Description

By (author) Hanoosh, Yasmeen

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Modern Chaldeans are an Aramaic speaking Catholic Syriac community from northern Iraq, not to be confused with the ancient Mesopotamian civilization of the same name. First identified as ‘Chaldean’ by the Catholic Church in the sixteenth century, this misnomer persisted, developing into a distinctive and unique identity. In modern times, the demands of assimilation in the US, together with increased hostility and sectarian violence in Iraq, gave rise to a complex and transnational identity. Faced with Islamophobia in the US, Chaldeans were at pains to emphasize a Christian identity, and appropriated the ancient, pre-Islamic history of their namesake as a means of distinction between them and other immigrants from Arab lands. In this, the first ethnographic history of the modern Chaldeans, Yasmeen Hanoosh explores these ancient-modern inflections in contemporary Chaldean identity discourses, the use of history as a collective commodity for developing and sustaining a positive community image in the present, and the use of language revival and monumental symbolism to reclaim association with Christian and pre-Christian traditions.

Table of contents:

Dedication
FiguresAbbreviationsAcknowledgements
Introduction 1.On thePolitics of Appellation:The Making of the ModernChaldeans27
2.
Archaeology, Philology and Mission: The Modern History of Ancient ChaldeanHistory
3.
Arab/Chaldean/Assyrian Distinctions: PoliticalSurvival in the New Nation State of Iraq
4.
From Religious to Ethnic Minority: Between Iraq and America in the TwentiethCentury
5.
Family, Marriage and Ethnic Economy: A Transnational Social Field Perspective
6.
The Modern Chaldean Church: Global Circuits of Ecclesial Power
7.
A Safe Haven Dream: Home between Detroit and the Nineveh Plain
8.
Chaldeanness: The Official Narrative and its Changing Displays
Epilogue: Centre and Peripheries of Chaldeanness in the Twilight of the Nation State
Appendix: Appellations and Languages
NotesWorksCitedIndex

Review quote:
The Chaldeans offers a superbly textured account of the shifting interplay of religious, racial, national, and ethnic designations and self-designations of community identity, moving compellingly from the late Ottoman era to the present. Addressing the modern revival of ancient Mesopotamian civilization, Hanoosh develops a densely complex narrative of the fraught ideological politics swirling around “Iraq’s Christians,” especially as articulated vis-à-vis Arabness and Islam. In this astute analysis of the efforts to stabilize definitions of belonging, the book insightfully captures the tensions and paradoxes embedded not simply in regional but rather in transnational processes of minoritization.

Review quote:
The Chaldeans is the first study that successfully frames the community in a social fields perspective and retains an analytic lucidity that makes the work beautifully clear for scholarly and classroom audiences alike. Hanoosh demonstrates an unmatched ability to weave together competing perspectives in a way that compassionately represents them without condescension or side-taking. The book”s findings are impressive on their own, but I was doubly struck by her modeling of empathetic scholarship for the many communities she writes about.

Review quote:
Hanoosh has written one of the most provocative ‘identity’ studies to date, compelling us to rethink key notion of relationality, citizenship, and displacement. The Chaldeans is a timely and sobering book pre