AN392      Half Unit
Anthropological Entanglements in the Middle East

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

Course Convenor

Availability

Requisites

Mutually exclusive courses:

This course cannot be taken with AN292 at any time on the same degree programme.

This course provides a wide-ranging, critical, and historically informed introduction to the ways anthropological knowledge has been produced, used and contested in the Middle East. It examines the conditions of possibility under which the idea of the Middle East as an ethnographic subject emerged,  situated within wider colonial contexts. It examines how anthropology came to turn its gaze upon people long-cast as Europe’s original and exemplary cultural Other, and how, at times, scholars and writers, including anthropologists  have sought to return, reverse or contest the occidental gaze. In doing so the course asks questions around the history, politics and poetics of representation that still resonate in popular discourses about the region today, and indeed in wider anthropology, and have important implications for thinking through our responsibilities as anthropologists and as members of western academic institutions in the face of ongoing epistemic injustice.

The course focuses ethnographically on the Arabic-speaking Mashriq; Egypt, Palestine, Syria, the Arabian Peninsular, Iraq, Jordan and Lebanon, as well as including, to a lesser extent,  work on Iran, Turkey and North Africa. A key theme running through the course is how representations of cultural difference and of modernity have been created, debated, applied to and contested within various Middle Eastern societies. We will follow this theme across the last two centuries in the face of colonialism, war and mass forced migration, from late Ottoman reforms to the Arab Uprisings of the last decade and beyond; from ‘Tanzimat to Tahrir’.  Considering a variety of voices and perspectives, the course will look at the relationship between ethnographies of the region and wider debates in the discipline.

After some initial situating lectures, the course will involve a series of thematic and ethnography-driven lectures and classes, considering key themes and preoccupations in anthropological work in the region. These include; modernisation and colonialism; tribes and states; changing approaches to questions of gender;  approaches to Islam and to religious authority and piety; an examination of anthropological reckonings with complicity in historical and ongoing colonialism and violent dispossesion; anthropologists’ resulting turn towards cities, nationalisms, diasporic communities and migration in the last three decades; an introduction to ethnographic approaches to media and popular cultures; a look at youth, protest and revolution in a historical context; and finally a consideration of anthropological engagements with ideas of ecological crisis and environmental justice in an area widely expected to be especially affected by anthropogenic climate change, but where technocratic attention often ignores its social and political economic implications and intersections.

10 hours of lectures and 10 hours of classes in the Autumn Term.

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Autumn Term.

Essay (1500 words)

Students will have the opportunity to submit one formative essay of up to 1500 words during the course.

Students will be informed of their formative submission deadline by email by the end of Week 3 of term.

Abu-Lughod, L., 2016. Veiled sentiments: Honor and poetry in a Bedouin society. Univ of California Press.

Asad, T., 2009. The idea of an anthropology of Islam. Qui parle, 17(2), pp.1-30.

Armbrust, W., 2019. Martyrs and tricksters: An ethnography of the Egyptian revolution. Princeton University Press

Bayat, A., 2015. “Plebeians of the Arab Spring.” Current Anthropology 56(11): 33-43.

Deeb, L. and Winegar, J., 2015. Anthropology's Politics: Disciplining the Middle East. Stanford University Press.

Ho, E., 2006. The Graves of Tarim: genealogy and mobility across the Indian Ocean. U. of California Press.

Mahmood, S., 2005. Politics of piety: The Islamic revival and the feminist subject. Princeton University Press.

Menoret, P., 2014. Joyriding in Riyadh: Oil, urbanism, and road revolt (Vol. 45). Cambridge University Press.

Mitchell, T., 2002. Rule of experts: Egypt, techno-politics, modernity. Univ of California Press.

Said, E., 1995. W. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon.

Schielke, S., 2015. Egypt in the Future Tense: Hope, Frustration, and Ambivalence before and after 2011. Indiana University Press.

Shryock, A., 1997. Nationalism and the genealogical imagination: Oral history and textual authority in tribal Jordan. Univ of California Press.

Essay (100%, 3000 words) in Winter Term Week 1