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First published in 1980, The limbo people is based upon research
carried out in a day centre ('the Centre') for elderly Jewish
people in a London Borough and studies the experience and the
conception of time among the elderly. The development of the
arguments concerning time was founded on (a) the relationship
between the community of participants and the outside world; and
(b) the construction of events and interactions between
participants at the Centre. The organization of this book re-enacts
the process of reconstituting time as manifested in the Centre,
against the background of the participants previous experiences,
and in terms of their present existential situations. This book
will be of interest to students of sociology, anthropology and
gerontology.
Through an ethnohistorical chronicling of the emotionally-laden
treatment of selected suicide media-events, this book offers a
neo-Durkheimean account of suicide, addressing its social-moral
threat and the ensuing need to gloss over its unsettling
incomprehensibility. An analysis of the social dramas, cultural
performances, and suicide talk aired in the Israeli public sphere,
it suggests that such public glossing practices atone for and bring
about the symbolic rectification of the socially detrimental
effects of suicide. Drawing on Durkheim's thought on the social
significance of suicide and the sacred cohesive power of society's
self-representations through rituals and commemorations, the
authors revamp the contemporary pertinence of these cultural
devices, showing how, in the process of reconstituting and
redressing the disrupted order, suicide talk constitutes a revival
mechanism of communal 'life giving'. A rekindling of the
Durkheimian approach to suicide that examines how society deals
with suicide's shattering of normative we-feelings, Suicide Social
Dramas: Moral Breakdowns in the Israeli Public Sphere will appeal
to scholars and students of sociology and anthropology with
interests in social theory, Israel studies, suicide studies, and
the interpretation of societal and cultural processes.
Challenging the idea that fieldwork is the only way to gather data,
and that standard methods are the sole route to fruitful analysis,
Serendipity in Anthropological Research explores the role of
fortune and happenstance in anthropology. It conceives of
anthropological research as a lifelong nomadic journey of discovery
in which the world yields an infinite number of unexplored issues
and innumerable ways of studying them, each study producing its own
questions and demanding its own methodologies. Drawing together the
latest research from a team of senior scholars from around the
world to reflect on the experience of research, Serendipity in
Anthropological Research presents rich new case studies from Europe
and the Middle East to examine both new and old questions in novel
and enriching ways. An engaging examination of methodology and
anthropological fieldwork, this book will appeal to all those
concerned with writing ethnography.
Challenging the idea that fieldwork is the only way to gather data,
and that standard methods are the sole route to fruitful analysis,
Serendipity in Anthropological Research explores the role of
fortune and happenstance in anthropology. It conceives of
anthropological research as a lifelong nomadic journey of discovery
in which the world yields an infinite number of unexplored issues
and innumerable ways of studying them, each study producing its own
questions and demanding its own methodologies. Drawing together the
latest research from a team of senior scholars from around the
world to reflect on the experience of research, Serendipity in
Anthropological Research presents rich new case studies from Europe
and the Middle East to examine both new and old questions in novel
and enriching ways. An engaging examination of methodology and
anthropological fieldwork, this book will appeal to all those
concerned with writing ethnography.
Age into Race is a socio-anthropological essay on the repercussions
of the Covid-19 pandemic on the cultural status of the old. As the
worldwide horrors of the Corona era have since been publicly
repressed, the text is geared to revisit and relive the tenor of
that time while considering its latent revolutionary aftermath.
There was wide agreement that Covid-19 policies targeted older
people as a risk group in need of protection, setting it apart from
the rest of society. Yet, paradoxically, long-term facilities for
older people effectively became Covid-19 death traps. What kind of
abandonment propelled this apparent contradiction? This book
provides an answer by looking at ageist practices regarding
Covid-19 triaging, lockdowns and distancing that affected older
people around the world, devising Covid-19 as an inevitable
"problem of the elderly" and, by implication, instating and
categorizing "the elderly" as a public problem to be
bio-politically managed and wrought. The Covid-19 pandemic and its
concomitant "state of emergency" triggered an accelerated
transmutation of customary ageism into emergent racism, spelling a
fatal switch to designating the old as bearers of "bare" life
unworthy of human living, thus turning old age from a seemingly
cultural category to a socially fabricated viral menace of nature.
The book tracks down the process through which the "Coronization"
of culture legitimized and impelled a further stigmatization of old
age beyond mere ageism to sheer racism. Thus, this transmutation,
while compromising their autonomy and subjectivity via imposed
lockdowns, social isolation, excommunication and selective
discrimination rendered the old a race apart. Subsequently, the
moral panic invoked by the specter of the pandemic transformed the
social perceptions of later life from a containable social problem
to an unbridled public hazard that summoned total measures
presented as bureaucratically regimented regulations that
dehumanized its victims with impunity.
The city of Jaffa presents a paradox: intimate neighbors who are
political foes. The official Jewish national tale proceeds from
exile to redemption and nation-building, while the Palestinians' is
one of a golden age cut short, followed by dispossession and
resistance. The experiences of Jaffa's Jewish and Arab residents,
however, reveal lives and nationalist sentiments far more complex.
Twilight Nationalism shares the stories of ten of the city's
elders-women and men, rich and poor, Muslims, Jews, and
Christians-to radically deconstruct these national myths and
challenge common understandings of belonging and alienation.
