bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Tender Lives of Vitti/Vittoria
Authors: Campbell Timothy C.
Published: September 2017

In this final chapter, the Italian actress Monica Vitti is read as the generous form of life par excellance in three of Antonioni’s most important films: L’avventura, La notte, and L’eclisse. The generosity she evinces is registered in the way that Antonioni shows her repeatedly grasping and releasing objects such that a distinction between possession as grasping and non-possession as release emerges. That same distinction appears later as a strategy that Vitti adopts in playfully evading her capture by Antonioni’s apparatus.
The Rebirth of Ruins
Authors: Hui Andrew
Published: September 2017

This chapter argues that how the idea that material ruins could be objects of empirical knowledge was born in the Renaissance and defined the period as such. Rome, the proverbial palimpsestic city, came to be written and rewritten upon. The identity of the “Eternal City” perdured in its temporal mutations and representations, surviving multiple displacements and spoliation. Rome moved from the singularity of the medieval palimpsest to the multiplicity of the early modern print. As a building’s constituent parts—pediments, cornices, shafts, and bases of columns—were ripped from its original site and transported across the city and beyond, guidebooks, prints, récits de voyage, mirabilia and other memorabilia carried Roman images far and wide.
Neither Seeing Nor Having (Ni le voir ni l’avoir)
Authors: Nancy Jean-Luc , Van Reeth Adèle
Published: September 2017

A study of Gérard Granel’s rich examination of Dante’s obsessed lovers, Paolo and Francesca. The loss of consciousness as the moment of heightened awareness.
Nude Enumerated
Authors: Nancy Jean-Luc , Van Reeth Adèle
Published: September 2017

Jean-Luc Nancy at his most lyrical: “Nude Enumerated” is a prose-poem, an eloquent evocation of the naked body, figure drawing through words. An exploration of what it means to be truly naked.
Sexagon
Authors: Mack Mehammed Amadeus
Published: September 2017

Sexagon studies the broad politicization of sexuality in French debates about immigration and diversity since the 1980s, and how that politicization is reflected in and also created by French cultural productions. Surveying representations of communities of immigrant origin, as well as discourses circulating within them, it focuses in on literature, film, psychoanalysis, ethnopsychiatry, erotica, and feminist and gay and lesbian activist rhetoric to examine where sexualized representations take a political turn. It furthermore examines how guardians of French Culture have judged the integration of Muslim immigrants from North and West Africa—as well as their French descendants—according to these Muslims’ attitudes about gender and sexuality. More precisely, it studies the symptomatic “frustration” that French establishment figures consistently exhibit in the face of changes to a familiar France and argues that this frustration gravitates around the concept of virilism. A volatile virilism would not only animate the “difficult” Arab, black and Muslim boys so often the focus of sensational newscasts, it would also define their neighborhoods in the banlieues, their religion of Islam, and the notion of immigration itself. The frustrations studied here are crucially inflamed by a defining element of these virility cultures, namely their clandestinity. Mirroring the secret and underground qualities of “illegal” immigration, the proponents of clandestine cultures, both gay and straight, choose to withdraw away from official scrutiny within ethnic communitarian shelters that are anathema to the Republic’s desires for universalism and transparency. These sealed-off spaces of virile domain are all the more “annoying” to the surveillance apparatus for their impenetrability.
Sexual Undergrounds: Cinema, Performance, and Ethnic Surveillance
Authors: Mack Mehammed Amadeus
Published: September 2017

Against the backdrop of an overwhelming vilification of Arab, immigrant, and banlieusard masculinities on screen, I show how a selection of innovative films have sought to rehabilitate that masculinity and show its unexpected importance, even its necessity in French society. Far from being possessive, ethnocentric sexists jealously guarding their community borders, Arab men are shown to stand at the center of social constellations that include sexual minorities and a high degree of sexual experimentation. Recurrent throughout this chapter are the commonalities between the French policing of both ethnic and sexual “outlaws,” which can take symbolic or literal form or come from unexpected perspectives. In this way, the policed sexualities of minority characters become socially delinquent, shifting in and out of a “French-ness” confused with orderly, bourgeois sexuality. In connection with previous arguments about the rehabilitation of ethnic virilities and homosocialities on screen, this chapter shows how the concept of the urban sexual underground (populated by a variety of sexual minorities including sex worker and trans) has crucially hosted Arab masculinities and offered them spaces to nurture and bear witness to their own social utility.
Erotic Solutions for Ethnic Tension: Fantasy, Reality, Pornography
Authors: Mack Mehammed Amadeus
Published: September 2017

