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Zones of Theory in the Arab World
Abstract
Traces the shapes and patterns of anthropological discourse on the Arab world, focusing largely on theory. The paper is concerned both with the relationship of the anthropology of the Arab world to the study of the region and with more general anthropological theory. Looks firstly at those whose Arab fieldwork was been taken up by non-Middle East specialists, and then shows how limited anthropological theorising on the Arab world has been in its concerns and concepts. -after Author
... In this research, we chose to put the spotlight on the Arab world 1 as a source of cross-cultural comparison. We sought to rely on a cultural setting relatively homogenous in terms of some fundamental aspects that help define a culture such as language, religion, values, and traditions (Abu-Lughod, 1989;Deeb & Winegar, 2012;Kuper, 1999). Cross-cultural studies have shown that Arab-majority countries score similarly on cultural dimensions such as individualism or indulgence while scoring rather differently from the United States (Hofstede Insights, 2021). ...
... We argue that the pervasiveness of religion in Arab-majority countries (Abu-Lughod, 1989;Deeb & Winegar, 2012) has led Arab consumers to endorse a positive outlook toward their financial future. Our reasoning is based on the role of religion as a contributing factor to higher levels of optimism (Mattis et al., 2003;Schutte & Hosch, 1996) and a source of beliefs enabling individuals to perceive that God can influence personally relevant outcomes Landau et al., 2018). ...
... On the other hand, religion-and more specifically Islam-has repeatedly been viewed as a central aspect of Arab societies given the pervasiveness of religious rituals in people's lives (e.g., calls to prayer throughout the day) and the attachment to religious values and traditions that often translate into daily habits (e.g., dress code and verbal expressions such as "Inch'Allah" meaning "God willing") (Abu- Lughod, 1989;Deeb & Winegar, 2012). Attesting to the importance of religion in Arab-majority countries, survey data reveal that the proportion of individuals identifying as "not religious" is far lower in the Arab world (i.e., 1%; Pew, 2015) than in the United States (i.e., 26%; Pew, 2019). ...
This cross‐cultural experiment (N = 1000) shows that messages designed to promote financial literacy are differently effective among US and Arab consumers depending on the salience of materialistic thoughts at the time of exposure. Among US consumers, financial literacy messages increased savings intention by heightening the importance of saving when materialistic thoughts were salient but had no impact otherwise. This is consistent with existing research that has largely focused on WEIRD countries (Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich, Democratic; Henrich et al., 2010). However, among Arab consumers (data collected in the United Arab Emirates), we found that financial optimism was a key construct to explain savings behaviors. Specifically, our results show that financial literacy messages lower levels of financial optimism and, thus, increase savings intention at baseline levels. When materialistic thoughts are salient, our results suggest that Arab consumers prefer spending in the presence of financial literacy messages because having materialistic thoughts heightens financial optimism when one is assured that acquiring financial knowledge and skills guarantees one's financial success.
... This growth bifurcated the city into East and West Amman, with the latter characterized by wealthier populations and superior infrastructure, while the former became a densely populated area, housing lower-income communities and significant numbers of Palestinian refugees [6] (Ababsa, 2013). Urban planning choices such as zoning regulations, which favored larger, better-equipped plots in the west, reinforced these social divides [7,8]. ...
Amman, the capital of Jordan, has undergone significant urbanization over the past seventy years, evolving from a small village into the nation’s largest city. This rapid growth has led to unpredictable population increases, creating socioeconomic disparities and affecting residents’ access to services and overall wellbeing. This study investigates the impact of service accessibility on wellbeing in two neighborhoods of Amman: Abdoun Al-Janoubi and Al-Zahra. Data were gathered from 492 household heads through structured interviews and systematic sampling. The study analyzed accessibility factors such as safety, convenience, comfort, and esthetics, and their influence on residents’ wellbeing, defined by positive emotions, social relationships, and overall life meaning. The results indicate a robust correlation between service accessibility and resident wellbeing, with Abdoun Al-Janoubi demonstrating superior accessibility and higher wellbeing compared to Al-Zahra. Key insights are illustrated, with data supporting the idea that enhanced urban service access improves quality of life. Safety and esthetics are critical factors, while comfort is less significant. Abdoun Al-Janoubi’s favorable attributes lead to higher wellbeing scores. Recommendations for urban planners include improving Al-Zahra’s infrastructure, enhancing esthetics, and optimizing public transport. Community organizations should promote social engagement, while local governments need to adjust zoning laws and upgrade public amenities.
... Ethnography can both expose the operations of these harmful systems and epistemologies and elucidate their vibrant alternatives. This section, for reasons of scope, focuses on the work of anglophone sociocultural anthropologists based in the North Atlantic and other major settler colonies (reviews of older literature include Abu-Lughod, 1989;Deeb & Winegar, 2012). I focus on three ways that SWANA anthropology can challenge universalizing and colonial structures: by confronting the cultural assumptions of US and European empire; by analyzing the complex effects of the war on terror; and by addressing racial and colonial structures within the region. ...
In the anthropology of Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA), there is an effort underway to decolonize the field. This process is taking shape in academic writing, in academic institutions, in field practices, and among broader publics. It must arise from priorities in the region; it also builds on wider scholarship on race, indigeneity, and militarism. It requires an expansion of the bounds of politics, consideration of who can participate, and reconsideration of what the goals of political action are. It entails working toward liberations that are always plural. Decolonizing SWANA anthropology faces distinct challenges in the field, the university, and publication processes because scholars produce critiques that expose contemporary colonialisms, including those related to the long war on terror, Israeli settler colonialism, and other colonialisms in the region. Thus, scholars equip themselves with tools to confront and transform academic institutions. Collaborative research designed to produce change can be an important part of decolonizing anthropology, but such research is not possible across all settings.
