Suchergebnisse

T.N. Madan made the study of comparative moral systems into an important mainstay of Indian sociology. In this essay, we will be using the idea of 'moral practice' to compare notions of effi cacy in psychotherapy and various forms of religious healing. We argue that the realm of 'the moral' in ethnographic analysis consists not of abstract rules or ideologies, but of whatever has overwhelm ing practical relevance in the lives of the people and communities we study. Both psychotherapy and religious healing systems define efficacy in terms of culture-specific understandings of personhood and moral order; these, however, are mediated by the irreducible contingencies of social position, political strategy, and life histories of both sufferers and healers, as well as by large scale economic and political forces. Healing efficacy emerges from this study as a shifting, multi-vocal, and sometimes unattainable value. By turning our attention from the language of moral concepts to that of moral stakes, therefore, we are attempting to accommodate a concern with the concrete experience of suffering and healing as they are embedded in lived worlds of human experience.

Distilling more than ten years of ethnographic research, Don Seeman depicts the rich culture of the group, as well as their social and cultural vulnerability, and addresses the problems that arise when immigration officials, religious leaders, or academic scholars try to determine the legitimacy of Jewish identity or Jewish religious experience.

Michael Brenner, In Search of Israel: The History of an Idea (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018), 392 pp. Hardback, $22.50.Keren Or Schlesinger, Gadi Algazi, and Yaron Ezrahi, eds., Israel/
Palestine: Scholarly Tributes to the Legacy of Baruch Kimmerling [in Hebrew]
(Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2017), 525 pp. Paperback, $39.00.Omer Zanany, From Managing Conflict to Managing a Political Settlement:
Israeli Security Doctrine and the Prospective Palestinian State [in Hebrew]
(Tel Aviv: Tami Steinmetz Center for Peace Research and Molad: The
Center for Democratic Renewal, 2018), 99 pp.David Ohana, Nationalizing Judaism: Zionism as a Theological Ideology
(New York: Lexington Books, 2017), 224 pp. eBook, $64.40.Arie Krampf, The Israeli Path to Neoliberalism: The State, Continuity and
Change (London: Routledge, 2018), 254 pp. Hardback, $145.00.
eBook, $54.95.

Historically, canonic studies of ritual have discussed and explained ritual organization, action, and transformation primarily as representations of broader cultural and social orders. In the present, as in the past, less attention is given to the power of ritual to organize and effect transformation through its own dynamics. Breaking with convention, the contributors to this volume were asked to discuss ritual first and foremost in relation to itself, in its own right, and only then in relation to its socio-cultural context. The results attest to the variable capacities of rites to effect transformation through themselves, and to the study of phenomena in their own right as a fertile approach to comprehending ritual dynamics

Israel is the only country in the world that offers free fertility treatments to nearly any woman who requires medical assistance. It also has the world's highest per capita usage of in-vitro fertilization. Examining state policies and the application of reproductive technologies among Jewish Israelis, this volume explores the role of tradition and politics in the construction of families within local Jewish populations. The contributors—anthropologists, bioethicists, jurists, physicians and biologists—highlight the complexities surrounding these treatments and show how biological relatedness is being construed as a technology of power; how genetics is woven into the production of identities; how reproductive technologies enhance the policing of boundaries. Donor insemination, IVF and surrogacy, as well as abortion, pre-implantation genetic diagnosis and human embryonic stem cell research, are explored within local and global contexts to convey an informed perspective on the wider Jewish Israeli environment