the usual distinction between high and popular culture.

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232

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Cambridge University Press

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ISBN 10

1139426036

ISBN 13

9781139426039

Colonial Chaos in the Southern Red Sea

By: Nicholas W. S. Smith

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Colonial Chaos in the Southern Red Sea

By: Nicholas W. S. Smith

Shedding light on the historical origins of violence, trafficking, piracy and civil unrest in Somalia, Yemen and Djibouti.

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255

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Cambridge University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1108845665

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9781108845663

The Scandal of Empire

India and the Creation of Imperial Britain

By: Nicholas B. Dirks

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The Scandal of Empire

India and the Creation of Imperial Britain

By: Nicholas B. Dirks

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413

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Harvard University Press

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ISBN 10

0674034260

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9780674034266

In Near Ruins

Cultural Theory at the End of the Century

By: Nicholas B. Dirks

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In Near Ruins

Cultural Theory at the End of the Century

By: Nicholas B. Dirks

If culture is suspect, what of cultural theory? At a moment when culture's traditional caretakers -- humanism, philosophy, anthropology, and the nation-state -- are undergoing crisis and mutation, this volume charts the tensions and contradictions in the development and deployment of the concept of culture. A genuinely interdisciplinary venture, In Near Ruins brings together respected writers from the fields of history, anthropology, literary criticism, and communications. Together their essays present an intriguing picture of "culture" at the edges of humanism, of the politics of critical inquiry amid current social transformations, of the status and practice of historical knowledge in an age of theory. Skeptical of the concept of culture but fascinated with cultural forms, the authors take up diverse topics, from debates over sexuality in the contemporary United States to relations between empire, capitalism, and gender in nineteenth-century Britain; from poverty in U.S. inner cities to violence in war-torn Sri Lanka; from the operation of nostalgia on cultural practices in Japan to anthropological forms of state power in Indonesia and the writing of history in India. Linked by a common urge to think through the aesthetics and politics of particular social relations amid a variety of globalizing forces -- revolution, colonialism, nationalism, and the disciplinary institutions of the academy itself -- these writers contribute to the ongoing work of remapping the terrain of cultural analysis and reevaluating the stakes in such a daunting effort.

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332

Publisher

U of Minnesota Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0816631239

ISBN 13

9780816631230

Culture/power/history

A Reader in Contemporary Social Theory

By: Nicholas B. Dirks,Geoff Eley

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Culture/power/history

A Reader in Contemporary Social Theory

By: Nicholas B. Dirks,Geoff Eley

Organized around these three concepts, Culture/ Power/History brings together both classic and new essays that address Foucault's "new economy of power relations" in a number of different, contestatory directions. Representing innovative work from various disciplines and sites of study, from taxidermy to Madonna, the book seeks to affirm the creative possibilities available in a time marked by growing uncertainty about established disciplinary forms of knowledge and by the increasing fluidity of the boundaries between them. The book is introduced by a major synthetic essay by the editors, which calls attention to the most significant issues enlivening theoretical discourse today. The editors seek not only to encourage scholars to reflect anew on the course of social theory, but also to orient newcomers to this area of inquiry.

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Page Count

621

Published Date

ISBN 10

0691032203

ISBN 13

9780691032207

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