Surrealism was indelibly linked to the idea of revolution. This is evident in the name of the two reviews closely linked to the movement – La Révolution surréaliste and Le Surréalisme au service de la revolution – and its long history of engagement with revolutionary political movements, from the French Communist Party in the 1920s to the student movement in the 1960s. This chapter explores the dynamic of Surrealism and politics to argue that a tension between politics and culture not only animates the history of the movement, but is in fact constitutive of Surrealism. In this context the demands of politics repeatedly interrupt Surrealism’s efforts on a cultural level; yet, as Surrealism is incorporated into the annals of art and literary history, the priority given to its cultural achievements can eclipse the demands of politics.

Gadamer has made a tremendous contribution to twentieth century thought, for he has proposed a new and different model of understanding and understanding in the human sciences that carries us beyond the dilemma of ethnocentrism and relativism. This model is not that of a “science” that grasps an object but rather one of speech-partners who come to an understanding together. Three important features of understanding are (1) it is bilateral in character, (2) it is party dependent, and (3) it involves revising goals. It follows that there is an important difference between the human sciences and the natural sciences. Important to Gadamer’s model of the human sciences is the “fusion of horizons.” This chapter discusses the proximity of Davidson and Gadamer and their differences.

The purpose of the discussion in this chapter is to suggest some cardinal changes to the practice of male circumcision in order to make it more humane and less painful to its subjects. Balancing between group rights and the rights of the child, it is essential to avoid unnecessary suffering. It is one of the liberal state’s obligations to protect the best interests of vulnerable third parties. The chapter opens with some preliminary data about male circumcision and then explains its importance in Judaism and in Islam. It examines the medical reasons for male circumcision and the risks involved in the practice; subsequently, it discusses the critique of male circumcision. The discussion also highlights the points of agreement and disagreement between those supporting and opposing the ritual and insists that male circumcision should be performed by using anaesthesia. The final part of the discussion includes a proposal for humane male circumcision that considers religious sentiments and the rights of the child, aiming to strike a reasonable balance between competing interests. The hope is that the proposal will be debated in parliaments in the Western world.

Social learning, a type of information transmission in which individuals gain information by observing or interacting with another animal or the products of another animal’s actions, is an extensively studied subject in a wide array of species. Of particular interest is the ability of chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) to learn socially, especially given their extensive sociality and fission–fusion dynamics, which provides many opportunities for individuals to learn from each other in different contexts. Using observational and experimental approaches, researchers have explored how faithfully chimpanzees copy others, the type of information conveyed between individuals, and the extent to which social learning is influenced by external factors. In this chapter we review what is currently known about the mechanisms by which chimpanzees socially learn and the strategies they may employ when doing so. We also discuss the much-debated topic of chimpanzee "culture," and how this compares to our own culture. Last, we provide a comparative perspective for social learning in chimpanzees with other species, and discuss how understanding chimpanzee social learning can be useful in their captive care and aiding their conservation in the wild.

Capuchins are highly encephalized New World monkeys (family Cebidae, subfamily Cebinae) living in a variety of forest and savannah habitats, from Central to South America, and currently classified as “gracile” (the Cebus genus) or “robust” (the Sapajus genus). The literature on behavioural plasticity in this taxon highlights purported traditions in the social domain (as the dyadic “games” of Cebus capucinus) and in foraging techniques (notably, the use of tools by Sapajus spp.). Behavioural innovations (sensu “process”) are more easily detected in the social realm, while technological traditions seem to result from [inferred] innovations (sensu “product”) facilitated by innate predispositions and environmental affordances and perpetuated by means of socially biased learning. Constraints related to simpler forms of social learning (like “stimulus enhancement”) may limit the potential for cumulative cultural processes, resulting in conservative traditions, as may be the case of percussive stone tools’ use. On the other hand, the degrees of “niche construction” and “observability” associated to different forms of tool use may explain the difference between the widespread stone tool use traditions and the rarer cases of customary probe use (where individual innovations may occur, but seldom spread by socially mediated learning), in terms of different opportunities for socially mediated learning.

Why do men go to such trouble to shave off their facial hair? A man’s beard represents an especially salient secondary sexual characteristic: a physical feature that develops at puberty and distinguishes men from women. In nature, such sexual dimorphism has been believed, since Charles Darwin, to participate in so-called sexual selection – females choosing the fittest males based on such characteristics. Thus, according to Darwin’s account, a lion cropping his mane would be tantamount to committing evolutionary suicide. But, that’s exactly what human males do. Why and when they do so raises interesting questions concerning the origins of shaving equipment and technique as well as the changing tastes of both women and men. Cultural change can be a matter of both function and fancy; such change can even trump the physical results of nature itself.

