Download or read book Kings of Disaster written by Simon Simonse and published by MSU Press. This book was released on 2018-05-01 with total page 642 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The long-awaited, revised, and illustrated edition of Simon Simonse’s study of the Rainmakers of the Nilotic Sudan marks a breakthrough in anthropological thinking on African political systems. Taking his inspiration from René Girard’s theory of consensual scapegoating, the author shows that the longstanding distinction of states and stateless societies as two fundamentally different political types does not hold. Centralized and segmentary systems only differ in the relative emphasis put on the victimary role of the king as compared with that of enemy. Kings of Disaster proposes an elegant and powerful solution to the vexed problem of regicide.
Download or read book Scapegoat written by Charlie Campbell and published by ABRAMS. This book was released on 2012-02-02 with total page 109 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A “brief and vital account” of humanity’s long history of playing the blame game, from Adam and Eve to modern politics—“a relevant and timely subject” (The Daily Telegraph). We may have come a long way from the days when a goat was symbolically saddled with all the iniquities of the children of Israel and driven into the wilderness, but has our desperate need to absolve ourselves by pinning the blame on someone else really changed all that much? Charlie Campbell highlights the plight of all those others who have found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time, illustrating how God needs the Devil as Sherlock Holmes needs Professor Moriarty or James Bond needs “Goldfinger.” Scapegoat is a tale of human foolishness that exposes the anger and irrationality of blame-mongering while reminding readers of their own capacity for it. From medieval witch burning to reality TV, this is a brilliantly relevant and timely social history that looks at the obsession, mania, persecution, and injustice of scapegoating. “A wry, entertaining study of the history of blame . . . Trenchantly sardonic.” —Kirkus Reviews
Download or read book Kings of Disaster written by Simon Simonse and published by African Books Collective. This book was released on 2017-09-26 with total page 557 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the long awaited, revised and illustrated edition of Kings of Disaster, the study of the Rainmakers of the Nilotic Sudan that is in many ways a breakthrough in anthropological thinking on African political systems. Taking his inspiration from René Girard’s theory of consensual scapegoating, the author shows that the longstanding distinction of states and stateless societies as two fundamentally different political types does not hold. Centralized and segmentary systems only differ in the relative emphasis put on the victim role of the king as compared with that of enemy. Kings of Disaster thus proposes an uninvolved solution to the vexed problem of regicide.
Download or read book Portrait of the Kings written by Alison L. Joseph and published by Fortress Press. This book was released on 2015-03-01 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Much of the scholarship on the book of Kings has focused on questions of the historicity of the events described. Alison L. Joseph turns her attention instead to the literary characterization of Israel’s kings. By examining the narrative techniques used in the Deuteronomistic History to portray Israel’s kings, Joseph shows that the Deuteronomist in the days of the Josianic Reform constructed David as a model of adherence to the covenant, and Jeroboam, conversely, as the ideal opposite of David. The redactor further characterized other kings along one or the other of these two models. The resulting narrative functions didactically, as if instructing kings and the people of Judah regarding the consequences of disobedience. Attention to characterization through prototype also allows Joseph to identify differences between pre-exilic and exilic redactions in the Deuteronomistic History, bolstering and also revising the view advanced by Frank Moore Cross. The result is a deepened understanding of the worldview and theology of the Deuteronomistic historians.
Download or read book The Scapegoat written by Sara Davis and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2021-03-02 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The Scapegoat is a novel of disquiet and disturbance, with an atmosphere of perfect dread. Think Patricia Highsmith or Jim Thompson, that blend of menace and brilliance. Sara Davis had me shivering. This is the debut novel of a marvelous new talent." —Victor LaValle, author of The Changeling N is employed at a prestigious California university, where he has distinguished himself as an aloof and somewhat eccentric presence. His meticulous, ordered life is violently disrupted by the death of his estranged father—unanticipated and, as it increasingly seems to N, surrounded by murky circumstances. His investigation leads him to a hotel built over a former Spanish mission, a site with a dark power and secrets all its own. On campus, a chance meeting with a young doctor provokes uncomfortable feelings on the direction of his life, and N begins to have vivid, almost hallucinatory daydreams about the year he spent in Ottawa, and a shameful episode from his past. Meanwhile, a shadowy group of fringe academics surfaces in relation to his father’s death. Their preoccupation with a grim chapter in California’s history runs like a surreal parallel to the staid world of academic life, where N’s relations with his colleagues grow more and more hostile. As he comes closer to the heart of the mystery, his ability to distinguish between delusion and reality begins to erode, and he is forced to confront disturbing truths about himself: his irrational antagonism toward a young female graduate student, certain libidinal impulses, and a capacity for violence. Is he the author of his own investigation? Or is he the unwitting puppet of a larger conspiracy? With this inventive, devilish debut, saturated with unexpected wit and romanticism, Sara Davis probes the borders between reality and delusion, intimacy and solitude, revenge and justice. The Scapegoat exposes the surreal lingering behind the mundane, the forgotten history underfoot, and the insanity just around the corner.
