The Blackwell Companions to Anthropology offers a series of comprehensive syntheses of the traditional subdisciplines, primary subjects, and geographic areas of inquiry for the field. Taken together, the series represents both a contemporary survey of anthropology and a cutting edge guide to the emerging research and intellectual trends in the field as a whole.
A Companion to Heritage Studies, edited by William Logan, Máiréad Nic Craith, and Ullrich Kockel
A Companion to Oral History, edited by Mark Tebeau
A Companion to Dental Anthropology, edited by Joel D. Irish and G. Richard Scott
A Companion to South Asia in the Past, edited by Gwen Robbins Schug and S. R. Walimbe
Edited by
Soraya Altorki
This edition first published 2015
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Chapter 16a, “The invention of the Mizrahim,” © 1999 Ella Shohat. Published by University of California Press
Chapter 16b, “The Mizrahi Cinema of Displacement,” © 1989, 2010 Ella Shohat. Published by I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd
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Cover image: Bus station in Cairo, Egypt © Barry Lewis / Alamy; Berber village near Tahnaout, High Atlas, Morocco, North Africa © Robert Harding World Imagery / Alamy; Turkish girls strolling in riverside park, Amasya © B.O’Kane / Alamy.
To the Children of Palestine
Hussein Ali Agrama is associate professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Questioning Secularism: Islam, Sovereignty and Rule of Law in Modern Egypt (2012), published by the University of Chicago Press. His current research explores historical and contemporary relationships between Judaism and Islam in France.
Soraya Altorki is professor of anthropology in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the American University in Cairo, where she has been teaching since 1977, serving as department chair from 1989 to 1991, and as unit head of anthropology several times. Her major fields of interest include the family, gender studies, youth, and comparative religion. She received her PhD in anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley in 1973. Among her publications are the following books: Women in Saudi Arabia: Ideology and Behavior Among the Elite (Columbia University Press, 1986); Arab Women in the Field: Studying Your Own Society (co-edited with Camillia Fawzi El-Solh; Syracuse University Press, 1988); Arabian Oasis City: The Transformation of 'Unayzah (co-authored with Donald P. Cole; University of Texas Press, 1989); Bedouins, Settlers, and Holiday-Makers: Egypt’s Changing Northwest Coast (co-authored with Donald P. Cole; The American University in Cairo Press, 1998); and Jiddah: Umm al-Rakha’ wa al-Shiddah [Jiddah: Mother of Comfort and Hardship], (in Arabic; senior co-author with Abu Bakr Baqadir; Dar al-Shuruq, 2006). She is also the author of many scholarly journal articles and book chapters. Professor Altorki was a distinguished visiting professor at King Saud University (1982 and 1983–1984) and a visiting assistant professor at King Abdulaziz University (1974–1976). She has been a post-doctoral research fellow at Northwestern University (1973–1977), Harvard University (1973–1974), University of Pennsylvania (Spring 1984), University of California, Los Angeles (Spring and Summer 1992 and Summer 1993), Georgetown University (Spring and Summer 1995), and Columbia University (as Arcapita Visiting Professor of Anthropology and Middle Eastern Studies, Spring 2010). She has received numerous funding awards from the Ford Foundation (multiple times), Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Population Council in Cairo, and the American University in Cairo.
Kamran Asdar Ali is associate professor of anthropology and director of the South Asia Institute at the University of Texas, Austin. He is the author of Planning the Family in Egypt: New Bodies, New Selves (UT Press, 2002). He is the co-editor of Gendering Urban Space in the Middle East, South Asia and Africa (Palgrave, 2008) and Comparing Cities: Middle East and South Asia (Oxford, 2009). He has published several articles on the issues of health and gender in Egypt and on Pakistani politics and popular culture. His forthcoming book is called Communism in Pakistan: Politics and Class Activism 1947–1972 (I.B. Tauris).
