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This article focuses on Russian animation director Aleksandr Petrov’s short films, created with the rarely employed, labour-intensive paint-on-glass technique. Using an animation studies approach, ...

This article uses the cognitive content theory to develop a theoretical link between an impermanence mindset and a market-focused dynamic capability, the latter being an essential antecedent factor...

This paper addresses the link between local understandings of uncertainty and people management practices in the under-researched and uncertain context of Mongolia. It draws on a qualitative, interpretive study of 34 top and middle managers with people management responsibilities in Mongolian organisations. We put forward the concept of a ‘mindset about uncertainty’ for examining Mongolian practitioners’ understandings of and responses to the uncertainty inherent in the country’s institutional environment. We identify four elements of the Mongolian mindset about uncertainty: (1) belief that impermanence is natural; (2) consideration of uncertainty as normal; (3) framing of uncertainty as positive; and (4) emphasis on flexibility in adapting to changing circumstances. We discuss this approach to dealing with uncertainty as a potentially valuable source of learning for Multinational Enterprises (MNEs) and International Human Resource Development (IHRD) practitioners in unstable environments.

“Impermanence is the essence of everything.” – Pema Chodron Our last editorial, written in February 2020, feels distant. Like many of you reading this right now, we have been searching for ways to ...

Researches on emotion regulation have suggested that contextualizing a negative life event within a broader time frame, what is called impermanence focus, buffers its emotional impact. Does imperma...

Considered as one aspect of the task of individuation, acknowledging the impermanence of life is recognized as a pivotal component of an individual’s conscious relationship with a transcendent mean...

A foundational axiom about flux and impermanence from Heraclitus, alluding to the river, has been an important reference point for the philosophy of critical realism. This article begins with this,...

In 1994, apartheid rule collapsed in South Africa, and went away with most of the rigid structures that had circumscribed the movement, and arguably the entire lives of black people. In a haste to ...

In his 2016 article “Can Environmental Imagination Save the World?” Lawrence Buell argues that policy reform and technological interventions alone are not enough to address the threat of the ecolog...

Clay is an effective medium in art therapy insofar as it promotes mindfulness, acceptance, and a keen awareness of impermanence. Specifically, Buddhist-inspired lessons of meditative practi...

In my first conversation with Dennis, he shares his story with me. He describes how he had gotten his diagnosis of Stage IV lung cancer and was given a prognosis of two months. This was five years ...

Loss, impermanence, and death are facts of life difficult to face squarely. Our own mortality and that of loved ones feels painful and threatening, the mortality of the biosphere unthinkable. Consequently, we do our best to dodge these thoughts, and the current globalizing culture supports and colludes in our evasiveness. Even environmental educators tend to foreground 'sustainability' whilst sidelining the reality of decline, decay, and loss. And yet, human life and ecological health require experiencing 'unsustainability' too, and a pedagogy for life requires a pedagogy of death. In this paper we explore experiences of loss and dying in both human relationships and the natural world through four different types of death affording situations, the cemetery, caring-unto-death, sudden death, and personal mortality. We trace the confluence of death in nature and human life, and consider some pedagogical affordance within and between these experiences as an invitation to foster an honest relationship with the mortality of self, others, and nature. We end by suggesting art as an ally in this reconnaissance, which can scaffold teaching and learning and support us to courageously accept both the beauty and the ugliness that death delivers to life.

Recognizing cognitive imperialism in the emerging postqualitative regime, we propose a hesitation, a perturbation to think the other-than-ness of the west. Asserting the postqualitative regime as west reinforces hegemonic epistemological violence; we look to the East and Africa – progenitors of the west-termed postqualitative regime and seek to privilege the onto–epistemologies from which these concepts were culturally (mis)appropriated. More specifically, we explore the southern African philosophy of Ubuntu and Taoism from the East to transgress west. These oft-western denigrated indigenous philosophical concepts embody the postqualitative conceptual (mis)appropriations of entanglement, the inseparability of ontology and epistemology (onto–epistemology), and an ontological positionality of immanence – interpenetration – impermanence. Re-conceptualizing the postqualitative regime, we offer a turn to non-western indigenous ontologies illuminating African and Eastern philosophies pregnant with multi...

