Nationalism and the Genealogical Imagination

Nationalism and the Genealogical Imagination PDF Author: Andrew Shryock
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520916387
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 374

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Book Description
This book explores the transition from oral to written history now taking place in tribal Jordan, a transition that reveals the many ways in which modernity, literate historicity, and national identity are developing in the contemporary Middle East. As traditional Bedouin storytellers and literate historians lead him through a world of hidden documents, contested photographs, and meticulously reconstructed pedigrees, Andrew Shryock describes how he becomes enmeshed in historical debates, ranging from the local to the national level. The world the Bedouin inhabit is rich in oral tradition and historical argument, in subtle reflections on the nature of truth and its relationship to poetics, textuality, and power. Skillfully blending anthropology and history, Shryock discusses the substance of tribal history through the eyes of its creators—those who sustain an older tradition of authoritative oral history and those who have experimented with the first written accounts. His focus throughout is on the development of a "genealogical nationalism" as well as on the tensions that arise between tribe and state. Rich in both personal revelation and cultural implications, this book poses a provocative challenge to traditional assumptions about the way history is written.

Nationalism and the Genealogical Imagination

Nationalism and the Genealogical Imagination PDF Author: Andrew Shryock
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520916387
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 374

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book explores the transition from oral to written history now taking place in tribal Jordan, a transition that reveals the many ways in which modernity, literate historicity, and national identity are developing in the contemporary Middle East. As traditional Bedouin storytellers and literate historians lead him through a world of hidden documents, contested photographs, and meticulously reconstructed pedigrees, Andrew Shryock describes how he becomes enmeshed in historical debates, ranging from the local to the national level. The world the Bedouin inhabit is rich in oral tradition and historical argument, in subtle reflections on the nature of truth and its relationship to poetics, textuality, and power. Skillfully blending anthropology and history, Shryock discusses the substance of tribal history through the eyes of its creators—those who sustain an older tradition of authoritative oral history and those who have experimented with the first written accounts. His focus throughout is on the development of a "genealogical nationalism" as well as on the tensions that arise between tribe and state. Rich in both personal revelation and cultural implications, this book poses a provocative challenge to traditional assumptions about the way history is written.

Nationalism and the Genealogical Imagination

Nationalism and the Genealogical Imagination PDF Author: Andrew Shryock
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520916388
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 380

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Book Description
This book explores the transition from oral to written history now taking place in tribal Jordan, a transition that reveals the many ways in which modernity, literate historicity, and national identity are developing in the contemporary Middle East. As traditional Bedouin storytellers and literate historians lead him through a world of hidden documents, contested photographs, and meticulously reconstructed pedigrees, Andrew Shryock describes how he becomes enmeshed in historical debates, ranging from the local to the national level. The world the Bedouin inhabit is rich in oral tradition and historical argument, in subtle reflections on the nature of truth and its relationship to poetics, textuality, and power. Skillfully blending anthropology and history, Shryock discusses the substance of tribal history through the eyes of its creators—those who sustain an older tradition of authoritative oral history and those who have experimented with the first written accounts. His focus throughout is on the development of a "genealogical nationalism" as well as on the tensions that arise between tribe and state. Rich in both personal revelation and cultural implications, this book poses a provocative challenge to traditional assumptions about the way history is written. This book explores the transition from oral to written history now taking place in tribal Jordan, a transition that reveals the many ways in which modernity, literate historicity, and national identity are developing in the contemporary Middle East. As tr

Ancestors and Relatives

Ancestors and Relatives PDF Author: Eviatar Zerubavel
Publisher: OUP USA
ISBN: 0199773955
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
Noted social scientist Eviatar Zerubavel casts a critical eye on how we trace our past-individually and collectively arguing that rather than simply find out who our ancestors are from genetics or history, we actually create the stories that make them our ancestors.

The Persian Gulf in Modern Times

The Persian Gulf in Modern Times PDF Author: L. Potter
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137485779
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 641

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Book Description
This book explores the historiography, ports, and peoples of the Persian Gulf over the past two centuries, offering a more inclusive history of the region than previously available. Restoring the history of minority communities which until now have been silenced, the book provides a corrective to the 'official story' put forward by modern states.

Tribal Nation

Tribal Nation PDF Author: Adrienne Lynn Edgar
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400844290
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Book Description
On October 27, 1991, the Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republic declared its independence from the Soviet Union. Hammer and sickle gave way to a flag, a national anthem, and new holidays. Seven decades earlier, Turkmenistan had been a stateless conglomeration of tribes. What brought about this remarkable transformation? Tribal Nation addresses this question by examining the Soviet effort in the 1920s and 1930s to create a modern, socialist nation in the Central Asian Republic of Turkmenistan. Adrienne Edgar argues that the recent focus on the Soviet state as a "maker of nations" overlooks another vital factor in Turkmen nationhood: the complex interaction between Soviet policies and indigenous notions of identity. In particular, the genealogical ideas that defined premodern Turkmen identity were reshaped by Soviet territorial and linguistic ideas of nationhood. The Soviet desire to construct socialist modernity in Turkmenistan conflicted with Moscow's policy of promoting nationhood, since many Turkmen viewed their "backward customs" as central to Turkmen identity. Tribal Nation is the first book in any Western language on Soviet Turkmenistan, the first to use both archival and indigenous-language sources to analyze Soviet nation-making in Central Asia, and among the few works to examine the Soviet multinational state from a non-Russian perspective. By investigating Soviet nation-making in one of the most poorly understood regions of the Soviet Union, it also sheds light on broader questions about nationalism and colonialism in the twentieth century.

