BiblioVault - Books about Regeneration

After Collapse

The Regeneration of Complex Societies

Edited by Glenn M. Schwartz and John J. Nichols

University of Arizona Press, 2006

From the Euphrates Valley to the southern Peruvian Andes, early complex societies have risen and fallen, but in some cases they have also been reborn. Prior archaeological investigation of these societies has focused primarily on emergence and collapse. This is the first book-length work to examine the question of how and why early complex urban societies have reappeared after periods of decentralization and collapse.

Ranging widely across the Near East, the Aegean, East Asia, Mesoamerica, and the Andes, these cross-cultural studies expand our understanding of social evolution by examining how societies were transformed during the period of radical change now termed “collapse.” They seek to discover how societal complexity reemerged, how second-generation states formed, and how these re-emergent states resembled or differed from the complex societies that preceded them.

The contributors draw on material culture as well as textual and ethnohistoric data to consider such factors as preexistent institutions, structures, and ideologies that are influential in regeneration; economic and political resilience; the role of social mobility, marginal groups, and peripheries; and ethnic change. In addition to presenting a number of theoretical viewpoints, the contributors also propose reasons why regeneration sometimes does not occur after collapse. A concluding contribution by Norman Yoffee provides a critical exegesis of “collapse” and highlights important patterns found in the case histories related to peripheral regions and secondary elites, and to the ideology of statecraft.

After Collapse blazes new research trails in both archaeology and the study of social change, demonstrating that the archaeological record often offers more clues to the “dark ages” that precede regeneration than do text-based studies. It opens up a new window on the past by shifting the focus away from the rise and fall of ancient civilizations to their often more telling fall and rise.

CONTRIBUTORS

Bennet Bronson
Arlen F. Chase
Diane Z. Chase
Christina A. Conlee
Lisa Cooper
Timothy S. Hare
Alan L. Kolata
Marilyn A. Masson
Gordon F. McEwan
Ellen Morris
Ian Morris
Carlos Peraza Lope
Kenny Sims
Miriam T. Stark
Jill A. Weber
Norman Yoffee

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Embodying Honor

Fertility, Foreignness, and Regeneration in Eastern Sudan

Amal Hassan Fadlalla

University of Wisconsin Press, 2007

In the Red Sea Hills of eastern Sudan, where poverty, famines, and conflict loom large, women struggle to gain the status of responsible motherhood through bearing and raising healthy children, especially sons. But biological fate can be capricious in impoverished settings. Amidst struggle for survival and expectations of heroic mothering, women face realities that challenge their ability to fulfill their prescribed roles. Even as the effects of modernity and development, global inequities, and exclusionary government policies challenge traditional ways of life in eastern Sudan and throughout many parts of Africa, reproductive traumas—infertility, miscarriage, children’s illnesses, and mortality—disrupt women’s reproductive health and impede their efforts to achieve the status that comes with fertility and motherhood.
In Embodying Honor Amal Hassan Fadlalla finds that the female body is the locus of anxieties about foreign dangers and diseases, threats perceived to be disruptive to morality, feminine identities, and social well-being. As a “northern Sudanese” viewed as an outsider in this region of her native country, Fadlalla presents an intimate portrait and thorough analysis that offers an intriguing commentary on the very notion of what constitutes the “foreign.” Fadlalla shows how Muslim Hadendowa women manage health and reproductive suffering in their quest to become “responsible” mothers and valued members of their communities. Her historically grounded ethnography delves into women’s reproductive histories, personal narratives, and ritual logics to reveal the ways in which women challenge cultural understandings of gender, honor, and reproduction.

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Regeneration

Spiritual Growth and How It Works

Emanuel Swedenborg

Swedenborg Foundation Publishers, 2014

Centuries before popular Western culture embraced meditation, positive thinking, and the quest for enlightenment, Swedish scientist-turned-seer Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) developed a simple formula for achieving personal spiritual growth.
In his works, Swedenborg describes the two parts of our mind: the intellectual side that wrestles with questions of right and wrong, and the emotional side that drives us toward what we truly love. We are born with selfish impulses and desires, and while we may learn to act ethically, we don’t start growing as spiritual people until we transform our emotional side. That transformation, he says, happens from the outside in: first we decide intellectually to be more loving, and that decision leads us to choose consciously to act for the good of others. These external thoughts and actions gradually open us to a higher love, one that transforms our desires and ultimately our fundamental being. He calls this process regeneration.
Swedenborg discusses regeneration in many places throughout his prolific theological writings. This book brings his key teachings on this topic together in one volume, illustrating the process of becoming a spiritual being and discussing how and why that process works.

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