In Culture and Dignity - Dialogues between the Middle East and the West, renowned cultural anthropologist Laura Nader examines the historical and ethnographic roots of the complex relationship between the East and the West, revealing how cultural differences can lead to violence or a more peaceful co-existence. Outlines an anthropology for the 21st century that focuses on the myriad connections between peoples—especially the critical intercultural dialogues between the cultures of the East...
Abadeer incorporates informal norms such as religion, mores, myths, taboos, codes-of-conduct, customary laws, and traditions, into the structure of formal rules (e.g., polity, judiciary, laws, and the enforcement of law), which in turn influence the governance of the transactions.
In Politics in the Crevices, Sarah El-Kazaz takes readers into the world of urban planning and design practices in Istanbul and Cairo. In this transnational ethnography of neighborhoods undergoing contested rapid transformations, she reveals how the battle for housing has shifted away from traditional political arenas onto private crevices of the city. She outlines how multiple actors—from highly capitalized international NGOs and corporations to city dwellers, bureaucrats, and planning experts—...
The Arab Minority In Israel's Economy
by Noah Lewin-Epstein and Moshe Semyonov
"The Arab Minority in Israel's Economy" looks at the Arab population as an integral, albeit disadvantaged, part of Israeli society. Using data from a 30 year period, the book looks at Arab participation in the economy, and especially in the labour market. Taking an ethnic competition perspective, the book explores the extent of inequality, uncovering the institutional and social processes that influence it. The authors examine the role of local labour markets and individual human resources, givi...
This collection rethinks crisis in relation to critique through the prism of various declared ‘crises’ in the Mediterranean: the refugee crisis, the Eurozone crisis, the Greek debt crisis, the Arab Spring, the Palestinian question, and others. With contributions from cultural, literary, film, and migration studies and sociology, this book shifts attention from Europe to the Mediterranean as a site not only of intersecting crises, but a breeding ground for new cultures of critique, visions of fut...
Thirty Years of Islamic Banking (Palgrave Macmillan Studies in Banking and Financial Institutions)
by M. Iqbal and P. Molyneux
This text explains how Islamic banking works and what it offers as an alternative model of financial intermediation. Important questions addressed include: Why Islamic banking started and where it is going? Who are the main players at present and whom it will attract in future? What are its strengths and weaknesses? Will Islamic banks survive in highly competitive and globalized financial markets? What are their prospects and potentials? How does the relative performance and efficiency of Islami...
Islamophobia and Acts of Violence: The Targeting and Victimization of American Muslims is a collection of perspectives by authors from a variety of academic disciplines such as legal studies, communication studies, political science, and criminology on the subject of Anti-Muslim hate crimes. Stereotypes of middle-eastern people had been part of the American landscape for decades prior to 9/11, and this act of terrorism intensified American misconceptions of the already marginalized community a...
This thought-provoking exploration of literature and art examines contemporary Israeli works created in and about diaspora that exemplify new ways of envisioning a Jewish national identity. Diaspora has become a popular mechanism to imagine non-sovereign models of Jewish peoplehood, but these models often valorize powerlessness in sometimes troubling ways. In this book, Melissa Weininger theorizes a new category of "diaspora Israeli culture" that is formed around and through notions of homeland...
What happens to our pop culture when it meets another culture head-onespecially one that, according to some, is completely at odds with our own? In The Sheikh’s Batmobile, pop culture commentator Richard Poplak sets out on an unusual two-year odyssey. His mission is to see what becomes of his and America’s obsessionspop songs and sitcoms, Hollywood movies and shoot-'em-up video games, muscle cars and punk musicwhen they make their way into the Muslim world. Over the course of his journey, P...
This comprehensive volume investigates the dynamics of mobilization and demobilization of social networks before, during, and after episodes of political turbulence in the Middle East region, focusing particularly on the 2011 Arab uprisings. The authors consider important questions regarding agency, strategic action, and institutional outcomes that have significance for social mobilization, social movements, and authoritarian governance. This collection proposes an interactive perspective link...
Bedouin of Northern Arabia (Routledge Library Editions: Society of the Middle East)
by Bruce Ingham
This is an absorbing and authentic account, first published in 1986, of the history and traditional way of life of the Al-Dhafir bedouins of north-eastern Arabia, based on a study of their traditions, Arabic historical annals and the reports of western travellers over the past two hundred years. During the early part of the twentieth century the Al-Dhafir were a major power in the desert south west of the Euphrates between Samawa and Zubair. Beginning in the Hijaz in the early 1600s as a confede...