This chapter examine how the French porn industry channels and manipulates tensions and fears related to the immigration debate and the place of Arabs in France, at times offering erotic “remedies.” This has culminated in a new pornotrope: Porno Ethnik, or pornography involving men and women of color, usually Arab or black. The chapter begins with a discussion of the output of French directors who were the first to feature Franco-Arab actors in gay male pornography: Jean-Daniel Cadinot (Cadinot), Jean-Noël René Clair (JNRC), and Stéphane Chibikh (Citébeur). It then considers heterosexual pornography featuring Franco-Arab women and asks whether or not this field of production is so different in its representations of minority sexuality that it precludes comparison with homosexual pornography. Tropes of sex tourism to North Africa, the hypersexualization of single immigrant men, the “eroticization of poverty” as regards both women and men, the veil as striptease, and the “homothug” type are all surveyed. Pornography, often seen as apolitical, does tackle issues of undigested colonial memory and contemporary race relations in a much more forthright (if politically incorrect) way than do the traditional journalistic means available.
Conclusion: The Sexagon’s Border Crisis
Authors: Mack Mehammed Amadeus
Published: September 2017

Though far from comprehensive, Sexagon offers five interconnected perspectives into the sexualization of immigration. Recurring tropes and persistent figures cross boundaries of art and discipline, establishing a continuum of representations that filter cultural and ethnic difference through the prism of sexuality. This Western strategy, of comprehending the other’s cultural difference by expressing it in the more “intelligible” language of sexuality, has precedents in the Orientalist output of old. There are contemporary and political factors involved, however, when this translation of cultural difference into sexual difference happens in postcolonial, postimmigration Europe. The terms sexual modernity, sexual democracy, and sexual citizenship were coined to qualify our new sexualized hierarchies of cultural capital. A battle of representations has broken out on the slippery terrain where culture meets politics in multiethnic France: it has been fomented by the recasting of the issue of cultural assimilation as a sexual one, as well as by the initially slow but now increasing consciousness that such a recasting has taken place.
Cultural Brokers in Interwar Orientalism
Authors: Lim Jeehyun
Published: September 2017

Chapter one examines the formation of Asian American writers in the era of Asian exclusion through a comparative analysis of Younghill Kang’s and Carlos Bulosan’s responses to Orientalism in their works. As legal exclusion created the racial category of Asian in the United States, migrant Asian writers faced the challenge of creating modern Asian subjects in literary English. Cultural brokers between Orientalist images of their countries of origin and the modern experiences of Asian migrants in the United States, Kang and Bulosan tested the boundaries of English to represent migrant experiences lived in languages other than English. As a heterogeneous cultural epistemology, Orientalism placed different constraints on Kang, who contended with the Orientalist valorization of the Far East, and Bulosan, who resorted to the Filipino intellectual tradition of the ilustrado in the face of Orientalist primitivism.
Global English and the Predicament of Monolingual Multiculturalism
Authors: Lim Jeehyun
Published: September 2017

Chapter five examines the writings of Julia Alvarez and Ha Jin as examples of literary bilingual brokering in the age of global English. As writers of bi-national scope in their writings, Alvarez and Ha Jin explore a cultural politics of circulation to dislodge the assumption of an organic relationship between national language and literature. However, the coexistence of World Literature in English and US multicultural literature in these writers’ works places their representations of political oppression and human rights abuse abroad within the pedagogy of neoliberal multiculturalism at home that is geared toward an individualistic understanding of freedom and rights. Even as Alvarez and Ha Jin seek to claim belonging in the homeland of language outside the narrow confines of national literature, that choice itself is circumscribed by the cultural politics of writing in English at a time of global English hegemony.
Faith and Reason
Authors: Marion Jean-Luc
Published: September 2017

In this chapter Marion claims that faith and reason are not opposed to each other, as is often supposed, but faith has its own rationality, namely unfolding the reason of the “logos” as the gift of love. Christians have a duty to rationality. Modernity reduces everything known to objects and hence leads to nihilism. We must exercise a “greater reason,” namely a rationality of the flesh and of love, which gives Christ’s logos to the world as gift. As Christians we must hand on the love we have received. Such love is unconditioned and enables both true self-knowledge and genuine knowledge of the other.
The Service of Rationality in the Church
Authors: Marion Jean-Luc
Published: September 2017

In this chapter Marion claims that the term of the “intellectual” is both recent and problematic. It makes little sense to speak of the “Catholic intellectual” or to criticize the church. Rather, one should convert oneself and contribute to the church by loving it. The baptized intellectual must think through the information he gives to the church; he must work out the logic of faith. We must operate on the principle that truth never contradicts truth and simply unfold the truth as best as we can. Faith and knowledge are never opposed to each other. The job of the rational believer is to “decline revelation” and unfold its logic.
The Invisible Saint
Authors: Marion Jean-Luc
Published: September 2017

Sanctity cannot be experienced or claimed; thus the saint is always invisible. Only someone who has returned from the dead can witness to it. The paradox of holiness reproduces that of death. God’s utter alterity is holiness, what cannot be aimed at. Holiness marks the realm of God’s very phenomenality as unreachable invisibility. The saint operates in the paradox of the order of charity.
2
Authors: Nancy Jean-Luc , Fort Jeff
Published: September 2017

