Phantom Punch: Contemporary Art from Saudi Arabia (with Dan Mills). By Loring Danforth. Bates College Museum of Art. 2017.
Overview
Phantom Punch: Contemporary Art from Saudi Arabia in Lewiston is the first exhibition in New England of work by Saudi artists. This multifaceted project includes a significant exhibition of leading and emerging Saudi artists, as well as a series of lectures, visiting artists, and performances, story-telling and other pop-up events that create timely cross-cultural dialogue on campus and in the surrounding communities. In America, very little is known about contemporary Saudi art and artists. Media accounts of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia are frighteningly predictable – deserts, camels, and oil, rich sheikhs, oppressed women, and terrorists. With this exhibition, we have a rare opportunity to gain critical new perspectives on Saudi society and culture from a group of perceptive young artists who are challenging conventions and exploring the limits of what is possible in Saudi culture.
Crossing the Kingdom: Portraits of Saudi Arabia. By Loring Danforth. University of California Press. 2016.
Overview
Crossing the Kingdom – For many people, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia evokes images of deserts, camels, and oil, along with rich sheikh in white robes, oppressed women in black veils, and terrorists. But when Loring Danforth traveled through the country in 2012, he found a world much more complex and inspiring than he could have ever imagined.
With vivid descriptions and moving personal narratives, Danforth takes us across the Kingdom, from the headquarters of Saudi Aramco, the country’s national oil company on the Persian Gulf, to the centuries-old city of Jeddah on the Red Sea coast with its population of undocumented immigrants from all over the Muslim world. He presents detailed portraits of a young woman jailed for protesting the ban on women driving, a Sufi scholar encouraging Muslims and Christians to struggle together with love to know God, and an artist citing the Quran and using metal gears and chains to celebrate the diversity of the pilgrims who come to Mecca.
Crossing the Kingdom paints a lucid portrait of contemporary Saudi culture and the lives of individuals, who like us all grapple with modernity at the dawn of the twenty-first century.
Reviews
“Readers will learn much about the challenges faced by a generation of young Saudis trying to lead a full life despite social religious and polictical restrictions. . . . Throughout Crossing the Kingdom [Danforth] tries to challenge simplistic interpretations and crude propaganda. The result is a travelogue that is more sophisticated than the perspectives that dominate Western media reporting on the kingdom.
Madawi Al Rasheed, London Times Higher Education.
“Danforth provides a superb anthropological analysis of the culture problems the Saudi state has become entangled in.”
Children of the Greek Civil War: Refugees and the Politics of Memory (with Riki Van Boeschoten). By Loring Danforth. University of Chicago Press. 2012.
Overview
Children of the Greek Civil War – At the height of the Greek Civil War in 1948, thirty-eight thousand children were evacuated from their homes in the mountains of northern Greece. The Greek Communist Party relocated half of them to orphanages in Eastern Europe, while their adversaries in the national government placed the rest in children’s homes elsewhere in Greece. A point of contention during the Cold War, this controversial episode continues to fuel tensions between Greeks and Macedonians and within Greek society itself. Loring M. Danforth and Riki Van Boeschoten present here for the first time a comprehensive study of the two evacuation programs and the lives of the children they forever transformed.
Marshalling archival records, oral histories, and ethnographic fieldwork, the authors analyze the evacuation process, the political conflict surrounding it, the children’s upbringing, and their fates as adults cut off from their parents and their homeland. They also give voice to seven refugee children who poignantly recount their childhood experiences and heroic efforts to construct new lives in diaspora communities throughout the world. A much-needed corrective to previous historical accounts, Children of the Greek Civil War is also a searching examination of the enduring effects of displacement on the lives of refugee children.
Reviews
“In this excellent book, Loring Danforth and Riki van Boeschoten steer a careful course between claim and counter-claim. . . . The life stories revealed in their interviews with the evacuees make for fascinating, if at times harrowing, reading. The book is an important contribution to the study of a still contested aspect of the civil war in Greece and to one of the least-known dimensions of the Greek diaspora.”
Richard Clogg. Times Literary Supplement
“Danforth and Van Boeschoten grippingly tell the stories of thousands of Greek children relocated during the Greek Civil War….Amid charges of communist baby snatching and fascist child manipulation, the book charts an astonishingly evenhanded and supremely well-researched course. Insisting that refugee children ought to occupy center stage in their own history, the authors support their argument with two chapters of testimony from the historical actors themselves remembering their own childhood experiences. This innovative book ends with some insightful thinking about the production of historical memory….Highly recommended.”
