bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Rabbinic Tales of Destruction
Authors: Belser Julia Watts
Published: December 2017

Rabbinic Tales of Destruction examines early Jewish accounts of the Roman conquest of Jerusalem from the perspective of the wounded body and the scarred land. Amidst stories saturated with sexual violence, enslavement, forced prostitution, disability, and bodily risk, the book argues that rabbinic narrative wrestles with the brutal body costs of Roman imperial domination. It brings disability studies, feminist theory, and new materialist ecological thought to accounts of rabbinic catastrophe, revealing how rabbinic discourses of gender, sexuality, and the body are shaped in the shadow of empire. Focusing on the Babylonian Talmud’s longest account of the destruction of the Second Temple, the book reveals the distinctive sex and gender politics of Bavli Gittin. While Palestinian tales frequently castigate the “wayward woman” for sexual transgressions that imperil the nation, Bavli Gittin’s stories resist portraying women’s sexuality as a cause of catastrophe. Rather than castigate women’s beauty as the cause of sexual sin, Bavli Gittin’s tales express a strikingly egalitarian discourse that laments the vulnerability of both male and female bodies before the conqueror. Bavli Gittin’s body politics align with a significant theological reorientation. Bavli Gittin does not explain catastrophe as divine chastisement. Instead of imagining God as the architect of Jewish suffering, it evokes God’s empathy with the subjugated Jewish body and forges a sharp critique of empire. Its critical discourse aims to pierce the power politics of Roman conquest, to protest the brutality of imperial dominance, and to make plain the scar that Roman violence leaves upon Jewish flesh.
The Sexual Politics of Destruction
Authors: Belser Julia Watts
Published: December 2017

This chapter examines the nexus of gender, sex, and sin in early Jewish narrative, arguing that Bavli Gittin’s account of catastrophe reveals a strikingly different portrayal of sexual sin. Biblical narrative frequently uses pornographic portrayals of the female body to convey God’s punishment of Israel, figuring women’s “whoredom” as justification for divine violence and abandonment. The Palestinian midrash collection Lamentations Rabbah amplifies and intensifies such dynamics in key narratives of Jerusalem’s fall. Bavli Gittin, by contrast, studiously avoids associating destruction with women’s sexual sin. Instead, its tales emphasize the consequences of men’s sexual transgressions. But even as its narratives draw attention to male sexual sin, Bavli Gittin also portrays conquered men’s compromised bodies as stunning sites of sexual virtue, suggesting that men’s sexual piety might nonetheless serve an antidote to the violence and violation of the Jewish body amidst Roman conquest.
Disability Studies and the Destruction of Jerusalem
Authors: Belser Julia Watts
Published: December 2017

This chapter uses disability studies theory to analyze the political and cultural significations of the body amidst Roman conquest. Extending the insights of scholars who have examined way Roman colonial dominance reshapes Jewish gender discourse, it argues that imperial violence similarly restructures the way rabbinic narrative portrays the body. Bavli Gittin and Lamentations Rabbah both recount stories of Rabbi Tsadok, a celebrated priest who fasted for forty years in an attempt to avert the destruction of Jerusalem. In contrast to the beauty tales examined in the previous chapter, Rabbi Tsadok’s body is used to mark the visceral impact of Roman conquest—and to chronicle the enduring scar that catastrophe leaves upon the flesh. Yet even as these stories use disability to make visible the tremendous loss that destruction brings, they also resignify the cultural logic of imperial victory, emphasizing the subversive power of disabled Jewish flesh.
Postlude—Theology in the Flames
Authors: Belser Julia Watts
Published: December 2017

The postlude sheds light on rabbinic theological responses to destruction, arguing that Bavli Gittin’s stories portray God as passionately—even catastrophically—responsive to human need. It examines shared resonances between Bavli Gittin’s portrayal of the destruction and the well-known rabbinic story of the Oven of Akhnai (Bavli Baba Metsia 59b), which recounts the cataclysmic disaster provoked by the tears of the humiliated Rabbi Eliezer. Similarly, Bavli Gittin claims that God destroys the temple in response to the humiliation of Bar Qamtsa, and that Israel’s doom was sealed after another wronged man weeps. Rather than emphasizing sin and punishment, Bavli Gittin’s stories highlight God’s immense self-sacrificial empathy for victims of shame, sexual violation, and economic exploitation. These tales of destruction reveal the devastating power of divine empathy, suggesting that God’s tremendous responsivity to suffering can shatter the world in the wake of one man’s pain.
Possessed by the Virgin
Authors: Bloomer Kristin C.
Published: December 2017