Heidegger’s thought begins with a questioning of being, of the difference between being and beings. He intends this thinking of being to provide a new beginning of ontology, or something other than an ontology. This thinking need not have any connection with anti-Semitism, and yet in Heidegger’s Black Notebooks anti-Semitism is invoked within the thinking of being. This is because Heidegger thinks being in terms of a history of peoples. Russians, English, French, Italian, Americans, Japanese, but especially Germans and Greeks, all make their appearance in the Black Notebooks. Heidegger understands the new beginning of the thinking of being as one that must be brought about by a people.
3
Authors: Nancy Jean-Luc , Fort Jeff
Published: September 2017

In the Black Notebooks, Heidegger evokes the Jews and “world Jewry” as the agents of a radical uprooting of the world on a world-historical or “historial” scale. This view reveals in Heidegger a historial anti-Semitism that attributes to the Jews the world-historical role of uprooting being. While this view shares common ground with banal anti-Semitism, Heidegger’s absorption of it shows that it is inscribed within a larger malaise in Western Culture, and in philosophy itself. Heidegger’s anti-Semitism must be distinguished in many respects from that of the Nazis, as the Black Notebooks also show, but his “archi-fascism” does not mean that Heidegger can be banished from philosophy, rather it only deepens the problem concerning the relationship between western thought and anti-Semitism.
7
Authors: Nancy Jean-Luc , Fort Jeff
Published: September 2017

Heidegger was perfectly capable of investigating the provenance of anti-Semitism, but he did not. Instead he received his age’s prejudices, and put them to work in his thinking. Why did he not pursue such an investigation? Did he read Theodor Lessing’s book on Jewish self-hatred? Heidegger called for both the conquest and abandonment of self, a renunciation and a sacrifice. If he had investigated anti-Semitism he might have learned that this repudiation of self is the very structure of the latter. Instead he gives the anti-Semitic image of the Jew as destructive of the West a historial dimension in the forgetting of beyng.
10
Authors: Nancy Jean-Luc , Fort Jeff
Published: September 2017

Perhaps rancor—in the sense of bitter disappointment and rage at unjust deception—is a more appropriate term than hatred for describing what infected the West from its beginnings, insofar as the latter promised itself completion and fulfillment. Such a completion then could only take the form of destruction, which Heidegger both dreaded and wished for. Such thinking gives rise to a form of despair that couples misery (Not, distress) with the need for an Other that harbors an absolute alterity through which a new and essential event may become possible. While this configuration may be highly questionable, it does not invalidate the thinking of alterity and multiplicity that was, perhaps ironically, inspired by Heidegger, in thinkers such as Sartre, Levinas, Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, and even Deleuze. Through such thinkers there may be seen a thought derived in part from Heidegger which in no way transmits the anti-Semitic configurations underpinning Heidegger’s fixation on the fulfillment of being. Indeed, they attest to a motif of Jewish alterity, which ironically can in turn be seen to have been made possible by Heidegger, albeit also despite him. But Heidegger also had a sense of another way, which can be seen in his evocation, in the Black Notebooks, of “grace”—which translates charis in Greek, and chen in Hebrew.
Coda
Authors: Nancy Jean-Luc , Fort Jeff
Published: September 2017

Between the writing of this book and its publication, many things have been said about Heidegger’s Black Notebooks. Attempts at separating their author from the infamy of anti-Semitism only reinforce the necessary denunciation of both. But what is at stake in the fact that Heidegger cannot simply be struck from our history. Neither the Nazi enterprise of crude domination, nor the thought that attempted to exceed it in the direction of a “new beginning,” arose out of nothing. It arose out of our history, and it happened [arrivé] to it; and if it did so this is in part because the thought of happening, of arrival, remains attached to the desire for foundation, for inauguration, and for schematic programming. This thought goes beyond Heidegger and reaches into many domains. In anti-Semitism, there is a hatred for what withdraws itself from auto-foundation. This hatred takes up from Christian doctrine the repudiation of the latter’s Jewish provenance, its provenance in errancy and wandering. History is not confined to being the destiny the forgetting of being, but has no doubt long since escaped this destiny as it continues to wander and err.
Supplement
Authors: Nancy Jean-Luc , Fort Jeff
Published: September 2017

Given the recent publication of another volume in German of Heidegger’s Black Notebooks (Anmerkungen, volume 97 of Heidegger’s Collected Edition), Nancy appends some remarks concerning Heidegger’s relationship to Christianity. He finds this relationship to be marked by a view, on Heidegger’s part, that Christianity itself is divided between a “univocal” aspect, more in line with his own thinking of being and the originary beginning, and an “equivocal” or ambiguous aspect, associated more with the institutional and dogmatic aspects of Christianity. This view suggests a strange rivalry between Heidegger’s thinking and a certain Christianity, despite the philosopher’s proclaimed anti-Christianism. What remains unexamined is the place of Judaism within this broad historical dynamic.
In Common
Authors: Esposito Roberto
Published: September 2017