... In putting together this special forum, we invited contributors from inside and outside the cosmopolitan centers of the academy to write about what the decolonization of anthropology means where they work; how decolonization is conceptualized and contested; how anthropologists in their community relate to particular regional histories of colonization, including settler colonialism; and what analytical traditions prevail in their "zones of theory" (Abu-Lughod, 1989). In addition to the first-order and nonmetaphorical mandate for "land back" that decolonization demands (Tuck & Yang, 2012), the contributions to this special forum show how varied and situated the stakes are under the contested sign of decolonizing the discipline. ...
... As war, occupation, and authoritarianism have rendered Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Palestine, and Egypt increasingly dangerous, if not impossible, to research, Lebanon became a compelling field site for anthropology graduate students interested in the Middle East. Thus, in the anthropology of the region, Lebanon has perhaps emerged as a new "prestige zone" (Abu Lughod, 1989;Deeb & Winegar 2012). After all, war and violence are not just theoretical or ethnographic subjects; they are often the conditions of possibility, and impossibility, for funding, access, mobility, and academic knowledge production. ...
... This amalgamation of topics that make up Islam has been pointed out by numerous scholars, whereby I find(Ahmed 2016;Abu Lughod 1989) most insightful. ...
Islamic higher education finds itself at the cross-roads of a variety of developments: it oscillates between the ‘teaching into’ approach of Theology and the ‘teaching about’ approach of Religious Studies, between the security-driven need for a ‘European Islam’ and a European Muslim-driven need for a high-quality education in ‘Islam in Europe’, between traditional one-way knowledge dissemination and innovative two-way knowledge sharing, and between Islam as defined and discussed by scholars and Islam as defined and discussed by the public. This myriad of dynamics is challenging and a source of tensions among all parties involved, in particular between lecturers and students. In this article, a qualitative self-study research based on personal experiences with various Islamic higher education programs at Leiden University will be used to reflect on the broader developments in Islamic higher education programs in Europe. It argues that thinking about Islamic higher education is not a process of finding solutions to problems but is a process of educational opportunities and innovation.
... [7] En la misma línea de Abu-Lughod (1989), quien identificó el "harem", la "tribu" y el "islam" como las tres zonas de teoría de este ámbito de conocimiento. ...
Cómo citar este artículo / Citation: Lems, J. M. 2020. "Los musulmanes y la esfera pública. Transformaciones en la España del siglo XXI". Revista Internacional de Sociología 78(3):e165. https://doi.org/10.3989/ ris.2020.78.3.20.001 Resumen A partir de una selección de publicaciones académicas re-cientes, este artículo indaga en la situación actual de las poblaciones musulmanas que viven en el Estado español para reflexionar sobre el lugar que viene ocupando el islam en la esfera pública española durante esta última década. El aumento del número de ciudadanos y ciudadanas espa-ñolas musulmanas, la mayor visibilidad y diversidad con las que expresan su identidad musulmana en el espacio urba-no, así como su participación en la vida social, económica y política han contribuido a crear y transformar múltiples esferas públicas. No obstante, dicha presencia y contribu-ción se enfrentan a menudo a distintos procesos como la invisibilización o la "extranjerización" de la población mu-sulmana, en particular de los jóvenes y las mujeres, e inclu-so la criminalización de determinadas prácticas religiosas. Esta praxis discriminatoria contribuye al silenciamiento de potenciales nuevos actores sociales y políticos y llevan a plantear la cuestión del papel que juegan las instituciones públicas en esta realidad.
Groups labeled “tribes” are at the core of anthropology's rethinking of its older ethnological avatars. This article examines the complex and evolving notion of “tribe,” uncovering successive layers of meaning and politics that have accreted over centuries. It traces an intellectual genealogy of the term, increasingly in vogue in Euro-American debates over the future of liberal democratic societies. The article locates the epicenter of tribalism in the Indian Ocean, where it has coexisted with a “thin liberalism” over the past two centuries, and where invocations of timeless “tribes” conceal all-too-modern social structures. While colonial anthropologists and administrators infused new meaning into preexisting ideas, colonial subjects were not passive victims but active partners in constructing and governing “tribes” in colonial and postcolonial territories. A comparative and historical analysis across the Old World of Afro-Eurasia thus highlights the significance of “distributed sovereignty” in shaping both continuities and changes into the present. Understanding the myriad pasts of “tribes” and the historical texture of ethnopolitics in the East and West is also important for thinking reflexively about our own roles as producers of social-scientific knowledge. Not only might we recognize trends and tropes of (re)making tribes, but we may also unshackle ourselves from the burdens imposed on us by shared, unacknowledged imperial pasts.
This chapter is an annotated bibliography of texts from the fields of anthropology, history, literature, political science, and travel writing which relate to the Arabian Peninsula. The books and articles are arranged by topic and country for researchers interested to see what kinds of work have been done and for readers looking for more in-depth information. There are also short essays on the importance of changing your ideas and acknowledging when you are wrong while doing research, as well as how to pick a fieldsite. Next the chapter gives a selected bibliography of texts pertaining to specific Arabian Peninsula counties. This is followed by short lists of texts pertaining to reoccurring themes in Arabian Peninsula research: Islam, Partner studies, Labor/Migration, Politics/Power, Social life/Family, Survive/Thrive, Tribes, and Woman.
