A Companion to the Anthropology of the Middle East

Soraya Altorki

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781118475614
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781118475652
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

A Companion to the Anthropology of the Middle East presents a comprehensive overview of current trends and future directions in anthropological research and activism in the modern Middle East.

• Named as one of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles of 2016 
• Offers critical perspectives on the theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical goals of anthropology in the Middle East
• Analyzes the conditions of cultural and social transformation in the Middle Eastern region and its relations with other areas of the world
• Features contributions by top experts in various Middle East anthropological specialties
• Features in-depth coverage of issues drawn from religion, the arts, language, politics, political economy, the law, human rights, multiculturalism, and globalization

PART I
Introduction: Theoretical and Conceptual Issues

CHAPTER 1
Enduring Concerns, Resilient Tropes, and New Departures: Reading the Companion

Deniz Kandiyoti

The reader perusing this volume will not fail to be struck by the dizzying array of topics, themes, and approaches characterizing the anthropology of the Middle East in the opening decade of the twenty-first century. Initially identified with the study of bounded cultures, the anthropological enterprise has become increasingly expansive, extending its reach to diverse manifestations of globalization. This expansive thrust now subsumes the study of phenomena such as neo-liberalism, development, humanitarianism, social movements, new media and cyberspace, popular culture, transnationalism, migration, forced displacement, and diasporas—all featured in the chapters to follow—within the remit of anthropological enquiry.

The breadth of this remit inevitably mandates a (possibly salutary) blurring of disciplinary boundaries. How do anthropologists of the state, for instance, manage not only to survive but to thrive on the established turf of political science? How do ethnographic sensibilities inflect and illuminate the ways in which we approach phenomena studied by political economists, legal scholars, sociologists, or, indeed, historians? The same questions apply to the fields of art and aesthetics, popular culture, poetry, biomedicine, urbanism, and many others. Does it come down to a question of methodology (assuming there is some agreement about the methods that characterize the field)? Or does it come down to remaining anchored in recognizable canons of the discipline (although these are also shifting, as Altorki reminds us in her comprehensive discussion of the important questions of structure and agency in Chapter 3)? I would like to suggest that, despite their diversity, the contributors to this volume are engaged in an ongoing conversation about how to do anthropology in the Middle East. They all share preoccupations—some more explicitly articulated, and others more implicit—about the conditions of knowledge production, the choice of paradigms, and the methodologies that characterize anthropological enquiry.

It is not my intention to reprise or evaluate successive attempts at stock-taking of the state of play in the anthropology of the Middle East (Fernea and Malarkey 1975; Abu-Lughod 1989; Deeb and Winegar 2012), nor to comment on the field at large, but rather to tease out the enduring concerns that permeate the treatment of seemingly disparate themes in this volume and to identify both productive openings and the points at which theory risks congealing into conventional wisdoms that may inadvertently limit our field of vision.

Troubled Legacies: Knowledge Production in the Middle East

No social science or humanities discipline has been more explicitly—or vocally—preoccupied about the grounds of its own existence than the anthropology of the Middle East—and for good reason. Involvement of European powers—France and Great Britain in particular—in colonial expansion from the eighteenth century onward, their encroachment on Ottoman lands throughout the nineteenth century until the demise of the empire, and their continuing grip up to decolonization after World War II have meant that knowledge of the languages and cultures of subject populations remained central to the arsenal of imperial governance. The various European schools of “Oriental studies” (with their distinct French, German, and British variants) harnessed academic knowledge, sometimes of remarkable erudition, to the task of consolidating spheres of influence and administering dependencies.¹ If the missionary was one of the key figures of the Spanish conquest of the Americas, the trained administrator was certainly an important player in the Middle East and North Africa.

Little wonder then, as Steve Caton points out in Chapter 4, that anthropology was the discipline that was most vulnerable to the Saidean critique of Orientalism (1978) and most painfully conscious of its potential collusion with centers of imperial power.² This “original sin” has not only haunted the discipline and its vexed politics of representation (a matter not necessarily remedied by the inclusion of a growing number of “native” anthropologists based either in Western academe or in universities in their own countries or regions), but has also fuelled passionate debates on the nature and effects of colonial encounters, post-coloniality, modernity, liberalism, secularism, and, more recently, neo-liberalism. These broader debates (drawing upon philosophy, history, metaphysics, comparative literature, and hermeneutics, among others) act as a meta-narrative that cuts across various sub-fields of anthropology and informs numerous contributions to this volume, whether they are dealing with law (Chapter 18), history (Chapter 22), biomedicine (Chapter 11), gender (Chapter 9), sexuality (Chapter 8), urbanism (Chapter 23), development (Chapter 19), religion (Chapter 7), political economy (Chapter 20), humanitarianism (Chapter 14), or aesthetics (Chapter 5).

The question of when and how the “colonial gaze” turned upon itself, putting its own discourses, institutional practices, and apparatuses of power at the center of anthropological enquiry, is undoubtedly important. However, a few words may first be in order about the material conditions of knowledge production that act as the backdrop to the intertwined histories of the fields of “area studies” and the anthropology of the Middle East.

The moment of decolonization in the aftermath of World War II coincided with the period of Cold War rivalry between the superpowers. This is generally assumed to have prompted the institutionalization of an infrastructure for “area studies” in the United States, although more nuanced accounts of these beginnings suggest a more complex history (see Mitchell 2002). This infrastructure, aptly described by Suad Joseph in Chapter 2, was consolidated through the Title VI of the National Defense Education Act of 1958, which launched the National Resource Centers for area studies, and the Fulbright-Hays Act of 1961, which funded doctoral and post-doctoral fellowships. The influx of federal funding—reaching its peak in the 1970s—contributed significantly to the growth of research on the Middle East, and anthropology was among the beneficiary disciplines.

