Middle East Politics in US Academia: The Case of Anthropology
Rent from DeepDyve- Middle East Politics in US AcademiaThe Case of Anthropology
As we noted in volume 36, number 1, the editorial board of Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East will use the pages of the journal to reflect occasionally on the politics of the academy. For the past three years, a debate about the relationship between Middle East politics and scholarship has spread across universities in the United States and elsewhere, raising important questions concerning the possibilities for creating critical knowledge about the region.
In their recent book, Anthropology's Politics: Disciplining the Middle East (Stanford University Press, 2016), Lara Deeb and Jessica Winegar provide the first academic study of how political and economic pressures shape the way scholars based in the United States research and teach about the Middle East. Lila Abu-Lughod, a member of the journal's editorial board, recently talked with the authors about the dynamics of the field. The book's final chapter examines the movement among anthropologists in support of a boycott of Israeli academic institutions. Just after the book's publication, the issue came to a vote at the American Anthropological Association. Abu-Lughod asks the authors whether their research enables us to understand the outcome of the vote.
This has been a time of intense debate and activity in the US academy around Middle East politics as various proposals to support the academic boycott of Israeli institutions have been put forward, studied, debated, and sometimes put to a vote by scholarly associations, including ours, the American Anthropological Association (AAA). At the same time your coauthored book, Anthropology's Politics: Disciplining the Middle East, was published. Edward Said's Orientalism had treated Middle East anthropologists as a sort of exception. Later he challenged the discipline as a whole for its fetishization of difference and utter silence on its imperial location in the United States. I still remember his address to the AAA in 1987, later published as "Representing the Colonized: Anthropology's Interlocutors." With all the reflexivity and self-criticism that marked the discipline in the 1980s, he found it remarkable that no one ever asked the basic question of what practicing anthropology and speaking as an anthropologist meant "in an enormously influential and powerful state whose global role is that of a superpower."1 His concern was with the discipline as a whole, not the work of anthropologists of the Middle East in particular. I wonder if you could talk about how being anthropologists of the Middle East shaped your approach to your subject of Middle East politics in the US academy. [End Page 103]
Academic disciplines vary in their commitment to interrogating the politics of knowledge production. The range and forms of commitment become clear if we examine how disciplines construct, engage with, or even ignore different world regions. Our study of the anthropology of the Middle East reveals that the social practices of a discipline are crucial to understanding the nature of such disciplinary intersections with region. Anthropologists have constituted the "region" of the Middle East in ways deeply shaped by gendered and racialized academic politics, US engagement with the region, and national political and economic shifts. We ground our analysis in interviews with over one hundred Middle East anthropologists based in the United States; fifteen years of participant observation in the subfield of Middle East anthropology; archival research on academic associations, including the AAA; and research on right-wing media and external lobbying groups.
Excavating the politicized social practice of Middle East anthropology in the United States over the past decades is critical for understanding the present political moment in both the region and discipline and in area studies more generally. Our findings actually help explain the outcome of recent efforts within anthropology and specifically in the AAA to support Palestinian rights through a boycott of Israeli academic institutions. These efforts and the failure of the AAA membership to endorse the boycott resolution in 2016 by a tiny margin highlight the ways socialized disciplinary practices of knowledge production both constrain and enable politically engaged scholarship.
Anthropology's Politics lays out some...