The last decade has seen an intensification of anti-trans mobilisations as backlash to efforts to expand rights and increased visibility in multiple countries. Analysis of newspaper coverage in Spain and the United States reveals that science and religion are employed in justification of such mobilisations. However, neither the sociological study of gender and sexuality or of science and religion has paid attention to this intersection. Drawing upon Raewyn Connell’s work on gender and power and using Spain as the primary case study with comparison to the U.S., this field-scoping article first demonstrates that hegemonic structures of Christianity and a biological determinism are employed together in conservative rhetoric and action, in transnationally connected ways. Second, building upon Connell’s concept of ‘arenas of struggle’, the concept of the (embodied) battlefield is proposed to highlight how scientific and religious authority, institutions, and discourses can be weaponized in ways that harm trans people, and sensitise scholars in the fields of gender and sexuality, and science and religion, to how these fields are deeply mutually implicated. Further work studying the impact upon trans people, international comparisons, applying the frame to other gender and sexuality issues, and queering the battlefield is called for.
Cultural anthropology took a late interest in the Arab world because the populations that inhabited this region were considered too complex to be a legitimate object of the discipline. Despite the existence of literature written by European administrators and missionaries aimed at mapping the social customs and cultural traditions of the colonised, in most Arab countries anthropological studies were born in the postcolonial period. Condemned as colonial knowledge, with few exceptions, cultural anthropology was absent from university curricula and an object of suspicion over several decades. This chapter intends to trace the broad outlines of the history of cultural anthropology in the academic institutions of Arab countries, exploring its complex relations with the colonial period and the political dynamics that influenced its development after independence.
Sampling from the “Indigenous turn” in anthropology, this article asks what might be relevant for our thinking about the politics and ethics of social research practices in the Middle East/North Africa (MENA) region from the decolonizing efforts of those working in New Zealand, Hawaii, Bolivia, and Native America. It begins with Linda Tuhiwai Smith's 1999 classic Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples and her judgment that “from the vantage point of the colonized . . . the term ‘research’ is inextricably linked to European imperialism and colonialism.” Decolonizing means shifting the focus from the power/knowledge formations and questions of representation that Edward Said's work highlighted for those of us in MENA studies toward the ethics of social research itself and the silences on the political contexts that shape research and make research possible. If we were to transpose the practical ethical questions about the methods and purposes of social research, imagining our research subjects as analogous to “Indigenous” people in settler-colonial states insofar as they are living in the region or coming from the region under study—despite their diversity of location, class, ethnicity, religion, social capital, political power, living conditions, and possibilities, not to mention experiences of displacement, coercion, and violence—how would the decolonial impulse translate?
This essay discusses the discourse of race and racism as a “new zone” of theory grounded in orientalist claims about discovery and saving. It shows how this discourse centers slavery as an ultimate lens through which to understand the race question in the North Africa. The essay asks these questions: why have race and migration in North Africa and the Middle East become such an active zone of theory? Which concepts and frameworks dominate the scholarly debates, and with what political effects? These are consequential questions that the Moroccan case can help answer. A decolonial ethics should begin with the vibrant debates already taking place in Morocco. Moroccans’ engagement with the question of race preceded its discovery as a new field for generating expertise by Western-based scholars and journalists.
Drawing on critical feminist and decolonial perspectives, this article takes research on Iraq as a framework to raise essential questions about politics and geopolitics of knowledge production and about what constitutes the global academy today. It analyzes the structural, infrastructural, and political dimensions that led to Iraq being researched and theorized outside of its borders, and it highlights the systemic inequalities existing between scholars based in the United States and scholars based in Iraq. The article also questions the production of knowledge and the development of research agendas stemming from institutions based in and tied to an imperial power that has destroyed the very possibility of the existence of a robust academic life in Iraq. It also proposes an alternative research imaginary that politicizes research ethics by putting justice and equality over an obsession for research.
Its about Han Chinese conversion to Islam.
This chapter summarizes the main arguments of the book based on the paradigm shifts in the ethnographic discourses on women and Islam in Turkey. A major outcome of these shifts is the emergence of an ethnographic discourse that counters Orientalism; this has caused the production of knowledge to cluster around research questions and issues that address the relationship between women and Islam—primarily in relation to the different phases of Islamist movements. This study argues that this clustering, which indicates the points at which social conflict and power struggles have taken place in relation to the tensions between secularism and Islamism, also reflects the political nature of knowledge production by revealing the researchers’ standpoints based on what they exclude from their research and the truths they circulate in the academic discourse. The gaps and clusters in the literature also indicate the multiple layers of institutional power acting on academic research, rendering some research subjects preferable, attractive or timely. These discourses have been formative in our perceptions of pious Muslim women and the relationship between gender and Islam in Turkey.
The ethnographic study of the relationship between gender and Islam in Turkey has a recent history dating to the early 1980s. This chapter analyses studies published between 1983 and 1992, which have common discursive practices in terms of their focus on how women’s subordination is legitimized by Islamic beliefs and traditions. The ethnographies produced by Carol Delaney (The seed and the soil: Gender and cosmology in Turkish village society. University of California Press, 1991), Julie Marcus (A world of difference: Islam and gender hierarchy in Turkey. Zed, 1992), Nancy Tapper (Gender and religion in a Turkish town: A comparison of two types of formal women’s gatherings. Routledge, 1983; Muslim travellers: pilgrimage, migration, and the religious imagination. Routledge, 1990) and Nancy Tapper and Richard Tapper (The birth of the Prophet: Ritual and gender in Turkish Islam. Man, 22, 69–92, 1987) constitute the initial discursive period, with several commonalities in their research questions and analyses. Even though the ethnographic discourse represented by these studies might seem too limited to be defined and examined as a discursive period, it is still possible to recognise and point out circulated statements and representations of gender and Islam in Turkey, the most important of which is the assertion that Islam establishes a gender hierarchy. The analysis argues, however, that these studies have predominantly Eurocentric and essentialist approaches to the subject. They represent Muslim Turkish women as victims of religion, patriarchy and traditions, and fail to consider the complexity and diversity of Islamic beliefs and rites. The lack of comprehensive contextualization and a dynamic historical approach to Islamic culture in Turkey leads to generalizations about a persistent and constant religious structure legitimizing the gender hierarchy.
