REFIGURING THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF THE MIDDLE EAST AND NORTH

AFRICA

Glenn Bowman

In the twenty odd years since the publication of Lila Abu-Lughod’s and Michael Gilsenan’s

masterly, and highly influential, summations of the contemporary state of play in the

anthropologies of the Middle East and North Africa (Abu-Lughod, 1989; Gilsenan, 1990) not

only have there been substantive regional and topical redrawings of anthropological focus,

but also radical transformations of the societies studied, as well as of the wider world to

which anthropologists appeal for support and with which they attempt to communicate. Abu-

Lughod predicted, and was a participant in, anthropology following its subjects out of

villages and into the cities. North Yemen and Morocco were ‘prestige zones’ for the

anthropology she described (Abu-Lughod, 1989: 279); today, as Lara Deeb and Jessica

Winegar have argued (Deeb and Winegar, 2010), these places have been replaced by

Lebanon (Beirut) and Egypt (Cairo). Two decades ago, the theoretical metonyms or

‘gatekeeping concepts’ (Appadurai, 1986: 357) which organized hegemonic discourses on the

region were ‘segmentation, the harem, and Islam’ (Abu-Lughod, 1989: 280). Today, while

segmentation, and the emphasis on tribes and patrilineal parallel cousin marriage which

localized it, has largely fallen out of favour (though not, as Deeb and Winegar (2010) point

out, ‘for policymakers, right-wing analysts, and embedded anthropologists’), the earlier

interest in the hidden lives of women ‘behind the veil’ that Abu-Lughod saw as

undertheorized and inflected by a ‘colonial discourse on Oriental women’ (Abu-Lughod,

1989: 289) has been reformed by feminist theorization and brought into a far more critical

and incisive relation with the analysis of Islam. The proliferation and amplification of secular

and religious identity politics over the past twenty years have given rise not only to increased

concern with nationalism, populist movements, and subject formation, but have also - fuelled

by the events of 11 September and the further violence ‘legitimated’ by reference to them -

1
generated contending discourses on the role of Islam in both domestic and public arenas. For

the most part, anthropologists have sought to counter the clarion calls of the advocates of a

‘War on Terror’ with portrayals of the ‘everyday life’ of Islamic societies (Levine, 2005), but

some have been drawn to take up discursive arms in the defence of what they define as

civilization (Price, 2011). In both the UK and the US, popular and institutional support for

mobilization against the ‘Arab’ and/or ‘Muslim’ world has had an impact on anthropology,

leading to attempts to muzzle critical anthropological voices addressing Islam, Israel, Iraq

and other ‘regional’ topics, to cut funding for research, and to impede the hiring (and

occasionally encourage the firing) of anthropologists working in the Middle East or North

Africa.

While the anthropology of the Middle East and North Africa may continue to appear,

in Gilsenan’s 1990 phrase, ‘very like a camel’ in having evolved at a tangent to the main

currents of social and cultural anthropology,1 many of the features of the region which in the

past shaped its exceptionalism as a field of study (urban cosmopolitanism, historical depth,

the roles of Islam and of women, the complex networking of local, regional, urban, national

and diasporic populations) have become distinctive concerns of the contemporary world. As a

result, Middle Eastern and North African anthropologies now have the potential to become

bellwethers for current anthropology.

The field, like the regions it encompasses, is extensive and multiform, and I shall not

attempt to summarize the significant and influential writings of the past twenty years; the

recent essay by Laura Deeb and Jessica Winegar in the Annual Review of

Anthropology (Deeb and Winegar, 2012) ably covers that ground. Instead I shall

investigate changes in the ways the Middle East and North Africa have been conceptualized

1
. ‘[E]thnography in the Middle East first fixed on exceptions to comparative anthropological
models...[because] much that is distinctively “regional” in scope as well as in type has few
parallels in those parts of the world where anthropology had been worked out’ (Anderson
1996: 788).
2
by anthropologists over the past two decades, focusing on definitions of the terms and criteria

for inclusion. Where I cite particular works (for the most part books in English) I do so either

because these are texts familiar to me and salient to my argument, or because they were

among texts practising anthropologists of the Middle East and North Africa referred to, in

response to questions I circulated in July 2010, asking them to nominate ‘the three to five

most important anthropological texts written in the past twenty years for your approach

to/awareness of the Middle East’.

Colonial and post-colonial geographies

The terms ‘Middle East’ and ‘North Africa’ are deeply imbued with European and American

military and colonial history, hence their conceptual boundaries have been shifting as fields

of influence have expanded, retracted and relocated. 2 The ‘Middle East’ charted by European

strategists in the nineteenth century referred to the lands between the domains of the Ottoman

Empire and those of British India (thus Iran, Afghanistan, Central Asia, Turkestan, and the

Caucasus); meanwhile the ‘Near East’ encompassed the Balkan Peninsula and Turkic

Anatolia as well as the region stretching eastward from Egypt to the Euphrates and southward

through the entire Arabian Peninsula. ‘North Africa’ was a French term referring to colonies

and protectorates (Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco and Mauritania) established between 1830 and

1911 to the north of its African Empire, and the term came to encompass the Western Sahara

and Libya, even though these came respectively to be under Spain and Italy.

The collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the wake of the First World War rendered

such distinctions less pertinent, and in the inter-war period the term ‘Near East’ was in most

quarters supplanted by ‘Middle East’, with consequent retraction from the original ‘Eastern’

territories. This tendency was accelerated by the 1939 establishment of the ‘British Middle

East Command’ in Cairo (Davidson, 1960: 669-670) to control Egypt, Sudan, and

2
. See Timothy Mitchell, ‘The Middle East in the Past and Future of Social Science’
(Mitchell, 2003), for an incisive analysis of the genealogy of Middle East area studies.
3
Palestine/Transjordan. After the Suez Crisis of 1956, with growing American hegemony in

the region, the ‘Middle East’ of American political and military usage came to refer to Egypt,

Syria, Israel, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Qatar. ‘North

Africa’ continued for the most part to retain its colonial referents, although Mauritania was

not consistently included in it. Recently, impelled in 2004 by the Bush Administration, a

‘Greater Middle East’ has been articulated by the G8 which encompasses not only the more

recent definition of the Middle East, and the longstanding North Africa, but also Sudan and

the earlier conception of the Middle East (Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan, and those areas of

the Caucasus seen as ‘Islamic’). The addition of Somalia - a ‘state’ discontinuous with the

rest of the region – gives the game away by suggesting that this large and disparate category

is held together by an essentialized and antagonistic Islam, allied to the designation of

‘politically problematic’.3 At least in both popular and International Relations usages,

military and (now post-) colonial concerns continue to define the borders of the region.

The anthropologists’ Middle East: Orientalism and the ‘question

of Islam’

How have anthropologists sought to define the region and delimit their field of ethnographic

study? It has proved difficult for generalists, when attempting to provide introductions to a

field imagined as a coherent category, to avoid the colonial cartography. 1981 saw the

publication of the first edition of Dale Eickelman’s The Middle East: an

Anthropological Approach, a text which over the next twenty years and with an updated

second edition (1989) would provide a popular and authoritative introduction to the study of a

region encompassing Asian and European Turkey, Western Iran, the Arabian Peninsula,

Sudan, the Levant, and North Africa (including Mauritania). By 1998 The Middle East

had morphed into The Middle East and Central Asia: an Anthropological

3
. The G8’s ‘definition of the Greater Middle East: besides the Arab countries...covers
Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, Turkey and Israel, whose only common denominator is that they
lie in the zone where hostility to the US is strongest, in which Islamic fundamentalism in its
anti-Western form is most rife’ (Achar, 2004) .
4
Approach through the addition of material dealing with all of the eastern regions added by

the G8 to their definition of the Greater Middle East: Afghanistan, Pakistan, Eastern Iran,

Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstahn. Eickelman justified this

extension in part because of ‘cross border cultural and commercial ties’ between the two

regions, but more signally because ‘Islam remains a basic (although not exclusive) element of

identity for most people of the region’ (1998: viii).

Debates over the role of Islam in defining a coherent domain of study have long

troubled anthropology and cognate fields (see el-Zein, 1977; Asad, 1996 [1986]; Donnan,

2001; Varisco, 2005; and, of course, Said, 1978 and 1989), yet it continues to provide the

rationale for bringing together the regions Eickelman called ‘the Middle East’ and ‘Central

Asia’. Charles Lindholm, in his two editions of The Islamic Middle East (1996 and

2002), consolidated the link between region and religion by adopting the historian Marshall

Hodgson’s idea of a ‘cultural core region of Muslim society ... stretching from the Nile on the

West to the Oxus on the East’ (2002: 7; see also Hodgson, 1974 and for a critique Burke,

2010), and adding North Africa. Bowen and Early’s Everyday Life in the Muslim

Middle East (Bowen and Early, 1993; Bowen and Early, 2002) similarly collocated Islam

and the Middle East, ranging from Morocco through Sudan and Iran to Afghanistan.

Gerasimos Makris’s Islam in the Middle East: a Living Tradition (2006), however,

notably disarticulated the two, elaborating that Islam is sited in the Middle East rather than

conflating an Islamic Middle East.

There are reasons to maintain the distinction between communal affiliation and

locale; not only do numerous non-Muslim communities, sectarian and secular, exist in the

region amongst majority Muslim populations (themselves aligned with various exclusive

Sunni or Shi’a branches) but the characterization of a ‘culture area’ engages in precisely the

kind of essentialization that Edward Said critiqued in his massively influential Orientalism

5
(Said, 1978). Lindholm, recognizing the influence of Said's critique, defended his collocation

of Islam and the Middle East by arguing for the validity of concepts of ‘culture and of cross-

cultural comparison’ (1995: 806). Lindholm claimed anthropology had in effect ‘lost its way’

as a consequence not only of the influence of Said’s works but also of those of Geertz and

Bourdieu, with their earlier turns towards interpretivism and agency.

[T]his new concern with ‘negotiated realities’ was preadapted to

accommodate itself to Said’s attack on all forms of cultural constraint

since it was a small logical step from arguing that the traditional

anthropological-native categories were a disguise for the reality of

maximizing individuals manipulating for advantage within culturally

constructed webs of meaning to arguing that all categories whatsoever

were merely reflections in the colonizing eye of the Western onlooker.

