Download or read book The Scandal of Continuity in Middle East Anthropology written by Judith Scheele and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2019-09-12 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite a rich history of ethnographic research in Middle Eastern societies, the region is frequently portrayed as marginal to anthropology. The contributors to this volume reject this view and show how the Middle East is in fact vital to the discipline and how Middle Eastern anthropologists have developed theoretical and methodological tools that address and challenge the region's political, ethical, and intellectual concerns. The contributors to this volume are students of Paul Dresch, an anthropologist known for his incisive work on Yemeni tribalism and customary law. As they expand upon his ideas and insights, these essays ask questions that have long preoccupied anthropologists, such as how do place, point of view, and style combine to create viable bodies of knowledge; how is scholarship shaped by the historical context in which it is located; and why have duration and form become so problematic in the study of Middle Eastern societies? Special attention is given to understanding local terms, contested knowledge claims, what remains unseen and unsaid in social life, and to cultural patterns and practices that persist over long stretches of time, seeming to predate and outlast events. Ranging from Morocco to India, these essays offer critical but sensitive approaches to cultural difference and the distinctiveness of the anthropological project in the Middle East.
Download or read book The Scandal of Continuity in Middle East Anthropology written by Judith Scheele and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2019-09-12 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “An exciting and intellectually fluent work that avoids most of the clichés of contemporary anthropological thought.” —Gregory Starrett, coeditor of Teaching Islam: Textbooks and Religion in the Middle East Despite a rich history of ethnographic research in Middle Eastern societies, the region is frequently portrayed as marginal to anthropology. The contributors to this volume reject this view and show how the Middle East is in fact vital to the discipline and how Middle Eastern anthropologists have developed theoretical and methodological tools that address and challenge the region’s political, ethical, and intellectual concerns. The contributors are students of Paul Dresch, an anthropologist known for his incisive work on Yemeni tribalism and customary law. As they expand upon his ideas and insights, these essays ask questions that have long preoccupied anthropologists, such as how do place, point of view, and style combine to create viable bodies of knowledge; how is scholarship shaped by the historical context in which it is located; and why have duration and form become so problematic in the study of Middle Eastern societies? Special attention is given to understanding local terms, contested knowledge claims, what remains unseen and unsaid in social life, and to cultural patterns and practices that persist over long stretches of time, seeming to predate and outlast events. Ranging from Morocco to India, these essays offer critical but sensitive approaches to cultural difference and the distinctiveness of the anthropological project in the Middle East.
Download or read book State Building in the Middle East and North Africa written by Mohammad-Mahmoud Ould Mohamedou and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-10-21 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why have state-building projects across the MENA region proven to be so difficult for so long? Following the end of the Ottoman Empire in the early 1920s, the countries of the region began a violent and divisive process of state formation. But a century later, state-building remains inconclusive. This book traces the emergence and evolution of state-building across the MENA region and identifies the main factors that impeded its success: the slow end of the Ottoman Empire; the experience of colonialism; and the rise of nationalistic and religious movements. The authors reveal the ways in which the post-colonial state proved itself authoritarian and formed on the model of the colonial state. They also identify the nationalist and Islamist movements that competed for political leadership across the nascent systems, enabling the military to establish a grip on the security apparatus and national economies. Finally, in the context of the Arab Spring and its conflict-filled aftermath, this book shows how external powers reasserted their interventionism. In outlining the reasons why regional states remained hollow and devoid of legitimacy, each of the contributors shows that recent conflicts and crises are deeply connected to the foundational period of one century ago. Edited by Mohammad-Mahmoud Ould Mohamedou, the volume features contributions by stellar scholars including Faleh Abdel Jabar, Lisa Anderson, Bertrand Badie, François Burgat, Benoit Challand, Ahmad Khalidi, Henry Laurens, Bruce Rutherford, Jordi Tejel and Ghassan Salamé.
Download or read book Hired Daughters written by Mary Montgomery and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2019-02-19 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hired Daughters examines a fading tradition of domestic service in which rural girls familiar to ordinary Moroccan families were placed in their homes until marriage. In this tradition of "bringing up," the girls are considered "daughters of the house," and part of their role in the family is to help with the housework. Gradually, this tradition is transforming into one in which workers unfamiliar to their host families are paid a wage and may not stay long, but where the Islamic ethics of charity, religious reward, and gratitude still inform expectations on both sides. Mary Montgomery examines why Moroccans so often talk about their domestic workers as daughters, what this means for workers and employers, and how this is changing in contemporary Morocco. Prioritizing the experiences and perspectives of these women, Montgomery charts the tension that has developed between socially embedded, loyal domestic workers who operate within narratives of kinship and obligation and women who seek greater individualization, privacy, and self-empowerment. Hired Daughters offers a nuanced understanding of a world that bridges public and private, morality and money, family and outsiders. In doing so, it provides an intimate consideration of contemporary Moroccan households as economic enterprises and sites of navigation between the traditional and the global.
