Anth 3707
Anthropology of the Middle East
Fall 2017
M/W 2:20-3:35
Professor Ilana Feldman Office: 2112 G St., Room 101
Tel: 994-7728
Email:
Office hours: Tuesdays 2-4pm, and by appointment
Teaching assistant: Ferhan Güloğlu
Office: 2114 G St. Room 101-A Email:
Office hours: Wednesdays 1-2pm, and by appointment
Course Description: Because of the global significance of the Middle East, and perhaps especially from our vantage point in Washington, DC, when we learn about the region we often ask first about the impact of practices, social formations, and events in the Middle East on our lives and on our government’s policies. What anthropology as a discipline asks us to do instead is to try to approach the region on its own terms. What are the things that matter most to people who live in these societies? What do they hope for, value, seek to change in their lives? And, to turn the question back on ourselves, what aspects of life in the Middle East that seem very different from our own may be more similar than we imagine?
To facilitate critical thinking and exchange on these and other important questions, this course explores key themes in the anthropology of the Middle East, including: nations and states, urban life, minorities, conflict, religion, gender. We will read a lot of anthropological texts – both articles and full-length ethnographies – and will work together to explicate their arguments and modes of analysis. We will also learn about the region through other sources, including novels, films, and visual materials. We will learn about many (though not all!) Middle Eastern communities and will encounter them as dynamic, changing, contentious, and also joyful. You should leave the course with a deeper understanding of life in the Middle East and – even more importantly – with new kinds of questions to guide your continued learning.
This course will help you to:
• Recognize and identify the richness and complexity of Middle Eastern societies.
• Interpret the relationship between evidence and argument in anthropological writing.
• Understand and evaluate ethnographic data and anthropological concepts across cultural contexts.
• Critically reflect on ethical challenges in anthropological research and analysis.
• Recognize the value of anthropological ways of learning about and interpreting the world.
• Develop new questions about Middle Eastern societies and peoples. Apply concepts in novel contexts through discussion and writing.
Course materials
The following texts are available for purchase through the GWU bookstore (all purchases are online now) and are on reserve at Gelman library:
Charles Hirschkind, Ethical Soundscapes: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics
(Columbia University Press, 2006).
Amelie Le Renard, A Society of Young Women: Opportunities of Place, Power, and Reform in Saudi Arabia (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2014).
Additional required readings are available through electronic reserves on blackboard. You should print these readings out and bring copies to class.
The novels you will be using for your presentations (see below) are also available at the GWU bookstore.
Reading guides: For each course topic I will give you a reading guide in advance. These guides will orient you to the issues we will explore in the topic, give you questions to think about while you read the assigned texts, and list the keywords that will form the material for your exams. The guides should help you with multiple aspects of your learning. I will hand them out in class (further incentive to be there). If you miss one, get a copy from one your classmates.
Assessment of learning
Attendance and participation
We will be working collectively and collaboratively over the course of the semester. For that reason, my expectation is that you will attend every class and will come prepared by having done the assigned readings for the day. You are responsible for the information presented in class, whether through lecture, discussion, presentation, or film.
Participating in class discussion: Active engagement with the course material is critical to your learning. One key form of engagement is participation in class discussion. We will regularly have both small-group and full-class discussions. You should come prepared to join in these discussions. Participating will help both your learning and your grade.
In-class work: Throughout the semester we will be learning collectively and will be working to connect the readings and topics of the day to broader issues in the Middle East and anthropology. To support these goals, we will regularly have in-class activities and small group discussions.
Each group will write brief notes on their conversation and each member of the group will write their name on the paper. This will provide a record of your participation in class that day, and the notes will give me a sense of what your group discussed. Each person must write their own name on the paper. Writing the name of an absent friend will earn the entire group a zero; any repeat will be treated as a violation of academic integrity. We will do this 10 times over the course of the semester, and I will count 9 of them.
Postings: The texts we are reading are at the center of our learning. Active engagement with these texts is vital – for your learning and for our discussions. To help ensure that we all reading actively, over the course of the semester, everyone is required to post – through Blackboard – 8 200-word reflections on the readings. These are not formal papers, but rather are an opportunity for you to react to and reflect on the readings for the week. Raise questions the readings posed for you, think about how they relate to other things we have read, consider how they fit into the course as a whole. These postings are not a test of whether you “get” the readings, but an opportunity to engage actively with them. These postings will help jumpstart our discussions of the readings, so you should be prepared to talk about your posting in class.
Ethnographic readings of novels: presentation and paper
Novels are different from ethnographies in a crucial way: novels are populated with fictional characters and made-up scenarios and ethnographies are analyses and descriptions of actual people and situations. But both novels and ethnographies describe real social worlds (leaving aside speculative fiction which we will not read here). Literature is also an important form of cultural production. You will have two assignments based on the reading of a Middle Eastern novel (you will pick one from the list below). Both assignments will let you explore and explain what we can learn ethnographically from a work of creative fiction.
Novel choices:
* Amitav Ghosh, In an antique land (New York, A.A. Knopf, 1993).
* Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar, The Time Regulation Institute (New York: Penguin Classics, 2013).
* Abdel Rahman Munif, Variations on Night and Day (New York, Vintage Books, 1994).
* Sayed Kashua, Dancing Arabs (New York: Grove Press, 2004).
* Ali Aswani The Yacoubian building (New York: Harper Perennial, 2006).
* Sahar Khalifeh, Wild Thorns (New York: Interlink, 2003),
* Nagib Mahfuz, Miramar (New York: Anchor Books, 1992)
* Sunnallah Ibrahim. The Committee (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2001).
* Tayeb Salih, Season of migration to the north (London ; New York, Penguin, 2003).