Hakem Al-Rustom is assistant professor of anthropology and the director of the graduate program in sociology and anthropology at the American University in Cairo. He earned his PhD from the London School of Economics for a thesis entitled “Anatolian Fragments: Armenians between Turkey and France.” His research interests lie in the intersection between political anthropology and history, ethnographic silences, political emotions, and settler colonialism. His research provides alternative approaches to the study of Middle Eastern and post-Ottoman societies, and interrogates the politics of “minorities”/“majorities” in governing population diversity, legally ambiguous populations, and sectarianism in everyday life with reference to Armenians, Arab Jews, Christians in the Middle East, and Muslims in Europe. Before joining the American University in Cairo, Hakem was a lecturer in history and Armenian studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is the co-editor of Edward Said: A Legacy of Emancipation and Representation (2010), and is currently working on a book manuscript on ethnographic silences and indigenous politics in Turkey.
J. Andrew Bush is a humanities research fellow at the New York University Abu Dhabi. He has conducted ethnographic research in the Kurdistan region of Iraq since 2004 on topics such as public intellectuals, poetry, Sufism, kinship, and sharia. Having recently completed his doctoral dissertation at Johns Hopkins University, he is at present revising a book manuscript tentatively entitled A Threadbare Prayer Mat: Sufi Poetry and the Texture of Everyday Life in Kurdistan.
Steven C. Caton is the Khaled Bin Abdullah bin Abdulrahman Al Saud professor of Contemporary Arab studies at Harvard University, where he teaches in the Department of Anthropology. He was a director of Harvard’s Center for Middle East Studies from 2004 to 2009. His area of specialization is the Arabian Peninsula, in particular, Yemen, where he did his doctoral fieldwork on Yemeni tribal poetry from 1979 to 1981, which resulted in his first book, “Peaks of Yemen I Summon”: Poetry as Cultural Practice in a North Yemeni Tribe (1990), and since that time has included two more years of cumulative research on media, water sustainability, and contemporary events. He has written a memoir/ethnography about those stints of fieldwork, Yemen Chronicle: An Anthropology of War and Mediation (2005), as well as edited and written a reference work intended for advanced high school and beginning college students, entitled Yemen (2013). His other research interests are film, media, and cultural studies, as represented by his book Lawrence of Arabia: A Film’s Anthropology (1999) and several articles on the cultural construction of the “white sheikh”—from T. E. Lawrence to Special Operations Forces—and the political work it performs in popular culture and military discourse. He has also done fieldwork in the Arabian Gulf (Kuwait, Qatar, the UAE) on the urban built environment and water sustainability, the latter subject of which is at the forefront of his research these days.
Dawn Chatty is a university professor in anthropology and forced migration, and director of the Refugee Studies Centre, Queen Elizabeth House, University of Oxford, United Kingdom. Her research interests include coping strategies and resilience of refugee youth, nomadic pastoralism and conservation, gender and development, health, illness, and culture. Her most recent books include Dispossession and Displacement in the Modern Middle East (Cambridge University Press, 2010); Dispossession and Forced Migration in the Middle East and North Africa (co-edited with Bill Finlayson; Oxford University Press, 2010); Deterritorialized Youth: Sahrawi and Afghan Refugees at the Margins of the Middle East (ed.; Berghahn Books, 2010); Nomadic Societies in the Middle East and North Africa: Facing the 21st Century (ed.; Brill, 2006); Children of Palestine: Experiencing Forced Migration in the Middle East (co-edited with Gillian Lewando-Hundt; Berghahn Books, 2005); and Conservation and Mobile Peoples: Displacement, Forced Settlement and Sustainable Development (co-edited with Marcus Colchester; Berghahn Press, 2002).
Julia Elyachar is a director of the Center for Global Peace and Conflict Studies, and associate professor of anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. Her first book, Markets of Dispossession: NGOs, Economic Development, and the State (Duke University Press, 2005), won the first book prize from the American Ethnological Association. She is the author of numerous academic journal articles on Egypt, the Middle East, financial crisis, social theory, and economic anthropology, published in journals such as Comparative Studies in Society and History, American Ethnologist, Public Culture, Cultural Anthropology, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, and Valuation Studies, and the co-editor (with Jessica Winegar) of a “Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Egypt a Year after the January 25th Revolution” in Cultural Anthropology. Most of Dr. Elyachar’s fieldwork was conducted in Egypt, and she also has extensive research experience in Israel/Palestine and former Yugoslavia. She has held fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation/SSRC Program in International Peace and Security in a Changing World; the Fulbright Commission; the International Center for Advanced Studies (NYU); the UC Humanities Research Institute; the Slovene Academy of Sciences and Arts, Ljubljana; and Harvard University (among others).
