This chapter defines the field of history by examining both the topics it investigates and some of its long-standing and unique epistemological and methodological assumptions. It points out the unique breadth of the discipline, which has always taken the whole of human experience as its object of study. It emphasizes the holism of the discipline – that is, History’s consistent interest not in particular parts or aspects of that experience, but in the interactions between different aspects of human societies. It examines the historicist tradition within the discipline – the fundamental assumption that every aspect of human life is conditioned by its broad historical context. And it explores the way in which that fundamental assumption has contributed to a primarily idiographic epistemological position – an interest in the analysis of the particular and specific, rather than the general or universal.

This chapter focuses on the "alternate endings" typology. Building on theories of political rhetoric, we can break norms down into norm frames (norm-based justifications) and behavioral claims (conclusions for actions) and identify four alternate endings of norm contestation: norm impasse, norm neglect, norm recognition and norm clarification. Whether states (dis)agree on frames, claims, or both affects the stability of these alternate endings and norm strength. As identifying frames and claims in actors’ interpretations of international law is the cornerstone of this book, this chapter first provides detailed guidance on different kinds of norm frame and claim disagreements. It then analyzes the relative stability of each "alternate ending" and shows that frame agreement is an internal source of stability. Norm strength is conceptualized as the extent of collective expectations related to applying a norm of international law in a certain way. Norms are stronger when these collective expectations are clearer (social norm strength), and are held by more (critical) actors and/or cover more situations (relative norm strength). The chapter shows that the "alternate endings" typology can anchor the assessment of how contestation affects collective expectations. This approach provides a more actor-centric assessment of norm strength, compared to other prominent approaches.

Is the biblical story about Israel’s “United Monarchy” history, fiction, or somewhere in between? This chapter reviews the scholarly discourse about the texts and introduces critical Bible study. Since the inception of critical scholarship, Bible scholars have noted that the narrative contains tensions and even contradictions that demonstrate the impossibility of accepting the details of the biblical narrative as an accurate reporting of events. Nevertheless, researchers long distinguished between the core narrative arc of the Saul and David stories, which was relatively consistent between the sources, and the many contradictions, alternative details, and smaller points, which were understood as attempts at polemic and apologetics, pushing one agenda or another, or simply rhetorical flourish. This meant that while many of the details in these accounts cannot be taken at face value as historical, the same critical reading of the text led biblical scholars to believe – until recently – in the historicity of the bigger picture. The reasons why this consensus has changed are primarily due to broader, “archaeological” considerations that are discussed in Chapter 3.

We have proposed in these pages to consider sacrificial violence as a singularity – in other words, as an object that eludes analysis and that can only be approached through examining the set of relations that are tied up in it.

We have seen how violence, in its exemplary form of sacrifice and in its generalised form of the ‘great sacrifice’ of war, is intertwined with social organisation. The latter is born of sacrifice in the myth of the first sacrifice. Reciprocally, for the royal sacrifice, each group assumes the function proper to its class, as created by this mythical account of the first sacrifice. This circular movement expresses a tautological ideology that posits sacrifice as the essence of organised life and, in return, sacralises its sacrificial reordering.

Through the consecration of the violence it operates within, sacrifice presents itself as a model of legitimate violence. This violence is openly exhibited and may be denied as violence or else declared necessary. This does not mean, however, that sacrifice represents a lesser violence aimed at containing generalised violence. On the contrary, it is magnified and propagated during the buffalo sacrifice. Nor does its legitimacy make it a violence that is not perceived as such, at least by some categories of people in the assembly. In the royal ceremony, at the same time as the sacrifice directs violence outside of the group, in the execution of the animal alter and then in the war which follows it, it also exerts violence within it, through a whole range of procedures that we have encountered throughout this text, such as by exclusion, victimisation or threat targeted at specific categories of people within the group. Sacrificial violence thus takes on a dual manifestation within the group from which it emanates – at once unifying and divisive, inclusive and exclusive, it is exerted upon the community, carving out its partitions only to unfold outside of them. It thus expresses social violence and political violence in the same movement, each containing the idiom of the other at its heart, recalling the sacrifice in ancient India, in which each constituent part contained the whole. In this manner, both social structure and political activity inter-construct each other through violence, which is itself conditioned by the form that sacrifice gives it.

