InPrecarious Lives, Shahram Khosravi attempts to reconcile the paradoxes of Iranians' everyday life in the first decade of the twenty-first century. On the one hand, multiple circumstances of ...precarity give rise to a sense of hopelessness, shared visions of a futureless tomorrow, widespread home(land)lessness, intense individualism, and a growth of incivilities. On the other, daydreaming and hope, as well as civility and solidarity in political protests, street carnivals, and social movements, continue to persist. Young Iranians describe themselves as being stuck in purposelessness and forced to endure endless waiting, and they are also aware that they are perceived as unproductive and a burden on their society. Despite the aspirations and inspiration they possess, they find themselves forced into petrifying social and spatial immobility. Uncertainty in the present, a seemingly futureless tomorrow: these are the circumstances that Khosravi explores inPrecarious Lives.
Creating an intricate and moving portrait of contemporary Iranian life, Khosravi weaves together individual stories, government reports, statistics, and cultural analysis of art and literature to depict how Iranians react to the experience of precarity and the possibility of hope. Drawing on extensive ethnographic engagement with youth in Tehran and Isfahan as well as with migrant workers in rural areas, Khosravi examines the complexities and contradictions of everyday life in Iran.Precarious Livesis a vital work of contemporary anthropology that serves as a testament to the shared hardship and hope of the Iranian people.
InViolence and Belief in Late Antiquity, Thomas Sizgorich seeks to understand why and how violent expressions of religious devotion became central to the self-understandings of both Christian and ...Muslim communities between the fourth and ninth centuries. Sizgorich argues that the cultivation of violent martyrdom as a path to holiness was in no way particular to Islam; rather, it emerged from a matrix put into place by the Christians of late antiquity. Paying close attention to the role of memory and narrative in the formation of individual and communal selves, Sizgorich identifies a common pool of late ancient narrative forms upon which both Christian and Muslim communities drew. In the process of recollecting the past, Sizgorich explains, Christian and Muslim communities alike elaborated iterations of Christianity or Islam that demanded of each believer a willingness to endure or inflict violence on God's behalf and thereby created militant local pieties that claimed to represent the one "real" Christianity or the only "pure" form of Islam. These militant communities used a shared system of signs, symbols, and stories, stories in which the faithful manifested their purity in conflict with the imperial powers of the world.
By engaging with recent developments in the study of empires, this book examines how inhabitants of Roman imperial Syria reinvented expressions and experiences of Greek, Roman and Syrian ...identification. It demonstrates how the organization of Greek communities and a peer polity network extending citizenship to ethnic Syrians generated new semiotic frameworks for the performance of Greekness and Syrianness. Within these, Syria's inhabitants reoriented and interwove idioms of diverse cultural origins, including those from the Near East, to express Greek, Roman and Syrian identifications in innovative and complex ways. While exploring a vast array of written and material sources, the book thus posits that Greekness and Syrianness were constantly shifting and transforming categories, and it critiques many assumptions that govern how scholars of antiquity often conceive of Roman imperial Greek identity, ethnicity and culture in the Roman Near East, and processes of 'hybridity' or similar concepts.
In the first book to analyze shifts in lesbian identity,
consciousness, and culture from the 1970s to the 1990s, Arlene
Stein contributes an important chapter to the study of the women's
movement and ...offers a revealing portrait of the exchange between a
radical generation of feminists and its successors. Tracing the
evolution of the lesbian movement from the bar scene to the growth
of alternative families, Stein illustrates how a generation of
women transformed the woman-centered ideals of feminism into a
culture and a lifestyle. Sex and Sensibility relates the
development of a "queer" sensibility in the 1990s to the foundation
laid by the gay rights and feminist movements a generation earlier.
Beginning with the stories of thirty women who came of age at the
climax of the 70s women's movement-many of whom defined lesbianism
as a form of resistance to dominant gender and sexual norms-Stein
explores the complex issues of identity that these women confronted
as they discovered who they were and defined themselves in relation
to their communities and to society at large. Sex and
Sensibility ends with interviews of ten younger women, members
of the post-feminist generation who have made it a fashion to
dismiss lesbian feminism as overly idealistic and reductive.
