Why do successive education reforms within a country resonate with familiar assumptions about educational goals, society, class, and state, even at moments of radical change? Repeating cultural narratives sustain continuities within institutional change processes, by influencing how new ideas are interpreted, how interest groups express preferences, and how institutional norms shape political processes. Repeating narratives make it more likely for some types of reforms to be implemented and sustained than others. This chapter develops a theoretical model suggesting how cultural narratives are transmitted across time and an empirical method for assessing cross-national differences in cultural narratives. Each country has a distinctive “cultural constraint,” or a set of cultural symbols and narratives, that appears in a nation’s literary corpus. Writers collectively contribute to this body of cultural tropes; despite individual fluctuations, they largely reproduce the master narratives of their countries. Computational linguistic processes allow us to observe empirical differences between British and Danish cultural depictions of education in 1,084 works of fiction from 1700 to 1920. Cultural narratives do not determine specific outcomes, as tropes must be activated in political struggles. Yet we can show how significant cross-national differences in literary images of education resonate with British and Danish educational trajectories.

A question not asked to this point in the study of genocide by all the scholars associated with this work in the various disciplines is whether or not there something inherent in the very social construction we call “religion” that lends itself, adapts itself, all-too-easily to those communities— both nation-states and non-nation-state actors—that perpetrate genocide, either in actuality or in potential? Thus, this contribution begins with something of a theoretical look-see vis-à-vis that nexus between religion and genocide by suggesting applicable definitions for both and further outlining the constituent factors of each. (NB: There are, in truth, uncomfortable similarities between religious groups and genocidal perpetrator groups which, to my understanding, have never been addressed or explored.) To further bolster my overall argument—that religion, however defined and understood, is a “participating factor” (my preferred term) in all genocides, both historically and contemporarily—a series of case studies, using Raphael Lemkin’s tri-partite division from his incomplete History of Genocide—Antiquity, Middle Ages, Modern Times—are examined to determine whether my thesis holds.

Sign systems help to create descriptive and depictive representations. Descriptive representations operate on symbols. They are based on conceptual analyses identifying objects or events as well as attributes and interrelations. Attributes and relations are ascribed by predications to entities according to syntactic rules resulting in so-called propositions (“idea units”). These propositions can be integrated into coherent semantic networks. Propositional representations are considered as mental structures which can be externalized in the form of spoken or written texts. Despite their informational incompleteness, descriptions have high representational power. Depictive representations are based on inherent commonalities between a representing object and the represented subject matter. The inherent commonalities can be based on similarity or analogy. These representations are complete with regard to a certain class of information. Due to their completeness and consistency and because information can be read off directly, depictive representations have high computational efficiency.

Whether great apes possess the capacity to acquire elements of human language is an enduring scientific question. Over the last 50 years, results from laboratories using either American Sign Language or an artificial symbol-based communication system suggested that core capacities for language acquisition and comprehension are present in apes. After the completion of these projects, newer approaches examining properties of great ape vocalizations and referential gestures have taken up the question. Results from ape language research challenge the claim that human language is a uniquely derived evolutionary specialization, but we are far from reaching consensus on this point. Through these language studies, apes have demonstrated socio-cognitive abilities crucial for the development of language skills, such as joint attention, intersubjectivity, and processing abilities that include referentiality and use of top-down processing for speech restoration. In this chapter, we review ape language projects, the additional work they inspired, and how the results of these studies offer insight into the evolution of language-related cognitive capabilities. We also discuss the effects of enculturation on language acquisition and ethical quandaries that stem from raising apes in homes and laboratories to test hypotheses about the evolution of cognition and language.

|Xam told stories in which quaggas were cast as sentient beings with families, some of which were quite dysfunctional. |Xam narratives explain their stripes and brown coloration, their fear of humans, and their behavior when hunted. While they existed, they gathered little attention from Europeans apart from featuring in accounts of explorers and hunters; they appeared in two poems by Thomas Pringle and were the focus of Lord Morton’s account of telegony. Few extinct animals, however, have had such an eventful afterlife as quaggas: in the last eighty years they have featured in stories, poems, paintings, and a film, and they were the first extinct organism to have their DNA sequenced. Similarities between quagga genomes and those of plains zebras show that these animals are conspecific and so all plains zebras now have the binomial name of Equus quagga; nonetheless, there are genetic differences between quaggas and other plains zebras. Quaggas live on symbolically in the coat of arms of the Western Cape province, and as an example of anthropogenic extinction.