At its best, area studies served to “deparochialize” US and Eurocentric social sciences, but it also created tensions with disciplines over intellectual agendas and resources. Nonetheless, up until the fall of the Berlin Wall, area studies remained an established and well-resourced large-scale interdisciplinary project in the United States and across numerous European universities.³ A prolonged crisis was triggered by the end of the Cold War, which occasioned a thorough “rethinking” about the utility of and need for area studies. This translated into declining Title VI funding and the diversion of resources into new international studies programs and initiatives. The advent of an apparently unipolar post-Cold War order gave impetus to the ascendance of the globalization paradigm and led to a reconfiguring of research priorities and initiatives. Yet, as Shami and Godoy-Anativia (2007) argued, the impetus toward internationalization that marked institutional debates of the 1990s was profoundly undermined by the 9/11 attacks in 2001. The most visible fallout was undoubtedly felt in the field of Middle East studies, which became the target of political attacks, especially from neo-conservative quarters, both in terms of its intellectual agendas and its inability to foresee and account for key developments with implications for US security.⁴ The invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the unresolved Palestine–Israel conflict, the continuing fallout of the Arab uprisings, the ongoing wars in Syria and Iraq—all contribute to an inimical conjuncture for field-based scholarship. One of the most serious costs of this conjuncture has been a securitization agenda that now conjoins the study of Muslim diasporas and Islam with that of terrorism and radicalization, potentially placing anthropologists in invidious positions either as adjunct security experts or as spokespeople and apologists for Islamic communities and movements. In brief, the anthropology of the Middle East is currently faced with numerous challenges that necessarily influence knowledge production and the choice of paradigms and research methodologies.

Post-Area Studies Scholarship: Sources of Inspiration

Lest we conclude too hastily that anthropologists of the Middle East are operating in a bleak landscape of polarized discourses and deteriorating fieldwork access (a reality that may entrench textual and discourse analysis as a method of necessity, if not of choice), it is important to recognize the numerous productive avenues and areas of strength. The move away from area studies has encouraged a radical rethinking of the boundaries of the field, or the move to what Suad Joseph (Chapter 2) calls the “unbounding” of the Middle East. This is most evident in the anthropology of Middle Eastern diasporas (thoughtfully surveyed by Paul Silverstein in Chapter 15), with its focus on transnational formations and territorialized modes of cultural belonging. This work, at its best, offers a capacious sense of culture where the movement of ideas, styles, and idioms finally transcend the categories of Self vs. Other.

Historical work on the “anthropology of mobility” has been key to reimagining the notion of “regions” and cultures. Engseng Ho’s (2007) work, analyzed in detail in Chapter 3 by Soraya Altorki, represents an emblematic text that combines a focus on multiple sites (Hadramawt in southern Arabia, the Indian subcontinent, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and China, and back again to Hadramawt) over a time span of five centuries, illustrating how the diasporic was always intrinsic to the local.⁵ Historical anthropology also enables a focus on groups and communities that elude both colonial categories and the majoritarian logic of the nation-state. Hakem Al Rustom (Chapter 22) shows, for instance, how focusing on Anatolian Armenians unsettles the boundaries between the Balkans and the Middle East in post-Ottoman lands, inevitably blurring the borders and expanding the boundaries of ethnographic inquiry. Ignored histories such as those that are traced through life stories, oral narratives, memories, songs, and other immaterial “archives” can serve to contest the colonial and nationalist construction of the “Middle East” since they bring to the foreground the social and political relations with peoples beyond that region. Without these openings, anthropology could fall into the trap of reproducing the nationalist bias of reading back history from the vantage point of ideologies that homogenize the nation and render minority populations invisible. The relative lack of attention to inter-communal interactions, mixed populations, and ethnic and religious minorities are indicative of these biases. More works on collective memory based on combinations of archival material, oral histories, musical traditions, culinary and material cultures, and ethnography would restore their full richness and complexity to Middle Eastern cultures that are often emaciated when apprehended through the limiting lenses of nationalism and Islam.

Working from the “margins” is clearly an important asset for anthropologists of the Middle East. Amira Mittermaier (Chapter 6), for instance, suggests that, as fields of inquiry, “dreams and visions can help us think beyond national, regional, confessional, and secular/religious dividing lines as they tend to exceed linear space and time and draw attention to in-between-ness” (p. 110). If dreams and miracles are understood as spaces for “meaning-making, negotiation, and (re)imagining,” they can certainly lead us to a richer language to talk about politics and utopia. Likewise, rethinking what counts as politics through the unexpected medium of poetry (Chapter 10) opens up promising and creative avenues of defining the political. In this vein, the “refugee camp” appears to be an excellent space from which to engage with concepts such as citizenship and sovereignty. As Dawn Chatty illustrates in Chapter 13, anthropological studies on refugees and forced displacement gave rise to pathbreaking debates on deterritorialization, liminality, and belonging. Finally, the “spatial turn” in the anthropology of the Middle East, presented by Kamran Asdar Ali in Chapter 23, appears to provide an excellent poin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• A Note on the Transliteration of Middle Eastern Language Words, Terms, and Expressions
• PART I: Introduction: Theoretical and Conceptual Issues
• PART II: Culture and Everyday Life
• PART III: Social Relations and Social Movements
• PART IV: Law, Politics, and the State
• PART V: Pop Culture and New Media
• Index
• End User License Agreement