The chapter starts with a reflection on the author’s positionality, especially as a British Iraq archaeologist, and how this influences key themes that run through the book regarding who heritage reconstruction is for, the limits of heritage reconstruction, heritage preservation and consensus seeking. This chapter includes several reflections that may seem provocative, perhaps even heretical, to a reader who has been digesting a Western preservationist paradigm most of their life. The author invites readers to reflect on their own positionality and how they are responding to the ideas presented here. The chapter ends with an overview of the histories of colonialism, Orientalism and nationalism as they relate to cultural heritage in Syria and Iraq.

For Gluckman, fame came, at the height of his career, from success as a sociologist of conflict and as a methodologist, most notably in publicizing others’ development of Manchester’s extended case method. Such fame came at a price. This chapter documents the renewed importance that his devotion to ethnographic scholarship, continually updated, has for at least two projects – one comparative, the other transformational. His transformational project aimed to bring together science and history. His comparative project in law, politics and ritual appears all the more fruitful, given the renewed regard for comparison in anthropology, after a period of doubt, even dismissal, of the utility of certain modes as naively empirical or positivist.

Chapter 9 presents a re-analysis of Victor Turner’s masterpiece, Chihamba, the White Spirit. The ritual drama in Turner’s account is tragic; against that, the re-analysis shows another genre of ritual drama: the comedy, teasing and making fun of the subjected, while revelling in Bacchanalian moments and playful sexuality, and while allowing, somewhat muted, alternative fun backstage, gendered for women only. The expressed intent in performance is to bring well-being, personal and communal, for people drawn from many Ndembu villages. Ancestrality is eroticized and conciliated, for the sake of fertility and other mystic benefits, with mysteries of masculinity and femininity under male dominance. Turner relates specific cultural expressions to universals of the human condition, most importantly to the figure he calls ‘the ritual man’; and as the theologian/literary critic, he seeks to convince us of profound truths of the religious imagination. One outcome of the re-analysis is a question: How useful is Turner’s notion of ‘the ritual man’? His appearance may be transfigured, with very different preoccupations in unlike places and ages. The re-analysis undoes Turner’s comparison between the ‘slain god’ in Chihamba and the resurrection in Christianity; instead the argument illuminates the play of magic, tricks and lustful fantasy, as in ancient mystery cults.

This chapter discusses how the media practices of amedia institution relate to the practices ofindividuals. By exploring the thoughts and actionsof non-Muslims’ media behaviour, it is possible toascertain in what ways a mediacratic society informsand structures behaviour. This will provide anatural follow-on from chapters 1 and 2, and informsthe reader as to how media as an institution relatesto socio-political practices.

Chapter 5 examines the turn by A. L. Epstein, Clyde Mitchell and others to relational thought, at first primarily about ties of friendship or kinship and about the structures of these ties. Where an earlier generation of anthropologists in the 1930s had turned to science for physicists’ ideas of process theory, in the 1950s, led by John Barnes and later Mitchell, anthropologists fostered an approach to science through mathematics. After Barnes, Mitchell reformulated mathematical concepts in sociological language and brought graph theory and algebraic ideas and methods to bear on the data of interpersonal relations. Chapter 5 shows, also, how Mitchell responded when the tide of social network analysis turned in a fresh direction, sometimes called ‘The Harvard Renaissance’, and towards ‘block modelling’, in part stimulated by very much faster computers and exponentially more powerful computer programs. Of all the interdisciplinary contributions by members of the Manchester School, the ones that are best known, especially in sociology, are their pioneering parts in the development of this huge growth industry: the field of social network analysis.

Chapter 7 considers the work on law, courts and justice by A. L. ‘Bill’ Epstein, the only one among Gluckman’s students who engaged publicly in sustained debate with Gluckman about the most cherished ideas of his mentor, colleague and life-long cherished friend. Whle he criticized Gluckman’s core arguments on the reasonable man, he and Gluckman remained on the very best of terms. They continued, also, always to make the most of actual cases, the very stuff of everyday hearings in court. Chapter 7, which discloses how they brought their case method to bear in interpretive, forensic and ethical reasoning, locates their arguments in a wider discussion of legal anthropology. Epstein made his contributions with characteristic deliberation. His moves were not only in ethnographic area – from his fieldwork in Zambia and his interest in Central African courts to his research on dispute settlement in Melanesia – but also in a turn from problems of the importance of reason and reasonableness, morality and ethics, in the affordance of justice. In this later turn, his cutting-edge exploration, bridging the anthropology of affect and legal anthropology, continues to be challenging for future research.

The book starts by detailing the theoretical andmethodological background to the work, and how thisinforms the work itself. It then goes on to explainthe significance of each individual chapter to thestudy as a whole, as well as the field ingeneral.

This introduction highlights the many-sidedness of the Manchester School, with its colonial and postcolonial interests. Care is taken to position the book’s author as an insider and to alert the reader to the book’s account of significant diversity in intellectual histories, personal dispositions and careers. This discussion also anticipates the book’s representation of Manchester’s cosmopolitan anthropology and living legacies for the whole development of social anthropology. Much attention is devoted to clarifying the importance of the Manchester tradition of re-analysing ethnography. Re-analysis is considered as one destabilizing strategy among others, such as deconstruction and redescribing, in order to pave the way for the fresh elucidation through re-analysis in Chapter 9 of a classic among Manchester School studies, Victor Turner’s Chihamba, the White Spirit (1975).

In this chapter we look at heritage reconstruction projects from a range of different sizes and budgets that have been proposed for Aleppo, Mosul and Tadmor-Palmyra, and explore the biases inherent in the proliferation of projects around Tadmor-Palmyra. The motivations behind these projects varies as does the quality of the outputs. Common issues in nearly all the projects looked at here are: the privileging of Western, scientific forms of knowledge and technology, leading to technological solutionism coupled with digital colonialism; a lack of local agency; confusion over making available versus making accessible with particular problems around language provision and digital inequalities; and issues around how funding is deployed. In amongst these, however, there are also some glimmers of good practice that focus on ethics, local inclusion and sustainable approaches to heritage reconstruction. These begin to give us hints at alternative modes of practice that we will look at in more depth later in the book.

In this chapter we explore a selection of community-driven projects and consider how these co-created projects might bring about feelings of hopefulness, self- and collective-efficacy and wellbeing in ways that are more powerful than a standalone reconstruction. Where tech is being used, we can see that it is possible to use it in ways that do not fall prey to assumptions of technological solutionism and that can be driven by ethical practice and the needs of the communities involved. Projects such as these give me hope that a different way is possible, one that will use cultural heritage creatively and meaningfully to promote peace, repair social bonds, develop respect and understanding, move on from past hurts in ways that are healthy, and help people build thriving lives that feel safe, hopeful and dynamic. The book ends with a series of recommendations and guidelines about heritage reconstruction, including outlining a consensus process to ensure that any projects meet the needs, wishes and hopes of local communities.