This chapter describes the social and political background and context of ethnographic discourses on women and Islam in Turkey. Extending the scope beyond a mere chronological narrative, it highlights the main developments and milestones in the history of Turkish modernization on a secularization–Islamization axis, from the foundation of the Republic until 2020. It also explains the transformation of the feminist movement and the history of gender and women’s studies as an academic discipline in the country. It then briefly reviews the global context, starting from the end of the Cold War, focusing on cultural transformations, the emergence of local and global Islamist movements and phases of Islamophobia in global politics in the post-9/11 period and the Arab Spring.
As part of recent years’ efforts at reaching a more context- and diversity-sensitive study of international relations, the nexus between fields of IR and Area Studies (AS) has received a renewed attention. While AS is usually presented as the “contextualizer” of the disciplines, this forum reverses the perspective by suggesting that an awareness of both diversity and context is also relevant when it comes to understanding the evolution of the field of AS and its relations to IR. In this forum, a selection of scholars with diverse backgrounds (US, Middle East, Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Central Asia), different (inter)disciplinary trainings and regional orientations examines how various fields of AS and its relations to the disciplines vary, and what follows from a stronger attention to such kind of diversity. By contextualizing the contextualizers, the forum brings attention to how a context-sensitive field can also suffer from its own provincialism. While the US-centric narrative about AS might have been almost “hegemonic,” at closer inspection, it turns out that AS in different (sub)disciplinary and geographical settings have evolved differently, and in some places the so-called Area Studies controversy (ASC) has been almost absent. A broadening of the perspective also reveals how the challenges to a successful cross-fertilization are not limited to those outlined in the “classic” ASC, but the forum does simultaneously offer encouraging lessons on how dialogues between area specialists and discipline-oriented scholars can help to overcome epistemological, theoretical, or methodological blind spots. Rather than presenting the IR/AS nexus as a panacea per se, the aim of the forum is therefore to invite to a broader and more self-reflective discussion on some of the opportunities as well as challenges associated with this strategy for making the study of international relations more context-sensitive and attentive to different forms of diversity.
This study examines novels by two contemporary Khaleeji authors and their engagement with desert modernity. Their works challenge the romanticization of the desert in modern Arabic literature as a pre-modern space defined and dominated by men. Examining Amal al-Fārān’s Ghawwāṣū al-aḥqāf [The desert divers] and ʿAbd Allah al-Buṣayyiṣ’s Ṭaʿm al-dhiʾb [The taste of the wolf], both published in 2016, the study aims to demonstrate how desert space is used to question and redefine concepts of belonging, alienation, agency, and gender. Al-Fārān counters the dichotomous representation of male domination/female subordination through female characters who assert their agency in different power structures; similarly, al-Buṣayyiṣ’s Ṣaʿlūk figure reflects the diversified desert community in a contemporary context, shedding light on alienated personas erased from the collective memory of the desert.
Turkish television serials' reception among women viewers in rural Türkiye: Gendered and generational readings between younger and older women ABSTRACT This study explores how rural women in Büyükkarabag, a village in western Türkiye, interpret popular Turkish drama serials on national television in relation to local values and moralities surrounding gender roles, honour, family values and motherhood. Through extensive informal conversations, structured and unstruc-tured ethnographic interviews and participant observations, the sociocultural dynamics influencing audience behaviour and attitudes were analysed. The study includes repeated in-depth interviews with 40 women villagers during summer and autumn, 2022. The findings reveal significant differences in the interpretation of Turkish serials between older and younger women, as well as generational conflicts in ideology, and tensions in understanding gender roles and honour. Older women perceive a disconnect between the urban and liberal representation of daily life in Turkish serials and local culture, while younger women view them KEYWORDS television drama rural women generational values gender culture Delivered by Intellect to:
Within scholarly literature as well as reports from humanitarian actors, including international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), United Nations agencies and local NGOs, Syrian marriages are often described in static, essentialist ways that reinforce Orientalist assumptions. Based on feminist ethnographic research with Syrian women and men in Jordan, this article explores marriages in historical and intersectional context, before and during displacement. The article challenges common representations of Syrian marriages and advances how Syrian women's power and agency are understood. It emphasizes women's role in deciding to marry (or not) and discusses violence and love in marriage and resistance to proposed love marriages.
PDF: https://vbat.org/article909
With massive urbanization across the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region over recent decades, research in urban anthropology has intensified. During the 1970s intense population growth (demographic transition) and rural‐to‐urban migration attracted the attention of many anthropologists who studied the ruralization of the city and its capacity to integrate newcomers. Anthropologists (and geographers) addressed this concern by focusing on urban practices, especially those taking place on the margins of the city. Today, urban anthropology has become one of the most important empirical and analytical prisms for observing MENA societies. The main achievements and paradigms of urban anthropology in the MENA region are structured along three axes: urbanity and urban practices, public spaces, and urban culture.
This article examines a Christian tradition defined by descent, but a descent that extends beyond family lineages to include relatedness with saints and sacred land. This tradition emerges from the Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem, one of the oldest churches in the world, composed of a Palestinian laity and a Greek monastic hierarchy. Through an ethnography of the Orthodox feast of St George and the ritual use of olive oil from Palestinian villages, the article frames discussion of indigeneity, land, and rootedness around the concept of descent. Putting Palestinian Orthodoxy in conversation with kinship theory and the critique of social structure, it argues against sequestering divine and human forms of relatedness in separate social domains. It suggests the concept of descent can be a powerful tool for integrating them when expanded to include all ‘forces that bring forth life’.
