Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Caton, Steven C
• Altorki, Soraya

Titel

Reflections on the Politics of Middle East Studies

Ist Teil von

• A Companion to the Anthropology of the Middle East, 2015, p.72-87

Ort / Verlag

Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc

Erscheinungsjahr

2015

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Wiley Online Library All Obooks

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• This chapter addresses how the study of an area such as the Middle East is enmeshed in the academic and global politics of the world and is thus “chosen” for research funding by governments, international aid organizations, and research foundations. It briefly examines the period of the 1960s and 1970s when Middle Eastern studies in anthropology came of age. The chapter also considers the topic that was once far more dominant in the anthropology of the Middle East than it is today, the topic of tribes, and asks what happened to it. In the 1970s, the study of Islam was guided by an empirical impulse that is at the base of anthropology, of attempting to understand a world‐historical religion in terms of its local and manifold incarnations, of breaking down a monolithic category into its manifest varieties.