Religious intoleranceand conflict Books

Book SynopsisShows that German anti-Semitism did not originate with racist ideology or religious animosity, as is often supposed. The author demonstrates that it was rooted in a more basic emotion: material envy.

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Book SynopsisIn an era of increasing interaction between the United States and the countries of the Middle East, it has become ever more important for Americans to understand the social forces that shape Middle Eastern cultures. Based on years of his own field research and the ethnographic reports of other scholars, anthropologist Philip Carl Salzman presents an incisive analysis of Middle Eastern culture that goes a long way toward explaining the gulf between Western and Middle Eastern cultural perspectives. Salzman focuses on two basic principles of tribal organization that have become central principles of Middle Eastern life—balanced opposition (each group of whatever size and scope is opposed by a group of equal size and scope) and affiliation solidarity (always support those closer against those more distant). On the positive side, these pervasive structural principles support a decentralized social and political system based upon individual independence, autonomy, liberty, equality, and responsibility. But on the negative side, Salzman notes a pattern of contingent partisan loyalties, which results in an inbred orientation favoring particularism: an attitude of my tribe against the other tribe, my ethnic group against the different ethnic group, my religious community against another religious community. For each affiliation, there is always an enemy. Salzman argues that the particularism of Middle Eastern culture precludes universalism, rule of law, and constitutionalism, which all involve the measuring of actions against general criteria, irrespective of the affiliation of the particular actors. The result of this relentless partisan framework of thought has been the apparently unending conflict, both internal and external, that characterizes the modern Middle East.Trade Review"While tribalism is in one sense culturally pervasive in the Middle East, tribal practices are less swathed in sacredness than explicitly Koranic symbols and commandments--and are therefore more susceptible to criticism and debate. Even jihad and suicide bombing can be interpreted through a tribal lens. We've taught ourselves a good deal about Islam over the past seven years. Yet tribalism is at least half the cultural battle in the Middle East, and the West knows little about it. Learning how to understand and critique the Islamic Near East through a tribal lens will open up a new and smarter strategy for change. The way to begin is by picking up Salzman's Culture and Conflict in the Middle East." -- Stanley Kurtz, Weekly Standard, 14th April 2008. "Salzman has made an important contribution that is must reading." --Jewish Voice and Opinion, Englewood, NJ, September 2008Table of ContentsIntroduction; Making a Living in the Middle East: Life in the Valleys, Deserts, and Mountains; Friends and Enemies: Security and Defence in the Middle East; Defence and Offence: Honour and Rank in the Middle East; Turning Toward the World: Tribal Organisation and Predatory Expansion; Tribe and State: The Dynamics of Incompatibility; Root Causes: The Middle East Today and Tomorrow; References; Index.

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Book SynopsisThis meticulously researched book uses previously secret official documents to explore the tangled web of relationships between the top echelons of the British establishment, incl Cabinet ministers, senior civil servants, police/military officers and intelligence services with loyalist paramilitaries of the UDA & UVF throughout the 1970s and early 1980s. Covert British Army units, mass sectarian screening, propaganda ‘dirty tricks,’ arming sectarian killers and a point-blank refusal over the worst two decades of the conflict, to outlaw the largest loyalist killer gang in Northern Ireland. It shows how tactics such as curfew and internment were imposed on the nationalist population in Northern Ireland and how London misled the European Commission over internment’s one-sided nature. It focuses particularly on the British Government’s refusal to proscribe the UDA for two decades – probably the most serious abdication of the rule of law in the entire conflict. Previously classified documents show a clear pattern of official denial, at the highest levels of government, of the extent and impact of the loyalist assassination campaign.

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Book SynopsisBased on ethnographic research conducted in a town on the Polish-Belarussian border, this book examines borders and the lingering echoes of conflict. Using hauntology as a guiding framework to understand how people live amidst the histories and reverberations of conflicts, the author investigates the role that landscape, with its material presences and absences, plays in evoking and maintaining the border. The ethnography probes themes of ethnicity, religious practice, memory and space, investigating the border as a dynamic social process. By immersing herself in the everyday lives of the borderland, Joyce unravels how traces – lingering imprints of the past – shape local relationships in the present, influencing shared understandings of history and the future. Introducing the concept of the spectral border as a lens to reveal the ambiguous presence of afterlives and memories tied to a historical boundary, the book unveils its present-day ghostly forms in the local ideas and practices of neighbourliness at the heart of borderland identity. Spectral Borders interrogates the use and limitations of these practices by exploring points of tension, where the meanings and uses of ‘being a neighbour’ and ‘being from the borderland’ are tested and challenged. In doing so, the book raises important questions about how conviviality is created and managed in a place with a long and unresolved history marked by ethnic and religious violence, war, and civil unrest.Trade ReviewJoyce has written a layered and nuanced ethnography of a formerly little-known Polish borderland. While tragic events have recently brought the region to world attention, she shows that the Polish–Belarus border has long been politicized, as it has shifted between different nations. The book focuses on the hauntings that underlie much of the social, religious and cultural life of the region: the spectres of religious conflicts played out in contested spaces by Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox institutions and actors, and ofa large Jewish community now all but disappeared. Joyce explores the complex relations local people have with the forest, a place full of secret histories as well as environmentalminitiatives, tourist trails, local foragers and more clandestine economic practices. The border follows the River Bug, also a site where traces of past conflicts lurk below the surface, easily evoked by present occurrences. This beautifully written book, moving easily between anthropology and history, in a dialogue between vivid ethnography and sophisticated theory, deserves to be read by anyone interested in the region, or in memory, place and landscape, and the complex social worlds that encompass and make them.Frances Pine, Emerita Reader in Anthropology, Goldsmiths, University of London; This monograph is a fascinating read, offering a fresh and original perspective on the complex cultural landscape of the Polish-Belarusian borderland. The concept of spectral borders is presented with particular ethnographic sensitivity and offers an engaging and elegant literary narrative.Justyna Straczuk, Associate Professor, Polish Academy of Sciences.Table of ContentsIntroduction – Around the kitchen table: neighbours and spectres; Chapter 1 – The House of Culture: working with fragments, traces and absences; Chapter 2 – The Bug Cycle Path: the border as a tourist destination; Chapter 3 – Boundary markers: spectral borders in eastern Poland; Chapter 4 – The Church of the Holy Spirit: contested churches and religious borders; Chapter 5 – The iron gate: ruins, absence and uncanny façades; Chapter 6 – The basilica: pilgrimage, presence and co-presence; Conclusion – construction sites; References; Index.

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