Through the stories told at life's end, Daniel Monterescu and Haim
Hazan illuminate how national affiliation ultimately gives way to
existential circumstances. Similarities in lives prove to be shaped
far more by socioeconomic class, age, and gender than national
allegiance, and intersections between stories usher in a politics
of existence in place of politics of identity. In offering the real
stories individuals tell about themselves, this book reveals shared
perspectives too long silenced and new understandings of local
community previously lost in nationalist narratives.
Talking about the Holocaust has provided an international language
for ethics, victimization, political claims, and constructions of
collective identity. As part of a worldwide vocabulary, that
language helps set the tenor of the era of globalization. This
volume addresses manifestations of Holocaust-engendered global
discourse by critically examining their function and inherent
dilemmas, and the ways in which Holocaust-related matters still
instigate public debate and academic deliberation. It contends that
the contradiction between the totalizing logic of globalization and
the assumed uniqueness of the Holocaust generates continued
intellectual and practical discontent.
The city of Jaffa presents a paradox: intimate neighbors who are
political foes. The official Jewish national tale proceeds from
exile to redemption and nation-building, while the Palestinians' is
one of a golden age cut short, followed by dispossession and
resistance. The experiences of Jaffa's Jewish and Arab residents,
however, reveal lives and nationalist sentiments far more complex.
Twilight Nationalism shares the stories of ten of the city's
elders—women and men, rich and poor, Muslims, Jews, and
Christians—to radically deconstruct these national myths and
challenge common understandings of belonging and alienation.
Through the stories told at life's end, Daniel Monterescu and Haim
Hazan illuminate how national affiliation ultimately gives way to
existential circumstances. Similarities in lives prove to be shaped
far more by socioeconomic class, age, and gender than national
allegiance, and intersections between stories usher in a politics
of existence in place of politics of identity. In offering the real
stories individuals tell about themselves, this book reveals shared
perspectives too long silenced and new understandings of local
community previously lost in nationalist narratives.
Talking about the Holocaust has provided an international language
for ethics, victimization, political claims, and constructions of
collective identity. As part of a worldwide vocabulary, that
language helps set the tenor of the era of globalization. This
volume addresses manifestations of Holocaust-engendered global
discourse by critically examining their function and inherent
dilemmas, and the ways in which Holocaust-related matters still
instigate public debate and academic deliberation. It contends that
the contradiction between the totalizing logic of globalization and
the assumed uniqueness of the Holocaust generates continued
intellectual and practical discontent.
At the core of the author's concern stands the question of cultural
transmutation in an era riddled with media channels and
all-embracing messages. Fragments of the Israeli experience are
pieced together in this provocative essay to provide a
socio-anthropological agenda for some of the issues involved in the
manufacturing of items of symbolic solidarity and common national
imagery in an epoch of social disunification and cultural pastiche.
The author argues that even though the aesthetic forms of major
cultural idioms have unrecognizably altered and are accommodated to
befit the shape and style of post-modern living, the basic programs
underlying them have remained immutable. Furthermore, it is the
quality of adaptability to changing aesthetic conventions that
allow such symbolic corner-stones to be left unturned. The case of
the youth culture is chose here as a yardstick for examining the
double voice of such process - the global versus the tribal.
At the core of the author's concern stands the question of cultural
transmutation in an era riddled with media channels and
all-embracing messages. Fragments of the Israeli experience are
pieced together in this provocative essay to provide a
socio-anthropological agenda for some of the issues involved in the
manufacturing of items of symbolic solidarity and common national
imagery in an epoch of social disunification and cultural pastiche.
The author argues that even though the aesthetic forms of major
cultural idioms have unrecognizably altered and are accommodated to
befit the shape and style of post-modern living, the basic programs
underlying them have remained immutable. Furthermore, it is the
quality of adaptability to changing aesthetic conventions that
allow such symbolic corner-stones to be left unturned. The case of
the youth culture is chose here as a yardstick for examining the
double voice of such process - the global versus the tribal.
Most studies of ageing have been done by the non-aged. To
correct this imbalance, Hazan enlisted the resources of an unusual
and innovative group of elderly persons in Cambridge, England.
Gathering together in a structured curriculum of seminars and
discussion groups and calling themselves the University of the
Third Age, the elders intellectually reexamine the spectrum of
sociocultural and epistemological principles starting with basics.
Hazan's careful observation, description and transcription of the
words of the Third Agers demonstrates that cognition and discourse
go through transformations and permutations as individuals attain
the so-called wisdom years. Alone in the literature on ageing,
Hazan's contribution lights the way for much new thinking and
research on and among our older population.
Haim Hazan is a leading specialist on old age in anthropology, and
has published several books on particular communities of old
people. The latest book is an essay on the realities of old age, as
it is experienced, as opposed to the ideas about the old current in
western societies. It argues that the construction of this world by
outsiders is inevitably affected by deeply ingrained social
attitudes and structures, such as the spatial segregation of the
aged as a population, and the fear of death with which they are
associated. By approaching the subject from the social
constructionist perspective, and by drawing on a variety of
detailed ethnographic accounts, the author describes a unique and
nuanced social world. This is a sophisticated and original book,
which should have a significant impact on a field still dominated
by a 'social problems' approach.
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