This book is an ethnographic account of three Roman Catholic women in contemporary Tamil Nadu, south India, who claim to be possessed by Mary, the mother of Jesus. It follows their lives over more than a decade, describing their own, the researcher’s own, and devotees’ understandings of the women’s healing and possession practices along with questions about agency, gender roles, authenticity, and social power. It asks, how is it that some experiences of “possession” (a word introduced to India by Christian missionaries, which the book complicates through Tamil renditions) are recognized as authentic, yet others are not? What are the local conditions that enable their very possibility? Discussions of local and widespread “Hindu” practices and discourses shed light on how these women and their followers navigate their bodily experience, socioeconomic status, caste, and gender roles in a modern world of technological change and global economy—and how Church officials navigate these women. Part travelogue, part academic analysis, the book addresses a wide audience, including academics interested in the study of religion, spirit possession, anthropology, women’s and gender studies, postcolonialism, Global Christianity, Tamil culture, Mariology, fluid boundaries across “traditions,” and the relationship between the ethnographer-“Self” and “Other.”
Rosalind
Authors: Bloomer Kristin C.
Published: December 2017

This chapter introduces Rosalind, her family, and the Jecintho Prayer House in Chennai. It tells the story of how Alex, her cousin, first came to be healed and possessed by Mary (Mātā). The accounts of possession move to Rosalind, and Mary reveals her true name as Jecintho (Queen of Roses). The family founds a prayer house, and a following grows. The chapter offers an account of members’ narratives. It also describes the author’s first visit to the prayer house and her personal responses to being prayed over and investigates what it means to be a participant-observer, a “witness.” It begins to analyze the form of agency involved in possession practices. Roman Catholic priests take note of the group with responses ranging the spectrum.
The Place, the People, the Practices
Authors: Bloomer Kristin C.
Published: December 2017

This chapter argues that the devotees of Our Lady Jecintho Prayer House are seeking home and embodied wholeness in an ever-shifting existential landscape. It offers a detailed description of the prayer house, ranging from its local geography, socioeconomic context, and local tropes to the structure of Rosalind’s family and of the prayer house community. It presents the notion that various forms of capital are desired in the quest for respectability and examines the place of gender in this quest. Interviews with Jecintho’s devotees—including Catholic nuns—lend insight into how their interactions with Rosalind and Jecintho impact their lives. Rosalind is seen to cultivate a relationship with Jecintho. The chapter further describes the experience of being a participant-observer while striving to retain the objectivity expected of academic work. It presents comparisons of the rosary to bhakti, and offers examples of how Jecintho’s messages help them cultivate modern selves.
Return to Mātāpuram
Authors: Bloomer Kristin C.
Published: December 2017

The chapter begins with a description of the Sivagangai region around Mātāpuram. Local caste conflicts, particularly those related to religious processions, have persisted for at least a century. A brief summary of the local history sets the stage for next chapters. Comparisons are made between the possession and healing activities of Mātāpuram, and the two faith communities in Chennai. Who is Dhanam’s Mātā, and is she related to Jecintho? Does Dhanam experience possession in the same manner (and degree) as Rosalind and Nancy? The chapter also explores similarities and differences between Mātā’s healing and possession practices and those of local Hindus. Residents of the area seek out all kinds of healing.
Memory, Mimesis, and Healing
Authors: Bloomer Kristin C.
Published: December 2017

A return visit to Dhanam coincides with preparations for the ordination of her older son as a Roman Catholic priest. The elaborate celebration is both a boon and a burden to her family and her village. Both of her seminarian sons support Dhanam’s possession experiences and healing work, even as their studies are supported by the work of their parents. In finally relating the details of her first possession by Mata, Dhanam illuminates the depth of shared Hindu and Christian discourses and practices in the region. As the author tries to understand how Mātā’s possession of Dhanam is perceived by Dhanam and her community, she also examines the agency exercised in these practices. The language of possession is parsed carefully. The author also considers the impact of her presence on the field site and data.
Epilogue
Authors: Bloomer Kristin C.
Published: December 2017

In November 2015, Rosalind’s only son, Fredy [sic], dies in a car accident on his eighteenth birthday, plunging her and the prayer house community into grief. Our Lady Jecintho Prayer House members—mostly children—see visions of Fredy. The family hosts several death memorials, and a year later holds a three-day annual death anniversary. The community announces a “New Resurrection Era,” and the new name of the Lord: Fredy. They witness that Fredy’s death marks this new era and that, like the death of Jesus, God has changed a “bad death” into a “good death.” Rosalind now claims that she conceived Fredy through taking the Eucharist, and Jecintho’s rituals now honor the Lord’s new name. The reader is left to decide how to interpret these events, while endnotes referencing Hindu mourning rituals suggest various possibilities.
George Whitefield and the Emergence of Evangelical Devotion
Authors: Hindmarsh D. Bruce
Published: December 2017