Wary of the 'denial of coevalness' associated with earlier anthropology, anthropologists at the turn of the millennium increasingly emphasized how sharing not just space but also time is constitutive of the ethnographic encounter. However, drawing on online and offline fieldwork conducted in Jordan, I use the tensions between a blood feud and the holy month of Ramadan to illustrate how humans often refuse to inhabit each others' histories and temporal schemes regardless of the presence of anthropologists. I argue that discomfort with acknowledging such refusals of coevalness has increasingly hobbled anthropological description, especially at a time when new communications technologies are reshaping human experiences of sharing (and not sharing) space and time. I suggest that anthropologists would benefit from following many of the Jordanian Muslims I encountered in attending to how one does not 'share time' with various others-as well as the ways in which one does.
Cultural anthropology took a late interest in the Arab world because the populations that inhabited this region were considered too complex to be a legitimate object of the discipline. Despite the existence of literature written by European administrators and missionaries aimed at mapping the social customs and cultural traditions of the colonised, in most Arab countries anthropological studies were born in the postcolonial period. Condemned as colonial knowledge, with few exceptions, cultural anthropology was absent from university curricula and an object of suspicion over several decades. This chapter intends to trace the broad outlines of the history of cultural anthropology in the academic institutions of Arab countries, exploring its complex relations with the colonial period and the political dynamics that influenced its development after independence.
This article is an ethnographic study of a sakan shababiyy––a non-familial domestic space shared by young Syrian men living in exile. Based on fieldwork carried out in Lebanon between 2017 and early 2020, the article describes the texture of everyday life in a space where young men attempt to make home together in exile amidst the escalating pressures of housing discrimination, political repression, and economic collapse. The narration critically engages Bourdieu’s famous analysis of the Kabyle house as a frame for considering the ambiguous ‘reversals and reflections’ that structure domestic space in the aftermath of war and displacement. As a group of formerly middle-class young men rebuild lives upended by violence, peer cohabitation produces a masculine domesticity that is both an improvised and creative response to the exigences of exile and the grounds for orienting towards more optimistic imagined futures.
Since the 2010s, the Middle East and Africa have witnessed a sharp proliferation of insurgent proto-states-territorial enclaves controlled by insurgent groups. Gathering six ethnographic accounts from these regions, this volume seeks to answer the following: How do rebel governments and kin-based forms of socio-political organisation shape and influence one another? When rebels establish territorial control, their emerging proto-states will be shaped by processes of negotiation with pre-existing social forces. Therefore, sociopolitical organisation in rebel-held areas can only be understood by analysing the interactions between "the preexisting" and "the incoming" orders. Nonetheless, as we emphasise in this introduction , the study of kinship groups in conflict areas and rebel governments have developed as two distinct research fields. The aim of this volume is to bring them together and seek a deeper understanding of how kin-based loyalties, networks, institutions, and social conventions may shape and influence rebel governance practices. The volume features many examples of insurgent groups meticulously crafting "tribal administrations" to curtail civilian resistance. Yet, it also shows that the various rebel groups described face far greater difficulties in reforming society culturally, than asserting military dominance over tribal actors. For the rebels, social revolutions are harder earned than political domination. ARTICLE HISTORY
A particular theme dominates contemporary heritage projects in the neoliberal context of Jordan: sustainable development based on participatory approaches. Although these approaches are celebrated in academic and governmental circles, the history and the power dynamics within which they operate remain underexplored. We aim to establish a theoretical framework that examines why and how local communities in the Arab region shifted from the peripheral to the centre, and from background to foreground, of the field of archaeology and heritage. We situate archaeology and heritage within two seemingly different contexts, colonialism and neoliberalism, that have governed the relationship between the West and the Arab region. As we contrast colonialist exclusionary policies with the inclusivity promoted by neoliberal policies in archaeological and heritage projects in Jordan, we argue that despite the obvious differences between the two, they both managed to make substantial shifts in the perception of and attitudes toward archaeology and heritage. In spite of participatory paradigms, the shifts seem to have always come ‘from the outside’, operating on sites and peoples alike.KeywordsColonialismNeoliberalismArchaeology-based and heritage development projectsParticipatory approach
War begets crises that are among the most urgent areas requiring help from the international HCI/CSCW community; yet too few scientists address it using context-based, participatory field methods and by engaging in country and regionally based, longitudinal partnerships. Drawing on the author’s ongoing eight-year engagement as a design ethnographer with UNHCR Jordan and region for the Syrian War, this paper discusses Humanitarian Research as a framework for guiding HCI/CSCW research in conflict zones with displaced persons. Based on the principle of “People First, Data Second,” Humanitarian Research is explained with illustrative examples along with the nature of war and UNHCR’s protection mandate, the research challenges and ethical roles of HCI scientists in conflict zones and how these roles entwine with refugee stakeholders, NGOs, country actors, and university IRBs.
