Private Beliefs Research Articles

Public Exposure: Lelchuk's American Mischief and Ziff: A Life?

Public Exposure: Lelchuk's American Mischief and Ziff: A Life?Alan Lelchuk. American Mischief. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2004. 507 pp. $19.95.Alan Lelchuk. Ziff A Life? New York: Carroll, 2003 (2004 pb). ix + 409 pp. Cloth $25.00; pb $14.00.Catching a man off guard that way, with his pants down so to speak, can result in exposing certain truths about his whole life that were only dimly in evidence before. (Lelchuk, American Mischief 15)If people would live private lives that reflect what they publicly say they believe, then understanding human action would appear to be a simple task of connecting the dots. As it usually goes, however, people speak one belief (set of truths) and live according to another. The public sphere of life holds universally constructed ideals and desires, ideas that consistently mimic or challenge the norm. It is by delving into the private closets of life that true beliefs are exposed, and then the simple task of connecting the dots becomes complicated. The task of exposing both the private life and the ensuing public life complications (or vice versa) is one voluntarily undertaken by Alan Lelchuk in his latest novel, Ziff: A Life? The goal of exploring binary themes of public/private, reconciliation/alienation, and rebellion/compliance is not new to Lelchuk's writing. As a matter of fact, he began his writing career by engaging these very subjects in American Mischief. In this earlier novel, the lines of public and private beliefs and practice cross the lines of social and political rebellion characteristic of the 1960s. The deterioration of productive communication among generations, sexes, races, and various belief systems led to both private and public chaos. The major characters in American Mischief bleed real blood and shed real tears in what appears to be a futile attempt at reconciling the two spheres. However, in his more recent fictional exploration of the literary friendship between two established writers in Ziff: A Life? Lelchuk moves the question of public and private alignment to a level of personal exploration. The real blood and real tears of this novel come in the main characters' desperate attempts to publicly uncover, discover, and then recover exposed, private truth(s).Although reviews of Ziff: A Life? acknowledge the novel's obvious references to Lelchuk's literary relationship with Philip Roth, there also is another aspect that the Lelchuk books share with Rothian works. The reprinting of American Mischief in 2004 and the availability of Ziff: A Life? in paperback that same year conveniently provide an avenue for a discussion of these connections. The manipulation of fact and fiction, public and private is a recurring subject in many of Roth's works, and Lelchuk's attempts to address the same issues make for an interesting comparison.Despite the ring of simplicity that truthfulness in both public and private identity has, locating it, especially in writing, is usually a difficult task to accomplish. Besides the classic unwillingness of many people to reveal their private lives to the public eye, there are times when the public does not wish to see the truth of private desires; consequently, the public voice or image that a person has dominates his or her perceived identity. Thus, the lines between what to say or do and when to say it or do it are not as distinct as some would like them to be. These are times when an expected public image supersedes any private expression. The fight to establish or reestablish a clear, feasible connection between the two is evident in much of modern literature, particularly in the literature of multiethnic writers. Here, public and private identities and their expressions take on many layers, including, but not limited to, those that address identity as it relates to the ethnic group, the larger social and political world, the individual, the writer within the writing community, and the writer within the particular ethnic community. …