True spirituality was described by the Wesley brothers as being like a fire from heaven, and the most fiery of preachers was George Whitefield. Examining his manuscript diaries, this chapter traces Whitefield’s early formation as a case study of the making of evangelical devotion. The key influences on Whitefield were the discipline of Oxford Methodism, the fearless enterprising spirit of Pietism, and the practical biblical emphases of Puritan-Nonconformist writers. These elements were fused together in the heat of experience as Whitefield discovered a new appreciation for the indwelling Holy Spirit as “the life of God in the soul of man.” After his conversion, he emerged as a force that ignited revival far and wide, and his letters and sermons display a taut dialectic of self-exertion and self-abasement, as his private spirituality was turned inside out in a public ministry of remarkable zeal.
The Classical Sources of Evangelical Devotion
Authors: Hindmarsh D. Bruce
Published: December 2017

For all its seeming newness, evangelicalism revived ancient ideals. Evangelical use of Scripture was especially similar to ancient patterns of devotional reading. Moreover, evangelicals routinely appealed to confessional formularies (Anglican and Reformed) and creedal standards, and to precedents in church history from the Puritans, the Reformation, and beyond, stretching back to the early church. Evangelicals’ concern for true religion meant that they were also able to assimilate spiritually edifying sources from the Catholic tradition and from the Middle Ages. The reception history of Henry Scougal’s Life of God in the Soul of Man and Thomas à‎ Kempis’s Imitation of Christ illustrate a process of simplification, naturalization, and democratization of mystical and ascetical ideals. The libraries, book lists, and church histories of evangelicals further illustrate a wide range of sources, critical to evangelical spiritual life and identity.
Evangelicals and the Rise of Science
Authors: Hindmarsh D. Bruce
Published: December 2017

The evangelical devotional attitude passed over into their view of the natural world as radiant with God’s presence. The God of nature and grace invited a response of “wonder, love, and praise”; this led them to perceive God as immediately present in the material world revealed by Newtonian science and described by mechanical philosophy. This is evident in John Wesley’s multifaceted interaction with science as a popular disseminator of natural knowledge, and Jonathan Edwards’s probing of the meaning of the Newtonian postulates. The attitude of worship, recalling the older “harmony of all knowledge,” was manifest especially in the Wesleyan and Edwardsian view of the spiritual senses and their profound rejection of dualism. In Charles Wesley’s poetry too we witness a devout response to the Holy Spirit’s presence in the material world. Instead of reflecting the reductionist “quantifying spirit” of the age, he responded to the world described by science with a unified sensibility.
Law and Conversion in Evangelical Devotion
Authors: Hindmarsh D. Bruce
Published: December 2017

Evangelical spirituality had implications for both felons and philosophers. Convictions about the psychological depth and comprehensiveness of God’s law led evangelicals to minister to those who were condemned and imprisoned by the law. The evangelical message of law and gospel was tested when confronted by the desperate condition of the capital convict. This is evident in the prison ministry of John Wesley and Charles Wesley, and other lay Methodists, especially at Newgate prison in London, and also in the response of the Dissenters Philip Doddridge and Benjamin Fawcett to condemned criminals. Intellectually, John and Charles Wesley and Henry Venn offered a deontological ethics grounded in evangelical spirituality, and Jonathan Edwards challenged dominant ideas in moral philosophy by showing that true virtue was deeper and more comprehensive than natural virtue. It required the grace of conversion and the presence of God who was always first and last in any moral considerations.
Introduction
Authors: Schwadron Hannah
Published: December 2017

This introductory chapter frames the book’s emphasis on the twenty-first-century Sexy Jewess, whose image proliferates in neoburlesque, comedy, mainstream film, and progressive pornography. A review of significant literature in Jewish studies, gender and sexuality studies, and dance and performance studies (1) introduces how performers complicate self-critical jokes of the excessive Jewish female body by playing up their differences, (2) historicizes the techniques that performers employ to mimic and master different ideas of sexiness, and (3) theorizes how performances of Jewish female identity use the body to participate in and parody notions of appropriate femininity as they relate to white womanhood.
Punk Porn Princess Joanna Angel and the Rise of Jewess Raunch
Authors: Schwadron Hannah
Published: December 2017

This chapter transitions from mainstream film to the adult film industry, highlighting the punk porn and XXX parody of popular Jewish porn star and director Joanna Angel. As Angel leads an altporn phenomenon, she exemplifies the salability of the Sexy Jewess who sells sex outright. Her Burning Angel brand of Jewish joke-work builds on the emboldened platforms of neoburlesque striptease while nodding to the ironic suggestion of sex in mainstream comedy and its horrible sin when seen in Hollywood plots. Powered by their success as hard-core sex, Angel’s performances play with the liberatory potential of Jewess raunch as a secular comic pulpit for distinctly commercial ends.
Renewing Democracy in Young America
Authors: Hart Daniel , Youniss James
Published: December 2017

