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Exemplary Life
Based on over five years of ethnographic fieldwork in Syria, Exemplary Life focuses on the life of a Damascus woman, Myrna Nazzour, who serves as an aspirational figure in her community. Myrna is regarded by her followers as an exemplary figure, a living saint, and the messages, apparitions, stigmata, and oil that have marked Myrna since 1982 have corroborated her status as chosen by God. Exemplary Life probes the power of examples, the modelling of sainthood around Myrna’s figure, and the broader context for Syrian Christians in the changing landscape of the Middle East. The book highlights the social use of examples such as the ones inhabited by Myrna’s devout followers and how they reveal the broader structures of illustration, evidence, and persuasion in social and cultural settings. Andreas Bandak argues that the role of the example should incite us to investigate which trains of thought set local worlds in motion. In doing so, Exemplary Life presents a novel frame for examining how religion comes to matter to people and adds a critical dimension to current anthropological engagements with ethics and morality.
Israeli Identity
For many years before and after the establishment of the state of Israel, the belief that Israel is a western state remained unchallenged. This belief was founded on the predominantly western composition of the pre-statehood Jewish community known as the Yishuv. The relatively homogenous membership of Israeli/Jewish society as it then existed was soon altered with the arrival of hundreds of thousands of Jewish immigrants from Middle Eastern countries during the early years of statehood. Seeking to retain the western character of the Jewish state, the Israeli government initiated a massive acculturation project aimed at westernizing the newcomers. More recently, scholars and intellectuals beg...
Weathering the World
The Asian tsunami in December 2004 severely affected people in coastal regions all around the Indian Ocean. This book provides the first in-depth ethnography of the disaster and its effects on a fishing village in Tamil Nadu, India. The author explores how the villagers have lived with the tsunami in the years succeeding it and actively worked to gradually regain a sense of certainty and confidence in their environment in the face of disempowering disaster. What appears is a remarkable local recovery process in which the survivors have interwoven the tsunami and the everyday in a series of subtle practices and theorisations, resulting in a complex and continuous recreation of village life. By showing the composite nature of the tsunami as an event, the book adds new theoretical insight into the anthropology of natural disaster and recovery.
Qualitative Analysis in the Making
How do scholars transform qualitative data into analysis? What does making analysis imply? What happens in the space in-between data and finalized analysis is notoriously difficult to talk about. In other parts of the research process, scholars and students are aided by method books that describe the technicalities of generating, processing and sorting through data, handbooks that teach academic writing, and scholarly works that offer meta-level, theoretical perspectives. Yet the path from qualitative data to analysis remains ‘a black box.’ Qualitative Analysis in the Making ventures into this black box. The volume provides a means of speaking about how analyses emerge in the Humanities....
The Human Rights Turn and the Paradox of Progress in the Middle East
This book aims to shift the limited and often negative popular understanding of the Middle East’s place in the world by chronicling the region’s contributions to the international order rather than disorder, and to the development of the international human rights system. It elucidates the many paradoxes that make the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region both a troubling place and also a region brimming with great potential for peace, prosperity and progress. By demonstrating the paradox of human rights progress amid regress, the book tells a radically new and more hopeful side of the story of the region that has largely been obfuscated and omitted from the chronicles of history. In so doing, it shows that fostering a human rights culture is not only possible for all universally, it is inevitable.
Paramilitarism
From the deserts of Sudan to the jungles of Colombia, from the streets of Belfast to the mountains of Kurdistan, paramilitaries have appeared in violent conflicts. Ungor presents a comparative and global overview of paramilitarism, showing how states use it to successfully outsource mass political violence against civilians.
Politics of Worship in the Contemporary Middle East
In Sainthood in Fragile States, a wide range of social scientists explore the contested role of sainthood in the contemporary Middle East. By expanding the notion of sainthood to cover both the religious and secular ways of dealing with extraordinary events, people and things, the volume offers new insights into the way sainthood is embedded in various levels of everyday life, as well as national and international politics. The case studies highlight how fragility as a central aspect of sainthood is a productive force that often consolidates tales of the extraordinary, and is also the source of contesting social identities. Contributors include: Andreas Bandak, Mikkel Bille, Jürgen Frembgen, Sune Haugbolle, Angie Heo, Daniella Kuzmanovic, Edith Szanto, and Pnina Werbner.
War and Memory in Lebanon
Sune Haugbolle's often poignant book chronicles the battle over ideas that emerged from the wreckage of the Lebanese civil war.
A Political Economy of Arab Education
The failure of reform policies in areas of critical importance to Arab populations such as health and education played a central role in igniting the Arab Awakening, yet this policy perspective has been largely absent from recent studies of the region. Arab regimes most reliant on repression to guarantee their survival were also those most vulnerable to mass politics. Where threats to regime survival have been limited, so have more meaningful reforms been possible, finding an alternative to political change through focusing on "soft policy" areas such as education. A Political Economy of Arab Education offers a comprehensive analysis of K-12 education systems in Arab countries, deepening und...
Towards an Understanding of Kurdistani Memory Culture
This book presents a thorough analysis of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq’s memory culture, focusing particularly on commemorations and representations of the Anfal and Halabja atrocities. The author employs a transdisciplinary approach that draws on Memory Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Heritage Studies, Kurdish Studies, Literary Studies and Trauma Studies, to analyze cultural objects such as Kurdistani literary novels, museums, and school curricula. The book introduces two key concepts: the "phantomic museum" and the "apostrophic museum." The former explores the fragile and politicized nature of memories of missing individuals who disappeared during Saddam Hussein's genocidal campaigns and who have never been found, primarily as they return in the Halabja Monument and Peace Museum. The latter examines how the addressing – apostrophizing – of Kurdistan, in and by the Amna Suraka museum in the city of Sulaymaniyah, institutionalizes “official” and highly politicized versions of the past.