The instrumental use of Muslim women’s experiences as a symbol and justification for Western countries interventions is not a new business and was not employed for the first time in the post September 11th “war on terror” campaigns. Indeed, the production of stereotypes of Muslim women in political platforms can be tracked back to different colonial enterprises. Clearly, as Lughod (2002) has highlighted, the consistent resort to a cultural framing through the equation women/religion/suffering has always been a tool to hide political and economic interests and consequently to bury more complex political and historical developments. In the academic sphere, debates on Muslim women also widened. However, as Lila Abu-Lughod (2002) contended, the efforts were almost put solely on denouncing the great violent and oppressive contexts where those women were living under the barbaric violations perpetrated to them by Islamist movements. Otherwise, if a scholar tried to problematize the cultural framing of Muslim women’s questions, she (or he) would very likely be accused of cultural relativism (Lughod, 2002). Therefore, a sole and unproblematic focus on the suffering of Muslim women is not only futile, but also contributes to reify the old Orientalist perceptions on Islam and Muslim women, and to provide intellectual foundations for Western imperialist wars. The objective of this article, on the contrary, is to raise another set of questions, which I believe to be more urgent. These questions aim at both unpacking Muslim women as a discursive category, and understanding the major challenges their experiences impose on secular feminist conceptions of agency. I contend that addressing these questions is more urgent for different reasons. Firstly, I argue vigorously that apart from the obsessive and somehow blind criticism that religion is inherently patriarchal and consequently oppressive to women, scholarship especially from within feminist theory remained oblivious to a more systematic and self-reflexive engagement with religion and Muslim women. In addition, I argue that surprisingly, even in a period of post-Orientalist deconstruction, which supposedly would have already dismissed those essentialist and repressive accounts of Muslim women and Islam, subtle but very important remnants can still be found on the so called “corrective” postcolonial feminist scholarship on Muslim women. Indeed, there is a plurality of work on Muslim women in the social sciences. However, they are scattered and apparently separated by their own agendas and claims, with very few attempts at dialogue or debate. Hence, a systematic account of this diversity has been missing, one which could provide an up to date appraisal of the state of scholarship and activism on Muslim women, and build a firm foundation for advancing knowledge both of the subject itself and on interdisciplinary efforts like the one I advance here. Therefore, while doing a systematic and critical literature review, oriented specifically by an interdisciplinary approach, I expect this article to fill part of this gap and raise crucial questions in order to build knowledge of the intersection between Muslim women’s studies and feminist theory. It is here where more research is certainly needed in order to reduce the gulf that exists between both areas. The introduction of this article outlines briefly the ways through which Muslim women have been approached as a discursive category, constructing stereotypes of Muslim women in political platforms, as well as on the academic stage. Politically, the production of stereotypes can be tracked back to different colonial enterprises and more recently to the interventions by Western countries that comprised the “war on terror” campaign. On the academic stage, these stereotypes were reproduced in the sole efforts to denounce the great violent and oppressive contexts where those women are living, as previously mentioned. The first section is concerned with the exclusion of religion and more specifically of Muslim women’s experiences from history and feminist knowledge production, including IR feminist studies. I acknowledge that the ontological and epistemological openness in feminist and gender studies in international relations and other areas ensured the recognition of the existence of differences and of multiple “layers” of identities which affect sexed bodies in distinct ways. These were crucial to challenge Eurocentric narratives as the only legitimate source of knowledge production. However, I put forward in this section that despite a greater plurality in feminist studies, there is still a silence from feminist theorists regarding religious women’s experiences, and hence, the importance of religion to women (Salem, 2013). Using the work of Phyllis Mack (2003) I argue that one of the reasons for this gap resides in the metanarrative of secularization, which is the basis of secular feminist scholarship. Within this analytical framework, I analyse how the conceptions of agency and emancipation underlying the different strands of secular feminism are limiting to the different voices and experiences of Muslim women. The second section addresses the challenges Islamic feminism imposes to feminist notions of agency. As religion is seen as inherently patriarchal and oppressive to women, Islamic feminism or any other effort to pursue gender equality from within an Islamic framework would be taken as contradictory or incompatible. By locating the struggle within a religious framework, and at the same time claiming for the existence of what seems to be the untouchable foundations of Islam, Islamic feminists are cast away from secular feminisms. I argue that those experiences of activists and scholars make serious challenges to the notions of agency based on rationality and secularity as the only pillars whereby women can struggle for and reach gender equality. As a result, Islamic feminism(s)’s experiences also help to unsettle and complicate some binaries which feminist theory has been contributing to reify, such as secular/spiritual; reason/obscurantism; science/religion; freedom/oppression; modern/backward. In the third section, the article discusses some of the piety women’s movements anchored on Saba Mahmood’s work on pietistic agency, firstly in order to highlight the inability of most feminist scholarship in capturing the diversity of Muslim women’s voices; second to denounce the perilous nature of encapsulating women’s agency solely within “the entelechy of liberatory politics”. These movements advance very different agendas and orientations from the Islamic feminist ones. Those agendas are precisely what denounce the subtle but very important remnants of Orientalist assumptions, particularly its adherence to secular-liberal values, and the teleological conceptions of modernity (Lakhani, 2008). I conclude the article arguing that rather than neglecting the important achievements feminism promoted in the lives of women in different parts of the world, the main intention of this work was to provincialize (to borrow the expression from Chakrabarty) the secular and liberal accounts of agency, feminism, empowerment, freedom and so on, locating them in the historical, political and cultural context that produced the desires that animate them.
Based on first-hand ethnographic insights into Shi'i religious groups in the Middle East and Europe , this book examines women's resistance to state as well as communal and gender power structures. It offers a new transnational approach to understanding gender agency within contemporary Islamic movements expressed through language, ritual practices, dramatic performances , posters and banners. By looking at the aesthetic performance of the political on the female body through Shi'i ritual practices – an aspect that has previously been ignored in studies on women's acts of resistance -, Yafa Shanneik shows how women play a central role in redefining sectarian and gender power relations both in the Middle East and in the European diaspora.