Download or read book After Society written by João Pina-Cabral and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2020-07-01 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the early 1980s, when the contributors to this volume completed their graduate training at Oxford, the conditions of practice in anthropology were undergoing profound change. Professionally, the immediate postcolonial period was over and neoliberal reforms were marginalizing the social sciences. Analytically, the poststructuralist critique of the notion of ‘society’ challenged a discipline that dubbed itself as ‘social’. Here self-ethnography is used to portray the contributors’ anthropological trajectories, showing how analytical and academic engagements interacted creatively over time.
Download or read book Arab Masculinities written by Konstantina Isidoros and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2022-01-04 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Arab Masculinities provides a groundbreaking analysis of Arab men's lives in the precarious aftermath of the 2011 Arab uprisings. It challenges received wisdoms and entrenched stereotypes about Arab men, offering new understandings of rujula, or masculinity, across the Middle East and North Africa. The 10 individual chapters of the book foreground the voices and stories of Arab men as they face economic precarity, forced displacement, and new challenges to marriage and family life. Rich in ethnographic details, they illuminate how men develop alternative strategies of affective labor, how they attempt to care for themselves and their families within their local moral worlds, and what it means to be a good son, husband, father, and community member. Arab Masculinities sheds light on the most private spaces of Arab men's lives—offering stories that rarely enter the public realm. It is a pioneering volume that reflects the urgent need for new anthropological scholarship on men and masculinities in a changing Middle East.
Download or read book Legal Rules in Practice written by Baudouin Dupret and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-12-30 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Understanding legal rules not as determinants of behavior but as points of reference for conduct, this volume considers the ways in which rules are invoked, referred to, interpreted, put forward or blurred. It also asks how both legal practitioners and lay participants conceive of and participate in the construction of facts and rules, and thus, through decisions, defenses, pleas, files, evidence, interviews and documents, actively participate in law’s life. With attention to the formulation of notions such as person, evidence, intention, cause and responsibility in the course of legal practices, Legal Rules in Practice provides the outlines of a praxiological anthropology of law – an anthropology that focuses on words, concepts and reasoning as actively used to solve conflicts with the help of legal rules. As such, it will appeal to sociologists, anthropologists and scholars of law with interests in ethnomethodology, rule-based conduct and practical reasoning.
Download or read book Rules and ethics written by Morgan Clarke and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2021-08-10 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book investigates the pronounced enthusiasm that many traditions display for codes of ethics characterised by a multitude of rules. Recent anthropological interest in ethics and historical explorations of ‘self-fashioning’ have led to extensive study of the virtuous self, but existing scholarship tends to pass over the kind of morality that involves legalistic reasoning. Rules and ethics corrects that omission by demonstrating the importance of rules in everyday moral life in a variety of contexts. In a nutshell, it argues that legalistic moral rules are not necessarily an obstruction to a rounded ethical self, but can be an integral part of it. An extended introduction first sets out the theoretical basis for studies of ethical systems that are characterised by detailed rules. This is followed by a series of empirical studies of rule-oriented moral traditions in a comparative perspective.
Download or read book Porous Becomings written by Andreas Bandak and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2024-02-23 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the foremost intellectuals of his generation, French philosopher of science Michel Serres (1930–2019) broke free from disciplinary dogmas. His reflections on science, culture, technology, art, and religion have proved foundational to scholars across the humanities. The contributors to Porous Becomings bring the inspirational and enigmatic world of Serres to the attention of anthropology. Through ethnographic encounters as diverse as angels and religious conversion in Ethiopia, the percolation of war in Bosnia, and incarcerated bodies crossing the Atlantic, the contributors showcase how Serres’s interrogation of the fundamentals of human existence opens new pathways for anthropological knowledge. Proposing the notion of "porosity" to characterize permeability across boundaries of time, space, literary genre, and academic discipline, they draw on Serres to map the constellations that connect humans, time, technology, and planet Earth. The volume concludes with a conversation between the editors and Vibrant Matter author Jane Bennett. Contributors. Andreas Bandak, Jane Bennett, Tom Boylston, Steven D. Brown, Matei Candea, Alberto Corsín Jiménez, David Henig, Michael Jackson, Daniel M. Knight, Celia Lowe, Morten Nielsen, Stavroula Pipyrou, Elizabeth Povinelli, Andrew Shryock, Arpad Szakolczai
Download or read book New Directions in Rhetoric and Religion written by James W. Vining and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2021-08-10 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New Directions in Rhetoric and Religion reflects the complex and fluid natures of religion, rhetoric, and public life in our globalized, digital, and politically polarized world by bringing together a diverse group of rhetorical scholars to provide a comprehensive and forward-looking collection on rhetoric and religion. This volume addresses these topics in three separate sections: 1. Rhetorics of religion at work in public activism, 2. Rhetorics of religion in contemporary public discourse, and 3. Ways that rhetoric scholars study religion. Scholars of rhetoric, religion, and social sciences will find this book particularly interesting.