(Lindholm, 1995: 807).

According to Lindholm Said ‘portray[ed] the Middle East as nothing more than a pale and

distorted reflection of European stereotypes, without substance of its own’ (1995: 806), and

anthropologists (a particular target of his criticism being Lila Abu-Lughod, whose 1993

Writing Women's Worlds is one of the texts reviewed in his article) followed in

‘credit[ing] Western intellectual discourse as the active creator of local realities and...

downplay[ing] or ignor[ing] the history and tradition that Middle Eastern people continually

refer to in identifying themselves and marking out the course of their lives’ (1995: 809).

Said was, of course, by training and profession a literary scholar whose concern was

with the discursive construction of what were, in effect, fictional worlds; Orientalism

contended that the ‘Middle East’, as constructed through a long discursive Western tradition,

was literally a fiction. Mitchell points out that the text was intended to repudiate the claim put

6
forward by Orientalists past and present ‘that the Middle East was simply an empirical fact’

(Mitchell, 2003) through asking the questions ‘how does one know the “things that exist”,

and to what extent are the “things that exist” constituted by the knower?’ (Said, 1978:

300). In the introduction to Orientalism Said wrote that,

the phenomenon of Orientalism as I study it here deals principally, not

with a correspondence between Orientalism and Orient, but with the

internal consistency of Orientalism and its ideas about the Orient (the

East as career) despite or beyond any correspondence, or lack thereof,

with a ‘real’ Orient.

(Said, 1978: 5).

Following Foucault, however, Said did assert that discursive constructs such as Orientalism

have practical impact; thus Orientalist discourse created a simulacrum of the ‘Orient’ which

prevented Orientalists from being able to observe the living societies of the region, and also

provided models of deportment and governance for colonial agents active in the region, thus

imposing that image on those societies (see Mitchell, 1988, 1998).

Ironically some commentators mistook Said’s critique of Orientalism’s literary

misconstrual of the ‘Middle East’ as an assertion of Said’s belief that the literal Middle East

was a creation of the West ‘without substance of its own’. As Hosam Aboul-Ela illustrates in

a recent article, Said’s ‘relentless focus on the western gaze’ seemed to produce a ‘hyper-

objectification of the Arab, who remains at the end of the study an object constructed,

controlled and fully circumscribed by the discourse of Europe and America’ (Aboul-Ela,

2010: 729). Although, as Aboul-Ela chronicles, Said offered numerous correctives to this

reading (see for instance his rejection of an early Foucauldian reductionism in his 1984

‘Traveling theory’, and his celebration of resistance in 1993’s Culture and Imperialism)

7
‘still, the momentum of that earlier formulation which seemed to strip the orientalized, the

colonized, and the subaltern of all agency and of any voice has been enduring’ (Aboul-

Ela,2010: 731).

The rigorous reflexivity that informs the ethnographic work of Abu-Lughod and many

other contemporary ethnographers of Middle Eastern regions is closely linked to the critique

of discursive positioning put forward by Said; by attending to their positioning relative to the

field, they refine awareness of the ways their training and the cultural baggage they travel

with might distort understanding of the peoples they work with. Abu-Lughod’s attention to

her position as a ‘halfie’ (Abu-Lughod, 1988), like the concern with perspective of the other

contributors to Arab Women in the Field: Studying Your Own Society (Altorki

and El-Sohl, 1988), is an intentional move not only to renounce the dispassionate gaze of the

disembodied scholar who ‘describes’ a world which is actually being constituted by that gaze

(Bowman, 1998) but also to allow her ‘located’ voice to engage in dialogue with the voices

of those resident in the field.4 The correlate of that reflexivity is close attention both to the

detail of everyday life and also to the perspectives on, and interpretations of, that life by those

who participate in it.

Lindholm sees this ‘narrative ethnography [a]s part of a postmodern literary-

anthropological genre that self-consciously seeks to subvert cultural stereotypes’ and

demands of authors that they make an effort to ‘give the reader a sense of the particular and

plural voices of the Others - an effort that is taken to be a morally noble thing, as the

portrayal of uniqueness is thought automatically to awaken the empathy of the reader

(generalization is bad because it turns individuals into abstractions and is therefore a

discourse of hegemony)’. He contends that ‘the foregrounding of experience and personal

voice at the expense of generalization, comparison or theory building is now the discourse of

4
. The concern of Abu-Lughod and her co-contributors with the work of anthropologists with
varying degrees of Middle Eastern background resonates with Gilsenan’s sensitivity to the
role of an earlier generation of indigenous Middle Eastern scholars who trained in the West
and produced significant and influential Middle Eastern ethnographies (1990: 225-226).
8
choice among a great many younger Middle East specialists’. This narrative strategy,

apparently meant to establish a sympathetic identification between readers and the people

studied via the mediation of tales of the ethnographers’ experiences, allows readers of the

texts the ‘recognition that the Others ... share our humanity’ but does so at the cost of

producing ‘very few usable data’ and generating few, if any, conclusions or hypotheses

applicable beyond the limits of specific field sites (Lindholm, 1995: 810-11).

