Emanuel Pfoh. Syria-Palestine in the Late Bronze Age: An Anthropology of Politics and Power. Copenhagen International Seminar. New York, NY: Routledge, 2016, 246 pp..
Emanuel Pfoh (Researcher at the National Scientific and Technological Research Council; teacher at the National University of La Plata, Argentina) utilizes anthropology in order to analyze from emic and etic perspectives the inter-polity dynamics of Syria-Palestine during the Late Bronze Age. Through consideration of competing theories, concepts, and analytical categories, he constructs a political anthropology of the Late Bronze Age indispensable to historians. Broadly speaking, Pfoh advances a well-argued, distinctive hypothesis:
“this study will attempt to show… that the societies of the ancient Levant seem to have been internally organised, at the smallest level, through kindship bonds, which also constituted the basis for ideological, economic, and political practices outside the local community, establishing a basic social differentiation between kind and not-kin. Such distinction affected the…
View original post 1,498 more words
Talmidimblogging 