New Books Week continues today, this time with titles in Ancient Studies, Anthropology, and Religious Studies.
ANCIENT STUDIES
Tomb Treasures of the Late Middle Kingdom: The Archaeology of Female Burials
Wolfram Grajetzki
"A wonderful work. . . . Wolfram Grajetzki provides a fascinating glimpse of female burials and funerary culture of the late Middle Kingdom." —Danijela Stefanovi, University of Belgrade
With detailed illustrations and archival images, Egyptologist Wolfram Grajetzki describes and compares the opulent tombs of eminent and royal women from the late Middle Kingdom, shedding new light on how the gendered and social identities of these women were viewed in the court and preserved in the grave.
Full Description, Table of Contents, and More
288 pages | 6 x 9 | 106 illus.
Hardcover | ISBN 978-0-8122-4567-7 | $79.95s | £52.00
Ebook | ISBN 978-0-8122-0919-8 | $79.95s | £52.00
ANTHROPOLOGY
Daughters of Parvati: Women and Madness in Contemporary India
Sarah Pinto
"A poignant, compelling, complex, and provocative example of anthropological storytelling. Based on original and evidently difficult fieldwork focused on the treatment of women's mental illnesses in north India, the book offers a gendered reading of psychiatry. It is also very much an intimate and intensely reflexive ethnography." —Ann Grodzins Gold, Syracuse University
"An important book, making interventions in how we think about choreographies of clinical mental health work with families broken and repaired. Its ethnographic specificities have to do with India, but its accounts of medical, familial, and narrative crises are of broad theoretical import." —Michael M. J. Fischer, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
In this account of an anthropologist's journey into Indian psychiatry wards, among women with mental illnesses and the loved ones who care for them, Sarah Pinto responds to ethical crises in caregiving with attention to culture, gender, and the globalized worlds of Indian women.
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296 pages | 6 x 9 | 2 illus.
Hardcover | ISBN 978-0-8122-4583-7 | $59.95s | £39.00
Ebook | ISBN 978-0-8122-0928-0 | $59.95s | £39.00
A volume in the Contemporary Ethnography series
Conscientious Objectors in Israel: Citizenship, Sacrifice, Trials of Fealty
Erica Weiss
"Erica Weiss dramatically illuminates and revises our understanding of the tensions and fissures of liberalism, the Israeli state, and the notion of conscience, alongside the realities of militarism and of women's devaluation. This is an intellectually deep and ethnographically wide account of the privileges, perils, and impossibilities that claims of conscientious objection entail. Weiss describes paradoxes of military dissenters' dance with the state and presents a thoroughly historical view of conscience with which a wide range of scholars across the social sciences will now necessarily engage." —Catherine Lutz, author of Homefront: A Military City and the American Twentieth Century
"As a study of conscientious objection not just as a philosophical and ethical concept, but also as a political discourse fashioned by government committees, military review boards, documents, and social relationships, Conscientious Objectors in Israel is a nuanced and robust addition to the anthropology of ethics." —Juliana Ochs, author of Security and Suspicion: An Ethnography of Everyday Life in Israel
Conscientious Objectors in Israel chronicles the personal experiences of two generations of Jewish Israeli conscientious objectors as they grapple with their consciences under the pressure of justifying their actions to the Israeli state and society.
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216 pages | 6 x 9 | 4 illus.
Hardcover | ISBN 978-0-8122-4592-9 | $49.95s | £32.50
Ebook | ISBN 978-0-8122-0942-6 | $49.95s | £32.50
A volume in the Ethnography of Political Violence series
RELIGIOUS STUDIES
Apocalypse of the Alien God: Platonism and the Exile of Sethian Gnosticism
Dylan M. Burns
"An original contribution to scholarship on the nature of the four Platonizing Sethian treatises from Nag Hammadi, challenging the consensus concerning their relationship to the academic Greek philosophy of Middle Platonism and the Neoplatonism of Plotinus and his early successors. Clearly and compellingly written, Apocalypse of the Alien God is a must for scholars in the field of Gnosticism and later Greek philosophy." —John D. Turner, University of Nebraska, Lincoln
Apocalypse of the Alien God shows that the fundamental break between the Platonic tradition and Judeo-Christianity began when the mystic Plotinus rejected the teachings of the Sethians, an influential group of Gnostics who operated at the intersection of Hellenic, Jewish, and Christian thought.
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336 pages | 6 x 9 | 4 illus.
Hardcover | ISBN 978-0-8122-4579-0 | $69.95s | £45.50
Ebook | ISBN 978-0-8122-0922-8 | $69.95s | £45.50
A volume in the Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion series
NOW IN PAPERBACK:
Violence and Belief in Late Antiquity: Militant Devotion in Christianity and Islam
Thomas Sizgorich
"Thomas Sizgorich is . . . a scholar truly at home in both the late antique and early Islamic worlds who does a superlative job of illustrating the continuities between them." —American Historical Review
"In this bold and learned book, Thomas Sizgorich probes the ideological roots of violence in the Christian and Muslim communities of late antiquity." —Church History
"A work of erudition and eloquent argument, combined with an abiding ethical impulse underwriting its historical project. Sizgorich has done a great service by historicizing some elements of religious violence and uncovering its underlying logics with sophistication and care." —Catholic Historical Review
"Sizgorich brings the early history of Islamic martyrdom and the emergence of the concept of the shahid ('witness' or 'martyr') into a common framework of similar developments in late antique Christianity in the eastern Mediterranean and the Levant. In doing so, he shows that the two worlds were closely related in their development of apparently different kinds of aggressive, even violent behavior that were connected to ideas of ascetic self-control and the disciplining of the community." —Brent D. Shaw, Princeton University
"An original, impressive, fascinating, and very important book. Sizgorich makes a seminal contribution by offering an alternative to the tendency that treats Islam as completely 'other' from the world in which it took shape. He offers instead a vision of an Islam that is an organic part of the late antique cultural and religious world." —Nadia Maria El-Cheikh, American University of Beirut
Focusing on the shared vocabulary of images and ideas with which late ancient Christians and Muslims imagined the past, present, and future, this book seeks to understand why violent expressions of religious devotion became central to the self-understandings of Christian and Muslim communities between the fourth and ninth centuries.
Full Description, Table of Contents, and More
408 pages | 6 x 9
Hardcover | ISBN 978-0-8122-4113-6 | $55.00s | £36.00
Paperback | ISBN 978-0-8122-2305-7 | $29.95s | £19.50
Ebook | ISBN 978-0-8122-0744-6 | $29.95s | £19.50
A volume in the Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion series