2015

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Winning Title

Pascal Menoret
Joy Riding in Riyadh: Oil, Urbanism, and Road Revolt   (Cambridge University Press)

Why do young Saudis, night after night, joyride and skid cars on Riyadh's avenues? Who are these 'drifters' who defy public order and private property? What drives their revolt? Based on four years of fieldwork in Riyadh, Pascal Menoret's Joyriding in Riyadh explores the social fabric of the city and connects it to Saudi Arabia's recent history. Car drifting emerged after Riyadh was planned, and oil became the main driver of the economy. For young rural migrants, it was a way to reclaim alienating and threatening urban spaces. For the Saudi state, it jeopardized its most basic operations: managing public spaces and enforcing law and order. A police crackdown soon targeted car drifting, feeding a nation-wide moral panic led by religious activists who framed youth culture as a public issue. This book retraces the politicization of Riyadh youth and shows that, far from being a marginal event, car drifting is embedded in the country's social violence and economic inequality.

‘Joy Riding in Riyadh is truly a joy to read [please forgive the pun].  Inspired by wide scholarship on youth and urbanisation, Menoret offers a unique contribution to the field.  His book is a great example of being close to the interlocutors and distant enough to capture their outlook’
Anonymous reviewer

Pascal Menoret is the Renée and Lester Crown Professor of Modern Middle East Studies at Brandeis University. His teaching and research interests include urban anthropology, infrastructure, protest, and ethnographic fieldwork.

Runners up

Christina Riggs
Unwrapping Ancient Egypt   (Bloomsbury)

In ancient Egypt, wrapping sacred objects, including mummified bodies, in layers of cloth was a ritual that lay at the core of Egyptian society. Yet in the modern world, attention has focused instead on unwrapping all the careful arrangements of linen textiles the Egyptians had put in place.

This book breaks new ground by looking at the significance of textile wrappings in ancient Egypt, and at how their unwrapping has shaped the way we think about the Egyptian past. Wrapping mummified bodies and divine statues in linen reflected the cultural values attached to this textile, with implications for understanding gender, materiality and hierarchy in Egyptian society. Unwrapping mummies and statues similarly reflects the values attached to Egyptian antiquities in the West, where the colonial legacies of archaeology, Egyptology and racial science still influence how Egypt appears in museums and the press.

 ‘Christina Riggs has made a fundamental contribution to Egyptological understanding, and she has presented so as to speak to a wide range of disciplines and contexts in the modern world. 

‘The final chapter, ‘Sanctity’ is designed to be uncomfortable reading because it problematizes much in modern museum practice and attitudes to the ancient world, or more broadly to the other.  A reminder of modern understanding and ethics is salutary and an effective conclusion to this outstanding book’.

Anonymous reviewer

Christina Riggs is Professor of the History of Visual Culture at Durham University. She is a historian of photography and archaeology, with a particular interest in North Africa and the Middle East.

Yonatan Mendel
The Creation of Israeli Arabic: Security and Politics in Arabic Studies in Israel   (Palgrave Macmillan)

This book sheds light on the ways in which the on-going Israeli-Arab conflict has shaped Arabic language instruction. Due to its interdisciplinary nature it will be of great interest to academics and researchers in security and middle eastern studies as well as those focused on language and linguistics.

 ‘This is an excellent study that sheds light on the ways in which the long history of Muslim-Jewish relationship and the Arab-Israeli conflict have shaped Arabic language instruction in Jewish-Isrealy society before 1948 and especially after the establishment of the State of Israel’. 

‘Dr Mendel’s study is one of the best studies written on the topic in any language including Hebrew.  The ability of the author to use a wide range of primary sources in Hebrew and Arabic, even classified ones, and to study them without any bias have contributed to that ground-breaking publication which adds significantly to the existing scholarly research in the field’.

Anonymous reviewer

Yonatan Mendel is based in the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. He investigates language-society interaction and the sociology of language, and more specifically, works on the Arabic language and the place of Arabic in Israel over the last century.