Vipassana meditation in the tradition of S.N. Goenka is based upon neutral, non-judgemental, non-reactive awareness of the arising and passing of body sensations. This focus for meditation has two advantages. First, it is a practical focus that most people find they can work with, and that derives from a historical connection to the Buddha’s words. Second, this meditative focus puts the practitioner in line with the modern scientific world view as well as with the Buddha. The rising and passing of body sensations can be understood in a seamless, scientific narrative that connects cell biology, biochemistry, bioenergetics, the history of the evolution of life on Earth, solar nucleosynthesis and the evolution of the universe. This article traces this elegant and elevating scientific narrative in greater detail.

The folklore of Nak (Naak) or ‘Mae Nak Phrakhanong’ (Mother Nak of Phrakhanong District) permeates Thailand as the most popular story of a ghostly haunting. The story, originating in the nineteenth century, has been made into a plethora of versions including more than 20 film adaptations. My research focuses on the 2003 opera Mae Naak composed by Somtow Sucharitkul. The opera contains idiosyncratic traits different from other versions, which reflect Thais’ multiple feelings of horror, veneration and affection to Nak. Somtow creates a new Asian heroine in opera, who bears powerful emotions of love and desire to live, unlike the stereotype such as Madama Butterfly. The conclusion, however, does not define the emotional aspect of the story as merely the ignorance of impermanence and attachment. Instead, the narrative helps each individual to concretise and personalise the more abstract concepts of Buddhism. The opera depicts true love that continues through rebirths with her beloved in a karmic journey.

We are delighted that our article has been chosen for this special anniversary issue. We thank Alice Bloch for her careful reading and insightful response to our ideas. We wrote this article more t...

Rhetoric is multiple and mutable in the sense that there is more than one kind of rhetoric and any particular rhetoric is highly adaptable to the point that what qualifies as rhetoric according to scholar A may be unrecognizable as such to scholar B. It is not safe to assume that we can account for rhetoric as a multiplicity or in its mutability. Despite an arsenal of terms to characterize rhetoric, how to talk about it as diverse?This essay first conceptualizes material “diversity” and presents a borrowed term, polythesis, to give some character to the problem of rhetoric as ontologically one and many. Second, the essay discusses genealogy as an approach that enables the sorting of different rhetorics without producing a fixed taxonomy. Parsing rhetoric’s multiplicity requires mobile discriminations and should be paired with a methodology sensitive to ontological flux. As historical ontologies, genealogies of different rhetorics can produce meaningful distributions while emphasizing impermanence ...

Meditative insight has been defined in previous research as a process of cognitive change based on the understanding through personal experience of the fundamental Buddhist concepts of impermanence, suffering, not-self, and emptiness. It has been proposed that the construct of insight represents an important mechanism in meditative practices, and an instrument for its assessment has recently been proposed. Building on previous findings, this study was designed (1) to test the psychometric properties and perform a validation of a French version of this instrument and (2) to explore the relationship between meditative insight and perceived stress through mediation of irrational beliefs. Self-report data were obtained from a sample of French-speaking meditation practitioners (N = 260). The results confirm the validity and the reliability of the French version of Ireland's Insight Scale (2012), and partially support the hypothesis of the relationship between meditative insight and perceived stress being mediated by irrational beliefs.

In the mid nineteenth century there were several travelling collections of anatomical waxworks in England. Their stated aim was to educate the public, especially women, about health, particularly reproductive health, to which end their proprietors gave demonstrations, sold pamphlets, and in some cases practised medicine. Most large population centres on the railway network played host to a museum and the total number of visitors is estimated at over a million. Despite a lack of complaints from the public, there was opposition from the magistrates which resulted in a series of prosecutions on charges of obscenity. Owing to their impermanence and their reputation as indecent exhibitions, these itinerant anatomy museums all but disappeared from cultural histories of nineteenth-century England. They were, however, sufficiently successful in engaging with audiences that they briefly challenged the monopoly that the medical profession — newly unified under the Medical Act — exercised over the study of a...

Fostering conservation as a discursive and contextual practice, this essay examines transitional media that necessitate new ways of thinking about continuity. It looks at two examples of artworks with the objective of unraveling the varying modes of their transition. An event score, event-performance, object, and film drawn from the artistic legacies of George Brecht and Nam June Paik illustrate that ideas of permanence and impermanence are linked with an understanding of artworks in time and duration. While conservation reveals itself as an intervention in the temporal dimension of artworks, the theories of duration allow us to better understand the reciprocal relations between materials and meanings. In doing so, these theories acknowledge and attempt to make sense of the performative materiality of these works.