Edmund Burke III, whose Struggle and Survival in the Modern Middle

East approaches the ‘transformations that Middle Eastern societies have undergone since the

beginning of the nineteenth century’ (Burke, 1993: 2) through a diverse collection of

biographies of twenty-four ordinary people, is taken to task by Lindholm for ‘an

unwillingness to accept responsibility for theorizing or abstraction ... [or for] the development

of any useful premises or hypotheses’ (1995: 812). Burke’s contends that

successful works ... locate their subjects in particular sociological and cultural, as well

as historical, contexts, and do not invoke broad psychological or cultural traits in

explanation. They are social biographies in their commitment to change and

complexity, as well as to the individuality of their subjects.

(Burke, 1993: 8)

Lindhom counters this with ‘we are left wondering about change from what and to what, and

whether we can say anything about the modern Middle East except that it is full of

complicated individuals with varied life histories who live in very different historical and

cultural contexts’ (Lindholm, 1995: 812-813). The issue of what else we might say is very

much to the point. What Lindholm alleges in the post-Saidian texts he criticizes is the

abandonment of any attempt to answer questions of cultural causation, 5 questions which for
5
‘The student might well ask why Middle Easterners remains so linked to their families and
communities despite processes of modernization? Why is the rhetoric of honour still
compelling? Why are tears the appropriate response to recitation of the Quran? But questions
of cause and effect cannot be answered from the text, and from the point of view of praxis
theory as it is reported here, ought not even to be asked’ (Lindholm, 1995: 812).
9
him can be answered only via the concept of a Muslim culture, which he believes capable of

rescuing Middle Eastern anthropology from the post-modernist morass in which it is emired.

Quoting James Clifford - not the most obvious ally - Lindholm claims that ‘we “cannot yet do

without” the notion of culture ... once culture is admitted, then it is possible to establish the

grounds for generalization and comparison’ (1995: 818, quoting Clifford, 1988: 10).

Is there a Middle Eastern/North African culture?

This argument raises very real questions about how ‘culture’ is to be defined. Instead of

coming to Middle Eastern history through ‘broad generalizations about Islam or the Ottoman

state, or from stereotypes about the Arab mind or Islam’, Burke proposes a ‘bottom up’

approach through close engagement with the minutiae of the everyday life of common people

(1993: 8). He is careful to point out that he is not seeking to use ‘typical’ individuals to

represent Middle Eastern character metonymically or provide examples of a generic ‘Arab

Mind’ (like Patai, 1973),

because the complexities of the area are so daunting, it is tempting to read Middle

Eastern society through the lives of a few individuals. A homogenized and essentialist

Middle East enables us to avoid engaging the historical and cultural specificities of

the various groups and peoples who live there ... [However] by their sheer variety the

twenty-four lives presented in this book constitute a potent antidote to the

homogenizing and essentialist impulse. While different themes can be traced in these

biographies, no one of them applies to all cases ... The very number of lives is an

incitement to thought, for one is compelled to consider the particular factors that

appear to have been significant in shaping the individual lives recounted here and to

locate them in a complex and historical context.

(Burke, 1993: 8).

This focus on historical and cultural specificities, common to many of the ‘new generation’

10
of Middle East ethnographers and historians,6 entails not only nuanced and detailed

ethnographic attention to lived lives but also, in its concern with the ‘transformations that

Middle Eastern societies have undergone’, siting the communities in which those lives are

lived within the multiplex strands of the region’s historical transformations. Lindholm’s

query – ‘change from what to what?’ - is more readily answered through a focus on local

contexts, that is the changes from the lives people understood themselves and their ancestors

to be living in the more or less distant past to the way they act out and interpret their lives

today, than it is in the wider, encapsulating terms of the ‘Middle East’ or ‘North Africa’.

After all, the Middle East has seen radical changes throughout the period during

which it has drawn the attention of ethnographers, Orientalist or not (for a survey of early

regional anthropology, see Eickelman, 1998: 27-52; and for twentieth-century developments

Eickelman, 1998: passim; Anderson, 1996: 287-91). Even had Orientalists and their

successors generalized from accurate observations, most of those generalisations would still

have been rendered obsolete by demographic and technological transformations and the

cultural and ideational changes effected by them. Eickelman notes that whereas the urban

population of the Middle East was ten percent in 1900, it was over two thirds by 1990

(Eickelman, 1998: 13)7. With urbanization and the technological changes that accompany it

came signal changes in social networks (Singerman, 1995; Meneley, 1996; Rabinowitz, 1997;

Ghannam, 2002) and modes of communication (Armbrust, 1996; Eickelman and Anderson,

