articles

This article tells the story of one of the first Israeli anti-occupation groups, Women for Political Prisoners (WOFPP), through an ethnography that follows the process of re-assembling the NGO’s scattered archive. The concept of ethno-archiving is used to describe the process of gathering oral histories and assembling documents from the groups’ emergence phase (1988–1993). Focusing on the organisation’s historical importance and its idiosyncratic documentation of Israel’s gender-based violence (GBV) against Palestinian women, including sexual violence, the article chronicles their emergence and early impact, and explains why they were gradually forgotten – partly due to their own strategy of stealth-ness and self-silencing, and partly due to their marginalisation by mainstream liberal activism and NGO professionalism. The article shows that the human rights archival gap of Women for Political Prisoners’ unique materials, as the first NGO to define Israeli practices as torture and the only one to focus on Palestinian women, is inextricably tied to the overall silencing of GBV in Israel/Palestine.

How can the study of Zaydi jurisprudence help us understand the relationship between Imam Yaḥyā Ḥamīd al-Dīn (r. 1904-1948) and the Jews of Yemen? What sources are available for study? What further questions does the focus on dhimma law raise regarding Zaydi law and political thought?

This article introduces two Jewish accounts on the 1948 turmoil in Sanaa/Yemen to a non-Hebrew reading audience. Following the problematisation of both accounts – one by Salim Mansura (1916–2007), the other by Mordechai al-Zahiri (later Yitshari, 1930–) – as a historical source, it gives a chronological overview of the events they describe, and partly witnessed themselves. It covers their narratives on the assassination of Imam Yahya Hamid al-Din, the al-Wazir coup, the countercoup led by Imam Ahmad as well as the subsequent looting of Sanaa and its Jewish quarter. Based on the two accounts, the article analyses whether the looting had a strategic function in reconquering the city and reflects on the question as to whether the looting of the Jewish Quarter in particular was or was not intended by the authorities.

Building upon previous literature and insights from natural corpus data, this paper questions the theoretical bases and applicability of Information-Structural categories, such as topic and focus, and proposes an alternative approach to this field. In the proposed framework, so-called “information-structural” phenomena are epiphenomenal effects of diverse linguistic devices, related directly to a broad array of primarily intersubjective, interactional and discourse-structuring aspects of communication and language. The paper presents cross-linguistic data that support this view and proposes the ensuing directions for the systematic study of these phenomena.

There have been recent advances in the phonological reconstruction of the South-Central (“Kuki}-Chin”) branch of Trans-Himalayan (Tibeto-Burman), in particular by VanBik (2009). However, the Northwestern (“Old} Kuki”) subgroup, generally considered to be conservative, is not represented in this work as reliable data have not been available. The present study provides a comprehensive documentation of the historical phonology of one Northwestern language, Monsang. The unexpected finding is that Monsang cannot be considered conservative in its phonological development. A large number of sound changes have occurred across all phonological domains. The majority of sound changes are mergers, and with small exceptions, no unusual sound changes are found. As a result, the diachronic development of Monsang can be considered a case of reduction in phonological complexity.

The paper ponders the object of archaeology, called here ‘the archaeological’. It argues that the existence of such an object is a necessary premise of the field and that ultimately it is on this object that the validity of all claims and arguments must rest. The paper suggests that the archaeological be conceived as a cultural phenomenon that consists in being disengaged from the social, an understanding that positions archaeology as a counterpart to the social sciences and the humanities, rather than a member in the same milieu. The first part of the paper focuses on the position of the archaeological with reference to the concepts of ‘Nature’ and ‘Culture’, which eventually leads us to a confrontation between archaeological statics and the dynamics of the world. Efforts to justify and understand archaeological statics consequently lead to the recognition of a constitutive distinction between buried and non-buried conditions, upon which the differentiation of the archaeological from the social is established.

Recently, new laws and medical guidelines in many countries have prohibited early genital surgeries and irreversible medical treatment for intersexed babies. Following the passing of the German law that allows parents to register intersexed babies with no sex/gender, and after the establishment of new medical guidelines for intersexed patients in Israel, this study aims to examine the current medical policies regarding intersexed bodies at DSD centres and hospitals in Israel and Germany. How, if at all, have they changed the previous medical guidelines? This is a narrative study that includes 62 in-depth interviews with medical professionals, parents and intersexed people from Germany and Israel. Three main controversial themes are examined, including the situated diagnostic medical gaze, the surgical practices for normalising intersexed bodies and the concealment of intersexed bodies. I find that in Israeli hospitals, early irreversible surgeries for 'ambiguous genitals' and the removal of internal sex organs are taking place frequently, whereas in Germany, the three DSD centres examined offer psychological counselling for parents instead of early surgeries for their babies. While in Israel concealment practices are embodied in the medical policy, the DSD centres in Germany encourage openness and peer group support. \copyright 2018 Foundation for the Sociology of Health & Illness.