This book suggests that youth civic development should be promoted by providing young people with opportunities to participate in community life. make four arguments. The first of these is that youth can be part of the solution to the problems of contemporary American democracy. The book then summarizes what political scientists say about contemporary politics and the systemic ills that have allowed ideological polarization to stymie the democratic process. Civic education must be located in the political context in which it occurs. This is because citizen participation reflects the political system and is not a consequence of citizens’ immutable characteristics. We must supply young people with opportunities. Our second argument is that civic development and civic education will not be improved by more of what we are already doing. There is scant evidence that schools successfully inculcate civic knowledge in students. There is also little evidence of the efficacy of state-mandated community service as a requirement for high school graduation. The third argument is that improving civic development will require new opportunities for youth participation in the community and in the electorate. We propose that civic education be enriched by science-based, community-oriented environmental engagement and by lowering the voting age for municipal elections to 16. Finally, we argue that now is the time to take steps to facilitate civic development. The problems of youth engagement will neither resolve on their own nor be cured by foreseeable changes in social media technologies, federal politics, or generational change.
Civic Life Through Environmental Engagement
Authors: Hart Daniel , Youniss James
Published: December 2017

Throughout the world, communities are increasingly facing environmental challenges. Youth can both contribute to solutions to these problems and develop civically from their efforts to do so. Youth played a crucial role at the beginning of the 20th century in transforming agriculture, and we suggest that youth today have the potential to inform and advance environmental practices. We describe how linking youth to community institutions to address community environmental issues can provide a context for civic development and also address what may be the central challenge to community life in the future.
The Académie and Its Dictionaries under the Old Regime
Authors: Fitzsimmons Michael P.
Published: December 2017

Because of criticism of its dictionary, the Académie decided to revise the work rather than begin work on a grammar. It adhered to this pattern throughout the eighteenth century and produced new editions in 1718, 1740, and 1762. The dictionary became the definitive instrument of the French language and enacted changes in it, especially in new spellings introduced in the fourth edition in 1762. Early in the eighteenth century, after he published a pamphlet that criticized Louis XIV, the Académie expelled the abbé de Saint-Pierre, who had wanted the body to assume a larger public policy role. By the latter part of the century, however, its membership included many philosophes. In 1784 Antoine de Rivarol won the prize of the Berlin Academy for his essay on the universality of the French language, heightening the importance of the dictionary, but the fifth edition had not appeared when the French Revolution began in 1789.
The Académie and Its Dictionary from the Beginning of the Revolution until the End of the Monarchy
Authors: Fitzsimmons Michael P.
Published: December 2017

The French Revolution ushered in a remarkable change in language, with both neologisms and new meanings for existing words. Supporters and critics of the Revolution often utilized a dictionary format for new or existing words to portray it in either a favorable or a pejorative manner. Provisionally funded in 1790, the Académie, rooted in the traditional high French of the court and elite, ignored the linguistic innovations, leading François-Urbain Domergue to attempt to form a body that would codify Revolutionary language, although it never came to fruition. Ultimately, partially because of its closeness with the monarch and in part because of the lateness with which Talleyrand presented a plan on educational reform, the Académie survived the reform agenda of the National Assembly, enabling it to continue work on the fifth edition. However, it disregarded not only linguistic innovations but also the societal transformation brought about by the National Assembly.
The Unexpected Appearance of a New Dictionary
Authors: Fitzsimmons Michael P.
Published: December 2017

The deficiencies of the fifth edition encouraged another Parisian publisher, Nicolas Moutardier, to bring out a new edition of the dictionary. Moutardier and a partner published the new edition during germinal year X (March–April 1802) under the title Dictionnaire de l’Académie Françoise, nouvelle édition. The holders of the rights to the fifth edition, Martin Bossange and two associates, appealed to the government for redress and the Minister of the Interior, Jean-Antoine Chaptal, advised them to go to court. They did, initiating what would become protracted litigation during which the government sought to help Bossange and his partners. The regime used the trials to assert its control of language through the dictionary. Ultimately, based primarily on the title of the new edition, Bossange and his associates prevailed; this was the outcome the government desired because allowing the publication of other editions would weaken its control of language.
The Fifth Edition Superseded
Authors: Fitzsimmons Michael P.
Published: December 2017

The second class of the Institut National had been given the task of preparing the sixth edition of the dictionary. The class had several Napoleonic loyalists, ensuring control of its content, and the regime was eager to see it appear, but Bonaparte abdicated before that occurred. The restored Bourbon dynasty was less concerned about control of language but equally desired to see the project concluded. Turmoil associated with a massive purge in 1816 slowed work, but the Académie completed editing of the dictionary in 1825. Rather than advance the sixth edition to publication, however, it decided to revise the earlier portion and the Bourbon regime fell in 1830 before it was published. The sixth edition appeared only in 1835 and, although it was more current than the fifth edition had been, it elided the Revolution and Empire in many entries through the use of the phrase “at a certain epoch.”
Public Monopoly
Authors: Gross Robert N.
Published: December 2017

Chapter 1 explores the rise of public school systems in the United States in the middle of the nineteenth century. It discusses the ways in which the growth of public school systems accompanied new economic theories about how education should be organized noncompetitively. As public schools rose in numbers and in stature, private schools dependent on parental tuition payments declined. By the 1870s, scholars and public officials began to view educational competition as detrimental to the public good. This implicit support for public monopolies introduced conflict when Catholic school attendance surged at the end of the nineteenth century.
The Fight for Peace
Authors: Feinberg Melissa
Published: December 2017

