The Joseph story has money the brothers paid for grain surreptitiously returned to their sacks, in some sense a loan only but, as it turned out, an act concealing a gift, which led to reconciliation. Topics in the Two Debtors parable covering debt, sin, and forgiveness rework these features of the Joseph story.

The Healing on the Sabbath parable’s focus on higher and lower standing at a feast affirms humility over ostentation. Evoked is the grand meal given by Joseph in honor of his brothers who, on account of his high and their low standing, could not sit with him at his table.

Although the 13 United States courts of appeals are the final word on 99 percent of all federal cases, there is no detailed account of how these courts operate. How do judges decide which decisions are binding precedents and which are not? Who decides whether appeals are argued orally? What administrative structures do these courts have? The answers to these and hundreds of other questions are largely unknown, not only to lawyers and legal academics but also to many within the judiciary itself. Written and Unwritten is the first book to provide an inside look at how these courts operate. An unprecedented contribution to the field of judicial administration, the book collects the differing local rules and internal procedures of each court of appeals. In-depth interviews of the chief judges of all 13 circuits and surveys of all clerks of court reveal previously undisclosed practices and customs.

This chapter examines the presence and role(s) played by elite women in military camps during the early Principate. The chapter starts with a consideration of our sources for elite women and the nature of Roman authors’ treatment of military women. Status consciousness was ever present so the authors define which women could be considered as elite in military settings. After reviewing evidence for elite women in camps the authors examine elite women through the lens of Agrippina the Elder. As a member of the imperial family Agrippina received an unusual level of attention from ancient authors which results in more evidence about her activities in camp. Comparing Agrippina’s behavior with the diverse evidence for other elite women yields a sense of how these women were comporting themselves in military settings. The study reveals that elite women were not disruptive troublemakers. Perhaps not surprisingly, elite women behaved in accordance with Roman culture expectations and elite gender norms, as would have been expected of a Roman matrona.

Children learn to distinguish registers for different roles: talk as child versus as adult, as girl versus boy, as parent versus child, as teacher, as doctor, marking each “voice” with intonation, vocabulary, and speech acts. They learn to mark gender and status with each role; what counts as polite, how to address different people, how to mark membership in a speech community (e.g., family, school, tennis players, chess players), and how to convey specific goals in conversation. They reply on experts for new word meanings and identify some adults as reliable sources of such information. They mark information as reliable or as second-hand, through use of evidentials. They adapt their speech to each addressee and take into account the common ground relevant to each from as young as 1;6 on. They keep track of what is given and what new, making use of articles (a versus the), and moving from definite noun phrases (new) to pronouns (given). They learn to be persuasive, and persistent, bargaining in their negotiations. They give stage directions in pretend play. And they start to use figurative language. They learn how questions work at school. And they learn how to tell stories.

Societies have constant competition between progressive forces that would reduce group-based inequality and regressive forces that would maintain it. As groups vie for superiority or equality, people on all sides can feel that their group is not being accorded as much status as it deserves, the feeling of status indignity. Further, political contests can lead people on all sides to feel excluded. We show that status indignity and exclusion are connected and can lead to radicalization. In reviewing research on social dominance orientation, right-wing authoritarianism, and collective narcissism, we identify evidence that regressive radicalization is more likely than progressive radicalization due to the psychological assumptions of people who favor regressive versus progressive movements.

Chapter 2 surveys phrases with the verb boulomai that describe the ability to do “whatever one wishes” or to live “however one wishes” as freedom in order to demonstrate that democratic freedom was understood as the ability to bring one’s will to fruition. These phrases are found in a wide range of genres, including history, philosophy, oratory, drama, and epigraphy. By defining themselves as free in contrast to slaves, Athenians perceived their actions and decisions as emanating from themselves rather than a master. Freedom was thus defined as not simply a prerequisite status for citizenship, in contrast to birth or wealth, but a personal capacity for action. This positive freedom was a central aspect of citizen identity, rendering scholarly accounts focused on negative freedom incomplete. The distinctive feature of democratic freedom was the insistence on the self as master of action; as a citizen, one did what one wished. Positive freedom gave rise to procedural components in Athenian administration and law, notably voluntarism and accountability, as well as served as a distinctive core marker of identity in contrast with other states, such as Sparta and Persia.