2000 and 2003; and Hirschkind, 2006) as well as practices of work (Hoodfar,1997),

marketing (Elyachar, 2005) and consumption (Bruck, 2005; Starrett, 1995a). Such

transformations gave rise not only to new patterns of social control and governance -
6
. Just as attention to the historical roots of contemporary situations has increasingly driven
anthropologists of the Middle East to engage with history, so too have historians of the region
increasingly involved themselves in ‘ethnographic’ readings of the historical past; examples
cited as influential by anthropologists include Barkey 1994 and Watenpaugh 2006. Two
recent publications on Palestine deserve to be noted: Tamari 2009, Campos 2010.
7
. Other estimates predict urban percentages of 60% in 2000 (Eickelman, 1998: 93), and
record 58% in 2008. (World Bank data including Iran but excluding areas east of there, as
well as Turkey, Sudan and Mauritania; these data also note an urban population of 38% in
1968, http://www.tradingeconomics.com/middle-east-and-north-africa/urban-population-
percent-of-total-wb-data.html, accessed 17 June 2011).
11
bureaucracy (Mitchell, 2002;Feldman, 2008), education (Messick, 1993; Starrett, 1998), bio-

politics (Kanaaneh, 2002) and medical intervention (Clark, 2009) - but were the conditions

for novel aspirations (Khosrav, 2007), identifications (Slyomovics, 2005), concepts of gender

relations (Ahmed, 1992; Moors, 1995; Abu-Lughod, 1998; Ali 2002) and imagings of

community (Layne, 1994). The state has taken on both a more intimate and a more intrusive

presence, facilitating more powerful forms of surveillance and intervention (Zureik, 2010),

while also enabling more complex structures of identification and resistance (Wedeen, 1999;

Navaro-Yashin, 2002; Wedeen 2008). Such transformations have had impact upon the

countryside as well, directly and indirectly, not just because both media (Abu-Lughod, 2004;

Hoffman 2008) and market (Kapchan, 1996) draw it into the ‘space’ of the city, but also

because patterns of labour migration and diaspora spin complex and well-travelled routes

between places and identities (Chatty, 1996; Silverstein,2004; Ho, 2006; Scheele, 2009).

Pastoral nomadism, which through the image of the Bedouin had generated many of the

significant tropes of Middle Eastern studies, had declined by 1970 to ‘slightly more than one

percent of the population of the Middle East’ (Eickelman, 1998: 74). Even where nomadism

is still practised it has been transformed by changing technologies of transport and

communication (Chatty, 1986; Cole 2003) as well as by the effects of colonial and post-

colonial state formations (Khoury and Kostiner, 1991; Young, 1995; Shyrock, 1997; Alon,

2009). The significance and practice of tribal identity (see Caton, 2000, 2005), forms of

religious worship, belief and mobilization as well as the structure and function of marriage

practices have all continued to be reshaped variously by the differential impact of local,

regional, national and international forces on the varied contexts in which they are practised.

In light of these transformations, it is difficult to know how to invoke ‘culture’ so as

to facilitate generalization and comparison (see Kuper, 2000 on the culture concept in social

and cultural anthropology more generally). Lindholm, in his pursuit of cultural ‘causes’

generating the ‘effects’ of individual beliefs and practices and social regularities, posits a

value configuration organised around

12
 equality and competitive individualism ... a high estimate of the

importance of bravery, independence and generosity; a personal honor

code based on self help, hospitality, blood revenge, sanctuary, and rigid

sexual mores of female chastity and seclusion...[with honor]

inextricably located within the patrilineal and patriarchal families, clans

and tribes into which men and women are born, and to which they owe

loyalty and support.

(Lindholm, 2002: 13)

Those who have lived or worked in the Middle East or North Africa will have seen shards

from this value nexus glittering amongst the detritus of the everyday (Kandiyoti and

Saktanber, 2001), but will just as often have heard assertions or observed practices that

disavow, contradict, reinterpret and even violate those tenets.

Culture in Lindholm’s formulation is generative rather than interpretative, whereas for

Abu-Lughod, Burke, and the others Lindholm critiques in his review essay culture is a means

of defining situations - or having them defined - in ways sometimes enthusiastically accepted

and at other times resisted. The ‘culture’ Lindholm refers to, which grounds itself in the

Quran as well as in tribal traditions of honour and vengeance, is only one of several

discourses circulating through the villages, cities, and far flung diasporas that constitute the

contemporary Middle East, where it mingles with other ideas. It - if one can refer to

something as an entity which is far from unitary and coherent - has authority, particularly

when it glosses the power of states, institutions and movements with legitimacy (see Messick,

1993), but this authority is ‘given’ to it by social apparatuses such as pedagogy and patriarchy

as well as, increasingly, by the desire of people and groups in an increasingly unstable world

to fantasize a stable centre. The Quran and the hadith are traditionally immutable and

inviolate and hence can be seen to provide a ‘still centre to the turning world’ but, as

demonstrated by both piety scholarship (Mahmood, 2004; Deeb, 2006) and the mobilization
13
of Islam towards new and modern structures of Islamic militancy (Eickelman and Piscatori,

2004; Marranci 2009), they are tools that can be put to new and radically diverse uses, all the

while helping those involved in radical reformations to seek emotional grounding and

ideological legitimation for their programmes. The reworking of tradition in various forms of

‘art’ (music, painting and literature) also shows how the past is used to both ground and

subvert identities and traditions (Stokes, 1992 and 2010; Shannon, 2006; Winegar, 2006).

