An Ideological Death

An Ideological Death: Suicide in Israeli Literature explores literary challenges to Israel’s national narratives. Many prominent Israeli writers use their fiction to confront the centrality of the army, the mythology of the “new Jew,” the positioning of Tel Aviv as the first Israeli city, and the very process by which a nation’s history is constructed. Yehudit Katzir, Etgar Keret, Amos Oz, Yaakov Shabtai, Benjamin Tammuz, and A. B. Yehoshua are among the writers who engage with depictions of suicide in a critical and rhetorical process that reconsiders myths at the heart of the Zionist project. In Israeli literature, suicide is linked to a society’s compulsion to create impossible ideals that leave its populace disappointed and deluded. Yet, as Rachel S. Harris shows, even at their harshest these writers also acknowledge the idealism that helped build Israel as a modern nation-state.

One of the world's leading specialists in Indo-European religion and society, Bruce Lincoln expresses in these essays his severe doubts about the existence of a much-hypothesized prototypical Indo-European religion. Written over fifteen years, the essays—six of them previously unpublished—fall into three parts. Part I deals with matters "Indo-European" in a relatively unproblematized way, exploring a set of haunting images that recur in descriptions of the Otherworld from many cultures. While Lincoln later rejects this methodology, these chapters remain the best available source of data for the topics they address. In Part II, Lincoln takes the data for each essay from a single culture area and shifts from the topic of dying to that of killing. Of particular interest are the chapters connecting sacrifice to physiology, a master discourse of antiquity that brought the cosmos, the human body, and human society into an ideologically charged correlation. Part III presents Lincoln's most controversial case against a hypothetical Indo-European protoculture. Reconsidering the work of the prominent Indo-Europeanist Georges Dumézil, Lincoln argues that Dumézil's writings were informed and inflected by covert political concerns characteristic of French fascism. This collection is an invaluable resource for students of myth, ritual, ancient societies, anthropology, and the history of religions. Bruce Lincoln is professor of humanities and religious studies at the University of Minnesota.

Based on a study of more than 200 burials at the US site of La Ciudad (725 AD to 1100 AD), this is an exploration of the meaning of burials as statements on the nature of power relations and social structure. Focusing on the inequalities between the distribution of grave goods and other aspects of material culture, the author argues against trying

Tracing the culture of racism and anti-Semitism among powerful elites and ordinary Germans, Mr.

This book combines archaeological and textual evidence to outline the process of mourning, burying, and venerating dead elites in Early Dynastic Mesopotamia. It argues that these ritual acts constituted a locus of ideological production and empowerment for early rulers.

Exploring gender, race, nation and narration, this groundbreaking study isolates how mainstream cinema works to bestow value upon certain lives and specific socio-cultural identities in a hierarchical and partisan way. Dedicated to the popular, to the pol

The U.S. hospital embodies society’s hope for itself—a technological bastion standing between us and death. What does the gold standard of rescue, as ideology and industry, mean for the dying patient in the hospital and for the status of dying in American culture? This book shows how dying is a management problem for hospitals, occupying space but few billable encounters and of little interest to medical practice or quality control. An anthropologist and bioethicist with two decades of professional nursing experience, Helen Chapple goes beyond current work on hospital care to present fine-grained accounts of the clinicians, patients, and families who navigate this uncharted, untidy, and unpredictable territory between the highly choreographed project of rescue and the clinical culmination of death. This book and its important social and policy implications make key contributions to the social science of medicine, nursing, hospital administration, and health care delivery fields.

Our conventional view of history and human progress is wrong. It is founded on a pernicious myth of an acheivable utopia that in the last century alone caused the murder of tens of millions. In Black Mass John Gray tears down the religious, political and secular beliefs that we insist are fundamental to the human project and shows us how a misplaced faith in our ability to improve the world has actually made it far worse.

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Center-right conservative author J. R. Dunn offers a cogent analysis of how liberalism has not only failed as an ideology but has proven fatal to citizens and societies around the world. Dunn’s piercing analysis of the Obama administration’s perilous public policy agenda is a provocative, must-read rallying cry for Tea Party adherents, fans of Ann Coulter and Jonah Goldberg, or anyone concerned about the left’s deadly impact on the future.

Death is the opposite not of life, but of power. And as such, Mohammed Bamyeh argues in this original work, death has had a great and largely unexplored impact on the thinking of governance throughout history, right down to our day. In Of Death and Dominion Bamyeh pursues the idea that a deep concern with death is, in fact, the basis of the ideological foundations of all political systems. Concentrating on four types of political systems—polis, empire, theocracy, and modern mass society systems—Bamyeh shows how each follows a specific strategy designed to pit power against the equalizing specter of death. Each of these strategies—consolation, expansion, preparation, and repression—produces a certain style of political behavior, as well as particular psychic traumas. In making his argument, Bamyeh revisits a wide range of empirical and theoretical discussions in existentialist philosophy, psychoanalysis, comparative historical sociology, literary studies, and anthropology. By demonstrating how schemes of power are by definition also schemes for defying death—despite their claims to the contrary—his book encourages us to think of a new style of politics, one oriented toward life.

At the beginning of Mesopotamia s Early Dynastic period, the political landscape was dominated by temple administrators, but by the end of the period, rulers whose titles we translate as king assumed control. This book argues that the ritual process of mourning, burying, and venerating dead elites contributed to this change. Part one introduces the rationale for seeing rituals as a means of giving material form to ideology and, hence, structuring overall power relations. Part two presents archaeological and textual evidence for the death rituals. Part three interprets symbolic objects found in the Royal Cemetery of Ur, showing they reflect ideological doctrines promoting the office of kingship. This book will be particularly useful for scholars of Mesopotamian archaeology and history.

Winner of the 2015 Kraszna-Krausz Best Moving Image Book Award. Examines the representation of death and dying in mainstream cinema. Death and the Moving Image reveals the ambivalent place of death in twentieth and twenty-first century culture: the ongoing split between its over- and under-statement, between its cold, bodily, realities and its fantastical, transcendental and, most importantly, strategic depictions. Our screens are steeped in death's dramatics: in spectacles of glorious sacrifice or bloody retribution, in the ecstasy of agony, but always in the promise of redemption. This book is about the staging of these dramatics in mainstream Western film and the discrepancies that fuel them and are, by return, fuelled by them. Exploring the impact of gender, race, nation or narration upon them, this groundbreaking study isolates how mainstream cinema works to bestow value upon certain lives, and specific socio-cultural identities, in a hierarchical and partisan way. Key Features. Examines the formal, psychological and political exchange between cinema and death Accessible 'before, during, after' structure: of death's presence as narrative promise, physical event and spectatorial reaction. Considers how filmmaking practice or visual medium affect the representation of death and its cultural significance

Murder Stories takes on the difficult question of American retention of capital punishment by investigating the elusive role of ideology in the law. As such it is a prime example of contemporary scholarship on the death penalty and law & society.