Shades of difference: mythologies of skin color in early modern England

Sujata Iyengar. Shades of Difference. Mythologies of Skin Color in Early Modern England. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2005. 310pp. ISBN 0 8122 3832 X.1. Whether romance, lyric, masque, or narrative, Sujata Iyengar, in her book Shades of Difference, suggests that early modern literary affiliations entangle with variable concepts of skin color and emergent racial distinctions to produce specifically early modern ways of figuring difference (1). Historical and material contexts - bodily, gendered, religious, scientific, and social - here collude with literary genres, constructing different languages and traditions for negotiating human variation. Iyengar explores racializing discourse as structure of feeling, term she borrows from Raymond Williams and uses to point out the temporal complexity of ideological formations as well as the overlap of political institutions and private beliefs in discursive construction.2. Iyengar's book is divided into three parts. The first part, 'Ethiopian Histories', examines the Renaissance transmission and interpretation of classical and Biblical texts on blackness. She focuses on ambiguous heroines such as Chariclea of Heliodorus'Aethiopica or the Bride of the Song of Songs, figures whose beauty, rank, and ethnicity depended on, and changed according to, understanding of skin colour. She then concludes her chapter with juxtaposed representations of the Irish and the Ethiopians in Stuart court masques.3. In part two, 'Whiteness Visible', Iyengar reads early modern poetry and drama for white skin in its different variations, including blushing, pallor, and cosmetic colourings. Contextualizing epyllia with moral treatises, and stage plays with anti-cosmetic tracts, Iyengar shows that skin colour worked towards configuring not only ethnic prejudice, but also sexual difference.4. 'Travail Narratives', the third and final part of Shades of Difference, plays with the early modern double meaning of 'travail' as both hard work and travel. Iyengar first examines different constructions of gypsies whose skin colour, whether natural or artificial, linked with mythologies of illicit labor and stage performance. The travel section of the chapter examines English travelers' ethnographic accounts of Africa and African bodies, texts that can be seen as constructing an early version of racialism that hinges on both skin colour and labour, especially slavery. The book concludes by moving forward in time towards the Restoration and the scientific revolution, where the escapism of prose romance may have offered an alternative to the gradually stabilizing fictions of race.5. Iyengar consistently resists imposing a straightforward historical trajectory 'toward' racialism or 'toward' color-prejudice as an explanatory mechanism (1). Rather, she interprets early modern negotiations of skin color as an open-ended discussion, dynamic history unbound by necessary march towards race and racism. She follows the diverse and often contradictory ways in which her texts construct otherness, and demonstrates the complexity of the varying meanings of skin colour while also reading for intertextual references, influences, and paraphrases. For her, following the multiple literary networks in which skin colour emerges can account for change better than can history that views skin colour through the later prism of race. …

Fantasies of Female Evil: The Dynamics of Gender and Power in Shakespearean Tragedy by Cristina Leon Alfar (review)