Talal Asad's ‘idea of an anthropology of Islam’

The malleability of Islamic and other cultural traditions demonstrates that culture, far from

being something that exists and can function as an active agent, is a mode of expression that,

in accord with social and historical contexts, variously legitimates or delegitimates

contemporary beliefs and practices. This, of course, is the approach to Islam ethnographically

mapped out by Michael Gilsenan in Recognizing Islam (1982) and theoretically

elaborated by Talal Asad in ‘The idea of an anthropology of Islam’ (1996 [1986]). 8 Asad

defines Islam as ‘a discursive tradition that connects variously with the formation of moral

selves, the manipulation of populations (or resistance to it), and the production of appropriate

knowledges’ (Asad, 1996: 388). Islam here engages in a repertoire of personal and social

shaping and, rather than being determinative, serves as a means of articulating selves or

strategies deemed appropriate by the persons who, or groups which, invoke it:

Clearly not everything Muslims say and do belongs to an Islamic discursive tradition.

Nor is an Islamic tradition in this sense necessarily imitative of what has been done in

the past. For even where traditional practices appear to the anthropologist to be

imitative of what has gone before, it will be the practitioners’ conceptions of what is

8
. Asad was a founding member of Britain’s radical Middle East Study Group which,
like the Alternative Middle East Studies Seminar (AMESS) in the US, critiqued
orientalist approaches and engaged with Middle East issues via a largely political economy
perspective (see Mitchell, 2003: 14-15). Gilsenan was another member of this academic
collective which continues to meet although many of its members have migrated to
professorial posts in the United States.
14
 apt performance and of how the past is related to present practices that will be

crucial for tradition, not the apparent repetition of an old form.

(Asad, 1996: 398).

Asad sets out an agenda to analyse the role of Islamic tradition in producing ‘Muslim’

subjects, suggesting how through various structures of pedagogy (Asad, 1993; Asad 2003)

Islamic discourse stitches particular local practices of self- and community-making into a

global fabric of texts and rituals, thereby simultaneously associating the local with the

historical depth and spatial extent of a sanctified faith, and allowing communities means to

bestow legitimacy on their sometimes heterodox responses to particular encounters with

historical and social forces. Here, Islam functions as something akin to what Slavoj Žižek ,

following Saul Kripke (1980), calls a ‘rigid designator’:

the word which, as a word, on the level of the signifier itself, unifies

a given field, constitutes its identity. It is, so to speak, the word to

which ‘things’ themselves refer to recognize themselves in their

unity ... It is not the real object which guarantees as the point of

reference the unity and identity of a certain ideological experience - on

the contrary it is the reference to a ‘pure’ signifier which gives unity

and identity to our experience of historical reality itself.

(Žižek , 1989: 95-96, 97).

Appeal to the discourse of Islamic tradition bestows sanctity while leaving open to dispute,

both internally and with other Islamic communities, the forms of belief or action such

sanctity entails. Rather than appearing ‘as a distinctive historical totality which organizes

various aspects of social life’ (Asad, 1996 [1986]: 388, referring to Gellner’s representation

in Muslim Society [1981]), Islamic tradition in Asad’s formulation is a hypothesised

touchstone for the diverse range of practices of shaping bodies, subjectivities, and societies

15
applied within particular locales. As a result its local mobilization is of primary importance:

to ‘the anthropologist of Islam the proper theoretical beginning is ... an instituted practice (set

in a particular context, and having a particular history) into which Muslims are inducted as

Muslims’ (Asad, 1996 [1986]: 399).

Asad’s approach is neither nominalist (see his critique of Gilsenan, 1996: 382f) nor

essentialist; what he advocates is an anthropology that attends to the specific ways discursive

elements are mobilized within particular contexts, and remains at the same time conscious of

how local interpretations either draw legitimacy from, or provoke disputation and conflict

with, discourses on Islamic tradition generated in other contexts (both contemporary and

historical). What is signally important, both for the approach to an ‘Anthropology of the

Middle East and North Africa’ taken here, and for attempts by contemporary anthropology to

engage with ethnographic theorization in that region, is the protean nature of Asad’s

‘Anthropology of Islam’. As a project it is characterized by a perspectival centre from where

anthropologists and their subjects engage with ‘Islam’; the project’s domain is described by

frontiers that expand and retract as the uses of Islamic tradition bring the subject community

into contact, whether supportive or antagonistic, with other ‘Islamic’ communities. Whereas

Lindholm’s approach is fundamentally deductive, setting out a checklist of core cultural

values with which to ascertain membership (or not) of the Islamic Middle East, Asad’s is

above all inductive, because it ascertains a community’s working definition of ‘Islam’, asks

how and why that definition is adopted in a particular context, and then seeks to understand

what relationships it enables (or disables) with other ‘Islamic’ communities. In some

instances, particular practices of Islam may force a community or society into antagonistic

isolation from surrounding collectives, which consider what they do in the name of Islam to

be ‘not really Islam at all’ (1996: 382); but under other circumstances (say in response to a

widely-disseminated perception of ‘Crusader Wars’ against Islam backed by ‘the social

forces of industrial capitalism’ [1996: 401]9) conceptions of scripturalist Islam calling for a
9
. As Asad points out such social and technological developments both provoke perceptions
and enable their dissemination. ‘Widespread homogeneity is a function not of tradition but of
16
global reinstatement of Islamic unity and purity may gather substantial transnational

followings.