Enmeshed in Stein's compelling and personal narrative are
coming-out experiences, questions of separatism, work, desire,
children, and family. Stein considers the multiple identities of
women of color and the experiences of intermittent and "ex"
lesbians. Was the lesbian feminist experiment a success? What has
become of these ideas and the women who held them? In answering
these questions, Stein illustrates the lasting and profound effect
that the lesbian feminist movement had, and continues to have, on
contemporary women's definitions of sexual identity.
Toward the end of the eighteenth century, a radical change occurred in notions of self and personal identity. This was a sudden transformation, says Dror Wahrman, and nothing short of a revolution in ...the understanding of selfhood and of identity categories including race, gender, and class. In this pathbreaking book, he offers a fundamentally new interpretation of this critical turning point in Western history.Wahrman demonstrates this transformation with a fascinating variety of cultural evidence from eighteenth-century England, from theater to beekeeping, fashion to philosophy, art to travel and translations of the classics. He discusses notions of self in the earlier 1700s-what he terms the ancien regime of identity-that seem bizarre, even incomprehensible, to present-day readers. He then examines how this peculiar world came to an abrupt end, and the far-reaching consequences of that change. This unrecognized cultural revolution, the author argues, set the scene for the array of new departures that signaled the onset of Western modernity.
In The Made-Up State, Benjamin Hegarty contends that warias, who compose one of Indonesia's trans feminine populations, have cultivated a distinctive way of captivating the affective, material, and ...spatial experiences of belonging to a modern public sphere. Combining historical and ethnographic research, Hegarty traces the participation of warias in visual and bodily technologies, ranging from psychiatry and medical transsexuality to photography and feminine beauty. The concept of development deployed by the modern Indonesian state relies on naturalizing the binary of "male" and "female." As historical brokers between gender as a technological system of classifying human difference and state citizenship, warias shaped the contours of modern selfhood even while being positioned as nonconforming within it. The Made-Up State illuminates warias as part of the social and technological format of state rule, which has given rise to new possibilities for seeing and being seen as a citizen in postcolonial Indonesia.
The ethics of identity Appiah, Anthony
2005., 20100628, 2010, 2007-02-09, 20050101
eBook
Race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, gender, sexuality: in the past couple of decades, a great deal of attention has been paid to such collective identities. They clamor for recognition and ...respect, sometimes at the expense of other things we value. But to what extent do "identities" constrain our freedom, our ability to make an individual life, and to what extent do they enable our individuality? In this beautifully written work, renowned philosopher and African Studies scholar Kwame Anthony Appiah draws on thinkers through the ages and across the globe to explore such questions.
Childhood and Migration in Europe Ní Laoire, Caitríona; Carpena-Méndez, Fina; Tyrrell, Naomi ...
2011, 20160523, 2012, 2016-05-23, 2016-05-31, 2011-02-01, 20110101
eBook
Challenging dominant adult-centric perspectives on contemporary global migration flows and presenting understandings of the lives of migrant children and young people from their own experiences, this ...book presents a detailed exploration of children's lives in four different migrant populations in Ireland. It challenges the prevailing assimilationist discourses underlying much existing research and policy, which often construct migrant children as deficient in different ways and in need of 'being integrated'.
Deep China Kleinman, Arthur; Yan, Yunxiang; Jun, Jing ...
2011., 2011-09-26
eBook
Deep China investigates the emotional and moral lives of the Chinese people as they adjust to the challenges of modernity. Sharing a medical anthropology and cultural psychiatry perspective, Arthur ...Kleinman, Yunxiang Yan, Jing Jun, Sing Lee, Everett Zhang, Pan Tianshu, Wu Fei, and Guo Jinhua delve into intimate and sometimes hidden areas of personal life and social practice to observe and narrate the drama of Chinese individualization. The essays explore the remaking of the moral person during China's profound social and economic transformation, unraveling the shifting practices and struggles of contemporary life.
In Self-Fashioning and Assumptions of Identity in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia, chapter authors assert the applicability of Stephen Greenblatt's self-fashioning theory, originally framed within ...Elizabethan England, to medieval and early modern Iberia in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries.