Download or read book The Crooked Kings of Ancient Greece written by Daniel Ogden and published by Bristol Classical Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By comparing traditional narratives concerning archaic colonists and tyrants, Ogden shows that monarchic rulers in archaic Greece were often paradoxically conceptualized as deformed scapegoats. He also considers a range of related themes, including the myth of Oedipus, and the fables of Aesop.
Download or read book King Manasseh and Child Sacrifice written by Francesca Stavrakopoulou and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2012-10-24 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Hebrew Bible portrays King Manasseh and child sacrifice as the most reprehensible person and the most objectionable practice within the story of 'Israel'. This monograph suggests that historically, neither were as deviant as the Hebrew Bible appears to insist. Through careful historical reconstruction, it is argued that Manasseh was one of Judah's most successful monarchs, and child sacrifice played a central role in ancient Judahite religious practice. The biblical writers, motivated by ideological concerns, have thus deliberately distorted the truth about Manasseh and child sacrifice.
Download or read book Characters and Characterization in the Book of Kings written by Keith Bodner and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-12-12 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is an examination of characters in the books of Kings; showing how understanding and interpretation of key characters affects readings of the story. The volume begins with more general pieces addressing how the study of characters can shed light on the composition history of Kings and on how characters and characterization can be considered with respect to ethics, particularly with respect to the moral complexity of biblical characters. Contributors then consider key characters within the Kings narrative in depth, such as Nathan, Bathsheba, Solomon and Jezebel. The contributors use their own specific expertise to analyze these characters and more, drawing on insights from literary theory and considering such approaches as questioning our view of a particular character with based on the character within the text with whom we identify. Contributors also assess whether or not characters as portrayed in the biblical text necessarily match up to their possible counterparts in history.
Download or read book The Cheerful Scapegoat written by Wayne Koestenbaum and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2021-03-23 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wayne Koestenbaum's first book of short fiction: a collection of whimsical, surreal, baroque, ribald, and heartbreaking fables. In his first book of short fiction--a collection of whimsical, surreal, baroque, ribald, and heartbreaking fables--Wayne Koestenbaum takes the gloom and melancholy of our own terrifying political moment and finds subversive solace by overturning the customary protocols of tale-telling. Characters and narrators wander into strange locales; the difference between action and thinking, between reality and dream, grows moot in a heightened yet burlesque manner. The activities in The Cheerful Scapegoat are a cross between a comedy of manners and a Sadean orgy. Language has its own desires: figures of speech carry an erotic charge that straddles the line between slapstick and vertigo. Punishment hangs over every dialogue--but in the fable-world of The Cheerful Scapegoat, abjection comes with an undertaste of contentment. The tchotchkes of queer culture--codes and signifiers--get scrambled together in these stories and then blown up into an improbable soufflé. Koestenbaum's fables travel in circles, slipping away from their original point and leading the reader to a paradisiacal suspension of fixed categories. Intensified sentences and curlicue narratives scheme together mesmerically to convince the reader to abandon old ways of thinking and to take on a commitment to the polymorphous, the wandering, the tangential. Koestenbaum's fables--emergency bulletins uttered in a perverse vernacular of syntactic pirouettes--alert us to the necessity of pushing language into new contortions of exactitude and ecstatic excess.
Download or read book The Character of Kingship written by Declan Quigley and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-05-31 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why has monarchy been such a prevalent institution throughout history and in such a diverse range of societies? Kingship is at the heart of both ritual and politics and has major implications for the theory of social and cultural anthropology. Yet, despite the contemporary fascination with royalty, anthropologists have sorely neglected the subject in recent decades. This book combines a strong theoretical argument with a wealth of ethnography from kingships in Africa, Asia and the Pacific. Quigley gives a timely and much-needed overview of the anthropology of kingship and a crucial reassessment of the contributions of Frazer and Hocart to debates about the nature and function of royal ritual. From diverse fieldwork sites, a number of eminent anthropologists demonstrate how ritual and power intertwine to produce a series of variations around myth, tragedy and historical realities. However, underneath this diversity, two common themes invariably emerge: the attempt to portray kingship as timeless and perfect, and the dual nature of the king as sacred being and scapegoat.
Download or read book The Plot to Scapegoat Russia written by Dan Kovalik and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-06-06 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An in-depth look at the decades-long effort to escalate hostilities with Russia and what it portends for the future. Since 1945, the US has justified numerous wars, interventions, and military build-ups based on the pretext of the Russian Red Menace, even after the Soviet Union collapsed at the end of 1991 and Russia stopped being Red. In fact, the two biggest post-war American conflicts, the Korean and Vietnam wars, were not, as has been frequently claimed, about stopping Soviet aggression or even influence, but about maintaining old colonial relationships. Similarly, many lesser interventions and conflicts, such as those in Latin America, were also based upon an alleged Soviet threat, which was greatly overblown or nonexistent. And now the specter of a Russian Menace has been raised again in the wake of Donald Trump’s election. The Plot to Scapegoat Russia examines the recent proliferation of stories, usually sourced from American state actors, blaming and manipulating the threat of Russia, and the long history of which this episode is but the latest chapter. It will show readers two key things: (1) the ways in which the United States has needlessly provoked Russia, especially after the collapse of the USSR, thereby squandering hopes for peace and cooperation; and (2) how Americans have lost out from this missed opportunity, and from decades of conflicts based upon false premises. These revelations, amongst other, make The Plot to Scapegoat Russia one of the timeliest reads of 2017.