(2017). Zimbabwe’s migrants and South Africa’s border farms: the roots of impermanence. Anthropology Southern Africa: Vol. 40, Becoming and unbecoming farm workers in Southern Africa. Guest Editors: Maxim Bolt and Tarminder Kaur, pp. 317-319.

Buero's mastery of stagecraft would qualify Las Meninas to be considered among his best works, though it has not received the critical acclaim accorded to his other plays. The thesis of this article is that the appeal of Las Meninas consists in its profound reflection on large existential questions similar to those explored by Miguel de Unamuno. For Buero, Las Meninas powerfully captures the atmosphere of impermanence and pretence which surrounds the regime of Philip IV. It thereby encourages audiences, and, more particularly, readers of the text, living under a regime of censorship, repression and false appearances, to see themselves as participants in the collective tragedy of the nation, and by extension of human life in general.

In this article, we illustrate the challenges and possibilities of Buddhist stories, including Zen stories and Jataka Tales, in the service of compassionate teaching. Through the tropes of these stories, we address manifestations and extensions of compassion in our teaching, including interdependence, impermanence, and equanimity. Using Buddhist stories and parables in the service of Western education can illustrate such deeper concepts and work to awaken and/or reinforce compassion, reflection, and mindfulness in teachers, pre-service teachers, and students themselves. The incorporation of Buddhist stories and parables in pre-service teacher education can focus the lenses of attention, encourage self-examination, and inspire students for further learning.

This paper seeks a reengagement with Doris Lessing's classic novel The Golden Notebook in relation to the concept of intermittency outlined in Andrew Gibson's recent theoretical work. Gibson argues that recent continental philosophy has broken with a linear reading of history in favour of the intermittent occurrence of Events: moments of crisis and rupture from which truth, politics, and justice emerge into the actual. Lessing's novel, praised for its honest depiction of women's experience at the dawn of the Sixties, is situated resolutely in a post-war world between Events, a time Gibson would depict as concrete in its non-Evental stasis. However, the vision of history which emerges in the novel is porous, ephemeral, one moment splintered between characters’ contested ideologies and the next fused in bodily interpellation. By returning to this work of considerable historical significance we can also contest Gibson's categorisation of literature as a ‘residue of events’. A paradigmatic rupture in ...

This article looks at Muscat's Hindu community, part of the city's wider Indian society. It examines the diasporic home-making history, practices, and strategies that have created distinctly Hindu and Indian spaces in an Arab environment. It maps the community's demographics and human geography, presents a case study of the Khimji Ramdas family, considers the community's “permanent impermanence”, and assesses the challenges posed to the community by the kafāla (sponsorship) system and other government restrictions.

Alvin Toffler wrote more than 50 years ago that modern civilizations, as they acquired more knowledge and technology, were exhibiting increased impermanence. The rates of change throughout modern s...

Class categorisation should not only be informed by academic pursuits but by the lived experiences of those being categorised. A human or community-centred definition of class will illustrate the complexities of class experience and will thus present a dynamic conceptualisation. Through two life-history interviews of two black women from South Africa, this article illustrates that middle-classness for blacks during apartheid was marred with constant shifts related to the socio-economic and political impermanence of class position. Continuous negotiation driven by the need to be included in one's own community and the effects of being racially othered in interaction with whites and white spaces influences these shifts. In conclusion, the article argues that being middle class and black is heterogeneously experienced and thus complex.

Anthony Minghella’s feature film Breaking and Entering (2006) constitutes a kaleidoscopic portrait of the Camden cityscape around King’s Cross/St Pancras, a North London area whose gradual gentrification at the beginning of the 21st century makes it the site of perpetual clashes along diverse lines of division, whether cultural, legal, social, ethnic or personal. Minghella tells the story of the encounter between well-to-do Londoner Will Francis and two Bosnian refugees, Amira and Miro, and in so doing explores both the destructive and affirmative potential to arise from a demographics of impermanence and difference. Focusing on the ways in which the various characters perceive and make use of their urban surroundings, and in which they negotiate the boundaries of personal space (both in literal and figurative terms), this article focuses on the film’s affinity with Derrida’s deconstruction of cosmopolitanism and its relevance to London as a postcolonial European, rather than British, metropolis.