This chapter examines the Communist-led peace movement and analyzes its propaganda. Like show trials, the peace movement spread a similar set of messages around the Soviet bloc and throughout the world. Unlike the show trials, peace discourse was primarily concerned with revealing the truth of the warmongering West. For example, peace activists detailed American war crimes in Korea and exposed American racist policies at home. Within Eastern Europe, peace activism became a part of daily life as both urban and rural populations were pressured to take part in various peace campaigns. In the United States, in contrast, supporting the peace movement was vilified as support for Communism. From the American perspective, the global peace movement of the 1950s only told lies.
Battling the Big Lie
Authors: Feinberg Melissa
Published: December 2017

This chapter examines the characterization of Eastern Europe in the American media, concentrating on the role of East European émigrés in shaping American perceptions of their homeland. It focuses on the role of American-sponsored radio stations, such as the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe These radio stations broadcast an anticommunist perspective to Eastern Europe and played key roles in creating American knowledge about the region. The annual Crusade for Freedom, designed to raise money for RFE, sought to mobilize Americans against totalitarian regimes in Eastern Europe. In the American media, East Europeans were often referred to as “the captive peoples.” This chapter tells the history of this discourse of East European captivity and examines how it circulated back and forth across the Iron Curtain, moving from émigré publications into the American media and back into Eastern Europe.
The Ethics of Storytelling
Authors: Meretoja Hanna
Published: December 2017

Against the backdrop of the polarized debate on the ethical significance of storytelling, this book develops a nuanced framework for exploring the ethical complexity of the roles narratives play in human lives. Focusing on how narratives enlarge and diminish the spaces of possibilities in which people act, think, and reimagine the world, it proposes a theoretical-analytical framework for engaging with both the ethical potential and the risks of storytelling. It elaborates a narrative hermeneutics that treats narratives as culturally mediated interpretative practices that can be oppressive, empowering, or both, and argues that the relationship between narrative unconscious and narrative imagination shapes one’s sense of the possible. Its hermeneutic narrative ethics differentiates between six dimensions of narratives’ ethical potential: they can cultivate a sense of the possible; promote self-understanding; enable understanding other lives non-subsumptively in their singularity; transform narrative in-betweens; develop the capacity for perspective-taking; and function as forms of ethical inquiry. These aspects are analyzed in dialogue with literary and autobiographical narratives that deal with the legacy of the Second World War by problematizing the adequacy of the perpetrator–victim dichotomy—exploring how it is as dialogic storytellers, fundamentally vulnerable, interdependent, and implicated in violent histories, that individuals and communities become who they are. The book brings into dialogue narrative ethics, literary narrative studies, narrative psychology, narrative philosophy, and cultural memory studies. It develops narrative hermeneutics as a philosophically rigorous, historically sensitive, and analytically subtle approach to the ethical stakes of the debate on the narrative dimension of human existence.
Introduction
Authors: Meretoja Hanna
Published: December 2017

Chapter 1 situates the book within current scholarly debate on the ethical significance of narrative for human existence. It articulates the need for a framework that allows one to explore the ethical complexity of the roles that narratives play in human lives by acknowledging both their ethical potential and risks. It outlines narrative hermeneutics as an approach that enables an analysis of how narratives enlarge and diminish the space of possibilities in which people act, think, experience, and reimagine the world together with others. The chapter maps the trajectory and key concepts of the project, including narrative unconscious and narrative imagination, the relation of which crucially defines one’s sense of the possible. It explains how the book draws on, brings together, and contributes to the following fields: (1) narrative ethics, (2) literary narrative studies and ethical criticism, (3) philosophy of narrative, (4) narrative psychology, and (4) cultural memory studies.
Narrative Hermeneutics
Authors: Meretoja Hanna
Published: December 2017

The chapter delineates narrative hermeneutics as a framework for exploring the ethical complexities of the relationship between life and narrative and discusses the interconnections between the ethical and ontological assumptions underlying different conceptions of narrative. It outlines a broad Nietzschean-hermeneutic conception of interpretation and proposes three interconnected advantages of privileging this approach in theorizing narrative, experience, subjectivity, and their interrelations. It allows one to (1) understand how narrative relates to experience without seeing their relationship as dichotomous or identifying them with each other, that is, how they exist in a tensional but reciprocal relationship, best understood in terms of an interpretative continuum; (2) articulate how life does not form one coherent narrative but is instead a process of constant narrative reinterpretation; and (3) understand the relationship between narrative webs and the individual subjects entangled in them as fundamentally dialogical and as entwined with practices of power.
Musical Portraits of Visual Artists
Authors: Walden Joshua S.
Published: December 2017

