Anthropology's politics : disciplining the Middle East / Lara Deeb and Jessica Winegar.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Deeb, Lara, 1974- author.

Winegar, Jessica, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Anthropology--Political aspects--Middle East.

Anthropology.

Universities and colleges--Political aspects--United States.

Universities and colleges.

American Anthropological Association. Middle East Section.

American Anthropological Association.

Universities and colleges--Political aspects.

United States.

Middle East.

Local Subjects:

American Anthropological Association. Middle East Section.

Physical Description:

xi, 273 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, [2016]

Summary:

This book is the first academic study to shed critical light on the political and economic pressures that shape how U.S. scholars research and teach about the Middle East. Lara Deeb and Jessica Winegar show how Middle East politics and U.S. gender and race hierarchies affect scholars across their careers -from the first decisions to conduct research in the tumultuous region, to ongoing politicized pressures from colleagues, students, and outside groups, to hurdles in sharing expertise with the public. They detail how academia, even within anthropology, an assumed "liberal" discipline, is infused with sexism, racism, Isiamophobia, and Zionist obstruction of any criticism of the Israeli state. Anthropology's Politics offers a complex portrait of how academic politics ultimately hinders the education of U.S. students and potentially limits the public's access to critical knowledge about the Middle East. Book jacket.

Contents:

Introduction : academics and politics

Becoming a scholar

Making it through graduate school

Navigating conflicts on the job

Building disciplinary institution

Dis/engaging the War on Terror

Conclusion : undisciplining anthropology's politics

Appendix A : methods

Appendix B : AAA motions and resolutions.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 247-258) and index.

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.

ISBN:

9780804781237

0804781230

9780804781244

0804781249

9780804796842

080479684X

OCLC:

906171887