The rise of the concept of race -- Social evolution and race -- Human evolution and the concept of culture(s) -- Archaeology and evolution -- Archaeology and the question of national identity : Gustav Kossinna -- Archaeology and culture : V. Gordon Childe -- Archaeology and the identity of Israel -- The emergence of "ethnicity" -- Primordialism and instrumentalism in the study of ethnicity -- Cognitive perspectives on ethnicity and identity -- Ethnicity as cognition : Pierre Bourdieu -- The loss of innocence -- New archaeology and the ethnic implications of style -- Style as active communication -- The archaeology of "practice" -- The identity of archaeology and the archaeology of identity -- Biblical archaeology and la longue durée -- Archaeology and Israelite identity -- Israel in the Merneptah Stele -- "Israel" as an essentialist category of social cognition -- Israelite ethnicity and biblical archaeology -- Ethnic sentiments in the Hebrew Bible -- The Hebrew Bible and the "creation" of Israelite identity -- Ideology, doxa and the boundaries of Israelite identity -- Common sense as social power
Summary
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 with
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 241-268) and indexes
