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

3. Anthropology’s Middle Eastern Prehistory: An Archaeology of Knowledge

47 3. anthroPology’s Middle eastern Prehistory: an archaeology of Knowledge Jon W. Anderson Interesting work is most likely to be produced by scholars whose allegiance is to a discipline defined intellectually and not to a “field” like Orientalism defined either canonically, imperially or geographically. —Edward Said, Orientalism What makes anthropology in the Middle East possible? For a generation, the answer has been complicity with power as anthropologists focused on power (and the powerless) in a paradigm of multidisciplinary area studies that Title VI of the National Defense Education Act of 1958 linked to power-focused disciplines. However,modern anthropology arrived in the Middle East under an older model of area studies with a different agenda and reference group, not on the coattails of power but of archaeology, which provided inter alia legitimacy, local contacts and connections, and often actual bases for fieldwork, which is the profession’s other bracket. Fieldwork begins before we get into the field; for a generation it has often begun at and through institutes established for archaeological research, as well as under the Title VI paradigm. Such institutional arrangements have themselves evolved along with their reference groups, which mediate relations linking “the field” that Said flags with quotes to the ethnographic sense of a site and activity of work. These arrangements matter for the kinds and conduct of 48 Knowledge Production in mena Anthropology anthropological field research in, and production of knowledge about, the region . Some of these intersections belong to a fuller ethnography of the state of the art. My own interest in the Middle East was sparked in the late 1960s by reading Fredrik Barth’s Swat Pathan studies,when there wasn’t much else on this region in comparison to other regions of the world. I encountered his Political Leadership among Swat Pathan (Barth 1959) bracketed by Reuben Levy’s Social Structure of Islam (1957) and altogether different concepts of social structure (nomad ecology) in fresh-from-the-field talks by William Irons and Philip Salzman. Looking around, there was Abner Cohen on Arab border villages (1965), which I didn’t read until later, Evans-Pritchard on the Sanusi (1949), Edmund Leach on Kurdistan (1940), an Egyptian village here (Fakhouri 1972), a Turkish village there (Stirling 1965), and Barth’s other work on Nomads of South Persia (1962) as well as his rescension of Robert Pehrson’s Social Organization of the Marri Baluch (1966). Otherwise, primary recourse could be had to classics in a more Dickensian mold, such as Lambton on Landlord and Peasant in Persia (1953) or Granqvist on Palestinian family life (1931–1935, 1947), which morphed from ancient into ethnographic research.1 I remember a long slog through Berque’s Les Structures Sociales du Haut Atlas (1955), and, since I was an incipient Afghanist, the colonial-period memoirs and aides-memoire on tribal social structures of Afghanistan and the North-West Frontier of Pakistan.2 Other work appeared while I was researching or writing my dissertation that substantially—and, more importantly, methodologically—engaged more social-scientific paradigms: Cole on nomads of eastern Saudi Arabia (1975), Fernea on community and authority in rural Iraq (1970), Bujra on stratification in Yemen (1971), Rosen (1984), and Eickelman (1976) on symbolic action in Morocco,Gilsenan’s Weberian treatment of Saint & Sufi in Modern Egypt (1973), and, by the later 1970s, Pierre Bourdieu’s Outline of a Theory of Practice (1977) and Michael Meeker’s brilliant reuse of Granqvist (1976) and Musil (Meeker 1976). A generation later, the ethnographic corpus is abundant with ethnographies of the power of words, markets of art, dynamics of class, the reaches of religion, the politics of piety, marketing “culture ,”imagining history, and,above all, literature that explores women’s lives and that follows a decisive transfer of interest from countryside to cities. To some, the anthropology of the Middle East circa 1970 seems quaint: kinship and marriage, especially parallel-cousin marriage, the veil, tribes, and above all nomads, in whom ethnographers of the region sought points of comparison, much as, say, Latin Americanists fastened on peasantry or Melanesianists on kinship. A lost world of studies of lost worlds, so utterly unlike contemporary Anthropology's Middle Eastern Prehistory 49 experience as to appear a caprice, goes the casual judgment of a discourse that subsequently became more interested in power, but above all in alternative continuities . This judgment can be fundamentally anachronistic and certainly more so than the work of...