The Shaping of the Arabs (Routledge Library Editions: Society of the Middle East)
by Joel Carmichael
This book, first published in 1969, brings out clearly and concisely the complex moulding of Arab identity. The present-day Arabic-speaking peoples may be traced back to the Arabian tribes that were later to be shaped into a people by Islam. With the Muslim conquests the language of the Arabian tribes became the vernacular of a vast cosmopolitan society extending throughout the Middle East and Southern Mediterranean.
Gender and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (Syracuse Studies on Peace and Conflict Resolution)
by Simona Sharoni
Simona Sharoni’s innovative approach to the conflict in the Middle East stresses the relationship between gender and politics by illuminating the daily experiences of women in Israel and in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. Among the issues explored are the connections between the violence of the conflict and the escalation of violence against women; the link between militarism and sexism; and the role of nationalism in building individual and collective identities. Sharoni also shows the i...
Birthing the Nation (California Series in Public Anthropology, #2)
by Rhoda Ann Kanaaneh
In this rich, evocative study, Rhoda Ann Kanaaneh examines the changing notions of sexuality, family, and reproduction among Palestinians living in Israel. Distinguishing itself amid the media maelstrom that has homogenized Palestinians as "terrorists," this important new work offers a complex, nuanced, and humanized depiction of a group rendered invisible despite its substantial size, now accounting for nearly twenty percent of Israel's population. Groundbreaking and thought-provoking, Birthing...
This book documents the life and migratory cycle of nomadic pastoralism in Iran. The Qashqa'i have played an important role in religion and politics in Iran, but lately their way of life has been eroded by economic and social pressures and the intolerance of the government. This book provides a day-by-day account of a year in the life of the leader of the tribe. It is both an anthropological document and a portrait of a powerful personality. The book should therefore be of interest to both acade...
Migrant Domestic Workers in the Middle East
For over half a century, the Middle East has been major migration corridor for domestic workers from Asia and Africa. This book Illuminates the multidimensionality of these workers' lives as they engage in finding a balance between acting and being acted upon, struggle and accommodation, and movement and stasis.
This book offers an ethnographic account of contemporary Christian Palestinian lives in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Through individual life stories, Bård Kårtveit shows how Christians in the District of Bethlehem strive to live meaningful lives. Lives which are shaped by Christian-Muslim relations within the national community, the impact of Israeli presence in the Palestinian Territories, migration and homeland-diaspora relationships, and which are heavily influenced by changes in th...
Conflicts between different racial, ethnic, national and other social groups are becoming more and more salient. One of the main sources of these internal conflicts is social and economic inequality, in particular the increasing disparities between majority and minority groups. Even societies that had been successful in dealing with external conflicts and making the transition from war to peace have realized that this does not automatically resolve internal conflicts. On the contrary, the reso...
This book analyzes the everyday lives of labour migrants in a rapidly developing city-state. Using the emirate of Dubai as a case study, Migrant Dubai shows that even within highly restrictive mobility regimes, marginalized migrants find ways to cope with structural inequalities and quotidian modes of discrimination.
*Shortlisted for the JQ Wingate Literary Prize, 2018* Drawing on a decade of courageous and pioneering reporting, Mya Guarnieri Jaradat brings us an unprecedented and compelling look at the lives of asylum seekers and migrant workers in Israel, who hail mainly from Africa and Asia. From illegal kindergartens to anti-immigrant rallies, from detention centres to workers' living quarters, from family homes to the high court, The Unchosen sheds light on one of the most little-known but increasing...
The Challenges of Diaspora Migration (Studies in Migration and Diaspora)
by Rainer K. Silbereisen and Peter F. Titzmann
Diaspora or 'ethnic return' migrants have often been privileged in terms of citizenship and material support when they seek to return to their ancestral land, yet for many, after long periods of absence - sometimes extending to generations - acculturation to their new environment is as complex as that experienced by other immigrant groups. Indeed, the mismatch between the idealized hopes of the returning migrants and the high expectations for social integration by the new host country results in...
Between Jew and Arab (Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry)
by David N. Myers
This book offers an exploration of the fascinating Jewish thinker Simon Rawidowicz and his provocative views on Arab refugees and the fate of Israel.This book brings new attention to Simon Rawidowicz (1896-1957), the wide-ranging Jewish thinker and scholar who taught at Brandeis University in the 1950s. At the heart of Myers' book is a chapter that Rawidowicz wrote as a coda to his Hebrew tome Babylon and Jerusalem (1957) but never published. In it, Rawidowicz shifted his decades-long preoccupat...
Within western political, media and academic discourses, Muslim communities are predominantly seen through the prism of their Islamic religiosities, yet there exist within diasporic communities unique and complex secularisms. Drawing on detailed interview and ethnographic material gathered in the UK, this book examines the ways in which a form of secularism - ’non-Islamiosity’ - amongst members of the Iranian diaspora shapes ideas and practices of diasporic community and identity, as well as wid...