K. Dubinsky. Choice.
“Danforth and Van Boeschoten provide a well-written, fair-minded, and convincing comparative study of the actions of both sides and of the subsequent politics of memory.”
European History Quarterly.
“This remarkable study breaks new ground in several areas: in its methodology, its style, and its topic. Historically and ethnographically, the book tells a duplex tale: by two authors, writing about two opposed camps, and exploring the vicissitudes of two states and two ethnicities. Balanced to an impressive degree, Children of the Greek Civil War succeeds magnificently in showing the parallels between the experiences of the two sides in a way that is moving as well as analytically compelling. Yet the greatest strength of the book, aside from the seamless writing and its emotional impact, lies in the theorization of the children’s agency in organizing their present lives and understanding their past.”
Michael Herzfeld, Harvard University.
“Successfully combing archival research with extensive ethnographic fieldwork, Children of the Greek Civil War is a work of first-rate scholarship, grounded in original research and sophisticated theoretical analysis, that is often gripping as it ranges from historical prose to deeply moving personal vignettes. Given the contentiousness of the book’s subject—an understudied but highly significant episode—it is as courageous as it is informed. The time seems ripe for beginning the process of reconciliation, and Danforth and Van Boeschoten’s work will help us move down that difficult road.”
Maria Todorova, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Awards
First Prize, Edmund Keeley Book Prize of the Modern Greek Studies Association, 2013
The Macedonian Conflict: Ethnic Nationalism in a Transnational World. By Loring Danforth. Princeton University Press. 1995.
Overview
The Macedonian Conflict – Greeks and Macedonians are presently engaged in an often heated dispute involving competing claims to a single identity. Each group asserts that they, and they alone, have the right to identify themselves as Macedonians. The Greek government denies the existence of a Macedonian nation and insists that all Macedonians are Greeks, while Macedonians vehemently assert their existence as a unique people. Here Loring Danforth examines the Macedonian conflict in light of contemporary theoretical work on ethnic nationalism, the construction of national identities and cultures, the invention of tradition, and the role of the state in the process of building a nation. The conflict is set in the broader context of Balkan history and in the more narrow context of the recent disintegration of Yugoslavia.
Danforth focuses on the transnational dimension of the “global cultural war” taking place between Greeks and Macedonians both in the Balkans and in the diaspora. He analyzes two issues in particular: the struggle for human rights of the Macedonian minority in northern Greece and the campaign for international recognition of the newly independent Republic of Macedonia. The book concludes with a detailed analysis of the construction of identity at an individual level among immigrants from northern Greece who have settled in Australia, where multiculturalism is an official policy. People from the same villages, members of the same families, living in the northern suburbs of Melbourne have adopted different national identities.
Reviews
“Danforth, an anthropologist, takes one through the ferociously juxtaposed claims and counterclaims, and he explains why the issues set people off with such intensity by fitting the case into modern anthropological thought about national identity, ethnic nationalism, and the role of culture….Danforth struggles mightily to maintain his scholarly detachment amid one of the more explosive topics in the universe, and for the most part he succeeds.”
Foreign Affairs
“A significant contribution both theoretically to the study of ethnic and national identity and specifically to those interested in Balkan politics.”
Adamantia Pollis, American Political Science Review
“A superb case study both of the conflict between nationalism and ethnic aspirations and of the curious parallelisms in their development. . . . It is a level-headed, humane, and very timely political intervention in a quarrel that continually threatens to become more than a war of words.”
Journal of Modern Greek Studies
“[An] engaging, original, timely, and conscientiously written study. . . . This is a well-written work and a major contribution to the study of national consciousness and nation-building.”
Philip Shashko, American Historical Review
“Loring Danforth humanizes the Macedonian conflict, shows us real people as they live this conflict, and makes clear that, despite its unique features, this struggle over ethnic and national identity is shared with other groups throughout the world. A good, rapid read filled with the fruit of first-rate, on-the-scene digging into people’s lives.”
Lou Panov, The Boston Book Review
Awards
Honorable Mention, American Ethnological Society’s Senior Book Award
CHOICE List of Outstanding Academic Books for 1996
Firewalking and Religious Healing: The Anastenaria of Greece and the American Firewalking Movement. By Loring Danforth. Princeton University Press. 1989.