Ilana Feldman is an associate professor of anthropology, history, and international affairs at George Washington University. She is the author of Governing Gaza: Bureaucracy, Authority, and the Work of Rule, 1917–67 (Duke University Press, 2008), In the Name of Humanity: The Government of Threat and Care (co-edited with Miriam Ticktin; Duke University, 2010), and numerous articles in journals such as Cultural Anthropology, American Ethnologist, and Comparative Studies in Society and History. She has conducted ethnographic and archival research in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon, and Egypt. Her current project traces the Palestinian experience in humanitarianism in the years since 1948, exploring both how this aid apparatus has shaped Palestinian social and political life and how the Palestinian experience has influenced the broader post-war humanitarian regime.
Shahla Haeri is an associate professor of cultural anthropology and the former director of the Women’s Studies Program (2001–2010) at Boston University. She has conducted ethnographic research in Iran, Pakistan, and India, and has written on the evolving yet contentious relationship between religion/law, gender, and the state in the Muslim world. She is the author of Law of Desire: Temporary Marriage in Shi’i Iran (1989; revised edition in 2014) and No Shame for the Sun: Lives of Professional Pakistani Women (Syracuse University Press, 2002). Her forthcoming book is tentatively titled, Muslim Women Rulers: From Bilqis to Benazir (Cambridge University Press, 2017). Haeri has authored numerous articles, and is the recipient of several grants and fellowships including those at Georgetown University’s Center for International and Regional Studies (CIRS) at Doha, Qatar, Henderson Senior Research Fellowship in the Humanities at Boston University; Women’s Studies in Religion Program at Harvard Divinity School (2005–2006); Fulbright; St. Anthony’s College, Oxford University; American Institute of Pakistan Studies; Social Science Research Council; Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women, Brown University; and the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard University. Shahla Haeri has also produced a video documentary entitled Mrs. President: Women and Political Leadership in Iran (2002; 46 minutes), focusing on six women presidential contenders in Iran in 2001 (distributed by Films for Humanities and Sciences; http://www.films.com/ecTitleDetail.aspx?TitleID=4826).
Nicholas S. Hopkins is professor emeritus of anthropology at the American University in Cairo, where he taught from 1975 to 2006. In 2000–2004, he was dean of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the American University in Cairo. He earned an AB from Harvard College (1960) and a PhD from the University of Chicago (1967). In his retirement, he continues to do research, while resident in Cairo. He has conducted research in Mali, Tunisia, India, and Egypt, and published a number of books and articles on these sites as well as on theoretical issues. Most relevant to the present article are his books on agricultural and social change in Testour (Tunisia) and in Musha (Egypt), and related articles. He has also co-authored a book on environmental understandings and action in Egypt with Sohair Mehanna and Salah el-Haggar: People and Pollution: Cultural Constructions and Social Action in Egypt (AUC Press, 2001). In this work, the guiding question is the link between what people think and what they do—in other words, thought and action.
Marcia C. Inhorn is the William K. Lanman Jr. professor of anthropology and international affairs in the Department of Anthropology and the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale University. A specialist on Middle Eastern gender, religion, and health, Inhorn has conducted research on the social impact of infertility and assisted reproductive technologies in Egypt, Lebanon, the United Arab Emirates, and Arab America over the past 25 years. She is the author of five books on the subject, and has won the American Anthropological Association’s Eileen Basker Prize and the Diana Forsythe Prize for outstanding feminist anthropological research in gender, health, science, technology, and biomedicine. She is also the co-editor of nine books, and the author of hundreds of articles and chapters. Inhorn has been a visiting faculty member at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon, and the American University of Sharjah, United Arab Emirates. She was also the inaugural Diane Middlebrook and Carl Djerassi visiting professor in the University of Cambridge’s Centre for Gender Studies. Inhorn is the founding editor of the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies (JMEWS), and co-editor of the Berghahn Books series on “Fertility, Reproduction, and Sexuality.” She has served on the board of directors of the Middle East Studies Association, is the former chair of Yale’s Council on Middle East Studies, and was named the 2013 “Middle East Distinguished Scholar” by the AAA’s Middle East Section.