Chapter 2 considers the connections between musical and visual modes of representing identity through the study of musical portraits of visual artists, with special focus on Morton Feldman’s “de Kooning” and Philip Glass’s “A Musical Portrait of Chuck Close.” Considering these musical portraits in relation to works by the artists they depict reveals how they portray their subjects by organizing musical structures to serve as metaphors of visual strategies of representation, evoking aspects of biography while representing painterly techniques in patterns of sound. These portraits do not only portray the artists named in their titles: they also highlight the very methods by which music operates for these twentieth- and twenty-first-century composers as a medium of representation.
Celebrity, Music, and the Multimedia Portrait
Authors: Walden Joshua S.
Published: December 2017

Chapter 4 examines hybrid works of multimedia portraiture and the genre of the portrait opera. The chapter first views the Voom Portraits of the American avant-garde director Robert Wilson, an ongoing series of multimedia video portraits of celebrities begun in 2004, looking in particular at his portraits of actors Robert Downey Jr. and Winona Ryder, which combine high-resolution film image with eclectic sound effects and scores by composers Tom Waits and Michael Galasso. The chapter then turns to the portrait opera Einstein on the Beach, created by Wilson, Philip Glass, and choreographer Lucinda Childs, to explore how they produced a multimedia portrait of Einstein that employs disparate allusions to popularly known elements from his life in a highly abstract work of opera that leaves the viewer to engage in a particularly imaginative act of interpretation about how the music describes this well-known modern icon.
After 1979
Authors: Dudoignon Stéphane A.
Published: December 2017

The purpose of this chapter is to show how the Pahlavi monarchy (1925-79) has reacted to the creation of the Islamic University of Medina, in 1961, by allowing in Easternmost Iran the development of Deobandi madrasa teaching and reformed Sufism. It suggests that since then, the Hanafi School of Islamic law and jurisprudence has begun to re-emerge during those years as a specifically Persian if not Iranian, tradition that contested Shia hegemony within Iran while opposing cross-border Wahhabi influence. Reconstructing the demographic change and interethnic cum inter-confessional violence that preceded and went with the revolution of 1979 in Iranian Baluchistan, the author shows how, thanks to the region’s Deobandi Sunni religious establishment’s ultimate acceptance of Khomeini’s rule, the new regime paved the way for the Sarbaz nexus to assess their position as guarantors of social peace and intermediaries between the state and a new-brand ‘Sunni community of Iran’.
Conclusion
Authors: Dudoignon Stéphane A.
Published: December 2017

The conclusion underlines, first, how Deobandi Sunni ulama in Easternmost Iran have promoted a staunch nationalisation of Hanafi Sunni Islam. Their adjustment to Iranian realities, the advantage they took from the eclipse of tribal might in the country, combined with the pragmatism of the Islamic Republic, permitted them to negotiate civil contracts reformulated since 1993, at every general election. At the same time, the conclusion also suggests that since the turn of the century, the Sarbaz nexus has had to confront several challenges: First came a new counter-elite of Baluch tribal background, embodied by the young guerrillas of Jund-Allah and Jaysh al-‘Adl, and by their terrorist activity. Second, the emergence of a new generation of tribal-background Deobandi religious scholars, with protections of their own among the republic’s paramilitary bodies. Competition between Sarbazi ulama and these rival networks, instrumented by Pasdaran leaders, partly explains the public violence in the region in the early 2010s. Third, the diffusion of Salafi trends in Baluch and Kurdish societies, and the first expression of Jihadi violence in Tehran further question the reality of the Sarbazi ulama’s authority, in a quickly changing geopolitical and cultural context.
Reversing the Tide
Authors: Mukherjee Joia S.
Published: December 2017

This chapter focuses on the emergence of the AIDS pandemic. It covers the emergence of symptoms associated with HIV, the discovery of the virus, and the understanding of its transmission. It emphasizes the importance of AIDS activists in acceleration of the development of drugs that changed the disease from a terminal to chronic disease. AIDS activists throughout the world then worked together to fight for equitable distribution of AIDS treatment. The movement drew an explicit connection between the AIDS pandemic and the right to health and succeeded in garnering novel funding for global health delivery. AIDS changed many things in global health, from patient-led activism to drug discovery to the long-term provision of care. In this book, the global health era is defined as the period after 2000, when AIDS activism helped shift the health paradigm in impoverished countries from prevention only to the delivery of health care.
The Millennium Development Goals and Sustainable Development Goals
Authors: Mukherjee Joia S.
Published: December 2017

This chapter focuses on the international goals to improve health and well-being around the world: the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), launched in 2000, and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) launched in 2016. The chapter discusses how the MDG framework, which coincided with the movement for HIV treatment access, set new and aspiration targets for improving access to infectious disease treatment, maternal mortality, and child health. The Goals highlighted the need for health systems strengthening to achieve the health improvements promised. The chapter also explains how monies for disease-specific or vertical programs can fragment health systems or, alternatively, can be leveraged to strengthen health care delivery. In 2015, the SDGs were launched with an even broader and more aspirational scope with the explicit goal of achieving Universal Health Coverage by 2030.
Health Financing
Authors: Mukherjee Joia S.
Published: December 2017

