Gregory Starrett

Gregory Starrett
University of North Carolina at Charlotte | UNC Charlotte · Department of Anthropology

Doctor of Philosophy

About

45
Publications
9,565
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683
Citations
Introduction
Additional affiliations
July 2008 - March 2021
University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Position
  • Professor (Full)
Education
September 1983 - June 1991
Stanford University
Field of study
  • Anthropology
September 1979 - June 1983
Northwestern University
Field of study
  • Anthropology

Publications

Publications (45)
Article
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On 6 January 2021, an overwhelmingly white, Christian mob stormed the US Capitol building in Washington DC as part of a rally to ‘Save America’. Moving beyond media reports and the analyses of popular pundits, the authors provide an ethnographic outline of some of the complexities and contradictions on display that day. Thinking with Hannah Arendt,...
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Recent public protests against right‐wing politics in the United States have often demonstrated a sense of surprise at the recurrence of racist, anti‐Semitic and fascist ideologies and movements which ought to belong to the past. Using insights from Walter Benjamin, Johannes Fabian and Jacques Derrida, the authors analyze the recent gathering of th...
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This is a commentary on a set of papers, "Religions and Their Publics," from the SSRC's blog The Immanent Frame. It applies the ethnographic details of these papers to John Rawls' theory that the development of an "overlapping consensus" is the basis of liberal politics. I argue that the development of such overlapping consensus is neither a politi...
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Here are the proofs of your article. • You can submit your corrections online, via e-mail or by fax. • For online submission please insert your corrections in the online correction form. Always indicate the line number to which the correction refers.
Chapter
IntroductionThe State of the FieldThe Moral Edification of YouthState Schooling and the Struggle for Moral AuthorityConclusion References
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KeywordsNation of Islam–Elijah Muhammad–Black Muslims
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The North American public sphere is suffused with claims and counter-claims about the relationship between Islam and violence. Schools and publishers have responded with training programmes for teachers and curriculum units for students introducing them to the Middle East and its dominant religious tradition. Such programmes are often accused by lo...
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It has become a nearly universal reflex to think about the contemporary Middle East as a region in which secularism is in decline. This is particularly true in countries like Egypt, where the modernist imagination of independence-era socialism seems to have been eclipsed by a grassroots vision of the future as a thoroughly Islamic place, and where...
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Anthropology's rediscovery of material culture has emphasized the centrality of objects and their production in constituting human experience. In Egypt, the design, mass production and marketing of different classes of religious objects-from prayer beads and bumper stickers to children's board games and jigsaw puzzles-not only construct boundaries...
Article
The North American public sphere is suffused with claims and counter‐claims about the relationship between Islam and violence. Schools and publishers have responded with training programmes for teachers and curriculum units for students introducing them to the Middle East and its dominant religious tradition. Such programmes are often accused by lo...
Article
•Fashion and the Meaning of Tehrani Style Pardis Mahdavi
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Anthropological fashion moves in a rhythm unlike the deliberate seasonal cycle of the couture houses that design the foulards the French find so troubling these days. But if gray or green is the new black this season in Paris and New York, public has been the new structure in anthropology for several long seasons now, and is only just beginning to...
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This article is about the politics of visual representation, specifically about how the documentary photograph can be used to mobilize collectivities. Images become the medium for transnational political contests in which opposing groups mobilized by projecting onto those images fundamental values: purity versus idolatry, heritage versus fanaticism...
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Mutual Life, Limited: Islamic Banking, Alternative Currencies, Lateral Reason. Bill Maurer. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. 217 pp.
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In Egypt and elsewhere in the Ottoman Empire, the social safety net represented by the extended family branched off in many directions. By Mamluk times, it encompassed the patronage of wealthy and noble families who distributed food to the poor on religious festivals and during times of hardship, and who sponsored the construction of bridges, water...
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In 2004 some of the first evidence began emerging that U.S. armed forces and intelligence agencies were torturing Afghan and Iraq war detainees at both acknowledged and secret facilities around the world. In the case of Abu Ghraib, photographs of the abuse of prisoners eventually led to the prosecution of some of the soldiers involved, but the offi...
