The Culture of Secrecy
The Culture of Secrecy

Author: David Vincent

Publisher: Clarendon Press

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 386

ISBN-13: 9780198203070

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The Culture of Secrecy is the first comprehensive study of the restriction of official information in modern British history. It seeks to understand why secrets have been kept, and how systems of control have been constructed - and challenged - over the past hundred and sixty years. The authortranscends the conventional boundaries of political or social history in his wide-ranging diagnosis of the `British disease' - the legal forms and habits of mind which together have constituted the national tradition of discreet reserve. The chapters range across bureaucrats and ballots, gossip andgay rights, doctors and dole investigators in their exploration of the ethical basis of power in the public, professional, commercial and domestic spheres. Professor Vincent examines concepts such as privacy and confidentiality, honour and integrity, openness and freedom of expression, which haveserved as benchmarks in the development of the liberal state and society.

The Culture of Secrecy in Japanese Religion
The Culture of Secrecy in Japanese Religion

Author: Bernhard Scheid

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-04-22

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 113416873X

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The Japanese Middle Ages were a period when forms of secrecy dominated religious practice. This fascinating collection traces out the secret characteristics and practices in Japanese religion, as well as analyzing the decline of religious esotericism in Japan. The essays in this impressive work refer to Esoteric Buddhism as the core of Japan’s "culture of secrecy". Esoteric Buddhism developed in almost all Buddhist countries of Asia, but it was of particular importance in Japan where its impact went far beyond the borders of Buddhism, also affecting Shinto as well as non-religious forms of discourse. The contributors focus on the impact of Esoteric Buddhism on Japanese culture, and also include comparative chapters on India and China. Whilst concentrating on the Japanese medieval period, this book will give readers familiar with present day Japan, many explanations for the still visible remnants of Japan’s medieval culture of secrecy.

Cultures of Secrecy
Cultures of Secrecy

Author: Andrew Lattas

Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 412

ISBN-13: 9780299158040

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After driving the Japanese out of Papua New Guinea during World War II, the U.S. military forces left their gear -- and the makings of a cargo cult -- to the native Kaliai. CULTURES OF SECRECY offers a close look at how, for fifty years, the bush Kaliai in Melanesia have worked these tailings of the western world into their indigenous culture. Lattas shows how cargo cults in general bring together past, present, and future in their curious blending of traditional myths, imported folklore, borrowed state practices and ideologies, and reworked Christian stories. The result is a richly interdisciplinary work that uses ethnography to explore questions of racial experience, gender relations, space, time, death, and the politics of human relations. Never passive imitators, the Kaliai as Andrew Lattas portrays them actively incorporate and transform western beliefs and practices into their own narratives of life, sexuality, and death. The consequences are new myths and histories, new relationships with the ancestral dead -- an alternative world of power and knowledge through which the Kaliai accommodate the dominant white culture and its institutions. Lattas examines the racial conflict that has riddled the recent history of the cargo cults. He also describes the cults' demonization by the New Tribes missionaries from the United States, who disapprove of the villagers' unorthodox miming of European symbols and practices. His book allows us to see behind the villagers' ambivalence toward "waitskin" (white-skins) as they continue to reinvent their social world.

Visual Cultures of Secrecy in Early Modern Europe
Visual Cultures of Secrecy in Early Modern Europe

Author: Timothy McCall

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2013-04-01

Total Pages: 466

ISBN-13: 1612480934

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Secrets in all their variety permeated early modern Europe, from the whispers of ambassadors at court to the emphatically publicized books of home remedies that flew from presses and booksellers’ shops. This interdisciplinary volume draws on approaches from art history and cultural studies to investigate the manifestations of secrecy in printed books and drawings, staircases and narrative paintings, ecclesiastical furnishings and engravers’ tools. Topics include how patrons of art and architecture deployed secrets to construct meanings and distinguish audiences, and how artists and patrons manipulated the content and display of the subject matter of artworks to create an aura of exclusive access and privilege. Essays examine the ways in which popes and princes skillfully deployed secrets in works of art to maximize social control, and how artists, printers, and folk healers promoted their wares through the impression of valuable, mysterious knowledge. The authors contributing to the volume represent both established authorities in their field as well as emerging voices. This volume will have wide appeal for historians, art historians, and literary scholars, introducing readers to a fascinating and often unexplored component of early modern culture.

Dissimulation and the Culture of Secrecy in Early Modern Europe
Dissimulation and the Culture of Secrecy in Early Modern Europe

Author: Jon R. Snyder

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 0520274636

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"A major scholarly achievement, which speaks to multiple disciplines and national traditions...Snyder offers an elegant introduction to the discourse of dissimulation in the courtly world of sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe, then moves beyond to make an important, original intervention on a topic that stands at the center of current debates about modernity."—Albert Ascoli, author of Dante and the Making of a Modern Author "The Baroque is the time of 'Machiavellianism' in politics, ethics, and religion. It is the time of esthetics of ostentation, chiaroscuros, and monumental theatricality. Paradoxically, it is also the time when freedom of thought, the value of dissidence, questions of authenticity, debates about virtues, and practices of confessions come to the fore. Snyder brings all these issues to new life in this deft and powerful book."—Giuseppe Mazzotta, author of The New Map of the World: the Poetic Philosophy of Giambattista Vico