Nation-states’ investment in heritage supports Benedict Anderson’s thesis that nationalism offers collective immortality in the face of individual mortality. By the same token, however, corruption – a metaphor based on the impermanence of the flesh – corrodes the official face of heritage, offering more covert and carnal understandings of urban life and of its architectural beauties while also affording opportunities for kinds of profiteering that damage the very fabric that heritage policies seek to celebrate. Both these aspects of social reality represent the ‘cultural intimacy’ that governments seek to deny or suppress but on which their citizens’ loyalty often depends. It thus becomes imperative for scholars of heritage to recognise that heritage and corruption represent two closely interrelated dimensions of the management of the past in the present, and that theories of heritage therefore cannot afford to ignore the concomitant implications of local ideas about corruption and the practices on which ...

This article argues that Buddhist philosophy offers a plausible theory of the education of the emotions. Emotions are analyzed as cognitive feeling events in which the subject is passive. The education of the emotions is possible if and only if it is possible to evaluate one’s emotional life (the normative condition) and it is possible to satisfy the normative condition through learning (the pedagogical condition). Drawing on the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism, as well as the concepts of conditioned arising, emptiness and anattā, the article presents a view of the education of the emotions that rejects craving for permanence.

New Zealand's economy remains highly dependent on agricultural production. There are 175,000 lifestyle blocks in New Zealand covering 873,000 ha, and these, along with urbanisation, potentially constrain future land productivity. Using GIS analysis to bring together data on land cover, land use, and lifestyle blocks, we find lifestyle blocks occupy 10% of New Zealand's high-class land, while urbanisation since 1990 occupies 0.5%. An average of 5800 new lifestyle blocks have been added every year since 1998. With one-sixth of all lifestyle blocks occupying high-class land, and an additional area affected by proximity factors such as ‘reverse sensitivity’ and the ‘impermanence syndrome’, both national monitoring of land fragmentation and policy interventions are urgently required.

This paper works through recent developments in museum practice and the work of performance company Mkultra in order to articulate a practice of scenography that proceeds through an engagement with material culture. In relation to the space brought into being by the museum and by performance a series of expectations might be in play – the museum as a site of permanence, a series of artefacts, a historical record; the performance as a site of impermanence, an ephemeral event, a limited duration. Certain contemporary museum practices and the increasingly common intermingling of performance/installation could be seen to subject these notions of permanence and impermanence to radical scrutiny through the particular scenographies they instantiate. Scenographies emerging from practices of collection and display, of the accumulation and articulation of “stuff”. Stuff, that is objects, enters performance most often as props or set yet in life objects and persons conspire to create ‘spaces’. A genuine resurrection...

Insecure, poorly paid manual work has been the hallmark of African labour migration for over a century, evident most saliently in southern Africa’s industrial landscape, where the differentials bet...

Thoroughbred breeding and racing has survived on the ability of racing administrators to capture gambling revenue, whether it is proximal, remote or virtual. Given this relationship, there is surprisingly little academic work on the perceptions of gambling, preferences for different forms of gambling, preferences for different types of thoroughbred races that may facilitate gambling, and the relationships between viewing thoroughbred races and gambling on these events. We address this important gap in the literature through a study involving racing patrons at two Sydney racecourses, including midweek and weekend racing meetings, and a corresponding study of four Sydney suburbs, with differing socio-economic characteristics. Our research highlights the variety of attitudes to gambling and the diversity of gambling experiences among participants. It situates contemporary technological innovations such as internet gambling within a longer history of approaches to revenue capture that address the impermanence...

Absract The government of the United Arab Emirates requires all foreign migrant workers to reside on temporary visas. This affects transnational mobility patterns among the one class of residents whom we should expect to show the least degree of transnationalism: second-generation migrants. While the degree of transnationalism varies, a very high number of these migrants leave, then return and then leave again from Dubai. Drawing on 51 semi-structured interviews conducted in Dubai amongst second-generation migrants, most of them of South Asian origin, I argue that the state’s policy towards migrants is important, and more determining than other factors such as ethnic/nationality communities in understanding these migrants’ transnational behaviour.

According to the Buddhist concept of ‘dependent origination’ (pratītyasamutpāda), discrete factors come into existence because of a combination of causes (hetu) and conditions (pratyaya). Such discrete factors, further, are combinations of five aggregates (pan caskandha) that, themselves, are subject to constant change. Discrete factors, therefore, lack a self-nature (ātman). The passing through time of discrete factors is characterized by the ‘characteristic marks of the conditioned’: birth (utpāda), change in continuance (sthityanyathātva), and passing away (vyaya); or, alternatively: birth (jāti), duration (sthiti), decay (jarā), and impermanence (anityatā). In the interpretation of the precise nature of these characteristic marks of the conditioned, and their relation to the discrete factor they characterize, different opinions were prevalent within the Sarvāstivāda School of Buddhist philosophy, with, judging from later scholastic literature, the views of the Dārṣṭāntika/Sautrāntika and the Vaibhāṣik...