484 Reviews accounts for 'the mild manner of [Mistress Page's] husband, George Page, who gives the impression of a middle-class man who has married money', and yet at the same time, in arranging for his wealth to skip a generation, the grandfather has 'not only short-changed George Page but [. . .] also deprived his daughter of a certain amount of income, perhaps creating some bitterness and giving Mistress Page reason to think hard about the transfer of wealth' (p. 13). The less speculative chapter on The Mer? chant of Venicethat concludes the book is much more helpful. Its discussion of Portia's prosecution of Shylock and the penalty she imposes (the transferof assets again) leads to some provocative conclusions. Thenegotiatedadjustmentto Shylock's punishment leaves Jessica as a beneficiary, a position she would have enjoyed had Shylock himself engaged in fraudulent convey ancing. And in suggesting that Shylock's 'I am content', which echoes Antonio and Petruchio, is part of public, legal discourse rather than a statement of private belief, Ross provides a more humane reading of the play than is usually the case. The research in both these volumes is prodigious and both benefit from the duodisciplinary skills of their authors: they are fine additions to the developing area of Law and Literature. University of Birmingham Catherine M. S. Alexander Fantasies of Female Evil: The Dynamics of Gender and Power in Shakespearean Tragedy. By Cristina Leon Alfar. Cranbury, NJ: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses. 2003. 254 pp. ?36. ISBN o87413 -781-0. Any performer would prefer playing Lady Macbeth to playing Lady Macduff. Lady Macduff is a dramatic role of a woman who is good. Lady Macbeth, in contrast, is a dramatic role of a woman who has all the good lines. In her study of those women in Shakespeare's tragedies who are regarded as evil, Alfar argues fortheir recuperation. Not only does Alfar interrogate what early modern culture regarded as evil, she also argues that the characters regarded as evil women do little more than what is done by other characters, male and female, regarded as admirable. In making her analysis, Alfar focuses Lady Macbeth, Goneril, and Regan as women who 'become evil through a simple double standard, arrogating forthemselves behaviors that would be laudable or at least condoned in men' (p. 25). She also considers such characters as Juliet,Cleopatra, Hermione, and Paulina, characters in three other plays who defyconvention without the sort ofcondemnation that audiences and critics have used in discussions of Lady Macbeth or the Lear sisters. That limited scope creates some difnculty.Alfar has nothing at all to say about the women of Shakespearean history plays, many ofwhom would provide useful instances of strong women who act to take or keep power, nor has she much to say about the women of Titus Andronicus, jfulius Caesar, or Hamlet. (Her omission of Timon ofAthens is understandable, while she does speak brieflyabout Volumnia in Coriolanus.) Aftera short introduction in which Alfar places her analysis in a theoretical frame? work, distinguishing her work from feminist psychoanalytical studies, while acknowledging the strength of Kristeva's idea of the abject, Chapters 1 and 2 turn to a discussion ofconduct books. Again Alfar begins with the theoretical, forshe considers 'female evil as culturally produced out of the patrilineal structure's anxieties about the female body's ability to threaten its investment in prestige and power' (p. 32). After some additional discussion of two historical women, Elizabeth Cary and Queen Elizabeth I, this section concludes with a consideration of Juliet and how her defi? ance of convention becomes acceptable, even admirable, because she acts to achieve romantic love. MLR, 100.2, 2005 485 In Chapters 3-5, Alfar considers in turn the sisters in Lear, Lady Macbeth, and Cleopatra. Goneril and Regan, she argues, are trapped by the pressures on any mon? arch in this period: ifthey behave like tyrants it is because all early modern monarchs are forced by their situation to behave like tyrants on occasion. Lady Macbeth is a differentand altogether more interesting case: in the book's strongest chapter, Al? far argues that Lady Macbeth is a parodic version of the perfect early...

Ausência de conflitos: relação entre religião e ciência na formação universitária

Introduction: The aim of this work is studying students’ representations of different ways of knowing, science and religion. We intend to verify if university experience can modify their relations with knowledge, improving new ways of realize their own lives. Methods: We have done 5 (five) semi-structured interviews with students from a Psychology Department in a private University sited in São Paulo. Results: Research reveals a representation of religion as offering a dogmatic knowledge, which, surprisingly, doesn’t oppose the scientific knowledge, and, indeed, it’s understood as a complementary knowledge. If religion can offer well being, protection, “food for our souls”, science, on the other hand, offers a way of knowing based on facts. But this specificity of science is not enough to modify private beliefs as students learn to separate religion and science during their academic formation. Knowledgeis presented as a private experience and they don’t support the idea of a social and ideological process of producing knowledge. Conclusion: We conclude that it is very hard to Brazilian universities offer tools for constructing a critical understanding of knowledge. Such social scene claims for educational and political actions, which could create “conflicts” that lead students and professionals to a critical position as citizens.

Safe Food: Bacteria, Biotechnology, and Bioterrorism (review)

