If biotechnology can be used to "upgrade" humans physically and mentally, should it be used at all? And, if so, to what extent? How will biotechnology affect societal cohesion? Can the development be controlled, or is this a Pandora's box that should remain closed? These are but a few of the perplex questions facing scientists as a result of the increasing ability of technology to change biology and, in turn, profoundly change human living conditions. This development has created a new post-human horizon that will influence contemporary life and politics in a number of ways. This book addresses the challenges of: Imagining a society where the properties of humans have shifted radically; Assessing the scope of deploying technologies that are already underway; Basing decisions on an ethical foundation that does not entail a concept of human nature; Ascertaining the types of political action that can and should be taken in the face of this situation The anthology brings together researchers from a wide range of disciplines: biotechnology, medicine, ethics, politics, and aesthetics, and among contributors are Francis Fukuyama, Julian Savulescu, Maxwell Mehlman, John Harris and Chris Hables Gray.

This book is a publication of the Danish-Dutch-Ukrainian survey project carried out between 2006 and 2008. The project introduced the systematic, intensive survey to the region. It took place at both sides of Lake Džarylga -- that is the hinterland of the ancient Greek settlement of Panskoe I in the Tarchankut Peninsula (Western Crimea). The survey aimed at investigating the landscape from prehistory until early modern times. We could conclude that the region was most intensively settled in the Late Classical and Early Hellenistic period. The results were spectacular: a large number of undisturbed Greek and ‘barbarian' sites were located, which have completely changed our understanding of ancient settlement patterns in the region.

This study argues that we cannot reasonably keep on speaking as though there is only one conception of human rights. The consensus around certain core rights, though important, hides the fact that very different moral sensibilities are at work. The American and French declarations from the 18th century originate in a very different moral sensibility than the Universal Declaration of Human Rights from 1948. Their conceptions of humanity and its moral destiny are totally different. The former emphasise liberty while the latter emphasise human flourishing. The former enforces basic rules of mutual respect and leaves the rest to the individual's own choice, while the latter conceives human life as basically moral prescribing an ideal of human perfection. A third and very common conception today conceives human rights as a basic standard of human decency, which does not exclude other moral considerations. A basic regime of human rights leaves room for local choices in favour of liberty, human flourishing or something else, but no particular declaration seems to correspond to the view. This third view seems to be of a recent date and its theoretical foundation is such that it cannot claim any of the other declarations as its ancestors though it might be a "mutation" or misunderstanding of the classical 18th century declarations. A major part of this study traces the origin of the conception of rights behind the classical declarations, notably the Virginia declaration of 1776 and the French declaration of 1789. This conception will be contrasted with a perfectionist conception of morality, which only furnished itself with a conception of human rights very late. The third conception will be examined in the last chapter.

For centuries the practice of undertaking fieldwork and expeditions has been adopted as an essential part of research by scientists and scholars from diverse disciplines. As a method of collecting on-site data through observation, the practice is shared by disciplines ranging from biology and botany, through geology, geography, and archaeology to anthropology, linguistics, and folklore studies. Presenting 17 essays by 17 scholars from almost as many disciplines of knowledge, this volume contains a rich tapestry of stories from -- and about -- 'the field', from early modern times until the present day. Taking us around the globe, from Europe to Asia, from the Arctic to Africa and America, this book investigates the entanglement of scientific, political, social, cultural, and personal interests and agendas that have shaped, and still shape, our effort to explore, explain, and exploit the world.

This book deals with the relationship between the material culture of humans, i.e. our technologies, arts and environments, and our mental worlds. Emphasising the close interdependence of mind and matter, the volume resonates with current developments within sociology, psychology and the cognitive sciences, yet it aims to supplement the focus on modern, predominantly Western societies and individuals with studies of different cultural contexts and processes in the evolutionary and historical past as well as the ethnographic present. With contributions from cognitive and social archaeology as well as anthropology, semiotics and the history of religion, the book combines well-illustrated case studies covering a wide chronological and geographic span - from Neolithic Europe to the present-day South Pacific - with incisive discussion of particular theoretical issues in the study of mind and material cultur

What happened when Athenian pottery reached other cultural contexts and was absorbed into indigenous communities around or outside Greece? How did the various contexts influence the adaption of Athenian iconography and does the setting add to an understanding of how Athenian iconographic themes were altered or absorbes as they entered into new cultural contexts? To highlight these interpretative challenges the National Museum of Denmark in 2009 stages the colloquium "Red-figure Pottery in its Ancient Setting" and invited a group of specialists to present cases from within their areas of research which would serve to enhance our understanding of the great range of the character and value of red-figure pottery and its imagery whether in local Greek, a colonial Greek, en Etruscan or any other indigenous community. The various cases presented in these proceedings of the colloquium clearly demonstrate that this approach to the study of Greek pottery and its imagery has much to offer.

Acts of a workshop held at the Danish Institute of Athens in collaboration with the INSTAP Study Center for East Crete, 27-29 June 2007.

Archaeologist are increasingly focusing on the transformation of artefacts from their use in the past to theri appearance in the archaeological record, trying to identiy the natural and cultural processes that created the archaeological record we study today. In Classical Archaeology, attention to these processes received an impetus by J. Theodore Peña's 2007 monograph, Roman Pottery in the Archaeological Record, which considered how ceramic vessels were made, used and stayed in use serving various secondary purposes, before finally being discarded. Peña relied mainly on evidence from Roman Italy, which raises the question of the impact of similar cultural forces on pottery from other periods and places. His work accentuates the need to continue the process of building and developing explicit interpretative models of ceramic life-histories in Mediterranean archaeology. With a view to beginning to address these challenges, the editors invited a group of specialists in the pottery of Greece and the rest of the Eastern Mediterranean to a colloquium in Athens in June 2008, asking the contributors to reconsider Peña's general models, approaches and examples from their own particular geographic and cultural perspectives.

