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

2. Occluding Difference: Ethnic Identity and the Shifting Zones of Theory on the Middle East and North Africa

23 2. occluding difference: ethnic identity and the shifting Zones of theory on the Middle east and north africa Seteney Shami and Nefissa Naguib Not so long ago, in the late 1970s, the Middle East was in an oil boom, on the brink of the Islamic revolution in Iran, the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, and a decisive military coup in Turkey. Ruling regimes were facing powerful new challenges in consolidating their power bases and boundaries. The wars in Lebanon had destroyed Beirut as the financial center of the Middle East and labor migration within the region was at its height. On the eve of Egyptian president Sadat’s historic visit to Israel, this is how societies of the Middle East were represented in the Annual Review of Anthropology (ara): The winds of change have by now penetrated even the more outlying, isolated communities. The process blurs the traditional boundaries between the component pieces of the Middle Eastern “mosaic of people,” but the mosaic does not disappear: new and larger pieces are formed and imposed upon the older ones as new boundaries are forged and older ones reassert themselves in new disguises. (Cohen 1977, 385) What are the notions of identity and difference on the one hand, and of change and modernity on the other, in this 1977 review of anthropology? And 24 Knowledge Production in mena Anthropology what do they reveal about presuppositions that long configured the ethnography of the region? Exploring these questions and tracing trajectories to contemporary anthropology reveals some long-occluded issues as well as potentials and strategies for a new ethnography of identity and difference in the Middle East and North Africa (mena). This intellectual project takes on renewed urgency with the dynamics unleashed by the uprisings in the Arab region starting in late 2010. New forms of knowledge about identity and difference in this region are central to the new social imaginaries that are emerging and being contested in city squares and streets every day. A Surfeit of Difference The notion of the “mosaic” became a pervasive metaphor of the “essential” Middle East once Carleton Coon deployed it as an organizing principle of his widely read book Caravan: The Story of the Middle East, first published in 1951. He argued that the Middle East was characterized by a diversity of social, ethnic , linguistic, occupational, and ecological groups, whose identities mapped a division of labor that perpetuated the differences between groups while linking them through the marketplace. The fundamentally religious fabric of society, especially Islam, provided a cementing factor, as did the various imperial, colonial, and post-independence authoritarian states that held these groups, the pieces of the “mosaic” together. More than twenty years after, in the quote above, Cohen redeploys the“mosaic ” and represents the mena as ahistorical, stagnant and unable to experience real social transformation or to accommodate changing, fluid, or multiple identities . “Change” arrives from the outside (“the winds of”) and shifts the pieces of the“mosaic”around, but the“groups”themselves are historical givens, always represent communities,and change only their“disguises.”Underscoring the continuity in intellectual genealogy, Coon wrote the introduction to the ara volume in which Cohen’s review appeared. Coon and Cohen share a notion of change as a “blur” and even an inconvenience for scholarship. For Coon, change is a chimera that obscures the essential qualities of society but does not transform them and in fact detracts from the task of the ethnographer, for a culture in transition is hard to describe and harder to understand; we must find some period of history when the culture was, relatively speaking, at rest. Then when we know the background we can bring in the automobiles Occluding Difference 25 and the movies and the parliaments and the radio broadcasts; and the presence of these bits of plastic and broken glass in our mosaic will no longer obscure the plan of the picture. (Coon 1951, 8) The production of modernity and processes of circulation, representation, negotiation, and communication, which today form the focus of the most exciting anthropological literature on the region, are here prefigured as inauthentic “bits of plastic and broken glass” obscuring the deeper inlay of the static objet d’art that is society. From the standpoint of contemporary ethnography, therefore , we could simply and comfortably relegate the“mosaic”and its implications to a bygone era of anthropology that has been superseded. To what, however, would we point...