Reviewed by: Safe Food: Bacteria, Biotechnology, and Bioterrorism Terry Sharrer (bio) Safe Food: Bacteria, Biotechnology, and Bioterrorism. By Marion Nestle. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Pp. xvi+350. $27.50. How safe is the American food supply? Industry and government often assert that the United States sets the world standards for quantity, quality, safety, and price. Foodborne diseases account for five thousand deaths annually, but chronic liver diseases, the tenth-leading cause of death, take a toll five times as great. So far, at least, food safety probably is a better indicator of declining infant mortality rates and rising life expectancy than it is of an imminent health hazard. But Marion Nestle does not ask if the American food supply is safe; she asks if it is safe enough, and thereby raises political issues that offer the meat of this provocative and stimulating book. [End Page 257] Nestle, professor and chair of nutrition and food studies in the Steinhardt School of Education at New York University, pursues five themes: (1) that fragmented responsibility among the regulatory agencies (Environmental Protection Agency, Food and Drug Administration, Department of Agriculture) creates vulnerabilities out of confusion; (2) that food companies pursue economic self-interest at the expense of public health; (3) that food companies use "science" to thwart regulation; (4) that consumer advocacy groups use safety to contest business and government collusion; and (5) that the "acceptability" of risk, on the public's part, makes food safety a political football in a never-ending game between facts and values. Actually, Nestle raises the fifth theme first: the struggle between scientifically derived evidence used to work out cost-benefit ratios and the private beliefs and public opinion that drive emotional reactions. An example of the former is the GRAS ("generally recognized as safe") approach the Food and Drug Administration applies to food additives. If ingredients are deemed safe under this standard, they are approved. If a problem arises after marketing, the FDA deals with it then. Alternatively, there is the "precautionary principle," which the European Union follows, whereby food manufactures must demonstrate safety before sale. Among other things, this difference in evaluating risks explains why genetically modified food exports from the United States encounter trade resistance abroad. Nestle's first and second themes—one describing the weird webs bureaucrats weave, the other portraying industry as untrustworthy in guaranteeing public health—have much in them to recommend the book, and shortcomings too. How the EPA, FDA, and USDA divvy up food safety regulation sometimes becomes laughable, but overlapping and confusing regulatory authority reflects a common feature of American governance—redundancy—and probably goes back to that well of ambiguity, the granting of powers to Congress to provide for "the general welfare" in article 1, section 8 of the Constitution. Equally old is the history of food companies swindling and poisoning for profit, but today the same degree of oligopoly in the industry that promotes aberrant behavior also makes business highly vulnerable to adverse public opinion. The 2001 merger of meatpacking company IBP and Tyson Foods may have created an entity that controlled 28 percent of the world's beef and 25 percent of its chicken, but a single case of mad cow disease traced back to its processing line would be devastating. If Nestle underrates the government's management and overrates the industry's single-minded greed, she still makes valid points about both. On science issues—present in themes three and four—Nestle describes how improved methods of detecting foodborne pathogens arose in the space program before 1960 but took another generation to reach regulatory practice because of manufacturers' obstruction, and how advocacy groups use science to raise scientific concerns about assertions industry and government make as scientifically based. In neither arena does she describe [End Page 258] how newer knowledge tends to antiquate rather than resolve controversies, though this largely explains why the political arguments constantly evolve. In the end, Nestle reaches the conclusion that the American food supply, safe as it is, is not safe enough to meet the known risks of food handling, the unknown risks of genetically modified foods, and the conceivable threat of bioterrorism. In remedy, she suggests that...

Disappearing Private Reputations in Long-Run Relationships, Second Version

For games of public reputation with uncertainty over types and imperfect public monitoring, Cripps, Mailath, and Samuelson (2004) showed that an informed player facing short-lived uninformed opponents cannot maintain a permanent reputation for playing a strategy that is not part of an equilibrium of the game without uncertainty over types. This paper extends that result to games in which the uninformed player is long-lived and has private beliefs, so that the informed player's reputation is private. We also show that the rate at which reputations disappear is uniform across equilibria and that reputations disappear in sufficiently long discounted finitely-repeated games.

When Private Beliefs Shape Collective Reality: The Effects of Beliefs About Coworkers on Group Discussion and Performance

The study presented in this paper examines how beliefs about coworkers affect group discussion and performance. Two beliefs are considered: (1) Perceptions of coworker task competence, and (2) achievement motivation. This study investigates whether these perceptions can actually hinder group discussion and performance, and considers the contexts in which these detrimental effects are more or less likely to arise. Results indicate that although perceptions of higher achievement motivation in coworkers lowered performance when task information was partially shared, they raised performance when task information was fully shared. A content analysis of group discussions reveals that the discussion behaviors examined by this study, rather than the more frequently examined bias toward discussing common information, mediated these results.