As the world moves from vertical programs to Universal Health Coverage, governments must address health financing to develop systems. This chapter focuses on the financing of health care in impoverished countries. Health care is funded by a mix of financing—government expenditure, donor financing, out-of-pocket expenditures, and health insurance. From the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness of 2005 to the newly developed Framework Convention on Global Health, there is a growing movement for the shared global responsibility to finance the right to health. This chapter covers the evolution of health financing, from the Commission on Macroeconomics and Health, the Gleneagles summit of 2005, and the Abuja Declaration in 2001, to recent novel financing and insurance schemes. The basic measures of macroeconomics are highlighted. Government, off-budget, and out-of-pocket expenditure are explained. Insurance and novel sources of health financing are discussed as they relate to financing and health as a human right.
Plotting Against the Regime
Authors: Wolf Anne
Published: December 2017

Chapter 3 explains how, when in 1981 Bourguiba became aware of the existence of the MTI, there was a showdown between its followers and the regime. Attempts by religious activists to apply for a party licence were short-lived as the president began to repress the movement, a trend which intensifed under Ben Ali. Although Ennahda leaders claimed that their activism had always been of a purely civilian nature, I show that some followers were prepared to use force, and plotted to overthrow the regime. However, this only occurred at the height of the crackdown, such as after the rigged legislative elections in 1989, when it became obvious that Ben Ali was not seeking a political rapprochement, but instead intensified measures against Ennahda, which he considered his main adversary.
Conclusion
Authors: Wolf Anne
Published: December 2017

We are for reconciliation. As for the details, they can be discussed. The project may be amended, but it will pass.

Rachid Ghannouchi1

This book sheds light on Ennahda’s historical evolution, the backdrop to understanding its current ideological and political orientation. Following Tunisia’s 2010–11 uprisings, many pundits analysed political developments through the prism of ‘Islamists versus secularists’ or ‘modernists versus obscurantists’. Whilst typically contrasted with more secular currents, Ennahda actually has much in common with them. Since the mid-2000s its leaders have attempted to position their movement within the traditions of the nineteenth-century Tunisian reformist movement just as Bourguiba and Ben Ali had sought to do decades earlier. Like them, senior Ennahda figures have engaged in a rewriting of history to portray their organisation as entirely non-violent and democratic, attempting to erase from its memory periods that conflict with this narrative. Bourguiba did so by downplaying, if not denying outright, his violent crackdown on the Ben Youssef opposition, an approach both he and Ben Ali later adopted regarding a range of dissidents. Ennahda leaders have taken a similar approach, if on a smaller scale, when dismissing the existence of plans in the 1980s to overthrow the regime by force. They have also downplayed the past violence of some of its own members. Rather than acknowledging past mistakes and controversies, the vast majority of its activists have internalised a one-sided discourse of victimisation and suffering....
Territories and Societies
Authors: Brandt Marieke
Published: December 2017

This chapter provides the reader with basic knowledge of the research area and its inhabitants. It starts with a brief overview of its topographical features and its diverse natural landscapes, followed by a discussion of the concept of ‘tribe’. The chapter then outlines the basic features of northern Yemen’s tribal system. It introduces the various tribes of the research area-Khawlān b. ʿĀmir in the area’s west, and Wāʾilah, Dahm and Sufyān in the area’s east and south-, their internal structures and settlement areas, and the peculiarities of the area’s other, nontribal social strata: sādah (descendants of the Prophet), qāḍīs (hereditary jurist-administrators of tribal descent), non-tribal ‘weak’ people and urban city dwellers.
Elite Transformations
Authors: Brandt Marieke
Published: December 2017

This chapter reconstructs the twisted evolution of the republican order in northernmost Yemen. It traces the research area’s profound socio-political and economic transformations since the beginning of the 1962 revolution and civil war that led to the overthrow of the Zaydi imamate, and describes the transition from the imamic kingdom into the republican order. Incomplete state building, underdevelopment, and the political and economic empowerment of certain influential tribal leaders (shaykhs) through the politics of co-optation and patronage resulted in severe political and economic imbalances which prepared the ground for growing dissatisfaction among the area’s average population.
The Saudi Influence
Authors: Brandt Marieke
Published: December 2017

This chapter explores the various manifestations of Saudi influence in Yemen’s extreme north, particularly with regard to the role of Saudi patronage politics in protection of the controversial and vulnerable border between the two countries. The beginnings of Saudi patronage policy can be traced back to the Saudi-Yemeni War of 1934 and the Treaty of Ṭāʾif, which resolved it. Since 1934 tribal elites in the Yemeni borderlands played a vital role in securing the common border. By considering the boundary problem through the lens of the borderland tribes, this chapter focuses on the influence of Saudi patronage politics in the area, the mutual interdependencies between Saudi boundary policy and the emergence of the Houthi conflict, and the vital role that tribes and tribal elites played in this process.
Sects and Politics
Authors: Brandt Marieke
Published: December 2017

