Food for Health, Food for Wealth (Anthropology of Food & Nutrition, #3)
by Lynn Harbottle
Food and eating practices are central to current sociological and anthropological concerns about the body, health, consumption, and identity. This study explores the importance of these themes as they intersect with processes of globalization and cultural production within a specific group of consumers, British Sh'ite Iranians. Through the analysis of the consumption practices of this particular migrant group, this book illustrates how both the nutritional value and symbolic significance of fo...
Lebanon may be the most complicated place in the world to be a "mixed" couple. It has no civil marriage law, fifteen personal status laws, and a political system built on sectarianism. Still, Lebanon has the most interreligious marriages per capita in the Middle East. What constitutes a mixed marriage is in flux as social norms shift, and reactions to mixed marriage reveal underlying social categories of discrimination. Through stories of Lebanese couples, Love Across Difference challenges reade...
“ Following her mesmerizing debut collection Atrium, Hala Alyan offers a sustaining and luminous meditation on love and war in Four Cities. Baghdad, New York, Beirut, Tel Aviv, Tripoli, Detroit and Paris are just names on maps, 'for when maps fold and countries vanish… it is just you and the dust you carry on your skin.' These gritty, volatile communities dissolve into dreamscapes, redolent with lemons, dazzled with snow, awake to conversation and kisses. The sky is alway...
Much modern anthropology has assumed that an adequate description of any society consists of rules that inform its members' relationships and the logic that unites their cultural symbols. In this book Lawrence Rosen argues that, for the people who live in and around the Moroccan city of Sefrou, attachment to others and the terms by which they are conceived are, at their most fundamental level, subject to a constant process of negotiation. Drawing on the philosophy of speech acts as well as inte...
The Hadramis of South Yemen and the emergence of their diasporic communities throughout the Indian Ocean region are an intriguing facet of the history of this region’s migratory patterns. In the early centuries of migration, the Yemeni, or Hadrami, traveler was both a trader and a religious missionary, making the migrant community both a “trade diaspora” and a “religious diaspora.” This tradition has continued as Hadramis around the world have been linked to networks of extremist, Islamic-insp...
The author argues that the Entertainment Authority of Saudi Arabia was created in 2016 was meant to introduce "a new Saudi" to the Western outsider audience that the "new Saudi" state is on a mission to transform the country from a traditional and conservative kingdom to a new state that is dedicated to social modernization and openness. The author argues that globalization and the neoliberalism capitalist mode of politics have reinforced the transformation of cultural production into global ent...
Salafis explicitly base their legitimacy on continuity with the Quran and the Sunna, and their distinctive practices-praying in shoes, wearing long beards and short pants, and observing gender segregation-are understood to have a similarly ancient pedigree. In this book, however, Aaron Rock-Singer draws from a range of media forms as well as traditional religious texts to demonstrate that Salafism is a creation of the twentieth century and that its signature practices emerged primarily out of Sa...
Nakba and Survival (New Directions in Palestinian Studies, #6)
by Adel Manna
A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. Beginning in 1948, Israeli paramilitary forces began violently displacing Palestinian Arabs from Palestine. Nakba and Survival tells the stories of Palestinians in Haifa and the Galilee during, and in the decade after, mass dispossession. Manna uses oral histories and Palestinian and Israeli archives, diaries, and memories to meticulously reconstruct the social history of the Palestinians who remained and...
Analyzing the visual syntax and display rhetoric applied in newspaper photos, national historical albums, and museum exhibitions, Noa Hazan shows that although racial thought was and still is verbally suppressed in Israel, it is vividly present in its nonverbal official and public visual sphere. The racist perspective of newspaper editors, book publishers, photographers, and museum curators were morally justified in its time by such patronizing ideals as realistic news coverage or the salvation...
Taking the perspective of anthropologist Clifford Geertz, Tibi re-approaches the problem of social change in Islam, arguing that religions represent cultural systems that both influence and are influenced by religion.
The Politics of Race and Racialisation in the Middle East (Ethnic & Racial Studies)
This book explores the extent to which race and racialisation offer us an explanatory framework to study the contemporary politics of identity in the Middle East today. Most studies of the Middle East commonly presume that the race signifier is reserved for the juxtaposition of 'Black' and 'White' identity to which the Arab, Persian and Turkish world counts itself as exterior. Up until now, few works on the Middle East have discussed race as central to their analysis. This book works to remedy t...