Download or read book The Book of Kings and Exilic Identity written by Nathan Lovell and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-02-11 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nathan Lovell proposes that 1 and 2 Kings might be read as a work of written history, produced with the explicit purpose of shaping the communal identity of its first readers in the Babylonian exile. By drawing on sociological approaches to the role historiography plays in the construction of political identity, Lovell argues the book of Kings is intended to reconstruct a sense of Israelite identity in the context of these losses, and that the book of Kings moves beyond providing a reason for the exile in Israel's history, and beyond even connecting its exilic audience to that history. The book recalls the past in order to demonstrate what it means to be Israel in the (exilic) present, and to encourage hope for the Israelite nation in the future. After developing a reading strategy for 1–2 Kings that treats the book as a coherent narrative, Lovell examines the construction of Israelite identity within Kings under the headings of covenant, nationhood, land, and rule. In each case he suggests that the narrative of the book creates room for a genuine but temporary expression of Israelite identity in exile: genuine to show that it remains possible for Israel to be Yahweh's people during the exile, but temporary to encourage hope for a future restoration.
Download or read book The Oedipus Casebook written by Mark R. Anspach and published by MSU Press. This book was released on 2020-02-01 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Who killed Laius? Most readers assume Oedipus did. At the play’s end, he stands convicted of murdering his father, marrying his mother, and triggering a deadly plague. With selections from a stellar assortment of critics including Walter Burkert, Terry Eagleton, Michel Foucault, René Girard, and Jean-Pierre Vernant, this book reopens the Oedipus case and lets readers judge for themselves. The Greek word for tragedy means “goat song.” Is Oedipus the goat? Helene Peet Foley calls him “the kind of leader a democracy would both love and desire to ostracize.” The Oedipus Casebook readings weigh the evidence against Oedipus, place the play in the context of Greek scapegoat rites, and explore the origins of tragedy in the festival of Dionysus. This unique critical edition includes a new translation of the play by distinguished classics scholar Wm. Blake Tyrrell and the authoritative Greek text established by H. Lloyd-Jones and N. G. Wilson.
Download or read book Life Land and Elijah in the Book of Kings written by Daniel J. D. Stulac and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-12-10 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using a canonical-agrarian approach, Stulac demonstrates the rhetorical and theological contribution of the Elijah narratives to the Book of Kings.
Download or read book The Venture Alchemists written by Rob Lalka and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2024-05-14 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We once idolized tech entrepreneurs for creating innovations that seemed like modern miracles. Yet our faith has been shattered. We now blame them for spreading lies, breaking laws, and causing chaos. Yesterday’s Silicon Valley darlings have become today’s Big Tech villains. Which is it? Are they superheroes or scoundrels? Or is it more complicated, some blend of both? In The Venture Alchemists, Rob Lalka demystifies how tech entrepreneurs built empires that made trillions. Meta started as a cruel Halloween prank, Alphabet began as a master’s thesis that warned against corporate deception, and Palantir came from a campus controversy over hateful speech. These largely forgotten origin stories show how ordinary fears and youthful ambitions shaped their ventures—making each tech tale relatable, both wonderfully and tragically human. Readers learn about the adversities tech entrepreneurs overcame, the troubling tradeoffs they made, and the tremendous power they now wield. Using leaked documents and previously unpublished archival material, Lalka takes readers inside Big Tech’s worst exploitations and abuses, alongside many good intentions and moral compromises. But this story remains unfinished, and The Venture Alchemists ultimately offers hope from the people who, decades ago, warned about the risks of the emerging Internet. Their insights illuminate a path toward more responsible innovations, so that technologies aren’t dangerous weapons but valuable tools that ensure progress, improve society, and enhance our daily lives.
Download or read book I II Kings written by Marvin A. Sweeney and published by Presbyterian Publishing Corp. This book was released on 2012-12-21 with total page 510 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume offers a close reading of the historical books of I and II Kings, concentrating on not only issues in the history of Israel but also the literary techniques of storytelling used in these books.
Download or read book Rene Girard and Myth written by Richard Golsan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-06-11 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this comprehensive introduction to the work of contemporary French critic Rene Girard, Richard Golsan focuses on Girard's theory of myth and its connections to his broader exploration of the origins of suffering and violence in Western culture. Golsan highlights two of Girard's primary concepts--mimetic desire and the scapegoat--and employs the concepts to illustrate the ways Girardian analysis of violence in biblical, classical, and folk myths has influenced recent work in theology, psychology, literary studies, and anthropology. The book concludes with an interview between Golsan and Girard, who offers his own analysis of the appropriation (and criticism) of his work by a politically and intellectually diverse company of scholars.