* Ibrahim Abdel Meguid, The Other Place (New York: AUC Press, 2006)
Paper: In this individual assignment you will write a short (2-3 page) paper exploring one feature of the cultural field of the novel, such as: material object, discourse/talk, institution, or practice. You can choose a feature that figures prominently in the book or one that is more marginal, even being mentioned only briefly.
Group presentation: You will also work with a group to prepare and present an ethnographic analysis of the novel to the entire class. The presentation will be one-week after the individual papers are due. Building from the analyses of individual features in your papers, the group presentation should explain the themes of the novel, connecting it to course topics and the assigned readings.
Key themes in Middle East Anthropology
Throughout the semester we will be learning not only about life in the Middle East, but about the questions and methods that anthropologists use when they study this region. You will have several opportunities to reflect on and explore the key themes in Middle East anthropology.
Posting #1: Your first posting – due August 30 – is a 200-word reflection on one of the themes identified in the article, “Anthropologies of Arab-Majority Societies.”
You will have two choices for an essay that engages the themes of Middle East anthropology:
Ethnographic analysis essay: Write an essay (1700-2000 words) analyzing one of the ethnographies we are reading in relation to a key theme in the anthropological literature on the Middle East. For this assignment you need to place the ethnography in the context of a broader scholarly literature, to evaluate its contribution to that literature, and to make a specific argument about that contribution and/or about the topic. This paper will also require you to engage with other readings, from the syllabus and outside the class. You will receive an assignment sheet with further details and instructions. This paper is due on December 11.
Or:
Ethnographic inquiry essay: Over the course of the semester we will read a lot of different anthropological texts, which explore many places and themes. But these texts will not cover everything about life in the Middle East. For this assignment you will start by identifying what else you would like to know about the Middle East. And then you will write a 1,700-2,000 word essay proposing an ethnographic study about this topic. This essay should describe your central research question, explain why this question is important, identify existing research relevant to your topics, and explain what ethnographic evidence you would need to answer this question.
When anthropologists apply for funding to support their research, they have to write proposals that address these same issues. You get to do it without the requirements of funding agencies. You will receive an assignment sheet with further details and instructions. This paper is due on December 11.
Exams
There will be two exams in the course, a mid-term on October 25 and a final on December 13. These exams will ask you to describe and explain the key terms that we will be learning throughout the course. They will also ask you to analyze these terms and concepts in novel settings: for example, by using an analytic concept we read about in an article about Jordan to understand a social practice that we learned about in a text on Egypt.
Course calendar
Part One: Orientations
What is the anthropology of the Middle East?
August 28: Introduction: What is the Middle East?
Read before class: The syllabus
August 30: Themes in Middle East Anthropology Read before class:
Lara Deeb and Jessica Winegar, “Anthropologies of Arab-Majority Societies” Annual Review of Anthropology
Assignment: Posting #1 Due
September 4 – no-class; labor day
Challenges of studying the Middle East: Stereotypes and other interference
September 6: Media coverage Read before class:
Edward Said, Covering Islam, Chapter 1 and 2
In-class film: Reel bad Arabs: how Hollywood vilifies a people
Assignment: email me your top 5 choices for presentation groups (in order of preference) by today
September 11: Gender and intervention Read before class:
Lila Abu-Lughod, “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and Its Others,” American Anthropologist 104, 3 (2002): 783-790
In-class activity 1: media artifacts Practice and Ethics of Fieldwork
September 13: Challenges of fieldwork in the Middle East
Read before class:
Anita Fabos “Ethical Dilemmas of Research Among Sudanese in Egypt: Producing Knowledge About the Public and Private” in Between Field and Text: Emerging Voices in Egyptian Social Science, ed. Seteney Shami and Linda Herrera, 98-118 (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1999).
Ted Swedenburg, “Occupational Hazards: Palestine Ethnography” Cultural Anthropology
1989: 265 - 272.
September 18: Fieldwork in revolutionary and conflict times Read before class:
Samuli Schielke, “You’ll be late for the Revolution!” An Anthropologist’s Diary of the Egyptian Revolution and What Followed: http://samuliegypt.blogspot.com/
At a minimum read the following dates: 2011: January 30 and 31; February 11; March 7 and
19. 2012: January 30. 2013: June 3. I recommend reading more as well. Ghassan Hage, “Hating Israel in the Field: on Ethnography and Political Emotions”
Athropological Theory 9, 1 (2009): 59-79 Group Presentation 1: In An Antique Land
In-class activity 2: map assignment
Part Two: Political, Social, and Spatial Forms
How do the nation and state shape people’s lives?
September 20: State Read before class:
Esra Özyürek, “Miniaturizing Atatürk: Privatization of state imagery and ideology in Turkey” American Ethnologist 31, 3 (2004): 374-391.
In-class activity 3: identifying “state effects”
September 25: On the state of the state in Turkey Class will be led by Ferhan Güloğlu
September 27: Nation Read before class:
Lila Abu-Lughod, “Ethnography of a Nation,” and “The Ambivalence of Authenticity: National Cultures in a Global World,” in Dramas of Nationhood: The Politics of Television in Egypt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
In-class activity 4: identifying and evaluating evidence: part 1 Group Presentation 2: The Time Regulation Institute
Bedouin, Minorities, and “Marginal” people
October 2: Bedouin Read before class:
Donald Cole “Where Have the Bedouin Gone?” Anthropological Quarterly 76, 2 (2003):235-67.
In-class activity 5: working with paired ids
Group Presentation 3: Variations on Night and Day
October 4: Race and Sectarianism Read before class:
Elizabeth Smith, “Place, Class, and Race in the Barabra Café: Nubians in Egyptian Media,” in Cairo Cosmopolitan, ed. Diane Singerman and Paul Amar, 399-413 (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2006).