Anthropology’s Politics: Disciplining the Middle East by Lara Deeb and Jessica Winegar (review)

Anthropology’s Politics is one of the rare (if not first) attempts to “turn the ethnographic gaze” (4) onto anthropologists and to explore what it means to be an anthropologist of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) in American academia. Lara Deeb and Jessica Winegar offer us an ethnographically engaging and rich exploration of a community of scholars who have been historically sidelined in the field of (American) Anthropology by virtue of the region they work on. In recent years, the targeting of scholars working on the MENA region in the US and the punishing actions taken against them (including termination of employment and un-hiring), have received controversial and high profile news coverage. The book shows how the treatment of these scholars is not an exception, but rather an “extreme version of common experiences” (54). Through a focus on mundane experiences of discrimination, the authors tease out the “intricate and historically constituted set of power relations” (4) that shape academic environments and disciplinary scopes: what scholars research, write, teach, speak about publically, and publish in relation to the MENA region are all shaped and molded by these power relations.

The book differentiates five generations of scholars who have worked in very different political contexts and who are by no means a unified or homogeneous community. Yet, what unites generations of MENA anthropologists is a shared experience of pressure, hostility, and threat against any critical engagement with different US and Israeli governments and their policies. Particularly, the authors examine the workings of a “compulsory version of Zionism” that permeates US academia and that stifles attempts to humanize Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims, an issue that anthropologists of the region perceive to be at the heart of their job.

While attacks on academic freedom go back to the McCarthy era, if not earlier, the authors argue that the post-9/11 period saw a heightened if not unusual form of assault that has emerged out of a variety of factors: “new media technologies, the Patriot Act, the rise of private advocacy groups (especially right wing and Zionist political organizations), the narrowing and militarization of government–academic funding relationships, and the concurrent shifts in university economic practices” (16). Taken together, these render the study of MENA in the North American academy a “political landscape” (23), of which this book offers a masterful, if not essential, study. The authors skilfully dispel the idea that an academic discipline is inherently politically disentangled, taking us through a powerful and lively ethnographic journey that is thought-provoking and demands a new kind of self-reflexiveness—one that a discipline so renowned for the art of self-reflection has yet to venture into.

Chapters 1–3 carefully chart MENA scholars’ academic trajectories. The authors explore the multitude of reasons that attracted individuals to anthropology, such as their personal motivations to understand “otherness” and a growing interest in “studying one’s own.” The latter was made possible thanks to the rise of feminist and anti-colonial approaches that were challenging discourses of objectivity and encouraged Arab Americans to study their own societies. But perhaps the most resonant attraction to Anthropology is the allure of its tools that are perceived to be exceptionally ethical, namely “being there” through fieldwork that encourages “listening to people on their own terms” (37). These tools seemed particularly appropriate in the context of a heightened involvement of the US in the Middle East and North Africa. Over the years, the Palestinian Intifada, the first Gulf War, and 9/11, all played a huge part in sparking an interest in the anthropology of the region. Anthropology seemed to provide the perfect space to challenge dominant structures of power for a growing number of scholars who expressed their political concern and who saw a need to “speak back to US empire’s effects at home and abroad” (46).

The ethnographic accounts that Deeb and Winegar provide illuminate the implications of some of these broader politics on the...