The milestones of the anthropological approach to sacrifice have drawn a dead-end trajectory. Initially inspired by a desire to construct a unique and universal model of sacrifice through the identification of its scheme, to which Hubert and Mauss attached themselves, within a matter of decades the idea that the infinite variation of sacrifice eluded any attempts to conclusively define it imposed itself. It even led to the term ‘sacrifice’ being denounced entirely, on the grounds that it would artificially unify an enormous diversity of practices across the globe, as well as being too connected to a Christian heritage. Such a definitive denunciation of sacrifice was formulated by Marcel Detienne (1979: 34–35):

A few decades later, it appears that, unlike the notion of totemism, which effectively fell into disuse after its deconstruction by Claude Lévi-Strauss (1962), sacrifice is far from weakened by these remarks, nor has it even ceased to be used as a category of analysis by its author and those working in the field. Briefly put, the political history of the last three decades in particular has dramatically reintroduced sacrifice to modern anthropological thought.

As Ivan Strenski (2003) points out, the science of religions was initially uninterested in sacrifice, which was seen as an amoral and primitive practice. Following the first works of the English school, an essay on sacrifice by Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss appeared in 1899, when its two authors were both 27 years old. The former was a history graduate, the second a philosophy graduate, and both shared a passion for ancient languages, notably Hebrew and Sanskrit, as well as for religious trivia.

Measurable residual disease (MRD) is an established prognostic factor after induction chemotherapy in acute myeloid leukaemia patients. Over the past decades, molecular and flow cytometry-based assays have been optimized to provide highly specific and sensitive MRD assessment that is clinically validated. Flow cytometry is an accessible technique available in most clinical diagnostic laboratories worldwide and has the advantage of being applicable in approximately 90% of patients. Here, the essential aspects of flow cytometry-based MRD assessment are discussed, focusing on the identification of leukaemic cells using leukaemia associated immunophenotypes. Analysis, detection limits of the assay, reporting of results and current clinical applications are also reviewed. Additionally, limitations of the assay will be discussed, including the future perspective of flow cytometry-based MRD assessment.

This chapter addresses how politics, epistemology, and modernity are co-produced, and, in this process, how the pre-defined notions of politics, epistemology, and modernity themselves are transformed and reconstructed. The emergent theoretical framing is empirically informed by the place-specific campaign against the aerial spraying of endosulfan pesticide wherein ‘life is cheaper than cashew’. The chapter highlights the structural connections between global capitalism and state-driven developmentalism but also how the very state was conscientized by the transverse solidarity of the ‘constituent power’, including the victims and the larger civil society as agents of modernity, the latter understood as resistance for egalitarianism. However, it does not stop there. We shall also touch upon the ‘epistemological break’ (Bachelard 1938; Althusser 1969) that has occurred in the larger context of knowledge controversies and conflicts (see Whatmore 2009).

In May 2010, the left-front government in the Indian state of Kerala took the historic decision to ban more than a dozen toxic pesticides in the state. This was the culmination of over a decade and a half of struggle and movements in protest against the aerial spraying of endosulfan on the state-owned cashew plantation in the northernmost district of Kasaragod. This chapter follows the prolonged struggle led by the victims of the deadly pesticide, the awakening of a general consciousness among the public, the building up of transverse politics and solidarity, and, finally, the persuasion of the state to ban the pesticide, along with other toxic wastes. The chapter is situated in the larger context of what Beck (1986), Habermas (1987), and Gaonkar (2001) would call risk society, a society in which modernity has become ‘a theme and a problem for itself’, and thus the crisis inherent in it is to be managed through a reinvention of politics. The chapter suggests that the concept of risk society and reflexive modernity as the outcome of a series of struggles and movements demanding the ban on endosulfan in the state offers fresh insights into the power of the people and the civil society in joining the victims.