Asad’s ‘idea of an anthropology of Islam’ is in fact a deconstruction of the traditional

concept of an ‘Anthropology of Islam’, proposing the means to investigate the work of Islam

in societies rather than to study ‘Islamic societies’. Important contemporary ethnography

devolving from Asad’s programmatic refocusing has concentrated on the relation of ‘Islamic’

knowledge to subject and state formations in specific settings: Hirschkind’s work on the

circulation of cassette tapes of Islamic sermons (2006), Mahmood’s reading of the re-

readings of Islamic texts by women in the modernizing piety movement (2004), and Starrett’s

work on Islam in education, labour discipline, and commodity circulation (1995a, 1995b,

1998) all focus on Cairo, while Messick’s work on the changing role of Islamicist and state

texts (1993) moves between Ibb and the archives in Yemen. These texts use Islamic materials

to open up perspectives on the particular settings they examine. Doing so, they reveal both

how ‘Islam’ shapes those settings, and also more saliently how the particularities of those

settings shape the Islams that manifest themselves there.

Escaping the cage: beyond the Middle East and North Africa

The literal equivalent to what Asad has proposed for an ‘Anthropology of Islam’ would be an

‘Anthropology of the Middle East and North Africa’ examining those ethnographic contexts

in which ‘the Middle East’ and/or ‘North Africa’ were brought into play as discursive

entities. Insofar as those categories are expressions of colonial and post-colonial governance,

these contexts would be likely to occur either when locals were drawn into dialogue with

representatives of outside powers still embracing such terminology (diplomats, military

officials, NGO spokespersons, see Slyomovics, 2005) or else, as in various forms of

mobilization against ‘the West’ and its proxies, when groups were defining themselves

the development and control of communication techniques that are part of modern industrial
societies’ (Asad, 1996: 401).
17
against powers which categorized them in such terms (Bowman, 2005).

Abandoning the various historic, western, geographical terms has its virtues, but it

would not make reference to the region in any global sense unproblematic. If we chose to use

emic categories for the societies we research we would find that the borders of the

communities referred to become quite labile: expanding at some moments to embrace the

whole of the Islamic umma (though still excluding non-Muslim minorities as well as many

heterodox Islamic communities), at others extending less generously to include only the

‘Arab world’ (to the exclusion of Turkey, Iran and points east), on occasions retreating to the

bounds of ethno-national communities (often themselves constituted discursively in

opposition to neighbouring communities or to minorities within the territory occupied by the

group articulating identity), and occasionally drawing back into even less extensive

communities that were defined in terms of class, urban or rural residence, political party,

sectarian identity, or hamula.10

There are, of course, emic terms for the geographical regions traditionally referred to

as the Middle East and North Africa and these, in the appropriate translation, would more

accurately serve to designate appropriate regions. Thus Al-’ālam al-’arabī (the ‘Arab

World’) would be used generically to refer to those Arabic-speaking nations belonging to the

Arab League (the whole of the Middle East and North Africa, including Somalia, Sudan, and

Mauritania and excluding Israel, Turkey, Iran and points east11), while they would

appropriately sub-divide, using terminology dating to the Arab Conquest, into the mashriq

(or ‘Arab east’, referring to those Arabophone countries to the east of Egypt and north of the

Arabian Peninsula, although Egypt is commonly included in the rubric), the maghreb (or

10
. For examples of such identity shifts in the Palestinian instance, see, Tamari 1982,
Bowman 2006, 2011, Lybarger 2007.
11
. The Arab League recognizes Moroccan sovereignty over the Western Sahara (contested
by the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic) which, despite nominal disavowal, is in effect
included in the Arab World.
18
‘Arab west’, incorporating Algeria, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Tunisia and Western

Sahara), and the šibh al-jazīrat al-’arabīya (the Arabian Peninsula: Saudi Arabia,

Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, United Arab Emirates and Yemen). Here, although the

criteria for inclusion and exclusion are overtly linguistic, language sharing is itself the

outcome of the successive waves of the Arab Conquest which produced shared historical and

cultural reference points even for those non-Muslim populations brought under Islamic rule

(reference points that allow for mutual intelligibility, even when positions taken with respect

to them are disputed or conflictual). Iran, Israel and Turkey not only differ linguistically from

the Arabophone countries, but have also positioned themselves historically and politically in

ways that preclude their inclusion in any generic cultural category with the neighbouring

mashriq nations. This division extends to ethnographic works on those regions which

hardly cross the boundaries of neighbouring ethno-linguistic communities (though, among

the rare exceptions, see Weingrod, 1991; Rabinowitz 1997).

While one can imagine resistance to replacing ‘the Middle East and North Africa’

with ‘the Arab World’, ‘the Arab West’, ‘the Arab East’ and ‘the Arabian Peninsula’ in

shelfmark classification, introductory regional studies courses, and general popular discourse,

it is not only possible (I teach an advanced anthropology course titled ‘Southern

Mediterranean: Maghreb and Mashriq’) but may well become an insistent demand when

(and if) students and the general public become more fully aware of the cultural specificities

of the regions. They will not, however, make such demands until they come to understand the

diversity of the region far better, and anthropology has an important role to play in that

pedagogy - a role for which some of the core developments of the past two decades have

prepared it well.

