Abstract
Harold Innis famously found that the empires of antiquity were based on models of communications that sustained centralized, hierarchical systems of politics, social structure, and culture. We find that the Book of Esther can serve as a corrective to Innis’s top-bottom perspective by revealing latent processes of counter-flow. Alongside the imperial network the book describes communication networks sustaining the peripheral perspective of minorities such as Jews and women scattered over the empire. Mildly subverting Innis we apply his notions of time bias and space bias to describe these two systems of communication densely inhabiting the Book of Esther.
Original language | American English |
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Title of host publication | At the Interface |
Subtitle of host publication | Probing the Boundaries |
Publisher | Brill Academic Publishers |
Pages | 183-204 |
Number of pages | 22 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - 2015 |
Publication series
Name | At the Interface: Probing the Boundaries |
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Volume | 88 |
ISSN (Print) | 1570-7113 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© KONINKLIJKE BRILL NV, LEIDEN, 2015.
Keywords
- ancient empires
- Book of Esther
- communication and religion
- communication history
- Harold Innis
- Jewish communications
- media history
- orality and literacy
- Persian Empire
- social networks
- social organization
- women and communication