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Intellectual practice is marked by a central asymmetry: we explain the beliefs of others with social scientific theories of causation, but do not seek similar causes for our own (self-evidently more reasonable) ideas. So the “fundamentalist” writings of martyred Egyptian intellectual Sayyid Qutb are normally analyzed as outgrowths of anti-colonial...
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Mass Culture and Modernism In Egypt. WALTER ARMBRUST. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1996. xil. 275 pp., illustrations, notes, references, index.
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Excerpt: “In this essay I hope to add an anthropological voice to the conversation about political Islam, one which seeks its context not in relation to some underdefined “non-political” or “traditional” or “pure” Islam, whatever those might look like, but in a rather more general consideration of the nature of religion and politics. . . .[T]he sta...
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This chapter reviews several processes that change the Islamic tradition, not only by molding it into a new format, but also by folding the child's experience of daily life into his understanding of God's will. It looks at the interpretation of culture and the culture of interpretation, and shows how elementary schools introduce students to the pro...
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This chapter examines the four areas where the interests of the state interact with the life cycle of the shabab. These are sexual development and marriage, the awakening of political consciousness and the start of economic activity, the development of attitudes toward official religious institutions, and the role of educational and public outreach...
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This chapter shows how the Egyptians learned about God outside the classroom, starting with the postmodern knowledge about God, which can be found in the bedtime stories Egyptian mothers told their children. It discusses the westernized Egyptian and authentic Islamic cultures, and the importance of parental practices and the child's imitation in re...
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This chapter introduces Egyptian religious culture, focusing on one aspect of this culture, namely the use of a modern public-school system to teach children about Islam and introduce them to God's official public persona. It argues that the increasing control of religious discourse in Egyptian public life since the 1970s is a basic result of Egypt...
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This chapter serves as a documentary supplement to Timothy Mitchell's description of the founding of European-style schools in Egypt, focusing on their use as centers of religious instruction and the detailed strategies incorporated by the school's administrators. It also argues that one needs to go beyond Mitchell's reading of Egyptian history in...
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This chapter outlines Egypt's response to the professionalization of teaching and educational administration during the twentieth century. It takes a look at how the expansion of schooling as a social institution, along with its accompanying theoretical elaboration, affected ideas on the nature and transmission of Islamic religious culture. The cha...
Book
The development of mass education and the mass media have transformed the Islamic tradition in contemporary Egypt and the wider Muslim world. This book focuses on the historical interplay of power and public culture, showing how these new forms of communication and a growing state interest in religious instruction have changed the way the Islamic t...
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In Egypt, twentieth-century developments in psychology and educational theory have combined with market forces and increasing state interest in religious and political socialization to produce radically new ways of transmitting the Islamic religious tradition to children. In conjunction with `Western-style' religious textbooks and examinations in s...
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This article examines how travelers, colonial officials, and educators have treated prayer and other body rituals in Egyptian popular schools. Once the object of colonial critiques of indigenous pedagogy, body ritual has now become the focus of a functionalist discourse that reads bodily postures and movements as natural manifestations of social, i...
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Studies of writing in developing societies generally focus on book, newspaper and commercial literacy, and do not address the cultural significance of writing on craft and manufactured objects, on the one hand, and the use of writing on public signs, murals and billboards, on the other. Although ‘scattered’ indeed, the two latter genres of writing...
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MessickBrinkley, The Calligraphic State: Textual Domination and History in a Muslim Society, Comparative Studies on Muslim Societies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). Pp. 353. - Volume 26 Issue 2 - Gregory Starrett
Article
Thesis (Ph. D.)--Stanford University, 1991. Submitted to the Department of Anthropology. Copyright by the author.

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