Article exploring and challenging the notion of the decline of the city as a preliminary to the study of rivalries among associations.

This paper explores how everyday religious narratives in post-disaster contexts can be interpreted as key sites of agency articulated in resistance to dominant discourses of disaster relief. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among affected communities after the 2010 floods in Pakistan, we argue that religious discourses code everyday actions with…[Read more]

An interpretation of the rock art appearing in The Shaft at Lascaux and a discussion of Aurignacian Rites of Passage

An interpretation of the rock art appearing in The Shaft at Lascaux and a discussion of Aurignacian Rites of Passage

An interpretation of the Red Mammoth Panel in Chauvet linking Chauvet to Lascaux in a single ritual landscape

An interpretation of the Red Mammoth Panel in Chauvet linking Chauvet to Lascaux in a single ritual landscape

In this chapter I discuss how contests about religious language have revolved around a contrast between, on the one hand, a preference for literalism, with its emphasis on reference and denotation; and on the other hand, a valuation of the poetic functions of language and its material properties. Turning to the issue of electronically mediated…[Read more]

In many US cities, especially those in the Rust Belt, the environmental goods and services (EGS) industry has played a significant role in restructuring local economies to promote new, flexible, and “creative” forms of service-based labour. And yet much of the environmental work conducted in these cities has been directed at an industrial pas…[Read more]

This article introduces a new perspective, the history of vision, into the study of rabbinic literature. Specifically it examines how rabbinic visual regimes dealt with those objects and images that it designated as idols. It argues that rabbis took seeing seriously and that they developed a set of strategies to shape the viewing of problematic…[Read more]

This article treats the cultural meaning of rabbinic toilet rules from their Tannaitic instantiation through to later developments in Palestine and Mesopotamia. It argues that these rules draw their corporeal and mental bearings from the Jerusalem temple, in inverse and opposite directions to prayer deportment. It shows how the juxtaposition of…[Read more]

Studies of Egyptian Late Period statuary often assume that the extant corpus is a representative sample of the artistic output of the Twenty-Sixth to Thirty-First Dynasties (c. 664–332 BCE). This assumption ignores the various human processes that affect the survival of statues after their initial dedication. In particular, the Roman practice of c…[Read more]

This essay considers the category of “Jewish law” in Jewish studies while inviting scholarly and historiographic assessment of the ways that Judaism’s link to law has come to appear as obvious. Considering that our present concepts of law are invariably linked to a geographically and temporally parochial “mythology of modern law,” the essay sounds…[Read more]

A critical analysis of the strategic reconfiguration of social relations in the British state.

Review of two recent works of urban studies research in the context of critical urban theory.

Over 30 years of strategic reconfiguration, Global Cities have proven
themselves productive of metropolitan oligarchies of various hues
that dominate the territories of their respective states. Set against
the ‘ecological contradictions’ of historical capitalism, the article
presents the Global City formation as a historically particular pos…[Read more]

In this paper, the authors show the application and use of automated text network analysis based on ancient corpora. The examples draw from Ancient Egyptian sources and the Indian Mahābhārata. Different text-based network generation algorithms like “Nubbi” or “Textplot” are presented in order to showcase alternative methodological approache…[Read more]

In this article, I will be focusing specifically on cryopreservation and two of the American biotechnomedical tenets introduced by Robbie Davis-Floyd and Gloria St. John in their technocratic model of medicine: the “body as machine” and “death as defeat.” These axioms are embraced by both the biotechnomedical establishment as well as the cryopre…[Read more]

This book is an example of how well cultural history can be written along with a critical analysis of textual sources. This book explores the various facets of the Hindu Brahmin identity and its relevance in the present. This book is a great resource for scholars of Sanskrit, Hinduism, mythology, social stratification, folklore, performance,…[Read more]

As the 2017-18 academic job cycle came to an end I found myself, for the first time in five years, in the enviable position of not having to resume my search for employment again in the fall, thanks to a two-year position at a very eminent institution. This good fortune has prompted me to compile my reflections on the classical archaeology job…[Read more]