Birds have contributed a great deal to our understanding of social learning. In this chapter we briefly review this extensive body of research, describing the contexts in which birds use social information to make behavioral decisions. We discuss the ecological factors that promote social learning, and the mechanisms by which social learning occurs. We consider individual differences in social learning, focusing on how learning strategies and biases influence when, how and from whom birds will learn. We examine the consequences of social learning for evolutionary processes, from the emergence of culture to speciation and adaptation to environmental change. Finally, we highlight how knowledge of social learning processes can be applied in the conservation and management of threatened bird species.

When Richard Wright read deeply in the social sciences, he became informally trained in the Chicago school of sociology led by Robert Park. Chicago sociology was an antidote to the idea of race. It replaced the dominant view of group-based identity as determined by race with a truer view of group-based identity determined by culture and environment: a paradigm of culture as not immutable, genetically inherited, natural, and hierarchical, but rather as malleable, learned, conventionally arbitrary, and relative. This social science vision undergirded his fiction, especially his most famous novel Native Son. But while Chicago sociology denied white racial superiority, it tended to accept white cultural supremacy, a contention shared by the legal strategy that led to Brown v. Board of Education and desegregation. Critics have frequently misunderstood Wright as a progenitor of late twentieth-century multicultural literature. That recognition more properly belongs to Wright’s rival Zora Neale Hurston, who had a different social-science-inspired model of minority culture that allowed her to see African American culture as healthy, continually creative, adaptive, and long-enduring.

In this integrative chapter, we summarize insights emerging from the volume as a whole with respect to the main propositions outlined in the introduction, namely, that (a) revenge is part and parcel of children’s and adolescents’ lives, manifesting various normative forms and functions, and (b) throughout childhood and adolescence, revenge can be both a consequence and a predictor of adverse psychological and social processes. In addressing the ways in which these two overarching concerns are woven throughout the chapters in this book, we summarize the contributions of individual, interpersonal, and institutional-level influences on the development of revenge. We conclude with proposed future directions and implications for intervention.

Many festivals and celebrations take place worldwide on a regular basis. What is of special interest to us is not only the nature of those diverse festivities but also their origin and evolution. How did those festivals begin? How and why might they have changed over time? Several intriguing festivals in Spain provide fertile material for attempting to answer these questions. Four Spanish festivals stand out for their uniqueness and audacity: the Running of the Bulls in Pamplona, made famous by Ernest Hemingway in his 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises; the tomato-throwing festival (La Tomatina) in Buñol; the construction of Human Towers in Catalonia; and, the Baby Jumping festival in Castrillo de Murcia. To one degree or another, the origins of these unforgettable celebrations involve religion, color, risk, and serendipity.

This chapter looks at ‘Twin Peaks’, not as distinct supervisory entities with reasonably well-defined responsibilities, as this is covered elsewhere in this book. Rather, it looks at the supervision of a concept ‘that must be considered by both ‘peaks’ – that of ‘culture’ and, in particular, ‘macro-culture’. The chapter concludes by pointing out that the ‘Twin Peaks’ are not independent but sit on shared foothills, beset by common problems – in this case, the need to understand the various ‘cultures’ of the individual firms that both peaks supervise. It makes little sense for one regulator to measure and try to ‘influence’ cultures in one way in a firm if another supervisor uses different definitions, measures and influencing mechanisms for the same firm. At the very least, there is a need for regulators to come to a shared understanding of problems that they have in common, such as how to influence the cultures of firms that they supervise. The chapter proposes a novel approach to addressing this quite complex problem.

This chapter provides a general contextual setting for the subsequent analysis of Simmel’s work. It discusses the emergence and significance of a particular perception of modernity that became very common among German intellectuals in the last third of the nineteenth century. They believed that the central conflict of modernity lay in the tension between two polar imperatives: those of general culture and specialisation, or universality and particularity. In Germany, this particular tension acquired a high degree of significance and was often accompanied by strong feelings of urgency and even despair. The chapter offers a brief history of this issue as well as a genealogy of the related conceptual apparatus that included notions such as Bildung, Cultur, Beruf and Civilisation. The final section of the chapter introduces the central aspects of Simmel’s philosophy of culture that may elucidate this general context and are in turn elucidated by it.

Principally, corruption is the willingness to gain or the act of gaining, what one is reasonably not in the position to earn or has not earned legally. It is as good a practice as it is a phenomenon that boils down to human actions and consequences. Truthfully, no human society is totally immune to this phenomenon, the question is only in matter of magnitude; both in practice and effects on the state. In all, corruption on a prebendal scale and sustained by a rentier/patrimonial system has been noted to be the worst of all. Exploring the culture and anatomy of corruption in Nigeria, the chapter presents new insights and interpretations to this phenomenon through the lens of the sociopolitical morphology of the country. This comes with the view of expanding the debate on corruption in Nigeria and contributing to the wide array of extant literature on the interesting, but unfortunate topic. Meanwhile, hardly anything is more talked about in the current Nigeria than this discourse. This provides this chapter with a plethora of sources to tap in addition to existing relevant literature.