Cognitive Perspectives on Israelite Identity [Hardcover]

Cognitive Perspectives on Israelite Identity breaks new ground in the study of ethnic identity in the ancient world through the articulation of an explicitly cognitive perspective. In presenting a view of ethnicity as an epistemological rather than an ontological entity, this work seeks to correct the pronounced tendency towards 'analytical groupism' in the academic literature. Challenging what Pierre Bourdieu has called 'our primary inclination to think the world in a substantialist manner,' this study seeks to break with the vernacular categories and 'commonsense primordialisms' encoded within the Biblical texts, whilst at the same time accounting for their tenacious hold on our social and political imagination. It is the recognition of the performative and reifying potential of these categories of ethno-political practice that disqualifies their appropriation as categories of social analysis.

Acknowledgement
Abbreviations

Introduction

Chapter One

The Rise of the Concept of Race

Social Evolution and Race

Human Evolution and the Concept of Culture(s)

Chapter Two

Archaeology and Evolution

Archaeology and the Question of National Identity: Gustav Kossinna

Archaeology and Culture: V. Gordon Childe

Archaeology and the Identity of Israel
Chapter Three

The Emergence of 'Ethnicity'

Primordialism and Instrumentalism in the Study of Ethnicity

Chapter Four

Cognitive Perspectives on Ethnicity and Identity

Ethnicity as Cognition: Pierre Bourdieu

Chapter Five

The Loss of Innocence

New Archaeology and the Ethnic Interpretation of Style

Style as Active Comunication

The Archaeology of Practice

Chapter Six

Biblical Archaeology and La Longue Dur?e

Archaeology and Israelite Identity

Israel in the Merneptah Stele

'Israel' as an Essentialist Category of Social Cognition

Chapter Seven

Israelite Ethnicity and Biblical AlS^