This chapter considers Homer's perspective as he oversees a scenario that comprises both Trojans and Achaeans. Here, there is something that goes beyond the often mentioned “impartiality” of Homer's relation to the two adversaries; something that seems to approach an impersonality in which Weil's notion of “reading” (First and Last Notebooks, 337) loses its subject and adheres to the object, to the point of disappearing into it, of becoming “non-reading”: “It is a question of uprooting our readings of things, of changing them, so as to arrive at non- reading” (Notebooks Vol. I- D, 312). It is only from this point—which does not coincide with any particular perspective and is, rather, an absence of perspective—that the author of the Iliad can frame the scene on the basis of the invisible circle that unites all combatants.
Imperium
Authors: Esposito Roberto
Published: September 2017

This chapter describes how Weil overturns all of Arendt's affirmations by uncovering the double foundation of violence and deceit that underlies the Latin framework upon which Arendt's assertions rest. This is certainly the case of the Roman principle of auctoritas-augmentum, which Weil re oriented in its very root toward the implacable logic of an increasingly limitless imperialism. Furthermore, through the Virgilian dictum of “parcere subiectis et debellare superbos” (to show mercy to the conquered and to subdue the proud; Aeneid, VI, 51), Weil defined the basis for the negation of all rights to the defeated enemy who refuses humiliation, not to mention the terrifying project of “totum sub leges mittere orbem” (the whole world placed under law), which is grounded in the gradual identification of Urbs with Orbis, and thus of law, with dominium.
Topologies
Authors: Esposito Roberto
Published: September 2017

This chapter argues that Weil's overturning of Arendt's views is not limited to the judgment on Rome. The very Christianity that Arendt situates as the commencement of the drift toward the modern constitutes for Weil both its internal rampart and its principle source of contention simultaneously. Indeed, for Weil Christianity is the spiritual thread that allows modernity to continue advancing in light of its originary inspiration. This does not mean that the two interpretative horizons are openly contradictory. They even coincide at one point precisely in their severe judgment of historical Christianity, which, paradoxically, Weil blames for the de-Christianization of our times. However, their two perspectives diverge once again as Arendt observes that this phenomenon surely occurs because Christianity is lacking in mundane, public figures. In contrast, Weil believes that it is precisely Christianity's spirituality that makes it the unique, authentic “continuation” of Greece.
The Final Battle
Authors: Esposito Roberto
Published: September 2017

This chapter presents one final twist, acute divergence, or digression that remains in the relation between Arendt and Weil's notions of heroism. This twist originates in one of Nietzsche's aphorisms: “The heroic consists in doing a great thing (or in not doing a thing in a great fashion) without feeling oneself to be in competition with others before others. The hero always bears the wilderness and the sacred, inviolable borderline within him wherever he may go” (Nietzsche, Human, 391–92). The image of the wilderness here—which Arendt's hero struggles to constrain—provides significant insight into Weil's notion of heroism.
Public Things
Authors: Honig Bonnie
Published: September 2017

In the contemporary world of neoliberalism, efficiency is treated as the vehicle of political and economic health. State bureaucracy, but not corporate bureaucracy, is seen as inefficient, and privatization is seen as a magic cure for social ills. This book asks whether democracy is possible in the absence of public services, spaces, and utilities. In other words, if neoliberalism leaves to democracy merely electoral majoritarianism and procedures of deliberation while divesting democratic states of their ownership of public things, what will the impact be? This book suggests that democracy postulates public things—infrastructure, monuments, libraries—that citizens use, care for, repair, and are gathered up by. To be “gathered up” refers to the work of D. W. Winnicott, the object relations psychoanalyst who popularized the idea of “transitional objects”—the toys, teddy bears, or favorite blankets by way of which infants come to understand themselves as unified selves with an inside and an outside in relation to others. The wager of this book is that the work transitional objects do for infants is analogously performed for democratic citizens by public things, which press us into object relations with others and with ourselves. The book attends also to the historically racial character of public things: public lands taken from indigenous peoples, access to public goods restricted to white majorities. The book underlines the material and psychological conditions necessary for object permanence and the reparative work needed for a more egalitarian democracy.
Public Things, Shared Space, and the Commons
Authors: Honig Bonnie
Published: September 2017

This epilogue compares the public things model with that of two others, the commons (or undercommons) and shared space. It argues that while all three models respond to the democratic need, public things have their own specific and necessary contribution to make. The Lincoln Memorial is the sort of thing Hannah Arendt has in mind as the basis of shared memory and action in The Human Condition. The commons model identifies the losses caused by dispossession, appropriation, and accumulation, and public things may well look like one more enclosure in a very long line of them. This epilogue discusses the contributions that all three models can make to the project of preventing ever-increasing privatization and promoting justice and equality in contemporary democratic societies.
Bose-Einstein Condensation of Confined Atomic Gases at Ultra Low Temperatures
Authors: Serhan M.
Published: September 2017

In this work I solve the Gross-Pitaevskii equation describing an atomic gas confined in an isotropic harmonic trap by introducing a variational wavefunction of Gaussian type. The chemical potential of the system is calculated and the solutions are discussed in the weakly and strongly interacting regimes. For the attractive system with negative scattering length the maximum number of atoms that can be put in the condensate without collapse begins is calculated.
“REMEMBER, REFLECT, REIMAGINE”: Jews and Irish nationalism through the lens of the 1916 centenary commemorations
Authors: Wynn Natalie
Published: September 2017