Volume 15.1: Architecture and Topography.

Volume 1: Field Work & Studies. Volume 2: Catalogues.

The two volumes of "The Archaeology of Medieval Europe" together comprise the first complete account of Medieval Archaeology across the continent. This ground-breaking set will enable readers to track the development of different cultures and regions over the 800 years that formed the Europe we have today. In addition to revealing the process of Europeanisation, within its shared intellectual and technical inheritance, the complete work provides an opportunity for demonstrating the differences that were inevitably present across the continent -- from Iceland to Sicily and Portugal to Finland.

The two volumes of "The Archaeology of Medieval Europe" together comprise the first complete account of Medieval Archaeology across the continent. This ground-breaking set will enable readers to track the development of different cultures and regions over the 800 years that formed the Europe we have today. In addition to revealing the process of Europeanisation, within its shared intellectual and technical inheritance, the complete work provides an opportunity for demonstrating the differences that were inevitably present across the continent -- from Iceland to Sicily and Portugal to Finland.

The universe is expanding, the world has gone global, and the US has launched a crusade to export the universal right to democracy to every part of the world. Under the circumstances, it is hardly surprising that the concept of universality is making a remarkable comeback in aesthetic and political theory. The meaning of the world, however, seems more contested than ever. Some denounce it as the ideological guise of particular interests, others as the conceptual equivalent of totalitarianism. But a growing number maintain that universality is an indispensable notion for any genuinely critical aesthetics and politics. This book consists of 12 contributors that examine how contemporary works of art in different media and genres influence, shape, or confront the political realm in both theory and practice by way of the universal. The topics of the essays include depictions of German unification, identity politics of aesthetic taste, contemporary uses of van Gogh, globalised photography, the infamous Danish cartoons, iconic architecture, cinematic representations of migration, the speeches of Nicolas Sarkozy and the interventions of contemporary art in the war in Afghanistan. From various theoretical points of departure, they all demonstrate the importance of the universal in the description of political aesthetic practice in a globalising world. Includes contributions by Mads Anders Baggesgaard, Mieke Bal, Kimberley DeFazio, Birgit Eriksson, Andrew Gibson, Rasmus Ugilt Holten Jensen, Stefan Jonsson and Ernesto Laclau.

What is the common denominator of Nordic artists and artist groups like Adel Abidin, Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Das Beckwerk, Björk, Olafur Eliasson, Håkki, Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset, Julie Edel Hardenberg, Lise Harlev, Kristian von Hornsleth, Sami van Ingen, Jonas Hassen Khemiri, Søren Lose, HuskMitNavn, Pekka Niskanen, Ellen Nyman, Øyvind Rimbereid, Annica Karlsson Rixon and Superflex? They all explore local identity formations and images of nationality and trans-nationality within a global context. The term 'Nordic' is indeed constructed historically for political, commercial and scientific reasons, but as any symbolic universe it obtains a material sense as a geopolitical 'place' through the collaborations between the nations involved. The Cartoon Crises and its many reverberations issuing from Denmark in 2005 became an important turning point for discussions on national as well as Nordic identities and values. The new cultural agenda in which local identities were branded for a global public, concurrent with attempts in domestic politics to create national safeguards toward globalisation, has indeed been noticed by artists during the last decade. In light of new global and transnational relations, contemporary art has requested a renegotiation of the frameworks constructing national and Nordic communities. All articles in this book discuss ways in which art seeks to redistribute national and cultural identity. Common to the artists examined is the drive to combine cultural images from multiple sources and several media. Thus, the book also explores how works that express new identity formations confront the conventional aesthetic production of meaning and, all in all, it contributes to the examination of how art reinvents itself when dealing with unresolved issues of political, national and cultural belonging.

This is the first comprehensive attempt at developing intercultural metalogues (ie: dialogues talking about how best to talk about intercultural problems). This book fills a remarkably empty spot in Nordic literature and philosophy on intercultural dialogue. In Part I: intercultural encounters, the metalogues stage encounters with "the other" on the Bosporus, on the Trans-Siberian and elsewhere, asking: how may meetings meet, be approached, talked about and created? Part II: intercultural hermeneutics uncovers the difficulties of understanding in intercultural encounters - philosophical, spiritual, and religious. Part III: intercultural rationalities discusses the relation between ideology and reason across cultures. Part IV: intercultural learning explores problematic ways in which it has been attempted to teach rather than to learn from others. Part V: intercultural blind spots seek the borders of the intercultural. To reflect the international and Nordic context in which the book was created, the metalogues appear in Swedish, Norwegian, Danish and English. 24 researchers and practicians have contributed to Learning from the Other.

Telling stories is an essential part of being human: We tell stories about ourselves to show other people who we are and where we belong. Nations have stories to tell too - "stories of peoplehood" - that build and maintain a sense of national belonging and identity. The concept has been used to analyse identities, memories, and histories of individuals, communities and nations. But does it make sense to talk about peoplehood today? Can plural societies tell national stories without marginalizing their minorities? And is it even fair to assume that our individual self-narratives are coupled with shared cultural ones? In Narrating Peoplehood amidst Diversity, 16 internationally renowned scholars reflect on the nature and history of peoplehood and discuss how it forms part of national identities, public culture, and academic historiography. Based on theoretical analysis and empirical studies drawn from Latinos in the United States and African immigrants in France, and from multicultural stands in Canada to grand narratives in Danish history, the book is a timely contribution to the ongoing debate on belonging and identification in multicultural societies.