Download or read book Altered States written by Sune Haugbolle and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-08-22 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Building on Timothy Mitchell's seminal 1991 exploration of the "Limits of the State," this book brings together contributions on the state in the Arab world from the past and present in an edited volume. Altered States views the state less as a matter of people and institutions and more as sets of practices, regimes of truth, and capabilities of power, and the effects they have on those under their control. Through analysing case studies - including Tunisia, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Palestine, UAE, Rojova, and the Islamic State - the concept of the state is applied and questioned. This book examines the roots of policies that led to the uprisings, focusing on how the "authoritarian bargain", which helped define Arab politics, broke down with the rise of neoliberalism. It also assesses how boundaries between state and society have been redrawn, as various dynamics have brought state forces into more open conflict with citizens and each other. The rapid pace of change in the Arab world has necessitated constant modification of themes and theoretical lens of analysis. This book will, therefore, be of interest to practitioners, graduate students and academics of the Arab world, statehood, and political science.
Download or read book State Law and Legal Positivism written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-12-13 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There was a truly global revolution that reflected a Great Divide between ancient and new legal regimes. The volume emphasizes its depth and scale and explores the phenomenon in the contexts of Morocco, Egypt, India, the Ottoman empire, China, and Japan.
Download or read book Voices That Matter written by Marlene Schäfers and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2022-12-23 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "'Raise your voice!' and 'Speak up!' are familiar refrains that assume, all too easily, that all who speak do so for themselves, and that doing so will lead to empowerment, healing, and reconciliation. Marlene Schäfers's Voices that Matter reveals where such assumptions fall short, demonstrating that "raising one's voice" is, in some contexts, an endeavor full of anxieties, struggles, and discontents. In its attention to the voice as form, this book examines not only what voices say, but also how they do so. By focusing on the social labor that voices carry out as they travel, vibrate, and produce sound, Schäfers shows that where new vocal practices arise, they can produce new selves and practices of social relations. Few examples bring this into relief as effectively as the Kurdish context. Written texts have existed mostly on the margins of Kurdish popular culture, whereas oral genres have a long, rich legacy. As Kurdish voices gain increasing moral and political value as metaphors of empowerment, representation, and resistance, these genres are rapidly changing. As she traces the transformations in how Kurdish women relate to and employ their voices, Schäfers illustrates that "gaining voice" is no straightforward path to liberation, especially when one's voice can be selectively appropriated in empty displays of pluralist representation"--
Download or read book The Mediterranean Redux written by Naor H Ben-Yehoyada and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-04-27 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book on historical anthropology remaps the Mediterranean by reframing classical themes from early Mediterraneanist anthropology. This edited volume showcases how anthropology can contribute to an understanding of ongoing transnational dynamics and the new wave of scholarship on the Mediterranean. The Mediterranean is back as a locus of international anxiety and academic concern. It has reemerged in the international news cycle as a space of desperate crossings and tragic endings, as the site in which a refugee crisis rivalling that of the Second World War is playing out in real time for a global viewing public. The scale of the crisis has called into question Europe’s humanitarian principles and internal political union, making the Mediterranean into a mirror for long-standing tensions between norms of universalism and demands for national security. These captivating events have further raised the tide of scholars’ interest in the Mediterranean. How should ethnographers contribute to the new wave of scholarship on the Mediterranean? To what extent does the Mediterranean offer alternative forms of political relatedness to those construed from within Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East? In this volume, we reframe classical themes from early iterations of Mediterranean anthropology to address these questions in our examinations of changing dynamics across land and sea borders, bringing ethnography back to the study of the Mediterranean, and the Mediterranean – with its Mediterraneanism – back to ethnography. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal, History and Anthropology.
Download or read book Cave Dwellers and Citrus Growers written by Harvey E. Goldberg and published by CUP Archive. This book was released on 1972-06-15 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Anthropological Approaches to Political Behavior written by Arthur Tuden and published by . This book was released on 1991 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays in this collection highlight theoretical issues surrounding concepts of power. These essayists argue that the only way to fully comprehend and analyze the complexities of power is to locate where the material, psychological, and social dimensions of political power are socially situated and reproduced.
Download or read book The Anthropology of Parliaments written by Emma Crewe and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-05-13 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Anthropology of Parliaments offers a fresh, comparative approach to analysing parliaments and democratic politics, drawing together rare ethnographic work by anthropologists and politics scholars from around the world. Crewe’s insights deepen our understanding of the complexity of political institutions. She reveals how elected politicians navigate relationships by forging alliances and thwarting opponents; how parliamentary buildings are constructed as sites of work, debate and the nation in miniature; and how politicians and officials engage with hierarchies, continuity and change. This book also proposes how to study parliaments through an anthropological lens while in conversation with other disciplines. The dive into ethnographies from across Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe, the Middle East and the Pacific Region demolishes hackneyed geo-political categories and culminates in a new comparative theory about the contradictions in everyday political work. This important book will be of interest to anyone studying parliaments but especially those in the disciplines of anthropology and sociology; politics, legal and development studies; and international relations.
