Anthropology's politics disciplining the Middle East

Abstract

This book sheds light on the contemporary state of Middle East anthropology as it is situated in broader, intertwined fields of anthropological, academic, national, and global politics. The aim is to track the relationship between anthropological work and politics, taking as the case study the primary region that has, in the post-Cold War era, become the focus of political intervention and politicized discussion. This ethnographic investigation of post-Cold War academic politics is framed in three overlapping histories. First, the authors excavate the institutionalization of the Middle East Section of the American Anthropological Association as the outcome of a longer struggle to establish the "Middle East" as a region of study within anthropology. Second, the authors analyze the relationship of the development of the regional subfield to changes with the AAA more generally, highlighting the sometimes fraught relationships of discipline to region (namely the growing prominence of disciplinary studies and declining interest in "area studies"), as well as on the presumed progressive politics of the discipline. Third, geopolitics are of course critical to discipline-region relations, and this book is situated within an analysis of the impact of post-Cold War geopolitics on the academy in general and scholarship of the Middle East in particular

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