[DOWNLOAD] "Gender in Ancient Cyprus: Narratives of Social Change on a Mediterranean Island (Book Review)" by The Journal of the American Oriental Society # eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Gender in Ancient Cyprus: Narratives of Social Change on a Mediterranean Island (Book Review)
- Author : The Journal of the American Oriental Society
- Release Date : January 01, 2004
- Genre: Social Science,Books,Nonfiction,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 198 KB
Description
Gender in Ancient Cyprus: Narratives of Social Change on a Mediterranean Island. By DIANE BOLGER. Walnut Creek, Cal.: ALTAMIRA PRESS, 2003. Pp. xvii + 268, illus. $34.95 (paper). Recent attempts to engender Cypriot archaeology have not always engaged successfully with current feminist theory or with the now immense corpus of published research on gender, the body, and sexuality. Diane Bolger's new monograph represents a pioneering attempt to highlight the role of women and men in reconstructing the Cypriot past. She roams widely and delves deeply into gendered relations and gendered identities on prehistoric Cyprus, tackling such issues as domestic space, the life-cycle, labor and technology, ritual performance, social agency, and sexual ambiguity. Bolger is more confident when treating archaeological data that lie within her own realm of expertise (the earlier prehistory of Cyprus, especially the Chalcolithic periods), but she treats a span of nearly eight thousand years with a fluency and competence that instill admiration and warrant recognition. She offers up-to-date, succinct overviews of the current literature--archaeological and otherwise--on gender, feminist theory, agency (chapter 3), the life-cycle (chapter 4), childhood and adolescence (chapter 5), and mortuary ritual and practices (chapter 6). Chapter 8--"Who Tells the Story?"--reveals how the published literature in Cypriot archaeology (as in archaeologies the world round) has been and continues to be dominated by men, and is written from an androcentric perspective, one in which women and children have counted for little, and where the "big issues"--social complexity, rise of the state, production and exchange, ritual and ideology--are still tackled by men, and are concerned primarily with men alone, whether implicitly (ungendered "elites") or explicitly (farmers, warriors, kings, priests).