In Gilsenan's and Abu-Lughod's surveys two important, and

profoundly connected, points are stressed. Gilsenan points out that when

19
he was preparing for his doctorate "many unambiguously anthropological

colleagues felt that you could become 'an anthropologist of the Middle

East' only with an Orientalist training" (Gilsenan 1990: 228) and indicates

that several influential anthropologists of the area in the nineties had

Oriental Studies backgrounds (he mentions Ken Brown, Dale Eickelman

and himself; Charles Lindholm also read Oriental Studies as a first degree

at Columbia University [Lindholm 2001: 113]). Abu-Lughod queries ‘why ...

do we seem to have a larger than usual number of monographs only

minimally concerned with contributing to or engaging with anthropological

theory?’, and posits that this may be due to an overly focused

commitment to doing ‘battle against shadow stereotypes’ of Middle

Eastern women and the Middle East in general (1989: 289-90).

During the period discussed by Gilsenan, training in the anthropology of the

Middle East was ‘not so much peripheral...as absent’ (Gilsenan, 1990: 227) with the result

that many of those who would become influential practitioners had their schooling in

language and cultural analysis provided by Oriental Studies. Even those (most of the women

then writing on the area) who did not suffer the ‘disabling aspects’ of that education found

themselves operating in a field in which the terms of discourse were effectively written out in

Orientalise. This meant that taking what Abu-Lughod calls an ‘oppositional stance’ (1989:

290) involved engagement with the terms of a debate ‘fixed on exceptions to comparative

anthropological models’ (Anderson, 1996: 788) and directed one along ‘the less theoretically

rigorous path of arguing against a vague but unchanging stereotype’ (Abu-Lughod, 1989:

290). The anthropology of the Middle East and North Africa consequently found itself caged

within a particularly restricted regional tradition and isolated from vital theoretical

developments driving late twentieth-century anthropology.

20
 New perspectives influencing the field when Abu-Lughod and Gilsenan wrote their

‘state of the art’ overviews - particularly the critique of Orientalism, a reflexive appreciation

of fieldwork (see Rabinow, 1977; Crapanzano, 1980 Dwyer, 1982), and Asad’s

deconstruction of the category of Islamic tradition - have substantially refigured the terrain.

Although a generic conception of an ‘Anthropology of the Middle East and North Africa’

retains a lexical grip on efforts to conceptualize an ‘area studies’ domain, effectively

ethnographic work has largely abandoned the concept of a Middle Eastern /North African

‘core culture area’ in favour of close ethnographic research into particular field sites. 12 This

tightening of focus, with a concomitant shift from deductivism to inductivism, has been

accompanied by - and undoubtedly supported by - a decline in the influence of Oriental

Studies on anthropological research in the area. Of the forty-nine anthropologists working in

areas loosely considered to be Middle East and North Africa who replied to my questions,

only two had received training in Oriental Studies (one of whom was Dale Eickelman). More

surprisingly, few had trained in graduate programmes associated with Middle East Studies

Centres (in the United States, Title VI support for Arabic language training had been greatly

attenuated in the 1980s), moreover a majority of them had studied no, or at most one, course

on the Middle East as either undergraduates or postgraduates. Most of those who carried out

field research in Arabic had learned Arabic outside their formal academic studies, either

through specialized language courses or while in the field.

12
Intriguingly, the call to attend to the discursive construction of social reality has
encouraged some recent ethnographers to focus not on the fieldsite as classically defined but
on the field of representations. Gilsenan’s Lords of the Lebanese Marches (1996, but
based on field research carried out in the early 1970s) is a rigorous example of rural
fieldwork, and is the book most frequently cited by my respondents in their lists of the five
ethnographies which have most influenced them. It is, however, very much a micro-study of
representations of self and other, and a later generation of ethnographies, inspired by it, and
by Asad, have constructed discursive domains – whether television (Abu-Lughod, 2004),
music (Shannon, 2006), artwork (Winegar, 2006), sermons (Gaffney, 1994 and Hirschkind,
2006), archives (Messick, 1993), etc. - as field sites in themselves. A spectacular example,
Ho’s Graves of Tarim (2006), follows the genealogies and legends of Sufi sayyids from
the Hadramawt, in southeastern Yemen across both centuries and the Indian Ocean back to
their ancestral tombs.

21
 The consequence of this attenuation of dedicated ‘Middle East’ training is a much

stronger integration of students of the Arab World (and I would assume other regions

previously classed as Middle East and North Africa, including Turkey and Iran) into general

anthropological pedagogy and hence with the wider theoretical concerns of contemporary

anthropology. Lindholm’s lament that the impact of interpretative, reflexive and ‘post-

modernist’ perspectives on the anthropology of the Middle East and North Africa has been a

decay of ‘generalization, comparison or theory building’ (Lindholm, 1995: 811) proves to be

misplaced; on the contrary, by engaging with broader anthropological theory – on a host of

subjects, including subject formation, performativity, sexuality and gender, consumption and

cultural production, nationalism and the nation state, globalization and neo-liberalism -

anthropology included the region within the discipline’s core concerns with human

experience. In the process, the region has come to be seen for what it is - rich in history,

deeply engaged in modernity, and vibrantly involved in contemporary politics – and not a

disciplinary enclave inhabited by exceptional beings and ‘very like a camel’.

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