Description
Book SynopsisDespite 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.
Trade Review"'Continuity' includes the ideas and practice of kinship, tribe, lineage, and moral authority that continue to underlie on shared values that are not just global or local, but that encompass much in between. It is good to think with."—Dale F. Eickelman, author of Muslim Politics
"Highlights the severely underappreciated theoretical productivity of work in Middle East anthropology. This is an exciting and intellectually fluent work that avoids most of the clichés of contemporary anthropological thought."—Gregory Starrett, editor (with Eleanor Abdella Doumato) of Teaching Islam: Textbooks and Religion in the Middle East
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction: On the Left Hand of Knowledge / Judith Scheele and Andrew Shryock
1. Dialogues of Three: Making Sense of Patterns That Outlast Events / Andrew Shryock
2. Totality and Infinity: Sharia Ethnography in Lebanon / Morgan Clarke
3. A Mirror for Fieldworkers / Christa Salamandra
4. Who are the Taliban? The Deflection of Truth among Tribal Pashtun in Pakistan / Ammara Maqsood
5. Secrecy and Continuity in Rajasthan / Anastasia Piliavsky
6. The Place of Strangers in Moroccan Domesticity: Nostalgia, Secrets, and the Continuity of Scandal / Mary Montgomery
7. Claiming an Individual Name: Revisiting the Personhood Debate with Afghan Poets in Iran / Zuzanna Olszewska
8. Segmentation versus Tyranny: Politics as Empirical Philosophy / Judith Scheele
9. The Republic of Precarity: 'Abd al-Fattah al-Sisi, Trickster Politician / Walter Armbrust
10. Experience and Its Modes / Paul Dresch
References Cited
Index
