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The historical emergence of time as it relates to capitalism and labor has been well documented and theorized, particularly in the Marxist tradition. The relationship between space, spatial representation and capitalism has only more recently received significant attention. Moving through a series of extended meditations, this essay inquires into the naturalization of space and its various representations as related to capitalism, colonization and the body. As evidenced in early modern maps of Europe and the Americas, techniques of spatial representation were central to both commerce and conquest, where cartographers effectively rendered disparate lands uniform, under the rubric of an objectifying gaze. Such a gaze allowed for the representation of space as existing outside the realm of human affairs, where land lay in wait of discovery. This myth of discovery, and the techniques which accompany it, have historical parallels in the mapping of the human body, where mapping renders space both "natural" and ultimately amenable to capitalism. In these parallels, the mapping of land and of the body have moved in the twenty-first century into the realm of digitized informatics, where space is discursively reduced (through speed) and expanded (through technology) in an ever emerging global market system. Reflecting on apparently quite disparate histories of spatial representation, the essay concludes with the naturalization of space in its current logic, cybernetics and the management of information, where the discourses of health and security meet the digital gaze of the human genome and the satellite.

This posthumously published work by Lawrence Krader surveys the study of myths from ancient times (in classical Greece and Rome, Egypt, Babylon, Akkad, Sumer, China), in the Biblical traditions, of the indigenous peoples of the Americas and Australia, and from Northeastern and Central Asia. It also covers the various approaches to the study of myth in Europe in the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and Enlightenment, and the Romantic movement in the late eighteenth and early to mid-nineteenth century; it discusses evolutionist, structuralist, hermeneutic, and linguistic approaches. The book covers on the one hand the treatment of myth from the inside, that is from the experience of those committed to the myth, and on the other the perspective of those ethnologists, philosophers and other students of myth who are outsiders. Krader takes up the theme of esoteric and exoteric myths as he rejects some of the assumptions and approaches to the study of myth from the past while singling out others for approval and inclusion in his general theory of myth. The book includes a discussion of myth in science and in infinitesimal mathematics. It also considers the relationship between myth and ideology in the twentieth century in relation to politics and power. It both incorporates and broadens Krader's theory of nature as a manifold consisting of different orders of space-time which he developed in his magnum opus Noetics: The Science of Thinking and Knowing.

Foreword / by Mayán Cervantes -- Myth in classical antiquity. Plato and Aristotle and the myth of the ancient wisdom -- Myth in the Renaissance and Enlightenment. The deciphering of myth -- Myth in the nineteenth century -- Durkheim and his school. Alcheringa, or Dreamtime -- Myth as the myth of others. Biblical Myth. Myth of Gilgamesh -- The force of myth in our own time. Myth in ideology. Sorel, Pareto, Weber, Mannheim -- Myth of another time and space. Buber, Otto, Cassirer, Langer, Jensen on the psychic unity of the humankind -- Myths of the North Pacific peoples. Boas, Gogoraz, Jochelson. The myth of Asdiwal/Asihwil. -- Winnebago trickster myths. Radin, Malinowski, Kluckhohn -- What is true myth? Pawnee creation and coyote myths. Dorsey and Grinnell -- Structuralists, Lévi-Strauss, Leach -- Myths and universals -- The treatment of myth as a code -- Myth of the law in the Book of Daniel -- Esoteric and exoteric myth. Bella Coola myth. The myth of the drunken goddess -- The state as myth and myths of the state. Hegel and the march of god through the world. Hobbes, Leviathan and Behemoth -- Sacred and secular myth -- Myth in the making. The transition from one myth to another. Benedetto Croce, Barrington Moore, Karl Popper -- Myth, the known and the unknown. The myth of Theseus and Sciron -- Myth and ideology.

Abstract Nationalism is a secular modern ideology that has been accompanied by revolutions and it has legitimised the rise to power of new social classes. For this reason many theorists have regarded nationalists as inventors of tradition and their claims to continuities with the past as either self‐delusion or a form of deceit. Yet in many cases premodern ethnic identities have powerfully shaped the programmes and policies of many nation‐states.How can nationalism be the expressions of ethnic continuity and also of revolutionary change? I will argue that nationalism is a novel form of ethnicity, shaped by the polycentric vision of romanticism and by the unprecedented and unpredictable challenges of the modern world that require innovation Nationalists are able to justify innovation because of the 'layered' nature of the ethnic past, and they are able to overcome established ethnic identities by generating at times of crises novel myths based on romantic acts of sacrifice by heroic elites that legitimise new national projects. But these new elite‐driven national mythologies overlie rather than obliterate older ethnic traditions. These latter can come to life in the process of nation‐building, redirecting it from its original secular goals.