Irreconcilable differences?: intellectual stalemate in the gay rights debate

Preface The New Cold War Group Affiliations and Post-Consensus Politics Religious and Sexual Diversity Religious Views: Past and Present Biblical Scholarship: Texts, Errors, and Methods Textual Ambiguities and the Scriptures The Theological Meaning of Sex Science and Uncertainty The Etiology of Homosexuality: Biology and/or Culture? Diversity within Diversity: Postmodern Sexual Identities Define Illness: Rival Theories of Pathology and Ex-Gay Ministries Politics and Sexual Diversity Demonizing the Enemy Gay Bashing and Social Control Pluralism versus Dogma: Public Spaces and Private Beliefs Works Cited Index

:Liberty and Religion: Church and State in Leiden's Reformation, 1572-1620

Acknowledgments List of Abbreviations Introduction 1. Leiden in the Late Sixteenth Century 2. Building a Church, 1572-1579 3. Schism in the Public Church, 1579-80 4. A "Minor Matter": The Question of "Genevan" Discipline 5. The Second Generation of Conflict: Arminians and Gomarists 6. Public Church, Private Belief: The Tolerated Congregations Conclusion Appendix: The Text of the Arbitral Accord Bibliography Indexes Index of Persons Index of Places Index of Subjects

Pregnancy and Working: A Critical Reading of Advice and Information on Pregnancy and Employment

As more women remain in paid employment during pregnancy, women's public role as worker is enacted in parallel with the transition to the private role of mother. Cultural resources, such as books, magazines and other literature, may support this transition and help to identify the expectations of new and changing roles. Information and advice about working contained in such publications may also be implicated in the continuation of public and private beliefs about pregnancy and employment. Investigation of the representations of work in literature available to pregnant women suggests several topics with-in which material on working can occur; these are health, rights, and work and home. This coverage is discussed in relation to the different discourses of pregnancy, particularly a discourse of responsibility, and how these may position women as workers or mothers.

Von Luther zu Bismarck: Kulturkampf und nationale Identitat bei Theodor Fontane, Conrad Ferdinand Meyer und Gerhart Hauptmann

Sprengel, Peter. Von Luther zu Bismarck: Kulturkampf and rationale Identitat bei Theodor Fontane, Conrad Ferdinand Meyer and Gerhart Hauptmann. Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 1999. 119pp. DM 34.00. Von Luther zu Bismarck proceeds from two unremarkable, but nevertheless important premises, first, that we know too little about evolution and content of German identity, both in Wilhelmine era and afterwards and, second, that we can learn useful things about Germany by reading the nation's literature. Our lack of detailed knowledge about nation before Bismarck is no less striking, but this is a book of more paradigmatic than global ambitions. Its information illustrates where others would try to define. Nobody should fault a work's limited scope, especially if undertaking provides a useful model for further research and synthesis, and Sprengel hints at inferences that one could make from his small sample. At one level he convincingly brings together three authors not normally considered members of a single category: Theodor Fontane, skeptical Prussian realist, Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, a Swiss writer of pan-Germanic ideals, and Gerhart Hauptmann, supposedly humanistic representative of naturalism. At another level, while providing close readings of selected texts, Sprengel seems to be more interested in showing how literary history can shed light on political issues. Although book concentrates on three authors' persistent use of motifs from Kulturkampf, long after anti-Catholicism had ceased to matter to Bismarck, Sprengel apparently wants to argue that we would learn more about questions that trouble a society by reading novels, poems, and plays than by studying an era's newspapers or its political history. What pope did and stood for may have stopped troubling politicians after 1880, but, according to Sprengel's reading of literary record, Luther and papacy structured debate over what it meant to be German until well into twentieth century. Again, thesis sounds plausible, but even most obvious proposition demands both a careful marshaling of evidence and a clear line of reasoning. Sprengel's shortcomings lie in arguments he refuses to make explicit and in conclusions he neglects to draw. This short book's two chapters might have formed core of something larger, but they fail to measure up to demands Sprengel implicitly places on them. The book starts well enough with a brief introduction devoted to explaining what Sprengel calls Legitimationsdefizit (9) in imperial Germany, and he attempts to give his account current interest by linking Kulturkampf to a present-day German bureaucracy's inability to deal with a Muslim teacher whose head scarf brought more than private beliefs into classroom. …

