Publisher description

When Princeton anthropologist John Borneman arrived in Syria's second-largest city in 2004 as a visiting Fulbright professor, he took up residence in what many consider a "rogue state" on the frontline of a "clash of civilizations" between the Orient and the West. Hoping to understand intimate interactions of religious, political, and familial authority in this secular republic, Borneman spent much time among different men, observing and becoming part of their everyday lives. Syrian Episodes is the striking result. Recounting his experience of living and lecturing in Aleppo, Syria's second-largest city, John Borneman offers deft, first-person stories of the longings and discontents expressed by Syrian sons and fathers, as well as a prescient analysis of the precarious power held by the regime, its relation to domestic authority, and the conditions of its demise. Combining literary imagination and anthropological insight, the book's discrete narratives converge in an unforgettable portrait of contemporary culture in Aleppo. We read of romantic seductions, rumors of spying, the play of light in rooms, the bargaining of tourists in bazaars, and an attack of wild dogs. With unflinching honesty and frequent humor, Borneman describes his encounters with students and teachers, customers and merchants, and women and families, many of whom are as intrigued with the anthropologist as he is with them. Refusing to patronize those he meets or to minimize his differences with them, Borneman provokes his interlocutors, teasing out unexpected confidences, comic responses, and mutual misunderstandings. He engages the curiosity and desire of encounter and the possibility of ethical conduct that is willing to expose cultural differences. Combining literary imagination and anthropological insight, Syrian Episodes offers an unforgettable portrait of contemporary culture in Aleppo.

Uses writings of Mesopotamian Christians to challenge modern scholarly narratives of early Muslim conquests, rulers, and religious practices.

The first study to undertake a wide-ranging comparison of invocations of al-Andalus across the Arab and Hispanic worlds. Around the globe, concerns about interfaith relations have led to efforts to find earlier models in Muslim Iberia (al-Andalus). This book examines how Muslim Iberia operates as an icon or symbol of identity in twentieth and twenty-first century narrative, drama, television, and film from the Arab world, Spain, and Argentina. Christina Civantos demonstrates how cultural agents in the present ascribe importance to the past and how dominant accounts of this importance are contested. Civantos’s analysis reveals that, alongside established narratives that use al-Andalus to create exclusionary, imperial identities, there are alternate discourses about the legacy of al-Andalus that rewrite the traditional narratives. In the process, these discourses critique their imperial and gendered dimensions and pursue intercultural translation.

As Syria’s anti-authoritarian uprising and subsequent civil war have left the country in ruins, the need for understanding the nation’s complex political and cultural realities remains urgent. The second of a two-volume series, Syria from Reform to Revolt: Culture, Society, and Religion draws together closely observed, critical and historicized analyses, giving vital insights into Syrian society today. With a broad range of disciplinary perspectives, contributors reveal how Bashar al-Asad’s pivotal first decade of rule engendered changes in power relations and public discourse—dynamics that would feed the 2011 protest movement and civil war. Essays focus on key arenas of Syrian social life, including television drama, political fiction, Islamic foundations, and Christian choirs and charities, demonstrating the ways in which Syrians worked with and through the state in attempts to reform, undermine, or sidestep the regime. The contributors explore the paradoxical cultural politics of hope, anticipation, and betrayal that have animated life in Syria under Asad, revealing the fractures that obstruct peaceful transformation. Syria from Reform to Revolt provides a powerful assessment of the conditions that turned Syria’s hopeful Arab spring revolution into a catastrophic civil war that has cost over 200,000 lives and generated the worst humanitarian crisis of the twenty-first century.

The final volume of The Cambridge History of Arabic Literature explores the Arabic literary heritage of the little-known period from the twelfth to the beginning of the nineteenth century. Even though it was during this time that the famous Thousand and One Nights was composed, very little has been written on the literature of the period generally. In this volume Roger Allen and Donald Richards bring together some of the most distinguished scholars in the field to rectify the situation. The volume is divided into parts with the traditions of poetry and prose covered separately within both their 'elite' and 'popular' contexts. The last two sections are devoted to drama and the indigenous tradition of literary criticism. As the only work of its kind in English covering the post-classical period, this book promises to be a unique resource for students and scholars of Arabic literature for many years to come.

Popular Culture and Foreign Policy: The Case of Turkey and the Valley of the Wolves: Ambush analyzes Turkish Foreign Policy from an interdisciplinary perspective. It seeks to understand and discuss how foreign policy discourses can be reproduced by a popular television series and consequently produce consent for certain foreign policies.

Migration across Europe's external and internal borders has introduced unprecedented sociocultural diversity, and with it, new questions about belonging, identity, and the incorporation of others into extant and emergent groups and communities. Bringing together leading cultural anthropologists, Digesting Difference offers a series of ethnographic studies that show incorporation to be a process rooted in the everyday encounters and exchanges between strangers, friends, lovers, neighbors, parents, workers, and others. Rich in ethnographic detail and ambitious in its theorizing, the volume tells the stories of Europe’s transformative engagement with sociocultural difference in the wake of migration associated with EU expansion, the Eurozone meltdown, and the 2015-2016 refugee crisis. It promises to be essential reading for scholars and students of cultural anthropology, migration, integration, and European studies.

This book is simply the memoir of the Syrian Revolution in its six-year journey, all through the eyes of a Syrian poet who lived his youth in the capital city of Damascus. Beginning on the first Friday after the revolution started and every Friday thereafter, the Syrians made it a habit, taking to the streets to demonstrate against the regime. They also gave names to those Fridays to reflect the current events. The first one was the Friday of Dignity (3/18/11), then Friday of Glory (3/25/11), Friday of Martyrs (4/1/11), Friday of Withstanding (4/8/11), Friday of Insistence (4/15/11), and so on until today, which sums up to more than three hundred Fridays. The author started firing poems in support of the revolution and also to document its events week after week for the next six years. He managed to translate almost half of them to put in this book. Listing the poems in order takes the reader on a journey throughout the ups and downs of the revolution and helps him to understand what happened, when, and why. Since the author is antidictatorship and prodemocracy, his writings are not only full of fury and power, confidence, and hope, but also satire and wit, which characterize the people of that historic city.

This book serves to contribute to a further understanding of our globe, and offers a number of insights into the field of geology through its use of various examples. As it shows, the Syrian outcrops present a highly diverse field for geologists, with their sedimentary and volcano-magmatic rocks and their fluid inclusions. Syria is located at the meeting point of Eurasian, African, and Arabic plates, and, consequently, it is underlain by an active global structure, the Dead Sea Fault Zone (DSFZ), also known as the Levant fault, making this area of even further interest for the geologist.