Books by Loring M. Danforth

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 Kingdompaints 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.

Examines the Macedonian conflict in light of theoretical work on the construction of national identities and cultures and the invention of tradition. This book analyzes two issues: the struggle for human rights of the Macedonian minority in northern Greece and the campaign for international recognition of the independent Republic of Macedonia.

"e;If the Saint calls you, if you have an open road, then you don't feel the fire as if it were your enemy,"e; says one of the participants in the Anastenaria. This compelling work evokes and contrasts two forms of firewalking and religious healing: first, the Anastenaria, a northern Greek ritual in which people who are possessed by Saint Constantine dance dramatically over red-hot coals, and, second, American firewalking, one of the more spectacular activities of New Age psychology. Loring Danforth not only analyzes these rituals in light of the most recent work in medical and symbolic anthropology but also describes in detail the lives of individual firewalkers, involving the reader personally in their experiences: he views ritual therapy as a process of transformation and empowerment through which people are metaphorically moved from a state of illness to a state of health. Danforth shows that the Anastenaria and the songs accompanying it allow people to express and resolve conflict-laden family relationships that may lead to certain kinds of illnesses. He also demonstrates how women use the ritual to gain a sense of power and control over their lives without actually challenging the ideology of male dominance that pervades Greek culture. Comparing the Anastenaria with American firewalking, Danforth includes a gripping account of his own participation in a firewalk in rural Maine. Finally he examines the place of anthropology in a postmodern world in which the boundaries between cultures are becoming increasingly blurred.

A photographic essay which conveys the emotional power of the death rituals of a small Greek village - the funeral, the singing of laments, the distribution of food, the daily visits to the graves, and the rite of exhumation.

At the height of the Greek Civil War in 1948, thirty-eight thousand children were evacuated from their homes. The Greek Communist Party relocated half of them to orphanages in Eastern Europe, while their adversaries placed the rest in children's homes elsewhere in Greece. This book presents a comprehensive study of the two evacuation programs.