The Impact of Public Testing for Human Immunodeficiency Virus

In this paper, we estimate the behavioral responses by individuals to the type of information-intervention a public human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) testing program would typify. A unique feature of the data we use is that the survey itself altered the allocation of information held by respondents by administrating a blood test for HIV as part of a longitudinal survey. Our framework for the demand for information on HIV implies that because only individuals who are surprised by the results of the intervention respond to it, in our case low-risk individuals who test HIV-positive or high-risk individuals who test HIV-negative, an information-intervention of this type may have surprising effects. Our framework also implies that looking just at the aggregate effects of an HIV testing program is a misleading indicator of the behavioral responsiveness of the average individual to the information intervention. We find that although the aggregate effect of the testing program is quite small, the effects disaggregated by private beliefs are consistent with information elastic behavior for the average individual. In addition, the subgroups of the population affected by a publicly subsidized testing program may have roughly offsetting behavioral responses, which may lead to little effect or possibly even perverse outcomes with regards to an objective of lowering disease transmission.

Judaism in Israel: Ben-Gurion's Private Beliefs and Public Policy

Judaism in Israel: Ben-Gurion's Private Beliefs and Public Policy

A Very Private Belief: Reincarnation in Contemporary England

Survey data indicate a substantial minority of westerners who have no attachment to Eastern or New Age religion but who nevertheless believe in reincarnation. This paper summarizes the findings of a small intensive interview study of a group of English people who take seriously the possibility of reincarnation: 1 Many of them hold reincarnation alongside Christian belief; 2) Most are less than dogmatic about their belief; 3) Some entertain the possibility of reincarnation because of experience (first or second hand), for others reincarnation solves intellectual problems, e.g., concerning theodicy; 4) They see bodily incarnations in the context of long-term spiritual progress, and they value spirit over body; 5) Their belief in reincarnation has rather little effect on the rest of their lives. It is concluded that rising belief in reincarnation heralds neither a spiritual nor a moral revolution, but fits easily into the privatized religion that characterizes contemporary western societies, and England in particular

Judaism in Israel: Ben-Gurion's Private Beliefs and Public Policy

Judaism in Israel: Ben-Gurion's Private Beliefs and Public Policy

Social Judgeability and the Bogus Pipeline: The Role of Naive Theories of Judgment in Impression Formation

According to social judgeability theory, people rely on naive theories of judgment to make decisions about others. Because of limited access to their cognitive processes, perceivers use meta-informational cues to estimate the validity of their judgment and misattribute the origin of their impression. In line with this hypothesis, Yzerbyt, Schadron, Leyens, and Rocher (1994) found that participants who thought that they had subliminally received individuating information felt more entitled to judge and they made polarized judgments. Experiment 1 uses a bogus pipeline procedure to examine the viability of an impression management account of Yzerbyt et al.'s (1994) data, for example, that participants judged only because they thought that they were expected to judge regardless of their private beliefs. In line with a private belief interpretation, the bogus pipeline participants replicated previous results. Moreover, participants also stereotyped the target more in the presence than in the absence of the bogus pipeline, suggesting the existence of social desirability concerns in the expression of stereotypes. Experiment 2 tested perceivers' sensitivity to judgmental contexts by avoiding any reference to person perception. The results not only replicate the social judgeability pattern but additionally show that the absence of information made participants feel even less inclined to judge in a context that does not stress social judgment so much. As a set, these findings emphasize the role of naive theories in social inference processes, as suggested by social judgeability theory.