This chapter provides an overview of the theory of relationality – the idea that people care about how others relate to them, and whether they can successfully relate to others – and how potential collaborators can be uncertain about these relational aspects. “Relating to others” captures both the information to be shared, and also the experience of interacting. Key to the theory of relationality, as it applies to potential collaborators with diverse forms of expertise, is that status-based stereotypes can drive a wedge between having expertise and having that expertise be socially recognized. This chapter builds up to a series of hypotheses about how potential collaborators care about the information to be shared and the experience of interacting when choosing whether to engage in new collaborative relationships with diverse thinkers. It also identifies several possible interventions for fostering valuable new collaborative relationships.

Status hierarchy likely exists in all human societies, whether pronounced or more subtle, and even in more egalitarian societies where resources are widely shared and overt status-seeking is actively policed. This chapter reviews models of the evolution of status hierarchy, including models from behavioral ecology as well as from evolutionary psychology and cultural evolution. A central concern of these disparate models is the adaptive problem of why any individual should adopt a subordinate status if higher status tends to increase fitness. Solutions to this problem involve the benefits to individuals from avoiding costs of repeated competition over resources or from deferring to prestigious others. Hierarchy can facilitate coordination and collective action that, in humans, enables both the massive scale of our societies and unparalleled levels of exploitation. These explanations are summarized in detail while addressing related questions, including: Do women and men differ in status-seeking? What contributes to variation in status hierarchy across species and across human societies? The goals of this chapter are to highlight consilience and provoke new directions within the evolutionary literature on status hierarchy.

The early modern Japanese city, in the paradigmatic form of the castle town (jōkamachi), gave spatial form to the social distinctions of status group (mibun), and it evolved through complex negotiations between multiple status communities, each with its own social logics and visions of urban life. This chapter sketches these spatial structures and social processes through a study of the shogunal capital of Edo, focusing on the triangular negotiation between three sets of agents: the shogunal administration, the propertied townspeople, and the diffuse occupational collectives of the unpropertied urban margins. This triangular negotiation is illuminated through a historical survey of the Edo firefighting system, revealing the ways in which the early modern city was shaped by competing interests and claims over space. Particular attention is given to the diverse forms of social agency that interacted in the urban process, complicating a binary model of governmental authority and popular subversion.

This chapter explores the “medical revolution” of Tokugawa Japan. At the beginning of this period, medical care by physicians was largely an urban phenomenon, but over the course of some 200 years, medicine became an integral part of everyday life in towns and villages all around Japan. The political authorities had little involvement in the expansion of the medical profession, which instead was driven by commercial and social factors. The development of print culture made medical knowledge more widely available, both to physicians and the larger public, while the tensions of the status system made the medical profession desirable to many, from low-ranking members of the warrior status group to the ambitious sons of villager families. Medical academies established by prominent doctors in cities such as Kyoto, Edo, Osaka, and Nagasaki made it possible for would-be doctors to acquire training in a variety of new medical fields, from obstetrics to so-called Dutch medicine. However, by the early nineteenth century, the proliferation of doctors with varying degrees of training and skill and the increasingly intense competition among them led some localities to adopt new licensing measures designed to weed out “quacks” and ensure the livelihood of established doctors.

This chapter examines the structure of regional authority in early modern Japan. Its aim is to clarify the nature of the early modern Japanese state. The shogunate delegated authority to autonomous daimyo domains, and both shogunate and domains delegated authority to village heads, who managed their communities with little direct oversight. The system worked well enough to keep the realm generally peaceful and prosperous for 265 years. The chapter begins with a top-down taxonomy of the daimyo domains and other, lesser jurisdictions under the authority of the Tokugawa shogunate. It then moves onto a discussion of village rule, framed in terms of governmentality – that is, the structures through which villagers participated in their own subjecthood to the shogunate and domains. The chapter concludes with a discussion of shared-revenue villages (aikyū mura), which were divided among multiple overlords while retaining a character as singular communities.

Chapter 4 commences a survey of the Court of Requests’ litigants. Drawing data out of the entire Court archive, it charts the origins of cases and clients in counties across English-governed territories and the status identifiers ascribed to both petitioners and defendants. The demography of this Court is characterised by considerable geographical and social breadth; this was a truly ‘national’ tribunal, accessible to everyone from poor widows and humble craftsmen to civic officials and the landed classes. The chapter puts these findings into dialogue with the scholarship on the relative litigiousness of English regions and on wealth distribution in early modernity. Finally, the chapter tests the claim that Requests was the ‘poor man’s court’, asking whether we can identify truly impoverished individuals among the standard social categorisations appearing in court records. It argues that royal justice could serve litigants of more humble status, though this observation will be qualified in following chapters.