“REMEMBER, REFLECT, REIMAGINE”: Jews and Irish nationalism through the lens of the 1916 centenary commemorations
Seekers of happiness: Jews and jazz in the Soviet Union
Authors: Khiterer Victoria
Published: September 2017

Seekers of happiness: Jews and jazz in the Soviet Union
Casting a shadow backwards and forwards: the para-holocaust fiction of Charles Reznikoff, Isaac Bashevis Singer and Bernrd Malamud
Authors: Partyka Jacek
Published: September 2017

Casting a shadow backwards and forwards: the para-holocaust fiction of Charles Reznikoff, Isaac Bashevis Singer and Bernrd Malamud
Fighting for Rosenbergs. The Polish staging of Leon Kruczkowski’s play “Julius and Ethel”
Authors: Keane Barry
Published: September 2017

Fighting for Rosenbergs. The Polish staging of Leon Kruczkowski’s play “Julius and Ethel”
Introduction
Authors: El Hadidi Hager
Published: September 2017

This book examines how different people in metropolitan Cairo experience zar as spirits, as rituals, and as a spiritual and initiatory path. Zar is a healing ritual complex practiced in societies around the Red Sea and the Arabian Gulf. It also refers to jinn spirits who possess humans and afflict them with troubles and ailments. In Egypt, the way of zar is one of the healing options that address jinn. People seek out zar initiation when in crisis for a variety of motivations and reasons. Drawing on years of extensive ethnographic fieldwork in different parts of Egypt and on personal experience, this book explores some aspects of Egyptian zar spirit possession that have rarely been addressed in the literature: the zar community (tayfat al-zar), zar rites and rituals, and songs and music within zar communities. This introduction discusses zar and spirit possession from an anthropological perspective and provides an overview of the chapters that follow.
Localization of Bodies in Time: Life Cycle and Other Crises
Authors: El Hadidi Hager
Published: September 2017

This chapter explores the association between zar possession crises and those that relate to the anxieties around periods of transitions in the life cycle of a person. Symptoms of zar affliction tend to occur during special moments of anxiety surrounding life-cycle transitions. The first episode of possession, or zar ritual crisis, typically occurs prior to marriage, when a woman is still a teenager. The chapter first considers crises related to adolescence, fertility, marriage, pregnancy, birthing, and menopause by using a variety of narratives to present people's varied perceptions and practice for zar. It then links Arjun Appadurai's concept of “locality” to the ways zar orients the devotee's body in time in time and space. It also examines how times of transition—ritual cycle crises—become socialized through zar initiations.
Localization of Bodies in Space: A Ritual Sampler
Authors: El Hadidi Hager
Published: September 2017

This chapter presents a sampler of zar sacrificial rites and rituals using a realist narration style, of the kind that is employed in fiction, based on transcriptions of actual recordings of real life. The opening sura of the Qur'an, the Fatiha, is the fundamental Muslim prayer. In zar rituals, the Fatiha is used as the central part of a special ritual formula performed at the beginning of any zar performance, called the Openings (al-fawatih). This chapter first describes the ritual use of incense in the Openings rite and its context before discussing the rite for sacrificial blood. It also considers the sacrificial procession dedicated to the Grand Lady, one of the most important zar spirits and leader of a spirit pantheon. Finally, it examines the mayanga (a Hausa word which means “cemetery”), a place where a zar devotee may harbor her possessing spirits and thus acquire direct access to them.
Social Capital and Local Water Management in Egypt
Authors: Gouda Dalia M.
Published: September 2017

From the 1980s onward, billions of dollars were poured into irrigation improvement programs in Egypt. These aimed at improving local Nile water management through the introduction of more water-efficient technology and by placing management of the improved systems in the hands of local water user associations. The central premise of most of these programs was that the functioning of such associations could rely on the revival of traditional forms of social capital—social networks, norms, and trust—for their success. This book shows how the far-reaching social changes wrought at the village level in Egypt through the twentieth century rendered such a premise implausible at best and invalid at worst. The book examines networks of social relationships and their impact on the exercise of social control and the formation of collective action at the local level and their change over time in four villages in the Delta and Fayoum governorates. Outlining three time frames, pre-1952, 1952–73, and 1973 to the present, and moving between multiple actors—farmers, government officials, and donor agencies—the book shows how institutional and technological changes during each period and the social changes that coincided with them yielded mixed successes for the water user associations in respect of water management.
Introduction
Authors: Gouda Dalia M.
Published: September 2017