Translations of Vocabularies in Systems of Communicating Agents

AbstractWe develop a programming framework for systems of agents that interact with each other in a shared environment. We model the common environment as a mathematical structure and assign to each agent a part of this environment as its expertise. This expertise is given by a syntactical signature composed of a collection of relation and function symbols, which gives rise to a window on the environment. The agents observe and manipulate their individual windows and additionally exchange information about them along interconnecting communication channels. During such communication steps the agents may introduce new mental concepts to act as translations of concepts from foreign signatures that are referred to in the information received. Finally, the agents maintain a private belief base, which together with their window on the environment constitutes their mental state. This all results in an abstract programming language of communicating agents, which incorporates and generalizes traditional programming concepts from the field of concurrency theory. The syntax for the language is given, followed by a semantical description in terms of a transition system. This system enables the formal derivation of computations and gives rise to an operational semantics of the multi-agent programming language.

Macrocosm, mesocosm, and microcosm: The persistent nature of ‘Hindu’ beliefs and symbolic forms

With his recent book, Mesocosm: Hinduism and the organization of a traditional Newar city in Nepal, Robert Levy has greatly indebted students and scholars of South Asia. The work deals with the urban universe and its components of Hindus in the Newar town of Bhaktapur in Nepal's Kathmandu Valley during the mid-seventies. It presents, in conWast to primarily philological and historical analyses, a structured account of the totality of a local form of Hinduism and, in my opinion, for the first time, a clear view of the intricate nature of the elements and their interrelations of a 'medieval-type' Hindu community. Mesocosm successfully combines a well-informed textual and historical background, with anthropological observation and, as his earlier work--Tahitians: Mind and experience in the Society lslands (1973)--1ed us to expect, insightful analysis. It is often overlooked that the Hindu texts, whether in Sanskrit, Middle or New Indo-.~,~Tan, or Dravidian, usually represent the voice of the Br~'~na~ (the Buddhist, the Jaina, and so forth) establishment. Even originally countermovements (Tantra, for example) made their way into the received texts only after a period of 'Br~lman. iT~tion'--entailing purification and adjustment to the norms of Hinduism. This book, however, presents Hinduism as it operates on the ground, from private beliefs to the city-wide Tantric religion, from private rituals to the public festivals of a whole realm, from individual sacred space in private houses to the sacred geography of the town of Bhaktapur and surrounding areas. It thus has inWinsic value not only for understanding local Newar Hinduism but also for the

Caught in the Middle: Evangelical Public Elementary Educators

The tensions that arise between private beliefs and teaching in the public school are examined in a case study of three evangelical elementary classroom educators who support constructivist pedagogy. This study involves teachers at differing points in their careers who strongly advocate a transactional curriculum in their professional community while existing in a theologically conservative community that often supports a return to traditional forms of educational practice. The article informs us that such teachers do exist, describes the range of challenges they face, and examines the roles of school, church, and family in mediating such challenges.

Government Action, Biases in Risk Perception, and Insurance Decisions

Biases in risk perception potentially have a large effect on insurance and risk-related behavior. The government can alter these perceptions either through informational programs or controlling the risk. Policies that convey a higher risk level generally have the expected effects on insurance and protective actions, whereas efforts that increase the precision of either the government risk information or private beliefs typically have ambiguous effects. In some cases, the structure of how government policies enter the risk-belief function is consequential. Ascertaining the magnitude of the effects, not simply the direction, also is an important issue. For example, misperceptions have a dramatic effect on the tradeoffs between compensating differentials and the size of the loss but a negligible effect on the tradeoff between compensating differentials and the magnitude of the probability.