Peronism as a Big Tent (McGill-Queen's Studies in Ethnic History)
by Raanan Rein and Ariel Noyjovich
Argentina's populist movement, led by Juan Peron, welcomed people from a broad range of cultural backgrounds to join its ranks. Unlike most populist movements in Europe and North America, Peronism had an inclusive nature, rejecting racism and xenophobia.In Peronism as a Big Tent Raanan Rein and Ariel Noyjovich examine Peronism's attempts at garnering the support of Argentines of Middle Eastern origins - be they Jewish, Maronite, Orthodox Catholic, Druze, or Muslim - in both Buenos Aires and the...
Music in Arabia extends and challenges existing narratives of the region's distinctive but understudied music to reveal diverse and dynamic music cultures rooted in centuries-old heritage. Contributors to Music in Arabia bring a critical eye and ear to the contemporary soundscape, musical life, and expressive culture in the Gulf region. Including work by leading scholars and local authorities, this collection presents fresh perspectives and new research addressing why musical expression is fund...
In this new history, French author Georges Bensoussan retells the story of what life was like for Jews in the Arab world since 1850. During the early years of this time, it was widely believed that Jewish life in Arab lands was peaceful. Jews were protected by law and suffered much less violence, persecution, and inequality. Bensoussan takes on this myth and looks back over the history of Jewish-Arab relations in Arab countries. He finds that there is little truth to the myth and forwards a nu...
Mental Health and Palestinian Citizens in Israel (Indiana Middle East Studies)
Constituting the Political Economy of the Kurds (Durham Modern Middle East and Islamic World)
by Omer Tekdemir
This book examines the development of Kurdish political economy and the emergence of collective Kurdish identity within a historical context through three main periods: the late-Ottoman Empire, the initial Republican Turkey era, and then the post-1990s period. It relates historical developments to the dynamics of Kurdish society, including the anthropological realities of the nineteenth century through the moral economy frame, the evolving nature of nationalism in the early twentieth century and...
This book explores comic performance in Pakistan through the vibrant Indo-Muslim tradition of the Punjabi bhānd which now holds a marginal space in contemporary weddings. With irreverent repartee, genealogical prowess, a topsy-turvy play with hierarchies and shape shifting, the low-status bhānd jostles space in otherwise rigid class and caste hierarchies. Tracing these negotiations in both historical and contemporary sites, the author unfolds a dynamic performance mode that travels from the Sans...
Religion and Nation (Studies in Forced Migration, v. 15) (Forced Migration, #15)
by Kathryn Spellman
An estimated 75,000 Iranians emigrated to Britain after the 1979 revolution and the establishment of the Islamic Republic. They are politically, religiously, socio-economically and ethnically heterogeneous, and have found themselves in the ongoing process of settlement. The aim of this book is to explore facets of this process by examining the ways in which religious traditions and practices have been maintained, negotiated and rejected by Iranians from Muslim backgrounds and how they have ser...
With the rare researches that focus on the cross-cultural aspects, this book tends to investigate how Arab immigrants construct and use landscape and public space in Berlin as a host city. The approach of social constructivist landscape research is chosen to highlight the effects of past and present in their experiences, including the effect of home and childhood period, social and cultural background, previous and current migration experiences including the level of integration and patterns of...
Getting Respect
by Michele Lamont, Graziella Moraes Silva, Jessica Welburn, Joshua Guetzkow, Nissim Mizrachi, Hanna Herzog, and Elisa Reis
Racism is a common occurrence for members of marginalized groups around the world. Getting Respect illuminates their experiences by comparing three countries with enduring group boundaries: the United States, Brazil and Israel. The authors delve into what kinds of stigmatizing or discriminatory incidents individuals encounter in each country, how they respond to these occurrences, and what they view as the best strategy--whether individually, collectively, through confrontation, or through self-...
The Formative Period of Twelver Shi'ism (Culture and Civilization in the Middle East)
by Andrew J. Newman
Shows how the frictions and disparities between the different pockets of believers scattered throughout the Eastern Islamic world in the late ninth and tenth centuries, the relations between each of these and the Abbasid political institution favoured the narration of different bodies of the Imams' traditions
While conventional wisdom points to the Arab-Israeli War of 1967 as the gateway for the founding of the first Arab American national political organization, such advocacy in fact began with the Syrian nationalist movement, which emerged from immigration trends at the turn of the last century. Bringing this long-neglected history to life, The Making of Arab Americans overturns the notion of an Arab population that was too diverse to share common goals. Tracing the forgotten histories of the Free...
In this provocative book Joumana Haddad uses the format of the political pamphlet to describe the liberating impact of literature on her life. She tells of reading the Marquis de Sade at twelve, of her metamorphosis into an award-winning poet, and reflects upon how this has shaped her as an Arab woman, as a writer and as a magazine editor. Joumana challenges prevalent notions of identity and womanhood in the Middle East and speaks of how she came to create the Arab world's first erotic literary...