Indies, Laws of the Entire body of law promulgated by the Spanish crown in the 16th—18th centuries for the governance of its colonies. It consists of a compendium of decrees on church government and educa¬ tion, upper and lower courts, political and military administration, Indi¬ ans, finance, navigation, and commerce. A summary promulgated in 1681 contained 6,377 laws; though criticized for its inconsistencies, for exces¬ sive attention to unenforceable details, and for depriving colonists of a responsible role in government, it was the most comprehensive law code
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936 I Indigenismo ► Indo-Aryan languages
ever instituted for a colonial empire, and it set forth humane (if often ignored) principles for treatment of Indians.
Indigenismo \en-,de-ha-'nes-mo\ Latin American movement pressing for a dominant social and political role for Indians in countries where they constitute a majority. Its adherents draw a sharp distinction between Indi¬ ans and people of European ancestry, who have dominated the Indian majorities since the 16th-century Spanish and Portuguese conquest. The movement became influential in Mexico with the revolution of 1910-20; it was particularly strong during the presidency of Lazaro Cardenas (1934— 40), who made serious efforts to reconstitute the country in accordance with its Indian heritage. In Peru it is associated with the APRA move¬ ment.
indigo \'in-di-,go\ Blue vat dye, obtained until about 1900 entirely from some species of the indigo plant. Extraction of the dye was important to the economy of colonial America and remained so in India until the early 20th century. Synthetic indigo has replaced the natural dye; it is reduced chemically to the soluble yellow compound leucoindigo, in which form it is applied to textile fibres and reoxidized to indigo (see oxidation- reduction).
indigo plant Any shrub or herb in the genus Indigofera of the pea family (see legume). Most occur in warm climates and are silky or hairy. The leaves are usually divided into smaller leaflets. Small rose, purple, or white flowers are borne in spikes or clusters. The fruit is a pod. Some species, particularly I. sumatrana and 7. arrecta, were once an important source of indigo dye, a deep navy blue.
indigo snake Non venomous snake (Drymarchon corals, family Col- ubridae) found from the southeastern U.S. to Brazil. The largest snake in the U.S., it has a record length of 9.2 ft (2.8 m). In the U.S. it is blue- black; southward it may have brown foreparts, and in the tropics it is often called brown snake. It kills small vertebrates, including venomous snakes, by crushing with its jaws and the weight of its coils, but is not a con¬ strictor. In defense it hisses and vibrates its tail but rarely strikes. It may share a burrow with a gopher tortoise, for which it is often called gopher snake. It has been listed as an endangered species since the 1970s.
Indigo snake (Drymarchon corais)
LEONARD LEE RUE III
indiscernibles, identity of See identity of indiscernibles
indium Metallic chemical element, chemical symbol In, atomic number 49. Of a brilliant, silvery-white lustre, it is so soft that it can be scratched with a fingernail. Its most common isotope, indium-115, is very weakly radioactive, with a half-life measured in billions of years. Like tin, the pure metal emits a high-pitched “cry” when bent, and, like gallium, molten indium wets glass and other surfaces, which makes it valuable for pro¬ ducing seals between glass, metals, quartz, ceramics, and marble. The metal is used in coating high-performance engine bearings and is an ingre¬ dient in low-melting-point alloys for sprinkler heads, fire-door links, and fusible plugs. In various combinations with elements such as gallium, phosphorus, and arsenic, it forms compounds having semiconductor prop¬ erties useful in electronics, including solid-state light-emitting devices. Transparent electrodes made from an oxide of indium and tin are widely employed in liquid crystal displays.