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. This book aims to understand the role played by social capital in irrigation water management generally, and in the recent creation and operation of water users' organizations (WUOs) in Egypt in particular. It examines networks of social relationships and norms and their impact on the exercise of social control and collective irrigation water management practices in Egyptian villages. It focuses on four villages in the Kafr al-Sheikh (KSH) and Fayoum governorates in Egypt, looking at informal water user groups and formal WUOs over two time periods—the 1950s and 1960s, and the 1970s onward—to understand how they function and change over time. The book draws on two main concepts, social capital and community-based natural resource management, which are discussed in the remainder of the chapter.
Social Capital and Irrigation Water Management in Kafr al-Sheikh and Fayoum since the 1970s
Authors: Gouda Dalia M.
Published: September 2017

This chapter identifies and describes the conditions of the village and institutional fields since the 1970s in the case study areas in Kafr al-Sheikh (KSH) and Fayoum, which were influenced by the socioeconomic, institutional, and technological changes discussed in the literature. It examines the impact of these changes on the village field interactions, and thus the formation of collective action and the exercise of social control, and the extent to which these changes affected the irrigation water management (IWM) field. This chapter is divided into two sections. The first examines the changes that have affected the village field actors and their ability to exercise the social capital functions, social control and collective action, as well as changes to the main social relationships in the village field. The second analyzes the formation and functioning of water users' organizations in KSH and Fayoum on the mesqa and branch canal levels. It considers the impact of changes on the autonomy of the IWM field and the extent to which the village field influences irrigation water management in both governorates.
Criminal Women
Authors: Donker van Heel Koenraad
Published: September 2017

This chapter focuses on the women of Deir al-Medina and the crimes they committed. It starts with the women from Naunakhte's family, who are not mentioned in connection with any court case except the division of her will. In particular, it cites the adultery between Naunakhte's daughter Menatnakhte and the workman Weserhat, and possibly other scandals in the family. It shows that there are few court cases involving women in Deir al-Medina, in part because women were not always allowed to file suit in court about trifles. It also asks why Naunakhte settled her last will in public and concludes with the argument that women appearing in court did not necessarily mean that they were criminals.
So Who Gets the Kids?
Authors: Donker van Heel Koenraad
Published: September 2017

This chapter examines Menatnakhte's relationship with the workman Weserhat. Despite the fact that Menatnakhte was married to—or officially cohabited with—the workman Qenna, she had apparently also found time to have sexual relatoins with Weserhat. The verso of the Turin Strike Papyrus (P. Turin Cat. 1880) contains a number of memos mentioning Weserhat. One entry mentions three daughters whom Weserhat apparently refuses to give up, leading some authors to believe that his wife had died and that he now needed a wet nurse to bring up his children. A passage in the Turin Strike Papyrus has also been interpreted as a property division between a husband and his wife as the result of a divorce. The chapter considers the possibility that this property division between Weserhat and Menatnakhte could actually also be a financial agreement on account of their marriage. It also discusses the charges, mentioned in the Turin Strike Papyrus, brought forward by the workman Penanuqet against Weserhat.
Women Can Party Too
Authors: Donker van Heel Koenraad
Published: September 2017

This chapter examines an ostracon, O. Cairo CG 25705 + O. IFAO 1322 + O. Varille 38 (or O. Cairo CG 25705+), showing what appears to be a women's drinking party in Deir al-Medina. At first glance, O. Cairo CG 25705+, dated to the reign of Ramesses III or IV, seems to deal with a women's drinking party in honor of the goddess Hathor. The text also mentions Telmontu, who was related to Naunakhte through marriage: her son Neferhotep was married to his daughter. However, this might not be the goddess Hathor after all, but the birthday girl herself (or perhaps a girl who had just had her first menstruation or child). The personal name Hathor is actually not all that uncommon in Deir al-Medina. In theory this drinking party could even refer to a memorial service for a deceased Hathor. This chapter considers the possibility that Naunakhte's daughters and sons, and even her husband Khaemnun, attended similar events.
Women Causing Trouble
Authors: Donker van Heel Koenraad
Published: September 2017

This chapter discusses the behavior of women in Deir al-Medina, focusing on those who caused trouble. It begins by wondering how the Deir al-Medina men viewed their own behavior as compared to female behavior. It then cites the Maxims of Ptahhotep, which offer some sound advice about the treatment of women. From a male point of view, Ptahhotep's teaching suggests that a woman could apparently cause much trouble, and women knew how to use this to their advantage. The chapter also considers the Wisdom of Any, which contains some maxims that could have been written with Naunakhte in mind, and instances in which wives committed adultery. Finally, it examines the Turin Indictment Papyrus, which describes the charges brought against the priest Penanuqet aka Sed of the temple of Khnum.
Nasser's Blessed Movement
Authors: Gordon Joel
Published: September 2017

This book explores the early years of military rule in Egypt following the Free Officers' coup d'etat of 1952. Enriched by interviews with actors in and observers of the events, the book shows how the officers' belief in a quick reformation by force was transformed into a vital, long-term process that changed the face of Egypt. Under Gamal Abdel Nasser, the military regime launched an ambitious program of social, economic, and political reform. Egypt became a leader in Arab and non-aligned politics, as well as a model for political mobilization and national development throughout the Third World. Although Nasser exerted considerable personal influence over the course of events, his rise as a national and regional hero in the mid-1950s was preceded by a period in which he and his colleagues groped for direction, and in which many Egyptians disliked—even feared—them. The book analyzes the goals, programs, successes, and failures of the young regime, providing the most comprehensive account of the Egyptian revolution to date. It includes a new Introduction that looks back at the post-1952 period from a post-2011 perspective.
"The People's Army"
Authors: Gordon Joel
Published: September 2017