Overview
Firewalking and Religious Healing – “If the Saint calls you, if you have an open road, then you don’t feel the fire as if it were your enemy,” says one of the participants in the Anastenaria. This compelling work evokes and contrasts two forms of firewalking and religious healing: first, the Anastenaria, a northern Greek ritual in which people who are possessed by Saint Constantine dance dramatically over red-hot coals, and, second, American firewalking, one of the more spectacular activities of New Age psychology. Loring Danforth not only analyzes these rituals in light of the most recent work in medical and symbolic anthropology but also describes in detail the lives of individual firewalkers, involving the reader personally in their experiences: he views ritual therapy as a process of transformation and empowerment through which people are metaphorically moved from a state of illness to a state of health. Danforth shows that the Anastenaria and the songs accompanying it allow people to express and resolve conflict-laden family relationships that may lead to certain kinds of illnesses. He also demonstrates how women use the ritual to gain a sense of power and control over their lives without actually challenging the ideology of male dominance that pervades Greek culture. Comparing the Anastenaria with American firewalking, Danforth includes a gripping account of his own participation in a firewalk in rural Maine. Finally he examines the place of anthropology in a postmodern world in which the boundaries between cultures are becoming increasingly blurred.
Reviews
“’Firewalking and Religious Healing’ is an important achievement: a mature, humanistic analysis of folk religious healing and an immediate, exemplary narrative of fieldwork practice. Firewalking in a Greek village is described richly with a depth of understanding based on intense fieldwork. . . . The book is reminiscent of Victor Turner’s field studies of Ndembu healing in its attention to the telling detail, to the dialogue between ritual and larger, more encompassing systems of thought, and to the realization of community in symbolic practice. Sensitive to issues surrounding th politics o representation, the author creates a portrait of a post-colonial ethnographer whose observational techniques are, on one hand journeyman’s tools necessary to detailed interpretation and, on the other, defenses that protect the observer’s vulnerability to emotional and environmental forces that may lad to deeper, empathetic understanding.”
University of Chicago Folklore Prize.
“Through the process of his detailed, delicate, and one might add, extraordinary honest ethnography, the exotic is gradually dissolved back into the social context from which it emerged, so that one sees firewalking in Ayia Eleni not as some bizarre cultural side-show, but rather as the expression of the socially and historically specific values, conditions, and concerns of a particular community.” Roger Just.
London Times Literary Supplement.
“This is a beautifully written and powerful ethnography. Danforth interprets two kinds of ritual therapy – firewalking in rural Greece and the American New Age movement – that are at once strangely similar and radically different.”
Ellen Badone.
Awards
First Prize Winner, Chicago Folklore Prize
CHOICE List of Outstanding Academic Books for 1991
The Death Rituals of Rural Greece. By Loring Danforth. Princeton University Press. 1982.
Overview
The Death Rituals of Rural Greece – This compelling text and dramatic photographic essay convey the emotional power of the death rituals of a small Greek village — the funeral, the singing of laments, the distribution of food, the daily visits to the graves, and especially the rite of exhumation. These rituals help Greek villagers face the universal paradox of mourning: how can the living sustain relationships with the dead and at the same time bring them to an end, in order to continue to live meaningfully as members of a community? That is the villagers’ dilemma, and our own. Thirty-one moving photographs (reproduced in duotone to do justice to their great beauty) combine with vivid descriptions of the bereaved women of “Potamia” and with the words of the funeral laments to allow the reader an unusual emotional identification with the people of rural Greece as they struggle to integrate the experience of death into their daily lives.
Loring M. Danforth’s sensitive use of symbolic and structural analysis complements his discussion of the social context in which these rituals occur. He explores important themes in rural Greek life, such as the position of women, patterns of reciprocity and obligation, and the nature of social relations within the family.
Reviews
“From first page to last plate the reader is drawn into a contemporary ritual drama, which opens at the graveyard in the village of ‘Potamia’ in northern Thessaly as the women gather at Vespers to tend the graves. Suddenly Irini’s cries for her daughter, killed five years before in a hit-and-run accident in Thessaloniki, are taken up by one, then another of the women in a crescendo of antiphonal lamentation.”
Margaret Alexiou, London Times Literary Supplement.
“Danforth (and Tsiaras) have produced an unusual, even beautiful book, which should satisfy scholars while being accessible to a lay readership. It should be moving for all readers. In addition to a rich ethnography of death-related practices, the book includes many funderal laments, refers to poetry to popular songs, to novels, and to the folkloric traditions so rarely invoked by anthropologists; then as if this were not enough, the text is supplemented by photograph of such quality that it is hard to resist the feeling that one has actually visited the village of Potamia.”
Peter Loizos. Man.
“The Death Rituals of Rural Greece is a rare book combining the best elements of anthropology and good writing. It is at once intensely personal and highly intellectual succeeding as serious anthropology without sacrificing its accessibility to a more general audience. Greece and anthropology have been well served by this fine piece of scholarship.”
