Friday, October 30, 2009

Were the Jews a Mediterranean Society?

Well Seth?

Princeton publishes Seth Schwartz's latest book. Sure to be a thought-provoker.
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2 comments:

  1. I'm reading it right now! It is actually very stimulating and thought provoking. I really enjoy Prof. Schwartz's work.

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  2. Reading Chapter One. Not sure what to think yet. Certainly different from reading Bickerman, Lieberman or the like. I spent much too much time at Columbia reading books that cite Sahlins, Bourdieu, Malinowski and their friends to readily enjoy this so far. But I am open-minded about it. His main object for me will be to get out of the semantic questions he has framed, and get into a thesis that isn't dependent on shades of meaning or definition in a few anthro-babble terms. That sounds dismissive but I was made to read miles, acres, fathoms of anthro-babble at CU, and when a book spends half its time name-dropping theorists & deriding competitors, and the other defining how it is using various loosey-goosey 'Bourdieuian'(!) terms, as if they were real picks and shovels moving aside real dirt, I get impatient. I hope this isn't like that. My hope is that he transcends any faulty assumptions of an earlier generation without becoming a caricature of a 'theory' book. I must say I prefer a modest, inductive process to the jargon-laden, which never seems to go anywhere, or to be susceptible to semantic falsifications at every turn.

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