Imperial Dreams Prefigured: America and its Middle Eastern Urge

Book reviewed:
McAlister, Melani. Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East.     

Things and the Slow Neolithic: the Middle Eastern Transformation

This paper argues that the search for an overarching explanation for the adoption of farming and settled life in the Middle East can be enhanced by a consideration of the dependencies between humans and human-made things from the Late Glacial Maximum onwards. Often not considered in discussions of the origins of agriculture is the long process of human tooth size reduction that started in the Upper Palaeolithic and can reasonably be related to the increased use of grinding stones that created softer and more nutrient-rich plant foods. A consideration of the use of groundstone tools through the Epipalaeolithic and into the Neolithic shows that they were entangled with hearths, ovens, houses and settlements, exchange relations and notions of ownership. The practicalities of processing plants drew humans into pathways that led to intensification, population increase, sedentism and domestication. Much the same can be said for other human-made things such as sickles, storage bins, domestic animal dung and refuse. The dialectical tensions between human-thing dependence and dependency generated the movement towards Neolithicization. Human-thing dependence (involving human dependence on things, thing dependence on humans and thing dependence on other things) afforded opportunities towards which humans (always already in a given state of entanglement) were drawn in order to solve problems. But this dependence also involved dependency, limitation and constraint, leading for example to increases in labour. In order to provide that labour or in other ways to deal with the demands of things and their entanglements with other humans and things, humans made further use of the affordances of things. There was thus a generative spiral leading to sedentism and domestication.     

Kuwait: Elections and Issues of Democratization in a Middle Eastern State

In 1992, elections were held in Kuwait to vote for the four-year assembly. The elections were essentially a compromise formula between two systems and political cultures in Kuwait: traditional hereditary rule and representative and modern forms. The successful conclusion of the election campaign, one of the most intensive in the history of Kuwait, may be the first step in the direction of much-needed political reform that may tilt the country more and more toward a true parliamentary system. The elections resulted in a victory for the opposition forces and their supporters, who together won thirty-five seats. For the first time in the history of Kuwait, government ministers can vote in parliament against a government-backed policy, should they feel the need to do so. Kuwait, as far as conditions allow today, is progressively shifting toward a parliamentary system. But, despite Kuwait's political steps forward, many questions and immense dangers still surround the democratic process.     

Six seasons of wild pea harvest in Israel: bearing on Near Eastern plant domestication

Harvest experiments of wild crop relatives are essential for our understanding of the biology of wild plants embodied in the economy of ancient forager communities. Most of the previous experimental harvest reports spanned a single season and therefore are unable to address questions concerning long-term yield potential. Herein we report on six consecutive harvest seasons taking place at four sites in Israel that harbour wild pea populations: three typical Pisum fulvum sites and one typical Pisum elatius site. Three out of the four sites showed no indication of a decline in grain yield as a result of repeated harvest and the removal of a considerable portion of mature seeds. Site-specific factors seem to have a strong influence on the grain yield as no seasonal yield similarity was observed between adjacent and ecologically similar sites harbouring the same wild pea taxon. The erratic year-to-year wild pea yield we observed calls for a reassessment of the presumed role of grain legume species in Near Eastern hunter–gatherers' diet. Combined with published data on cultivation of wild pea, our results are inconsistent with models suggesting protracted domestication of Near Eastern grain legumes or with the preliminary attempts to apply Niche Construction Theory to the study of plant domestication in the Near East.     

Private Body and Social Order: Problems of Sex among Pre-Modern Middle Eastern Jews

This article centres on a case that was brought to the Jewish court in Egypt around the middle of the seventeenth century. The protagonist was a man who was diagnosed with melancholy. The proposed cure, coitus, led the arbiter, Rabbi Mordechai Halevi, to discuss the ethical dilemma concerning its realisation, because the man's wife lived in Istanbul. The article contains two inter-related parts. The first analyses the legal case as a meeting of complementary interests. The second discusses the aetiology and the prevalence of two parallel diseases that were mentioned in the case: sperm-retention melancholy and suffocation of the womb. The article examines the social functions of these diseases, against the background of cultural perceptions of sexuality and gender in the Jewish communities of the pre-modern Middle East, thus shedding new light on patients as historical agents.     

Middle Eastern Minorities and Diasporas: Moshe Mo'az and Gabriel Sheffer,eds.

Book reviewed in this article: Muslim Minorities in the West: Visible and Invisible: Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad and Jane I. Smith, eds.     

The Eisenhower Doctrine in its American and Middle Eastern Contexts

Book reviewed:
Salim Yaqub. Containing Arab Nationalism: The Eisenhower Doctrine in the Middle East . Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. xiii + 377 pp. Illus., maps, notes, bibliography, index. $59.95 (cloth), $22.50 (paper).     

