Anthropology of the Middle East and North Africa: Into the New Millennium

1. State of the State of the Art Studies: An Introduction to the Anthropology of the Middle East and North Africa

3 1. state of the state of the art studies: an introduction to the anthroPology of the Middle east and north africa Susan Slyomovics In the present state of the art, this is all that can be done. —H. H. Suplee, Gas Turbine In both everyday and academic discourse, as noun or adjective, the phrase“state of the art” has come to mean “incorporating the newest ideas and most up-todate features” (Oxford English Dictionary online). The first usage, dated to 1910 according to the Oxford English Dictionary, was recorded in Gas Turbine, an engineering manual authored by H.H.Suplee,who issued this laconic observation:“In the present state of the art, this is all that can be done.”Wikipedia’s definition is: The state of the art is the highest level of development, as of a device, technique , or scientific field, achieved at a particular time. It also applies to the level of development (as of a device, procedure, process, technique, or science ) reached at any particular time usually as a result of modern methods. (Wikipedia, 1 October 2011) At least in legal parlance, the semantic range of the phrase extends beyond the implication of a definitive overview of what came before toward something new 4 Knowledge Production in mena Anthropology in order to establish the originality of an invention in patent law. Similarly, in state-of-the-art surveys in the social sciences, the understanding has been that the disciplinary terrain is to be surveyed primarily for the purpose of relegating known and disseminated research to the past in order to ask what’s new. My version of the “state-of-the-art” definition, by contrast with this forward-looking focus, is a past-oriented survey of what’s been accomplished and what’s missing. It must be excellent and comprehensive, publicly available for scrutiny, and used to assess the originality of future projects; these were the three goals of a 2010 ucla conference titled “State of the Art: The Anthropology of the Middle East and North Africa,” and of this volume which it inspired. Critically reviewing critical reviews enables me to engage shamelessly and explicitly with issues of hindsight bias, or roads taken and not taken. This is because decades of essays about the state of the art are characterized by negative assessments of the anthropology of the Middle East and North Africa (mena). Discourses about the state of the art have been organized around the oppositional figure of antithesis, a Janus-faced methodology that looks backward then forward, not only echoing and presaging the underlying shared enterprise of hindsight bias but inevitably embedding the particular biases of the author and his times (most authors were male). We could go so far as to label the “state of the art” as a genre, meaning a productive category of social science criticism with a specific set of conventions alluded to above, notably negative assessment , hindsight bias, and a dialectic of proposition and counter-propositions. Timothy Mitchell, in his 2003 state-of-the-art review, “The Middle East in the Past and Future of Social Science” provides examples of hindsight bias, the trope endemic to state-of-the-art studies. In so doing, he underscores the ways in which the genre of the state of the art begins by and depends on reciting a litany of failures attributed to Middle East studies and the social science of the region. Mitchell’s prime example is Leonard Binder’s sweeping condemnation of the field in his 1973 article,“Area Studies: A Critical Reassessment”:“The fact is that Middle East studies are beset by subjective projection, displacements of affect, ideological distortion, romantic mystification, and religious bias, as well as a great deal of incompetent scholarship” (Binder 1976, 16). Another example is an essay by anthropologist John Gulick (1969),“State of the Art III: The Anthropology of the Middle East,”which depicted the Janus-like face of Middle East anthropology poised between the negative and the positive, faced with two potential opposing directions: State of the State of the Art Studies 5 The state of art of anthropology in the Middle East is a state of growth like Topsy.1 We continue to be faced with the dilemma of either filling subregional gaps in descriptive knowledge (so that we can make generalizations more confidently) or of focusing much research on a few sub-regions (so that we can generate more...