Through an ethnohistorical chronicling of the emotionally-laden treatment of selected suicide media-events, this book offers a neo-Durkheimean account of suicide, addressing its social-moral threat and the ensuing need to gloss over its unsettling incomprehensibility. An analysis of the social dramas, cultural performances, and suicide talk aired in the Israeli public sphere, it suggests that such public glossing practices atone for and bring about the symbolic rectification of the socially detrimental effects of suicide. Drawing on Durkheim’s thought on the social significance of suicide and the sacred cohesive power of society’s self-representations through rituals and commemorations, the authors revamp the contemporary pertinence of these cultural devices, showing how, in the process of reconstituting and redressing the disrupted order, suicide talk constitutes a revival mechanism of communal ‘life giving’. A rekindling of the Durkheimian approach to suicide that examines how society deals with suicide’s shattering of normative we-feelings, Suicide Social Dramas: Moral Breakdowns in the Israeli Public Sphere will appeal to scholars and students of sociology and anthropology with interests in social theory, Israel studies, suicide studies, and the interpretation of societal and cultural processes.

Suicide Social Dramas: Life-Giving Moral Breakdowns in the Israeli Public Sphere (Routledge Advances in Sociology)

Self-Help

Romberg, Raquel

Hazan, Haim

Death & Grief

Routledge

Old Age: Constructions and Deconstructions (Themes in the Social Sciences)

Haim Hazan, a specialist on old age in anthropology, focuses on the reality of the experience of old age as opposed to the stereotyped image. He argues that the construction of this world by outsiders is affected by deeply ingrained social attitudes whereby the old are separated from society and associated with the fear of death. The author views the subject from a social constructionist perspective, drawing on ethnographic accounts to produce a sophisticated and original book that will have a significant impact on a field still dominated by the "social problems" approach.

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Cambridge University Press

Haim Hazan, a specialist on old age in anthropology, focuses on the reality of the experience of old age as opposed to the stereotyped image. He argues that the construction of this world by outsiders is affected by deeply ingrained social attitudes whereby the old are separated from society and associated with the fear of death. The author views the subject from a social constructionist perspective, drawing on ethnographic accounts to produce a sophisticated and original book that will have a significant impact on a field still dominated by the "social problems" approach.

Against Hybridity: Social Impasses in a Globalizing World

One of the major characteristics of our contemporary culture is a positive, almost banal, view of the transgression and disruption of cultural boundaries. Strangers, migrants and nomads are celebrated in our postmodern world of hybrids and cyborgs. But we pay a price for this celebration of hybridity: the non-hybrid figures in our societies are ignored, rejected, silenced or exterminated. This book tells the story of these non-hybrid figures Ð the anti-heroes of our pop culture. The main example of non-hybrids in an otherwise hybridized world is that of deep old age. Hazan shows how we fervently distance ourselves from old age by grading and sequencing it into stages such as ‘the third age’, ‘the fourth age’ and so on. Aging bodies are manipulated through anti-aging techniques until it is no longer possible to do it anymore, at which point they become un-transformable and non-marketable objects and hence commercially and socially invisible or masked. Other examples are used to elucidate the same cultural logic of the non-hybrid: pain, the Holocaust, autism, fundamentalism and corporeal death. On the face of it, these examples may seem to have nothing in common, but they all exemplify the same cultural logic of the non-hybrid and provoke similar reactions of criticism, terror, abhorrence and moral indignation. This highly original and iconoclastic book offers a fresh critique of contemporary Western culture by focusing on that which is perceived as its other Ð the non-hybrid in our midst, often rejected, ignored or silenced and deemed to be in need of globally manageable correction.

Anthropology

Polity

Managing Change in Old Age: The Control of Meaning in an Institutional Setting (Suny Series in Anthropology and Judaic Studies)

This book is an ethnographic study of an old age home in Israel that sheds light on the existential experience of elderly retirees. Hazan looks carefully at the universal concerns of old age, specifically examining the nature of everyday life in the institutional setting. He shows the workings of the micropolitics of control in an old age home and the tension between controlling dwindling resources and sustaining life-long meaning for residents. He also effectively brings out distinctive features of the Israeli situation, its cultural and bureaucratic codes. Hazan's study of the life cycle, based in the anthropology of process, is a senstive portrayal of the dynamics of institutionalized elderly in a complex society.

Managing Change in Old Age: The Control of Meaning in an Institutional Setting (Suny Anthropology and Judaic Studies)

History

Middle East

State University of New York Press

This book is an ethnographic study of an old age home in Israel that sheds light on the existential experience of elderly retirees. Hazan looks carefully at the universal concerns of old age, specifically examining the nature of everyday life in the institutional setting. He shows the workings of the micropolitics of control in an old age home and the tension between controlling dwindling resources and sustaining life-long meaning for residents. He also effectively brings out distinctive features of the Israeli situation, its cultural and bureaucratic codes. Hazan’s study of the life cycle, based in the anthropology of process, is a senstive portrayal of the dynamics of institutionalized elderly in a complex society.

Most studies of ageing have been done by the non-aged. To correct this imbalance, Hazan enlisted the resources of an unusual and innovative group of elderly persons in Cambridge, England. Gathering together in a structured curriculum of seminars and discussion groups and calling themselves the University of the Third Age, the elders intellectually reexamine the spectrum of sociocultural and epistemological principles starting with basics. Hazan's careful observation, description and transcription of the words of the Third Agers demonstrates that cognition and discourse go through transformations and permutations as individuals attain the so-called wisdom years. Alone in the literature on ageing, Hazan's contribution lights the way for much new thinking and research on and among our older population.

From First Principles: An Experiment in Ageing

Philosophy

Praeger

Serendipity in Anthropological Research: The Nomadic Turn

Challenging the idea that fieldwork is the only way to gather data, and that standard methods are the sole route to fruitful analysis, Serendipity in Anthropological Research explores the role of fortune and happenstance in anthropology. It conceives of anthropological research as a lifelong nomadic journey of discovery in which the world yields an infinite number of unexplored issues and innumerable ways of studying them, each study producing its own questions and demanding its own methodologies. Drawing together the latest research from a team of senior scholars from around the world to reflect on the experience of research, Serendipity in Anthropological Research presents rich new case studies from Europe and the Middle East to examine both new and old questions in novel and enriching ways. An engaging examination of methodology and anthropological fieldwork, this book will appeal to all those concerned with writing ethnography.

Reference

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Hazan, Haim. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Hazan, Haim

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Hazan, Haim. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Suicide Social Dramas: Life-Giving Moral Breakdowns in the Israeli Public Sphere (Routledge Advances in Sociology)

Old Age: Constructions and Deconstructions (Themes in the Social Sciences)

Old Age: Constructions and Deconstructions (Themes in the Social Sciences)

Against Hybridity: Social Impasses in a Globalizing World

Against Hybridity: Social Impasses in a Globalizing World

Managing Change in Old Age: The Control of Meaning in an Institutional Setting (Suny Anthropology and Judaic Studies)

Managing Change in Old Age: The Control of Meaning in an Institutional Setting (Suny Series in Anthropology and Judaic Studies)

From First Principles: An Experiment in Ageing

Serendipity in Anthropological Research: The Nomadic Turn

Serendipity in Anthropological Research: The Nomadic Turn