For marketing researchers, the growing number of wireless subscribers and, especially, the number of wireless-only households, has major implications for one of the traditional mainstays of survey methodology: the telephone interview. Mobile phones present a number of challenges with respect to sampling and coverage,” including changing the sampling unit from the household to the person, the need for dual-frame designs in order to reach those with landlines and those without, and how best to define access or use, given the relative impermanence of mobile phone numbers. The purpose of this two-stage exploratory research study was to assess how potential respondents would react to receiving a mobile phone call in which they were asked to complete a survey. This two-stage study contributes some initial insights into the reactions of young adults to this new potential data collection method and offers suggestions for needed future research on this method. Given the purpose of the research and the cal...

Climate, water shortages, poor soils, pests, isolation and the impermanence of settlements made ornamental gardening difficult for householders on the mining fields of Queensland's dry tropics between 1860 and 1960. Only some tried to overcome these disadvantages. Out of the many motivations that exist for ornamental gardening, the principal reasons here seem to have been the love of plants, climate mitigation, expectations of gender and class, the desire of schools to civilise their students, aesthetics derived from European tastes, and attempts to improve the raw rough mining settlements.

Legal theorist Desmond Manderson and Shakespearean Paul Yachnin develop parallel arguments that seek to restore a public dimension of responsibility to literary studies and a private dimension of responsibility to law. Their arguments issue from their work as the creators of the Shakespeare Moot Court at McGill University, a course in which graduate English students team up with senior Law students to argue cases in the “Court of Shakespeare,” where the sole Institutes, Codex, and Digest are comprised by the plays of Shakespeare. Yachnin argues that modern literary studies suffers from impermanence and isolation from real-world concerns and that it can redress these limitations—developing attributes of corrigibility, temporality, judgment, and publicity—by learning from law. Manderson finds that modern legal judgment is bereft of affective engagement with the subjects of law and wedded to an ideal of objectivity, regulation, and impersonality. Literature can restore to legal judgment the elements of narra...

This article, written by a therapist in midlife, considers the intersection of aging, psychotherapy, and spiritual practice. It includes professional and personal reflections as well as clinical examples explored through the complementary lenses of intersubjectivity theory, which describes the co-creation of experience by therapist and patient, and Zen Buddhsim, which explores the illusory nature of some of our most basic assumptions. The author discusses the nuances of listening to and attempting to understand others, especially in the transference and countertransference. The author reflects on her personal experience of the processes of aging and maturing, both emotionally and physically, and on ways in which life has changed for her, over time, as a result of aging, meditation, and psychotherapy practice. Concepts explored include co-creation of relationship, emptiness and impermanence, and existential anxiety.

This textual exploration of Cyber mohalla, an online journal authored by inhabitants of a temporary neighborhood in Delhi, India, offers a postmodernist critical spatial feminist critique of urban displacement and marginalization. It draws from feminist architectural critiques and cultural analyses of globalization to explore the writers' subjectivity within their spatiotemporal practices. Our examination of reterritorialization discourses reveals five themes addressing notions of structure, impermanence, social relations, urban disorder, and nature. We argue that the act of subjectivizing spaces of marginalization is not only a project of destabilizing resistance but one that examines essentialist notions of difference constraining agency and choice.

The role of Chan Buddhism for mind therapy is distinguished from psychotherapy by the objectives in diminishing or removing the deluded perceived self and the psychological self of attachments and cravings, which are considered as the more basic origins for psychological suffering and problems. The Buddhist concepts of impermanence, no-self and emptiness are discussed to explain the Buddhist explanation for human suffering. A four-stage theory is described to explain the common Buddhist meditation experience toward the realization of no-self. Removing psychological attachment is found to be of explanatory value for many enlightenment episodes of Chan masters. Meditation concentration and reduction of self-attachment will mutually reinforce each other toward a complete therapy of the mind. An innovative approach for psychotherapy in going further to tackle a person's basic life attachments is suggested.