This chapter examines the independence days and national commemorations of these four pseudo-states. It looks closely at the moments in which these four claimed to achieve sovereignty, and will consider the aesthetics and symbolism of the dates of their actual declarations of independence. Furthermore, it will examine how they each created national symbols and rituals, the ways in which these national days were subsequently commemorated, and how these national commemorations changed over time.

The chapter explores the symbols and myths of EU transnational solidarity through a threefold analysis of transnational solidarity within, across, and beyond the EU. Based on post-Cold War study of the EU in global politics over the past three decades, it compares and contrasts transnational solidarity from communitarian and cosmopolitan perspectives before advocating a cosmopolitical understanding of EU transnational solidarity in a global context. The chapter examines transnational solidarity within the EU by looking at symbols and myths of communitarian, cosmopolitan and cosmopolitical solidarities. It then looks across the borders of the EU to consider the symbols and myths of communitarian, cosmopolitan, and cosmopolitical solidarities within the European neighbourhood. It then goes beyond the EU to analyse the symbols and myths of communitarian, cosmopolitan and cosmopolitical solidarities with distantly situated others through EU external actions. It concludes by arguing the need to clearly identify, in line with Carol Gould, transnational EU solidarities as overlapping networks of relations that share and support actions to eliminate oppression or reduce suffering. It further argues that cosmopolitical solidarities that network and share global ethics with local politics are more likely to take actions in concert that are caring and empathic towards distantly situated others.

Chapter 3 unpacks the jewellery inference about Neanderthal language and appraises its soundness. Including three inferential steps represented by arrows, this inference looks in outline as follows: The Neanderthal occupants of the archaeological sites S1,…,Sn were associated with the objects O1,…,On → They wore these objects as personal ornaments → They treated these ornaments as symbols → They had language. [Sites S1,…,Sn include the Grotte du Renne and at least seven other caves/shelters. The objects O1,…, On include, inter alia, marine shells, raptor talons and feathers and perforated animal teeth.] With reference to a large literature, Chapter 3 finds the following about the soundness of the jewellery inference: (a) the data from which the first inference starts provide adequate empirical grounding for it; (b) this step is warranted by an accepted theory of the distinctive propeties of personal ornaments; (c)the second step is unwarranted: it is not underpinned by an adequate theory of the distinctive properties of symbols as opposed to other signs. This finding implies that the third inferential step lacks the necessary grounding.

Chapter 4 elucidates various inferences about Neanderthal language drawn from so-called cave art attributed to Neanderthals. Skeletally, these inferences look as follows, arrows depicting inferential steps: The markings M1,…,Mn are found on the walls of the Iberian caves C1,…,Cn → These markings represent art made by Neanderthal occupants of the caves → This art had a symbolic function for these Neanderthals → These Neanderthals had language. The markings include a hashtag engraving, red disks and hand stencils, a red ladder-shaped sign and red painted mineral deposits. Serious concerns have been expressed about the soundness of these inferences. Two are fundamental. First, the empirical grounding of some are suspect: the dating of the markings is claimed to be inaccurate. This means that some markings may have been made by a modern human rather than a Neanderthal. Second, it has been pointed out, the meanings of the markings are a mystery. This implies that it is unwarranted to infer that these markings were symbols. They could have had a non-symbolic function, which would make the third inferential step ungrounded. Chapter 4 discusses these and other doubts at length.