This chapter examines the extent to which the Free Officers formed a political ethos that inclined them toward intervention in civilian politics during the conspiratorial stage. The Free Officers' movement was the culmination of a dramatic political reorientation among the officer corps between 1936 and 1952. They represented the generation that turned away from the political establishment and rejected the leadership of its elders. The soldier's relationship to his country, to his people, to his commanding officers and king gave the young officers a particular perspective on the decay of the liberal order. This chapter first provides a historical background on the Egyptian military before discussing the organization of the Free Officers, along with its political activism, developing ideology, and ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.
"Revolutionary Jurisprudence"
Authors: Gordon Joel
Published: September 2017

This chapter examines how the Free Officers laid the groundwork for their revolution. During the first six months in power, the officers gradually came to see themselves not only as the vanguard of the struggle for national independence but as legitimate rulers of Egypt. They acted swiftly, purging political ranks and reforming the constitution. They abolished the political parties and assumed direct authority over the country. This was how the Free Officers declared their revolution. The chapter first considers the “blessed movement,” the term used by the Free Officers to refer to themselves, and the military junta they established before discussing the two factions, known as the minimalists and maximalists, that differed in attitude toward the issue of military rule. It also explores how the Free Officers' abolition of political parties intersect with the controversies of the previous six months: the resistance to voluntary “purification” and party organization, and opposition to land reform.
"The Great Deception"
Authors: Gordon Joel
Published: September 2017

This chapter examines how the relations between the military junta and its allies, particularly communists and the Muslim Brotherhood, deteriorated. The Democratic Movement for National Liberation (DMNL), the largest and least doctrinaire communist movement in Egypt, and Muslim Brotherhood had collaborated with the Free Officers and played significant supporting roles in their coup. The officers were thus confronted with two crucial questions: First, what debt, if any, did they owe their allies? Second, what ideological influence would these movements exert on the course of social and political reform? The chapter shows that the Free Officers gradually distanced themselves from the Muslim Brotherhood and abruptly turned on the communists. It considers the Command Council of the Revolution's (CCR) decision to outlaw the Muslim Brotherhood as well as its campaign against communism. It argues that the CCR's relations with the Muslim Brotherhood and the communist movements were influenced more by power politics than by ideology.
"The Secret of the Nine"
Authors: Gordon Joel
Published: September 2017

This chapter examines the relations between the military junta and the officer corps that formed it. It first considers the role envisioned by the Free Officers for the army and for their own movement before discussing their growing discord with Muhammad Nagib in the context of a power struggle. It then analyzes the officers' conflict with Colonel Rashad Mahanna and the controversy surrounding the revelation of the names of the original nine junta members who decided to oust King Farouk from power. It also assesses the impact of the power struggle between Nagib and his younger colleagues on the internal stability of the Command Council of the Revolution (CCR) and concludes with the argument that the junta's actions were not consistent with its promise of a return to democracy.
"A Pragmatic March toward Democracy"?
Authors: Gordon Joel
Published: September 2017

This book has examined how the Free Officers were able to seize and consolidate power, topple the parliamentary regime, and put in place a new political order with them at the helm. It has shown that the erosion of liberalism in Egypt caused turmoil which in turn sparked clamors for drastic social and political reform. This created a situation that was exploited by the officers to stage a coup d'etat, and the military regime they established received support from the public and the intelligentsia. The officers initially refused to call their movement a revolution, and instead called themselves the “blessed movement.” They eventually declared their movement a revolution in early 1953; it was described by Anwar al-Sadat two years later as a “pragmatic march toward democracy.” This conclusion discusses the legacy of Nasser and Nasserism in Egyptian politics.
Wind in the Reeds
Authors: Sadik Wafaa EL , Heimlich Rüdiger
Published: September 2017

This chapter focuses on the author's childhood in 1956. On July 26, 1956, Gamal Abdel Nasser declared that he was nationalizing the Suez Canal and would use the income from the canal's operations to finance the construction of the new dam at Aswan. The broadcast of the speech was the signal for the takeover of the canal office by an Egyptian military commando unit. This episode has gone into the history books as the Suez Crisis, a highly euphemistic term, for the “crisis” was a proper war, with many dead, wounded, prisoners of war, and massive destruction. The author also describes her experiences adapting to a new environment as they move from Kafr al-Arab and Fariskur to Cairo, Egypt's capital and the cultural and political center of the Arab world at the time.
Dinner with Cleopatra
Authors: Sadik Wafaa EL , Heimlich Rüdiger
Published: September 2017