This article investigates the development of militarism in the Arab Gulf using the militarized representation of the Bedouin and their poetic tradition as a site for its analysis. The article traces the ways in which Bedouin ‘martial masculinities’ and Bedouin culture have been appropriated and transformed by British colonialism and postcolonial nationalisms to produce unusual patterns of militarism within the Gulf. It addresses a gap in international relations and security studies literature, in which militarism is examined through state-centric and methodologically nationalist framings that largely overlook transnational and colonial histories. The article argues that contemporary displays of militarism by Qatar and the United Arab Emirates should be read in relation to how colonialism engendered militarism across the Gulf region through the paradoxical representation of the Bedouin as a ‘martial race’ whose martial-ness was also seen as a security ‘threat’ for the colonial/postcolonial state. Militarized responses and rationalities were normalized within Gulf society through the ‘Bedouin warrior’ stereotype, which served as a timeless and fixed construct, connecting the Gulf’s disjointed past to its present-day context. Significantly, the ‘Bedouin warrior’ stereotype helps foster the belief that stability and historical continuity underpin state-modernization processes in Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. The article’s intervention seeks to disrupt this continuity by looking at how militarism and its martial constructs created ruptures in state trajectories, using the example of the 1996 coup attempt, citizen revocations, and the depoliticization of the poetic act as evidence for the claim that militarism engenders particular insecurities for Bedouin populations in the Arab Gulf.
This article draws attention to how management scholars “the outsiders within” who are structurally positioned within the academies of dominant powers might negotiate the complexities of producing a locally rooted and meaningful knowledge, emancipated from the U.S. hegemony while carrying organization studies in Arab countries. Drawing upon my different ethnographic journeys as a researcher, brought up in an Arab country with a Francophone intellectual mindset and studying Arab management practices, I will discuss both the potential for and the difficulties of critical engagement with a decolonizing management research agenda. Then, and building on critical border thinking tradition, I will propose the Egyptian term “Fahlawa” as a metaphor for better describing the challenges of a decolonizing research practice that privileges contestation and perpetual bricolage over formal and universal design. Finally, I will conclude by highlighting the potential of “Fahlawa” as a survival/resistance practice to theorize what is unthought and invisible in management literature and to build situated knowledge less organized by U.S. domination.
While literature on the Middle East has often been preoccupied with the notion of honour and shame, attention on these topics tends to focus on exceptional examples such as honour killings, and less so on everyday practices of upholding honour, including secrecy. Based on anthropological research with Syrian women and men in Jordan, this article explores everyday, gendered practices of secret-keeping and secret-breaking related to six key topics: future plans, marital conflicts, intimate partner violence, relationships with the opposite sex, financial challenges, and personal needs and problems. This article reveals tensions and contradictions in how people adhere to and challenge gender norms in their practices of secret-keeping and secret-breaking. It highlights how secret-keeping is also not only about satisfying (or being seen as satisfying) a collective norm, but at times secrecy may be motivated by self-interest.
Zongos, wards in West Africa populated by traders and migrants from the northern savannahs and the Sahel, are a common sight in Ghana's Asante region where the people of these wards represent a dual-minority as both foreigners and Muslims in a largely Christian area, facing marginalisation as a result. Islam provides the people of the zongos with a common ground and shared values, becoming central to their identity and to their shared sense of community. This detailed account of Islamic lifeworlds highlights the irreducible diversity and complexity of 'everyday' lived religion among Muslims in a zongo community. Benedikt Pontzen traces the history of Muslim presence in the region and analyses three Islamic phenomena encountered in its zongos in detail: Islamic prayer practices, the authorisation of Islamic knowledge, and ardently contested divination and healing practices. Drawing on empirical and archival research, oral histories, and academic studies, he demonstrates how Islam is inextricably bound up with the diverse ways in which Muslims live it.
Drawing on prevalent Euro‐American folk models, extant theories of envy in the social sciences tend to reduce it to an emotion embodied in individual subjects, who are believed to envy those who have more and those who are hierarchically superordinate. Yet envy can also be viewed as a social, intersubjective phenomenon—one potentially incorporating humans and various other‐than‐human entities into complex and unpredictable relationships involving occult phenomena like witchcraft and the evil eye as well as entire families, regions, and abstract identity categories of ethnicity, gender, and class. The tension between ethnographic accounts of envy in the Middle East and Middle Eastern accounts of envy provides an opportunity to explore the phenomenon of “envying down” and an underappreciated, recursive dimension of envy: envying the efficacy of other people's envy. Envy is revealed to be reflexive, relational, and often institutionalized—even within the institution of ethnography itself.
During the autumn of 2012 the Hashemites (sāda) of a hijra I will call Kuthra, located southwest of the capital Sanaa, gradually rephrased their identity in political terms. Over the course of one year, most of them turned into Houthi supporters, prompting an equal and opposite reaction in the Qaḥṭānī Arabs of the village that defiantly adhered to the Islah party. Drawing on extended fieldwork in highland Yemen (2009–2013), this paper tackles identity politics by examining the subtle interplay of life and family stories, modes of livelihood and social institutions in a ‘glocal’ world.By exploring the family stories of two young sāda, the article argues that the rapid and unprecedented social and material changes that interested Kuthra during the last century laid the groundwork for nostalgic representations of a lost past. Building on this emotional foundation, Houthi discourse provided a political narrative capable of orchestrating nostalgic feelings into a coherent life project, thus providing a powerful tool for identity politics.