A confluence of increasing interest in popular culture as a source for religious inspiration and the growing interest, both popular and scholarly, in zombie-fiction bring together several possibilities for scholarship in the context of religious studies. This paper will present one aspect of the zombie-craze in the light of Buddhist philosophy. The Buddha taught that the illusion of self-ish-ness, and resulting attachments, are the greatest hurdles to achieving nibbana. Through meditating on the decomposing corpse, Buddhists may come to realize the Ten Impurities of the Body, and so come to grips with the impermanence of the self. I will illustrate how George Romero's Night of the Living Dead, recognized as the watershed film of the modern zombie sub-genre, unintentionally conveys the Buddhist teachings of dukkha (suffering by attachments), anatta (no-self), and anicca (impermanence).

SUMMARY In working with clients who are experiencing major difficulties in life, the more traditional, psychopathology-oriented approach is often content with symptom reduction and adaptive functioning. This article proposes that therapists can aim higher, going beyond survivorship. Inspired by Chinese medicine's holistic model, the authors develop the Eastern body-mind-spirit approach with the primary therapy goal being the facilitation of harmonious dynamic equilibrium within oneself, as well as between oneself and the natural and social environment. To achieve that, multimodal interventions are employed, including vitalizing body work, such as simplified Tai Chi and Qigong exercises, acupressure, body scan, breathing meditation, and mindful tea drinking and eating, as well as vibrant mind and spirit process, such as the acknowledgement and acceptance of impermanence and unpredictability, regaining self-control by letting go of control, the appreciation and affirmation of life, the fostering of loving k...

Contemporary art exhibitions Increasingly include artworks that vary in size and weight, are ephemeral in nature, organic in expression, sometimes deceptively frail, purposefully disorganized, or obsessively detailed. The ways in which curators, conservators, registrars, and exhibition designers are engaging in active collaboration with artists to realize complex conceptual installations are illuminated in these case studies from Tempo, an exhibition organized by The Museum of Modern Art in 2002. This article discusses how the museum's standards of exhibition preparation and installation, as well as conservation treatments and maintenance, were adapted. A simple shipment of material introduced a need to understand international trade law; ubiquitous technology provided a crash course on consumer-driven obsolescence; and the artist's intent, as well as notions of authorship, inspired inquiry into the relationship between the museum and the artist. Despite long-standing tradition in approaches to in...

The loss of strength gradient (LSG), which demonstrates the importance of geographic distance and the advantage of forward basing, has been under attack. Proximity is supposedly becoming less important for prevailing in war. It is a view that has been expressed not only by President George W. Bush but even by the person who devised the LSG, Kenneth Boulding. As a result, it is being used as reason for the withdrawal of U.S. forces back to the American homeland. However, this view is flawed. Distance is retaining its importance as a result of two factors: the competitive nature of war and the impermanence of great-power status. The United States cannot withdraw forward-positioned forces and expect to maintain permanently the same power projection capabilities.

This text offers a side-by-side examination of Four Systems and Tracer from the performer's perspective. After a brief overview in which the influence of Alexander Calder's work upon Brown's compositional style is examined, the article provides a detailed description of the author's ensemble's approach to these two scores. There is also a consideration of how Brown's use of spontaneity in performance helped to free music from its historical context, paving the way toward the eclectic music world of the early twenty-first century.

Augustine of Hippo has expressed a vision of beauty in nature that could, if better known, encourage traditional Christians and secular ecologists to affirm the ground they have in common. For Augustine the ideal would be to see nature as God sees it, feeling deeply both its beauty and its impermanence, loving nature without clinging to it. With such clear seeing would come love and the motivation for sustained and skillful action. This paper discusses Augustine's paradigm and what blocks us from seeing it, and then frames principles for an authentically Augustinian response.

Ideologies are still very much in evidence, although some of their configurations are novel. Their denial typifies utopian and neutralist approaches, but those are instances of misrecognition. Liberal epistemology (as distinct from liberal theory) has contributed to an awareness of ideological diversity, but also to the possibility of choice among ideologies, as items of eclectic – and occasionally inventive – consumption. Pluralism may hence become fragmentation, albeit a constrained one. Liberalism also encourages uncertainty and multiple future paths, endorsing the impermanence and non‐doctrinaire nature of much contemporary political thinking. The mass media, social movements and networks, and popular political language have disseminated new vehicles and forms of ideology, and the notion of a ‘post‐ideological’ age is itself a masking device. Ideologies mutate regularly, their boundaries are porous, and ideological delocalization is countered by cultural decentralization. Yet the fragility of particul...