Openness, Secrecy, Authorship
Openness, Secrecy, Authorship

Author: Pamela O. Long

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2003-04-30

Total Pages: 381

ISBN-13: 0801872820

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A history of the book and intellectual property that includes military technology and military secrets. Winner of The Morris D. Forkosch Prize from the Journal of the History of Ideas In today's world of intellectual property disputes, industrial espionage, and book signings by famous authors, one easily loses sight of the historical nature of the attribution and ownership of texts. In Openness, Secrecy, Authorship: Technical Arts and the Culture of Knowledge from Antiquity to the Renaissance, Pamela Long combines intellectual history with the history of science and technology to explore the culture of authorship. Using classical Greek as well as medieval and Renaissance European examples, Long traces the definitions, limitations, and traditions of intellectual and scientific creation and attribution. She examines these attitudes as they pertain to the technical and the practical. Although Long's study follows a chronological development, this is not merely a general work. Long is able to examine events and sources within their historical context and locale. By looking at Aristotelian ideas of Praxis, Techne, and Episteme. She explains the tension between craft and ideas, authors and producers. She discusses, with solid research and clear prose, the rise, wane, and resurgence of priority in the crediting and lionizing of authors. Long illuminates the creation and re-creation of ideas like "trade secrets," "plagiarism," "mechanical arts," and "scribal culture." Her historical study complicates prevailing assumptions while inviting a closer look at issues that define so much of our society and thought to this day. She argues that "a useful working definition of authorship permits a gradation of meaning between the poles of authority and originality," and guides us through the term's nuances with clarity rarely matched in a historical study.

Democracy Lives in Darkness
Democracy Lives in Darkness

Author: Emily Van Duyn

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 0197557015

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"Republicans and Democrats increasingly distrust, avoid, and wish harm upon those from the other party. To make matters worse, they also increasingly reside among like-minded others and are part of social groups that share their political beliefs. All of this can make expressing a dissenting political opinion hard. Yet digital and social media have given people new spaces for political discourse and community, and more control over who knows their political beliefs and who does not. With Democracy Lives in Darkness, Van Duyn looks at what these changes in the political and media landscape mean for democracy. She uncovers and follows a secret political organization in rural Texas over the entire Trump presidency. The group, which organized out of fear of their conservative community in 2016, has a confidentiality agreement, an email listserv and secret Facebook group, and meets in secret every month. By building relationships with members, she explores how and why they hide their beliefs and what this does for their own political behavior and for their community. Drawing on research from communication, political science, and sociology along with survey data on secret political expression, she finds that polarization has led even average partisans to hide their political beliefs from others. And although intensifying polarization will likely make political secrecy more common, she argues that this secrecy is not just evidence that democracy is hurting, but that it is still alive; that people persist in the face of opposition and that this matters if democracy is to survive"--

Selling the CIA
Selling the CIA

Author: David S. McCarthy

Publisher: University Press of Kansas

Published: 2018-06-14

Total Pages: 230

ISBN-13: 0700626425

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Dubbed the "Year of Intelligence," 1975 was not a good year for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Caught spying on American citizens, the agency was under investigation, indicted in shocking headlines, its future covert operations at risk. Like so many others caught up in public scandal, the CIA turned to public relations. This book tells what happened next. In the mid-1970s CIA officials developed a public relations strategy to fend off the agency's critics. In Selling the CIA David Shamus McCarthy describes a PR campaign that proceeded with remarkable continuity--and effectiveness--through the decades and regimes that followed. He deftly chronicles the agency's efforts to project an image of openness and accountability, even as it did its best to put a positive spin on secrecy--"[m]ore openness with greater secrecy," in the Orwellian words of one director of public affairs. A tale of machinations and manipulation worthy of Hollywood, McCarthy's work exposes a culture of secrecy unwittingly sustained by the forces of popular culture; a public relations offensive working on all fronts to perpetuate the CIA's mystique as the heroic guardian of national security. "Our failures are known, our successes are not" has been the guiding mantra of this initiative. Selling the CIA spotlights how the agency’s success in outmaneuvering Congress and avoiding public scrutiny stands as a direct threat to American democracy.

A State of Secrecy
A State of Secrecy

Author: Alison Lewis

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2021-10

Total Pages: 342

ISBN-13: 1640123792

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A series of five interlaced, in-depth biographical studies from across the spectrum of writers-turned-spies recruited by the Stasi.

Democracy in the Dark
Democracy in the Dark

Author: Frederick A. O. Schwarz

Publisher: New Press, The

Published: 2012-05-29

Total Pages: 299

ISBN-13: 162097052X

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“A timely and provocative book exploring the origins of the national security state and the urgent challenge of reining it in” (The Washington Post). From Dick Cheney’s man-sized safe to the National Security Agency’s massive intelligence gathering, secrecy has too often captured the American government’s modus operandi better than the ideals of the Constitution. In this important book, Frederick A.O. Schwarz Jr., who was chief counsel to the US Church Committee on Intelligence—which uncovered the FBI’s effort to push Martin Luther King Jr. to commit suicide; the CIA’s enlistment of the Mafia to try to kill Fidel Castro; and the NSA’s thirty-year program to get copies of all telegrams leaving the United States—uses examples ranging from the dropping of the first atomic bomb and the Cuban Missile Crisis to Iran–Contra and 9/11 to illuminate this central question: How much secrecy does good governance require? Schwarz argues that while some control of information is necessary, governments tend to fall prey to a culture of secrecy that is ultimately not just hazardous to democracy but antithetical to it. This history provides the essential context to recent cases from Chelsea Manning to Edward Snowden. Democracy in the Dark is a natural companion to Schwarz’s Unchecked and Unbalanced, cowritten with Aziz Huq, which plumbed the power of the executive branch—a power that often depends on and derives from the use of secrecy. “[An] important new book . . . Carefully researched, engagingly written stories of government secrecy gone amiss.” —The American Prospect