Full Description
Cognitive Perspectives on Israelite Identity breaks new ground in the study of ethnic identity in the ancient world through the articulation of an explicitly cognitive perspective. In presenting a view of ethnicity as an epistemological rather than an ontological entity, this work seeks to correct the pronounced tendency towards 'analytical groupism' in the academic literature. Challenging what Pierre Bourdieu has called 'our primary inclination to think the world in a substantialist manner,' this study seeks to break with the vernacular categories and 'commonsense primordialisms' encoded within the Biblical texts, whilst at the same time accounting for their tenacious hold on our social and political imagination. It is the recognition of the performative and reifying potential of these categories of ethno-political practice that disqualifies their appropriation as categories of social analysis.
Contents
Acknowledgement
Abbreviations
Introduction
Chapter One
The Rise of the Concept of Race
Social Evolution and Race
Human Evolution and the Concept of Culture(s)
Chapter Two
Archaeology and Evolution
Archaeology and the Question of National Identity: Gustav Kossinna
Archaeology and Culture: V. Gordon Childe
Archaeology and the Identity of Israel
Chapter Three
The Emergence of 'Ethnicity'
Primordialism and Instrumentalism in the Study of Ethnicity
Chapter Four
Cognitive Perspectives on Ethnicity and Identity
Ethnicity as Cognition: Pierre Bourdieu
Chapter Five
The Loss of Innocence
New Archaeology and the Ethnic Interpretation of Style
Style as Active Comunication
The Archaeology of Practice
Chapter Six
Biblical Archaeology and La Longue Durée
Archaeology and Israelite Identity
Israel in the Merneptah Stele
'Israel' as an Essentialist Category of Social Cognition
Chapter Seven
Israelite Ethnicity and Biblical Archaeology
Ethnic Sentiments in the Hebrew Bible
The Hebrew Bible and the 'Creation' of Israelite Identity
Chapter Eight
Ideology, Doxa, and the Boundaries of Israelite Identity
Common Sense as Social Power
Conclusion
Bibliography