This chapter focuses on the author's assignment to oversee Austrian archaeologist Karl Kromer's spring campaign on the Gebel Qibli, the south hill of the Giza plateau. Roughly 3 kilometers south of the Great Pyramid, his mission from the University of Innsbruck was to search for traces of early, predynastic settlement. The author then describes her dealings with foreign colleagues and considers the modern divide between Egyptian and European scholars. The chapter also looks at Howard Carter's discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun in the year 1922. In the same year, Egypt achieved its independence and a new era began for Egyptians in terms of politics.
At the Base of the Cathedral
Authors: Sadik Wafaa EL , Heimlich Rüdiger
Published: September 2017

This chapter begins with a description of the cathedral near the author's apartment in Cologne, which reminded her of the pyramids. Although erected thousands of years later, the cathedral, like the pyramids, is an amazing testament to the power of the faith. The cathedral and the Rhine, the museums, and the Philharmonic kept the author from becoming homesick. During her brief stay in Cologne, she had admired the educational programs for children the museums had developed to accompany their exhibition Nofret, the Beautiful. She then decided that she wanted to work in museum education programs, especially for children and the handicapped. From 1988 to 1991 the author worked on the study about an Egyptian children's museum, writing it first in Arabic, then in a German version.
Istwa Across the Water
Authors: Pressley-Sanon Toni
Published: September 2017

Istwa across the Water draws on the historian and poet Kamau Brathwaite’s concept of tidalectics as cultural exchange that is patterned after the back and forth movement of the ocean’s waves, to explore Haitian cultural production through the lenses of history and memory by way of the Vodou concept of the Marasa or twinned entities. Istwa across the Water takes on Haiti’s complementary or twinned sites of cultural production in the West African area of Dahomey/Benin Republic and the Central West African Kôngo region from which many Haitians originate. It discusses oral and visual art traditions from both sides of the Atlantic divide as a means to explore the dynamic and constantly evolving exchange of physical and spiritual energies between Haiti and its “motherlands” (sites of origin) as Spirit seeks to restore the balance that was lost during the transatlantic trade and slave era.
Exhuming Differences and Continuities after Colonialism at Puruchuco-Huaquerones, Peru
Authors: Murphy Melissa S. , Boza Maria Fernanda , Gaither Catherine
Published: September 2017

Murphy and colleagues highlight the study of mortuary practices after conquest and colonialism- Inca and Spanish- and how bioarchaeologists might integrate mortuary data with data on morbidity and mortality in the interpretation of the effects of colonialism in chapter two. They describe early postcontact burials from the cemetery of 57AS03 at the site of Puruchuco-Huaquerones and explore why a subsample of these funerary contexts were interred in an atypical fashion, departing from the traditional Late Horizon/Inca burial pattern. Many of the individuals buried atypically had perimortem injuries; however, they did not possess distinctly higher frequencies of nonspecific indicators of stress or signs of infectious diseases (porotic hyperostosis, cribra orbitalia, periosteal reactions, abnormal bone loss) than those individuals who were interred in traditional mortuary fashion.
Double Coloniality in Tierra del Fuego, Argentina
Authors: Guichón Ricardo A. , Casali Romina , Laborde Pamela García , Salerno Melisa A. , Guichón Rocio
Published: September 2017

Guichón and co-authors open the windows on the contact experience in Tierra de Fuego in southern Argentina. These authors explore colonialism to the very end of the archaeological record at the Salesian mission of La Candelaria, which was founded in 1897 and abandoned in the 1940s. Drawing from diverse documentary sources, Guichón and colleagues construct a remarkably contextualized case study and a guiding theoretical framework involving “double colonialism.” Diversity in mortuary practices at La Candelaria indicates that peoples buried there possessed distinct social identities (i.e., clergy, settlers, and Selk’nam natives). A paleopathological study of the human remains indicated mission residents experienced a notable degree of biological stress in the forms of porotic hyperostosis, cribra orbitalia, dental enamel hypoplasia, non-specific periosteal reactions, worsened oral health, and a high prevalence of skeletal tuberculosis, all emerging as functions of socioeconomic reality created by the mission setting.
The Bioarchaeology of Colonialism
Authors: Stojanowski Christopher M.
Published: September 2017

Stojanowski assumes the monumental responsibility of integrating the chapters with the themes of Colonized Bodies, Worlds Transformed and proposing some visions and prospects for a postcolonial bioarchaeology and for bioarchaeologists in general. He calls on practitioners to engage with bigger questions and a larger theoretical framework, a bold and ambitious agenda for future bioarchaeological investigations.
Are We Fake?
Authors: Ossip Kathleen
Published: September 2017

With a mixture of talent, naiveté, and marketing smarts, Anne Sexton created lasting images of glamour, genius, insouciance, and self-destruction that defined the late-twentieth century woman, poet, and woman-poet. These images contributed to her success, but also made it difficult to assess her poetry, as shown by contemporary reviews of her work. “Are We Fake? Images of Anne Sexton, Twentieth-Century Woman/Poet” looks at how the images evolved and what pleasure and enlightenment we can gain from them now.