[PDF] The Stains Of Culture eBook

Author : Ruth Tsoffar
Publisher : Wayne State University Press
Page : 264 pages
File Size : 39,26 MB
Release : 2006
Category : Health & Fitness
ISBN : 9780814332238

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A minority within Judaism, the Karaites are known as a 'reading community'-one that looks to the Bible as the authority in all areas of life, including intimate relations and hygiene. Here Ruth Tsoffar considers how Egyptian Kariates of the San Francisco Bay Area define themselves, within both California culture and Judaism, in terms of the Bible and its bearing on their bodies. Women's perspectives play a large role in this ethnography; it is their bodies that are especially regulated by rules of cleanliness and purity to the point where their biological cycles-menstruation, procreation, childbirth, lactation-determine their place in the community. As Tsoffar notes, the female body itself becomes a richly encoded text that reveals much about the Karaites' attitudes toward the interrelated issues of gender, sex, food, procreation, sacred traditions, time and space, as well as identity. The author illuminates the cultural strategies used by Karaite women to sustain their religious ideologies yet find personally meaningful ways of reading. The Karaites have survived since at least the 8th century by continually contemporizing their culture. Through a study of the rich, animated ritual experience of niddah (menstruation and purity codes in Leviticus), we see how the Karaite women seek to imagine and narrate a new history of purity through their bodies. The Stains of Culture presents issues of meaning and interpretation in a way valuable to students of women's studies, anthropology, minority cultural production, scholars of religion and Judaism, especially to those interested in exploring Judaism's diversity.

Author : Brackette F. Williams
Publisher : Duke University Press
Page : 350 pages
File Size : 48,10 MB
Release : 1991-04-12
Category : History
ISBN : 9780822311195

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Burdened with a heritage of both Spanish and British colonization and imperialism, Guyana is today caught between its colonial past, its efforts to achieve the consciousness of nationhood, and the need of its diverse subgroups to maintain their own identity. Stains on My Name, War in My Veins chronicles the complex struggles of the citizens of Guyana to form a unified national culture against the pulls of ethnic, religious, and class identities. Drawing on oral histories and a close study of daily life in rural Guyana, Brackette E. Williams examines how and why individuals and groups in their quest for recognition as a “nation” reproduce ethnic chauvinism, racial stereotyping, and religious bigotry. By placing her ethnographic study in a broader historical context, the author develops a theoretical understanding of the relations among various dimensions of personal identity in the process of nation building.

Author : Fred Astren
Publisher : Univ of South Carolina Press
Page : 370 pages
File Size : 42,89 MB
Release : 2004
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9781570035180

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Notions of history and the past contained in literature of the Karaite Jewish sect offer in­sight into the relationship of Karaism to mainstream rabbinic Judaism and to Islam and Christianity. Karaite Juda­ism and Histori­cal Understanding describes how a minority sectarian religious community constructs and uses historical ideology. It investigates the proportioning of historical ideology to law and doctrine and the influence of historical setting on religious writings about the past. Fred Astren discusses modes of repre­senting the past, especially in Jewish culture, and then poses questions about the past in sectarian--particularly Judaic sectarian--contexts. He contrasts early Karaite scriptur­alism with the litera­ture of rabbinic Judaism, which, embodying histori­cal views that carry a moralistic burden, draws upon the chain of tradition to suppose a generation-to-genera­tion trans­mission of divine knowl­edge and authority. The center of Karaism shifted to the Byzantine-Turkish world during the twelfth through sixteenth centuries, when a new historical outlook unoblivious of the past accommodated legal developments in­fluenced by rabbinic thought. Reconstructing Karaite historical expression from both published works and previously unexamined manuscripts, Astren shows that Karaites relied on rabbinic litera­ture to extract and compile his­torical data for their own readings of Jewish history. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Karaite scholars in Poland and Lithuania collated and harmonized historical materials inherited from their Middle Eastern predecessors. Astren portrays the way that Karaites, with some influence from Jewish Re­naissance historiography and impelled by features of Protestant-Catholic discourse, prepared complete literary historical works that maintained their Jewishness while offering a Karaite reading of Jewish history.

Author : N. Quinn
Publisher : Springer
Page : 286 pages
File Size : 33,76 MB
Release : 2016-09-23
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1137058714

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This edited collection presents a range of heretofore unpublished, unavailable methods for the systematic reconstruction of culture from interviews and other discourse. Authors set the design and evolution of their methods in the context of their own research projects, and draw general lessons about investigating culture through discourse. These methods have largely grown out of the work of the cultural models school, and represent the approaches of some of the very best methodologists in cultural anthropology today. An impetus for the volume has been inquiries from researchers, many of them graduate students, about how to conduct the kind of research that cultural models theorists do. This is not a linguistics book; unlike approaches to discourse analysis from linguistics, this volume focuses on culture, treating discourse as a medium especially rich in clues for cultural analysis, and hence a window into culture.

Author : Assaf Shelleg
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
Page : 481 pages
File Size : 35,51 MB
Release : 2020
Category : Music
ISBN : 0197504647

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"Theological Stains traces the growth of art music in Israel from the mid twentieth century to the turn of the twenty-first. In a riveting and provocative account, Assaf Shelleg explores the theological grammar of Zionism and its impact on the art music written by emigrant and native composers grappling with biblical redemptive promises and diasporic patrimonies. Unveiling the network that bred territorial nationalism and Hebrew culture, Shelleg shows how this mechanism infiltrated composers' work as much as it triggered less desirable responses from composers who sought to realize to the non-territorial Diasporic options Zionism has renounced. In the process compositional aesthetics gets stained by the state's nationalization of the theological, by diasporism that refuses redemption, and by Jewish musical traditions that permeated inaudibly to compositions written throughout the second half of the twentieth century. Accompanying this rich and dramatic story are equivalent developments in modern Hebrew literature and poetry alongside vast and previously unstudied archival sources. The book is also lavishly illuminated with 135 music examples that render it an incisive guide to fundamental chapters in modern and late modern art music"--

Author : R. Lee Lyman
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
Page : 278 pages
File Size : 21,46 MB
Release : 2007-07-27
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 0585304521

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This volume presents an insightful critical analysis of the culture history approach to Americanist anthropology. Reasons for the acceptance and incorporation of important concepts, as well as the paradigm's strengths and weaknesses, are discussed in detail. The framework for this analysis is founded on the contrast between two metaphysics used by evolutionary biologists in discussing their own discipline: materialistic/populational thinking and essentialistic/typological thinking. Employing this framework, the authors show not only why the culture history paradigm lost favor in the 1960s, but also which of its aspects need to be retained if archaeology is ever to produce a viable theory of culture change.