Cultivating the Past, Living the Modern

Cultivating the Past, Living the Modern PDF Author: Amal Sachedina
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501758624
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Cultivating the Past, Living the Modern explores how and why heritage has emerged as a prevalent force in building the modern nation state of Oman. Amal Sachedina analyses the relations with the past that undergird the shift in Oman from an Ibadi shari'a Imamate (1913–1958) to a modern nation state from 1970 onwards. Since its inception as a nation state, material forms in the Sultanate of Oman—such as old mosques and shari'a manuscripts, restored forts, national symbols such as the coffee pot or the dagger (khanjar), and archaeological sites—have saturated the landscape, becoming increasingly ubiquitous as part of a standardized public and visual memorialization of the past. Oman's expanding heritage industry, exemplified by the boom in museums, exhibitions, street montages, and cultural festivals, shapes a distinctly national geography and territorialized narrative. But Cultivating the Past, Living the Modern demonstrates there are consequences to this celebration of heritage. As the national narrative conditions the way people ethically work on themselves through evoking forms of heritage, it also generates anxieties and emotional sensibilities that seek to address the erasures and occlusions of the past.

Empires of Intelligence

Empires of Intelligence PDF Author: Martin Thomas
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520251172
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 447

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Book Description
'Empires of Intelligence' argues that colonial control in British and French empires depended on an elabroate security apparatus. Thomas shows the crucial role of intelligence gathering in maintaining imperial control in the years before decolonization.

Controlling the Past, Owning the Future

Controlling the Past, Owning the Future PDF Author: Ran Boytner
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816543755
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
What are the political uses—and misuses—of archaeology in the Middle East? In answering this question, the contributors to this volume lend their regional expertise to a variety of case studies, including the Taliban’s destruction of Buddhas in Afghanistan, the commercialization of archaeology in Israel, the training of Egyptian archaeology inspectors, and the debate over Turkish identity sparked by the film Troy, among other provocative subjects. Other chapters question the ethical justifications of archaeology in places that have “alternative engagements with the material past.” In the process, they form various views of the role of the archaeologist, from steward of the historical record to agent of social change. The diverse contributions to this volume share a common framework in which the political use of the past is viewed as a process of social discourse. According to this model, political appropriations are seen as acts of social communication designed to accrue benefits to particular groups. Thus the contributors pay special attention to competing social visions and the filters these impose on archaeological data. But they are also attentive to the potential consequences of their own work. Indeed, as the editors remind us, “people’s lives may be affected, sometimes dramatically, because of the material remains that surround them.” Rounding out this important volume are critiques by two top scholars who summarize and synthesize the preceding chapters.

Ours Once More

Ours Once More PDF Author: Michael Herzfeld
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1789207231
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
When this work – one that contributes to both the history and anthropology fields – first appeared in 1982, it was hailed as a landmark study of the role of folklore in nation-building. It has since been highly influential in reshaping the analysis of Greek and European cultural dynamics. In this expanded edition, a new introduction by the author and an epilogue by Sharon Macdonald document its importance for the emergence of serious anthropological interest in European culture and society and for current debates about Greece’s often contested place in the complex politics of the European Union.

Nomads and Nation-Building in the Western Sahara

Nomads and Nation-Building in the Western Sahara PDF Author: Konstantina Isidoros
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1786733641
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
Fabled for more than three thousand years as fierce warrior-nomads and cameleers dominating the western Trans-Saharan caravan trade, today the Sahrawi are admired as soldier-statesmen and refugee-diplomats. This is a proud nomadic people uniquely championing human rights and international law for self-determination of their ancient heartlands: the western Sahara Desert in North Africa. Konstantina Isidoros provides a rich ethnographic portrait of this unique desert society's life in one of Earth's most extreme ecosystems. Her extensive anthropological research, conducted over nine years, illuminates an Arab-Berber Muslim society in which men wear full face veils and are matrifocused toward women, who are the property-holders of tent households forming powerful matrilocal coalitions. Isidoros offers new analytical insights on gender relations, strategic tribe-to-state symbiosis and the tactical formation of 'tent-cities'. The book sheds light on the indigenous principles of social organisation - the centrality of women, male veiling and milk-kinship - bringing positive feminist perspectives on how the Sahrawi have innovatively reconfigured their tribal nomadic pastoral society into globalising citizen-nomads constructing their nascent nation-state. This is essential reading for those interested in anthropology, politics, war and nationalism, gender relations, postcolonialism, international development, humanitarian regimes, refugee studies and the experience of nomadic communities.