This chapter discusses the sectarian and political developments that unfolded in northernmost Yemen’s complex and competitive environment. It explores the spread of Salafism in Yemen’s Zaydi heartland, and the interplay between Sunni radicalization and Zaydi counter-radicalization, and the various sectarian, tribal, and political stages on which this radicalization took place. Since the turn of the millennium, the Zaydi revival has been significantly shaped by the Zaydi cleric and former politician Ḥusayn Badr al-Dīn al-Ḥūthī (d. 2004), who has given the Houthi movement its name. Under Ḥusayn al-Ḥūthī’s tutelage, the Zaydi revival movement became a catalyst with the potential to unite all those, in Ṣaʿdah and beyond, who felt economically neglected, politically ostracized and religiously marginalized. The chapter explains the local role of the al-Ḥūthī family in its very area of origin, the Marrān Mountains, and reconstructs the emergence of the movement led by Ḥusayn al-Ḥūthī.
Conclusion
Authors: Brandt Marieke
Published: December 2017

The concluding chapter provides a detailed summary of the research results and reflects them against the background of the research question and the principles of Social Anthropology. It argues that the study of local arenas and ‘background’ themes of kinship, family, and tribe are linked to the hard surfaces of national and regional politics, and that the micro-and meso-sociological study of an anthropologist makes a substantial, if not fundamental, contribution to the understanding of larger conflicts with regional impact in Yemen and beyond.
Turkey’s Energy Policy in the Middle East and South Caucasus
Authors: Winrow Gareth M.
Published: December 2017

While much has been written on Turkey’s energy policy and attempts to become a significant regional power, less attention has been focused on how Ankara has sought to combine foreign policy goals and energy policy objectives. This chapter addresses how energy could be exploited to boost Turkey’s credentials as a major regional actor. It discusses the linkages between energy policy and foreign policy with regards to Turkey, and its position as a major energy consumer, especially dependent on crude oil and gas imports, is examined. Turkey’s ambitions are to become an energy transit state and hub with a particular focus on gas. Turkey’s energy policy in the Middle East and South Caucasus is examined and complicating factors are considered, including the role of Russia. Although the importance of energy in Turkey’s regional policy should not be overstated, it is evident that energy has been used to further foreign policy objectives.
The Clash of Nationalisms
Authors: Ahmadi Hamid
Published: December 2017

While it is true that Iran is composed of various religious-linguistic minority groups, making ethnicity an issue worth studying, Iran has specific features that differentiate it from other societies that have more recent experience in political heritage and the nation-state-building process. Bearing the characteristics of ancient nations, as some theorists of ethnicity and nationalism have elaborated, Iran represents a specific historical case in which the saliency of nationalism and an Iranian national identity is more remarkable than that of ethnicity and ethnic nationalism. The present study of Iranian Azeris and Iran-Azerbaijan Republic relations can shed more light on this fact. This chapter argues that Iranian Azeris have produced the most enduring and systematic response to the Azerbaijan Republic’s pan-Turkist irredentist and ethnic nationalist claims.
“Un-Civil Society” and the Sources of Russian Influence in West Asia
Authors: Mankoff Jeffrey
Published: December 2017

Despite the extensive levels of control that Russia has available to it in its neighbourhood, many officials believe that the West has outmanoeuvred Russia in the employment of soft power, particularly through the proliferation of civil society and NGOs in the former Soviet Union over the past two decades. As corrupt regimes in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan have fallen under rising pressure from civil society, Russia has grown increasingly alarmed. The Kremlin has come to see “color revolutions,” and the activities of anti-government protesters in Russia itself, as the consequences of a deliberate Western campaign to promote regime change and curtail Russian influence. Moscow has focused a wide range of civil society groups: anti-corruption campaigners, pro-democracy activists, journalists, and human rights defenders, as part of a Western-backed fifth column whose raison d'être is less the promotion of good governance and more the advancement of Western strategic interests at Russian expense.
The Gülen Movement and Turkish Soft Power in the South Caucasus and the Middle East
Authors: Balci Bayram
Published: December 2017

This chapter focuses on a concrete case study in Turkey’s close neighborhood. It examines the exceptional role played by a social and religious organization that is unique in the Muslim world, namely the movement of Fethullah Gülen. The following questions are addressed: To what extent did the Gülen movement contribute to the development of Turkey’s soft power in both the South Caucasus and the Middle East?; reciprocally, how did the Gülen movement benefit from the government’s support and prestige to develop its own influence? Finally, the chapter questions the durability of the bond between Gülen and Turkey’s soft power through the lens of the clash between Gülen, the charismatic leader of the hizmet movement, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, leader of the Turkish executive power since 2002.