Ethnographies of the Middle East
This seminar focuses on ethnographies published in the last ten years. The texts selected cover a variety of topics (such as revolution, authoritarian retrenchment, structural racism, the particularities of universalism, the politics of artistic production, gender and sexuality, migration, violence, state infrastructure, and environmentalism). The books include efforts to learn something about various countries in the region, broadly understood (e.g., Syria, Egypt, Palestine, Morocco, and Jordan). Among the questions we shall ask are the following: What makes ethnography a distinctive sensibility, a particular form of writing, or a specific genre of address? What kinds of themes predominate and why? What types of questions can ethnographies grapple with especially well? What skills does one need to produce a compelling ethnography? How does theory tend to get deployed in these works? How well do ethnographies speak to general concerns that extend beyond a particular case or, for that matter, any one discipline’s preoccupations?