What constitutes ‘relevant’ and ‘apt’ Islamic knowledge and expert education of future Islamic authorities in Western Europe? This central point of departure of this Special Issue is a burdened question in the current public and political debate in Western Europe. In the last decades, higher education on Islam in Europe has predominantly taken place in two domains: in the publicly funded university context as Islamic Studies, and in the privately funded context of mosques, madrasa’s and teaching institutes, often with strong links to Muslim countries of origin. In recent years, however, different answers have been formulated to this question; alternative initiatives have been taken—or are in the making—to train Islamic experts who are preparing for professional and academic careers in Europe. Publicly funded universities have started to organize imam training or Islamic theology programs, notably in Germany, Belgium, The Netherlands and the Scandinavian countries. Furthermore, private confessional Muslim institutes are now recruiting lecturers who also graduated from Western Islamic Studies university programs. This Special Issue focuses both theoretically and empirically on these new aspirations, initiatives, debates and practices of those various actors who navigate between and beyond. To understand these developments, we need a theoretical framework that is able to deconstruct the power related epistemological narratives constituting these dichotomies. Therefore, we will use this introductory editorial article to elaborate on how these spaces/places of departure are not absolute or analytically stable, but per definition uncertain, blurry and constantly ‘in the making’, constituted by what David Scott has called ‘a problem-space’. Moreover, in addition to thinking only in terms of ‘interstices’ in order to overcome these dichotomies by way of ‘bonding or bridging’, but which often seems to presume an essential character to both ends, we suggest to consider these alternative initiatives in terms of ‘assemblages’.
Discussion on food sovereignty and agro-ecology, and Anglophone rural sociology have blind spots when it comes to the Middle East/North African (Arab) region. This article explores them; outlines some initial concepts, discusses avenues for research, and notes some socio-political features of the region which make it distinct from others. It focuses on the necessity to include war and the national question to understand the regional agrarian question and advances and retreats in regional knowledge production. It proceeds by (1) establishing the relative absence of the region from the leading peasant studies journals; (2) synthesizing the region’s political economy and waves of knowledge production; (3) highlighting local traditions which speak to the questions of food sovereignty and agro-ecology; and (4) listing a series of theoretical, historical, and analytical avenues which remain to be addressed.
Muftis are literate scholars who specialise in Muslim legal-religious interpretation. They provide an example of a higher level of systematic indigenous interpretation than the common sense, everyday constructions of reality that have been discussed in anthropological accounts. I discuss the institutional form of the muftiship, and contrast it with the judgeship, with reference to indigenous ideal-types found in several categories of written Muslim social thought. This ideal form is then compared with the identities of historical and contemporary muftis in Yemen. The interpretive method employed by muftis joins a Greek-derived concept of analogy with recitation and hermeneutics. While their method is structurally similar to scriptural interpretation, muftis are worldly interpreters who address practical life problems posed by lay questioners.
At the turn of the century the societies of the Near East provided materials for some of the most pressing anthropological and sociological issues of the day. W. Robertson Smith, Marcel Mauss, and Max Weber, to name only one representative of three national traditions, all devoted considerable attention to Semitic societies. Since that time, fewer sociologists and anthropologists have had a background in Semitic languages and literatures, and new materials from outside the classical and Semitic cultures have seemed to offer fresher, more challenging problems. In recent decades, Near Eastern societies have come to play a minor role in the development and discussion of anthropological problems. In general, only the tribal societies have maintained any prominence, and even these societies have only been test cases for a theory that was formulated by Evans-Pritchard for the Nuer of sub-Saharan Africa.
QADDAFI'S THEORY OF POLITICS AND POLITICAL ORGANIZATION amounts to the assertion that all forms of representation in fact result in unrepresentative government; that therefore they must be unjust; that therefore they must be replaced by nonrepresentative government. The Green Book describes the institutions of such government but is by no means utterly explicit about the relations between institutions, or about the way personnel are recruited to them. To examine what happens in practice at elections, surely critical events in a nonrepresentative system, suggests that Qaddafi is less a Periclean Legislator than an interpreter, casts some light on the theory, and hints at the nature of the concept of political community underlying both The Green Book and contemporary Libyan society.
The discourse of women's domestic weaving in North Africa embeds a distinctively female worldview. Ethnography concerning one Moroccan text of this discourse is cross-referenced with versions documented across the region. The reconstruction of the historically specific discourse of North African women is followed by an account of the political economy of its dissolution. In hierarchical societies, cultural accounts tap shared, public representations of gender relations, articulations of the dominant ideology. A subordinate discourse, characterized by its coexistence with such a dominant ideology and by its nonpublic, silent quality, can be interpreted using an initial structuralist step. [ideology, gender, cultural theory, North Africa]
Tuhami is an illiterate Moroccan tilemaker who believes himself married to a camel-footed she-demon. A master of magic and a superb story-teller, Tuhami lives in a dank, windowless hovel near the kiln where he works. Nightly he suffers visitations from the demons and saints who haunt his life, and he seeks, with crippling ambivalence, liberation from 'A'isha Qandisha, the she-demon. In a sensitive and bold experiment in interpretive ethnography, Crapanzano presents Tuhami's bizarre account of himself and his world. In so doing, Crapanzano draws on phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and symbolism to reflect upon the nature of reality and truth and to probe the limits of anthropology itself. Tuhami has become one of the most important and widely cited representatives of a new understanding of the whole discipline of anthropology.
Mohammed and Dawia: possession in Morocco
- V Crapanzano
Crapanzano, V. 1977. Mohammed and Dawia: possession in Morocco. In Case Studies in Sp irit Possession, ed. V. Cra panzano, V. Garrison. New York: Wiley and Sons
Shahhat: An Egyp tian
- R Critchfield
Critchfield, R. 1978. Shahhat: An Egyp tian. Syracuse: Syracuse Univ. Press
Doing Daily Battle: Interviews with Moroccan Wo men
- F Mernissi
Mernissi, F. 1989. Doing Daily Battle: Interviews with Moroccan Wo men. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univ. Press