Listening to Birth asserts that structures of power reproduce themselves by instituting particular modes of listening and sound production. Situating my research within feminist sound studies, I argue that meanings conjured around the audible, material bodies of women were carefully crafted by elites in antiquity, in order to construct gendered ideologies of kingship, civilisation, and nature. I examine these power dynamics as expressed in mythic and magical texts and iconographies, dating from the Bronze Age to later Roman antiquity. Throughout the thesis, I examine the development of symbolic systems and narrative tropes that linked mining and metallurgy with reproduction and vocality. My analysis emphasises how the invention of nature was accomplished, in part, through a metallurgical reclassification of the voices and sexualities of women as indiscrete phenomena: womb, mouth, and voice were elided with mining and smelting to form a unified semantic realm. I argue that this invention of ‘vulvar vocality’ reclassified female sounds as illicit, providing a plaform for the removal of women from the public sphere. I attempt to connect the gendered discourse found in myths and magical rituals to the political and economic domain of state-craft, to demonstrate the importance of hegemonic mythopoeic control of audible female reproduction for establishing ideologies of colonisation and extraction. I link analyses of texts and iconographies from the Bronze Age Mesopotamians, Hittites, Canaanites, Minoans, and Egyptians to later materials from the Iron Age Greeks, Israelites, and Romans—my goal is to demonstrate both the ubiquity and the continual reproduction of metallurgical ideology across the ancient world. I also present my preliminary research into the lasting impact that antique notions of vulvar vocality had on later state-craft. I begin to trace the preservation and elaboration of antique metallurgical literature by Byzantine and Islamic scholars, who in turn exerted strong influence on the Ottomans and late medieval and early modern Europeans. I outline future work to investigate the exponential rise of entrepreneurial metallurgy in late medieval and early modern Europe, arguing that this metallurgical discourse provided symbolic re-enforcement for the rapidly-accelerating mining and metal trade that formed the core of European colonial expansion. I suggest that vulvar vocality was central to early modern metallurgical, demonological, and colonial discourse, and that specific female vocalities and silences were purposefully crafted into the colonial project in order to forcibly redefine women, along with the lands and children stolen from them, as mere natural resources.

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Based on eighteen months fieldwork with Bedouin of the Negev, this thesis explores the varied presence of images as photographs and digital copies for local historicity in order to achieve a greater understanding of representational politics in southern Israel. It emphasizes pictures' ability to transmute, circulate, and acquire value in various social settings in contrast to popular academic treatments, which primarily focus on photographs' iconography and visual history in the Middle East. To do so, the thesis details the biographies of a series of 'significant images' (c. 1906-2010) circulating in this society. It describes their photographic and digital graphic contents as floating referents with the capacity to be coded and recoded by people but also their presence as historical evidence that acquire value in different contexts. The thesis builds on the concept of visual economy as opposed to visual culture in order to landscape images' meanings, material and digital transformations, and their influence for the making of Bedouin history over the last century amid Orientalist, national, and local imaginings. It argues that Bedouin in the Negev possess diverse representational repertoires and utilise a variety of techniques to pursue historical capital. In particular, local representations of the past are selective and instrumental but increasingly reliant on archival mediums such as photographs. Although it may be obvious, anthropologists of the Middle East have yet to adequately account for these occurrences among peripheral peoples and not merely urbanites in the region. Research found that Bedouin spokespersons treat photographs and digital images as evidentiary documentation during self-presentations of historical knowledge in the Negev. As they travel between visual economies, however, images become malleable proof for local history projects alternating between the tribal past, Islamic heritage, and ethnohistory. In conclusion, the thesis develops two theoretical themes in anthropology and visual culture studies of the Middle East: the material and visual efficacy of images for local historicity, and complicating self-representations among Bedouin in the Negev.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-29T13:48:37Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Bruno Huberman.pdf: 3948916 bytes, checksum: 0ac5109e458a9c62d4b1fe7fe11bbf86 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2014-05-26 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / This dissertation aims at investigating a phenomena called Judaization of Palestine: its purpose, politics, means, instruments, techniques, reasoning, objectives and interests and measure its impact on Israel-Palestine matter and lives of people living in Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) palestinians and jewish settlers. In that manner, the main manifestations of this phenomenon will be historically and analitically examined, such as the development of the Jewish settlements in Palestinian territories and the legal and burocratical instruments of social control over the Palestinian population between 1967 and 2013. The central problem of this investigation is focused on the oficial arguments of the israeli authorities about the Jewish presence in the OPT and the political impasse with the palestinians, linked to the paradigm of security and conflict in opposition to the Judaization of Palestine spectrum, which is about colonization, dispossession, volunteer and involunteer desplacement and social control of a foreigner dominant social ethnical group above other indigenous and subdued one. I intend to support the judaization narrative in opposition to the zionist hegemonic narrative as the most appropriate to understand some of the central aspects of the dispute between israelis and palestinians over that land, as the spatial fragmentation of Cisjordani, the Gaza Strip isolation, the silent displacement occuring in East Jerusalem and the maintenance of status quo. From this we can reach the relevance and justification for the elaboration of this dissertation / A presente dissertação pretende fazer uma investigação a respeito do fenômeno chamado de judaização da Palestina: qual é o seu propósito, políticas, meios, instrumentos, técnicas, racionalidade, objetivos e interesses, e medir o seu impacto sobre a questão Israel-Palestina e a vida das pessoas que residem nos Territórios Palestinos Ocupados palestinos e colonos judeus. Desta forma, serão historicamente e analiticamente examinadas as principais manifestações deste fenômeno, como o desenvolvimento da política de assentamentos judeus nos territórios palestinos e os instrumentos legais e burocráticos de controle social da população palestina entre 1967 e 2013. Pretende-se identificar a racionalidade da burocracia colonial israelense. O problema central da presente investigação reside na contraposição dos argumentos oficiais das autoridades israelenses à respeito da presença judaica nos TPO e do impasse político com os palestinos, trancados nos paradigmas da segurança e do conflito, com o espectro proposto da judaização da Palestina, que trata da colonização, desapropriação, deslocamento voluntário e involuntário e controle social de um grupo étnico social dominante e estrangeiro sobre outro subjugado e indígena. Pretendo sustentar que a narrativa da judaização em oposição à narrativa hegemônica sionista é a mais apropriada para compreender alguns aspectos centrais da relação entre judeus e palestinos naquela terra, como a fragmentação espacial da Cisjordânia, o isolamento da Faixa de Gaza, os silenciosos despejos em Jerusalém Oriental e a manutenção do status quo. As autoridades israelenses conseguiram, por meio do projeto de judaização, despolitizar a questão Israel-Palestina, transformando-a em uma discussão econômica, humanitária e de segurança