Recent work on the Middle Palaeolithic of the Eastern Sahara

Recent research at the remote depression of Bir Tarfawi, in the hyperarid Eastern Sahara, has revealed a sequence of four, or possibly five, Pleistocene lake-episodes. The first lake was probably associated with a Late Acheulean and the remaining four with a Middle Palaeolithic, specifically with a Denticulate Aterian, industry. Lithostratigraphic, macrofaunal and microfaunal analyses have permitted a quite detailed reconstruction of the local environment during the periods of the last two lakes; during the period of the fourth lake, local rainfall may have beenca 600 mm per annum but was rather less during the time of the fifth lake. Investigation of some of the many associated archaeological sites is revealing a complex pattern of specialized site-types, including living-sites, primary and secondary workshops and primary and secondary butchery-sites. Specific types of sites are closely related to the local landscape. Preliminary analyses from several experimental methods of chronometric dating suggest that almost all of the sequence falls within the Middle Pleistocene.

---

Résumé Des recherches récentes dans la dépression isolée de Bir Tarfawi dans le Sahara oriental hyperaride, ont révélé une séquence de quatre, ou peut être cinq, épisodes lacustres au Pléistocène. Le premier lac est probablement associé à un Acheuléen final, et les quatre autres au Paléolithique moyen, et spécifiquement à une industrie atérienne denticulée. Des analyses de lithostratigraphie, de macrofaune et de microfaune ont permis de reconstruire d'une façon assez détaillée l'environnement local pendant les périodes des deux derniers lacs. Pendant la période du quatrième lac, la pluviosité locale était peut être deca 600 mm par an, mais elle était un peu moindre à lépoque du cinquième lac. Les recherches dans certains des nombreux gisements archéologiques associés nous révèlent un schéma complexe de sites spécialisés, y compris des sites d'habitat, des ateliers primaires et secondaires, et des lieux de dépeçage primaires et secondaires. Certains types de gisement sont étroitement liés au paysage local. Des analyses préliminaires par plusieurs méthodes expérimentales de datation chronométrique suggèrent que presque toute la séquence appartient au Pléistocène moyen.

     

战国都城形态的东西差别

东周列国都城形态的演化经历了东西两条道路:东方国家都城在战国时期普遍发展成为“两城制”,体现了“朝、市并重”的格局;秦国都城则保持了“非城郭制”的特点,其大部分面积分布着宫殿区,朝寝有压倒庙、市的趋势。两汉都城形态是秦国“非城郭制”道路的延续和发展。     

9/11 and Middle Eastern Studies past and future: revisiting Ivory towers on sand

The events of 9/11 intensified attacks on the field of Middle Eastern Studies, especially in the US—attacks whose reverberations have been felt ever since in academia and beyond. A key moment was the publication in 2001 of a book by Martin Kramer, Ivory towers on sand , which accused the field of irrelevance, failure to predict, lack of patriotism and wilful blindness to the failings in the Arab and Islamic world. In a Foreword to this review article, Gerd Nonneman points out that the importance of the heated debate this occasioned, both on intellectual and political grounds, has if anything been heightened in today's policy environment. At the request of International Affairs , Fred Halliday therefore revisits the book's arguments. He accepts the desirability for scholars to engage in public assessment and critique of others' work and to relate this to broader concerns of both epistemology and public policy. He also acknowledges shortcomings in the literature on Islamism and civil society, and in Edward Said's Orientalism . But he concludes that Kramer's book fails to resolve the questions broached, adds nothing that is original to debates on social science method and theory, distorts the state of contemporary Middle Eastern Studies (in part by ignoring most of the important work done outside the US) and that the book has had damaging consequences for university life itself. In part, the article suggests, this is a reflection of a lack—shared by significant areas of recent social science writing, including Said's Orientalism —of an adequate grounding in issues of social science methodology and philosophy. It also reflects an untenable assumption about the nature of the relationship between academic work and public policy issues.     

19世纪中期中印边界东段的若干协定

19世纪中期有关中印边界东段的协定文本及形成这些协定的背景、进程、结果表明,在英属印度入主阿萨姆前,存在着一条沿着布拉马普特拉河谷平原边缘,或喜马拉雅山南侧坡脚行走的传统习惯线.这条线在一些山口地带的两属状况及不完全按照属地原则的管辖情况正体现了传统习惯线不同于近现代国际边界的特征.英属印度入主阿萨姆后,通过这些协定的订立承袭了传统习惯线,并以有利于它的方式解决了两属及不完全按照属地原则管辖的状况,但并未改变传统习惯线的基本走向,也未将管辖扩大到山地部落地区.