individualism Political and social philosophy that emphasizes indi¬ vidual freedom. Modern individualism emerged in Britain with the ideas of Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham, and the concept was described by Alexis de Tocqueville as fundamental to the American temper. Individualism
encompasses a value system, a theory of human nature, and a belief in certain political, economic, social, and religious arrangements. According to the individualist, all values are human-centred, the individual is of supreme importance, and all individuals are morally equal. Individualism places great value on self-reliance, on privacy, and on mutual respect. Negatively, it embraces opposition to authority and to all manner of con¬ trols over the individual, especially when exercised by the state. As a theory of human nature, individualism holds that the interests of the nor¬ mal adult are best served by allowing him maximum freedom and respon¬ sibility for choosing his objectives and the means for obtaining them. The institutional embodiment of individualism follows from these principles. All individualists believe that government should keep its interference in the lives of individuals at a minimum, confining itself largely to main¬ taining law and order, preventing individuals from interfering with oth¬ ers, and enforcing agreements (contracts) voluntarily arrived at. Individualism also implies a property system according to which each person or family enjoys the maximum of opportunity to acquire property and to manage and dispose of it as he or they see fit. Although economic individualism and political individualism in the form of democracy advanced together for a while, in the course of the 19th century they eventually proved incompatible, as newly enfranchised voters came to demand governmental intervention in the economic process. Individual¬ istic ideas lost ground in the later 19th and early 20th century with the rise of large-scale social organization and the emergence of political theo¬ ries opposed to individualism, particularly communism and fascism. They reemerged in the latter half of the 20th century with the defeat of fascism, the fall of communism in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe, and the worldwide spread of representative democracy. See also libertarianism.
individuation Determination that an individual identified in one way is numerically identical with or distinct from an individual identified in another way (e.g., Venus, known as “the morning star” in the morning and “the evening star” in the evening). Since the concept of an individual seems to require that it be recognizable as such in several possible situ¬ ations, the problem of individuation is of great importance in ontology and logic. The problem of identifying an individual existing at two dif¬ ferent times (transtemporal identity) is one of many forms that the prob¬ lem of individuation can take: What makes that caterpillar identical with this butterfly? What makes the person you are now identical with the per¬ son you were a decade ago? In modal logic, the problem of transworld individuation (or transworld identity) is of importance because the stan¬ dard model of theoretic semantics for systems of modal logic assumes that it makes sense to speak of the same individual existing in more than one possible world.
Indo-Aryan languages or Indie languages Major subgroup of the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European language family. Indo-Aryan languages are spoken by more than 800 million people, principally in India, Nepal, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka. The Old Indo-Aryan period is represented by Sanskrit. Middle Indo-Aryan (c. 600 bc-ad 1000) consists principally of the Prakrit dialects, including Pali. Modern Indo- Aryan speech is largely a single dialect continuum spread over an undi¬ vided geographical space, so demarcations between languages and dialects are somewhat artificial. Complicating the situation are compet¬ ing distinctions between languages with an old literary tradition, local language identification by native speakers (as in censuses), supraregional languages such as Modern Standard Hindi and Urdu, and labels introduced by linguists, particularly those of George Abraham Grierson. In the centre of the Indo-Aryan speech area (the “Hindi zone”), covering northern India and extending south as far as Madhya Pradesh, the most common lan¬ guage of administration and education is Modem Standard Hindi. Impor¬ tant regional languages in the northern Indian plain are Haryanvi, Kauravi, Braj, Awadhi, Chhattisgarhi, Bhojpuri, Magahi, and Maithili. Regional languages in Rajasthan include Marwari, Dhundhari, Harauti, and Malvi. In the Himalayan foothills of Himachal Pradesh are Grierson’s Pahari languages. Surrounding the Hindi zone, the most significant languages are, moving clockwise, Nepali (East Pahari), Assamese, Bengali, Oriya, Marathi, Gujarati, Sindhi, the speech of southern, northwestern, and northern Punjab province in Pakistan (called West Punjabi or Lahnda by Grierson), Punjabi, and Dogri. In Jammu and Kashmir and the far north of Pakistan are the Dardic languages; the most important are Kashmiri, Kohistani, Shina, and Khowar. The Nuristani languages of northwestern Afghanistan are sometimes considered a separate branch of Indo-Iranian. Sinhalese (spoken in Sri Lanka), Divehi (spoken in the Maidive Islands), and Romany are also Indo-Aryan languages.