20th century
21st century
A01=Loring M. Danforth
ancient cities
ancient ruins
Author_Loring M. Danforth
camel
Category=JHMC
Category=NHG
contemporary
current affairs
desert
eq_bestseller
eq_history
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eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
foreign country
immigrants
immigration
jeddah
kingdom
law and order
middle east
middle eastern culture
modern world
muslim
muslim world
natural resources
natural world
oil
oppressed women
persian gulf
personal narrative
prisons
protest
red sea
saudi arabia
saudi culture
social science
sufi
travel
travel memoir
traveler
true story
womens rights
Product details
- ISBN 9780520290280
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 29 Mar 2016
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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For many people, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia evokes images of deserts, camels, and oil, along with rich sheikh in white robes, oppressed women in black veils, and terrorists. But when Loring Danforth traveled through the country in 2012, he found a world much more complex and inspiring than he could have ever imagined. With vivid descriptions and moving personal narratives, Danforth takes us across the Kingdom, from the headquarters of Saudi Aramco, the country's national oil company on the Persian Gulf, to the centuries-old city of Jeddah on the Red Sea coast with its population of undocumented immigrants from all over the Muslim world. He presents detailed portraits of a young woman jailed for protesting the ban on women driving, a Sufi scholar encouraging Muslims and Christians to struggle together with love to know God, and an artist citing the Quran and using metal gears and chains to celebrate the diversity of the pilgrims who come to Mecca. Crossing the Kingdom paints a lucid portrait of contemporary Saudi culture and the lives of individuals, who like us all grapple with modernity at the dawn of the twenty-first century.
Loring M. Danforth is Professor of Anthropology at Bates College. He is the author of The Death Rituals of Rural Greece, Firewalking and Religious Healing, The Macedonian Conflict: Ethnic Nationalism in a Transnational World, and Children of the Greek Civil War: Refugees and the Politics of Memory.