Suad Joseph investigates the politicization of religious sects and the intersections of gender, family, and state in the Middle East, focusing on Lebanon, with comparative work in Iraq. She theorizes notions of “self,” “rights,” and “citizenship,” and is currently following a cohort of children in a Lebanese village, observing, as they learn their notions of rights, responsibilities, and nationality. She analyzes the representation of Arabs, Muslims, Arab Americans, and Muslim Americans in the New York Times. She founded the Middle East Research Group in Anthropology (which evolved into the Middle East Section of the American Anthropological Association); the Association for Middle East Women’s Studies (AMEWS); and the Arab Families Working Group and a consortium including the American University of Beirut, the American University in Cairo, the Lebanese American University, Birzeit University, and the University of California, Davis. She was president of the Middle East Studies Association of North America in 2010–2011. She co-founded the Arab American Studies Association and the Association for Middle East Anthropology. She is general editor of the Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures. She has edited or co-edited eight books and published over 100 articles in journals and books. She is a distinguished professor at the University of California, Davis; the founding director of the Middle East/South Asia Studies Program at the University of California, Davis; and was awarded the UC Davis Prize for Undergraduate Teaching and Scholarly Achievement—the largest such prize in the United States.
Deniz Kandiyoti is an emeritus professor of development studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. She was also on the faculty of the Middle East Technical University (1969–1974) and Boğaziçi University (1974–1980) in Turkey. She is the editor of Fragments of Culture: The Everyday of Modern Turkey (Rutgers University Press, 2002), Gendering the Middle East (Syracuse University Press, 1996), and Women, Islam and the State (Temple University Press, 1991); and the author of Concubines, Sisters and Citizens: Identities and Social Transformation (Metis Yayıncılık, 1997, in Turkish), and of numerous articles on gender, Islam, post-coloniality, post-Soviet transition in Central Asia, and gender and conflict in Afghanistan. She is currently working with gender, politics, and religion on 50.50 openDemocracy, where she has been monitoring the gender effects of the Arab uprisings.
Amira Mittermaier is an associate professor in the Department for the Study of Religion and the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations at the University of Toronto. She received her PhD in socio-cultural anthropology from Columbia University. Bringing together textual analysis and ethnographic fieldwork, her research illuminates how Islam is lived, embodied, and contested on the ground by going beyond the visible realm and paying attention to dreams, visions, the afterlife, and economies with God. Her award-winning book Dreams that Matter: Egyptian Landscapes of the Imagination (University of California Press, 2011) explores Muslim practices of dream interpretation, as they are inflected by Islamic reformism, Western psychology, and mass mediation. Mittermaier’s current book project examines modes of almsgiving and food distribution in different religious spaces in Cairo. This project aims to think through how everyday acts of giving relate to, and disrupt, political calls for social justice in post-Mubarak Egypt.
Nada Moumtaz is an assistant professor of Near Eastern languages and cultures at Ohio State University. She received her B.Arch from the American University of Beirut and her PhD in cultural anthropology from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in 2012. Her work is rooted in the anthropology of Islam, law, property, the state, and the economy while engaging Ottoman history during the era of reformand Islamic legal studies. As an architect, she has had a long-standing engagement with urban issues. She recently co-organized the yearly conference of the Graduate Programs in Urban Planning, Policy, and Design at the American University of Beirut, City Debates 2014, entitled, Of Property and Planning. During 2014–2015, Nada Moumtaz is a postdoctoral fellow at the program “Europe in the Middle East, the Middle East in Europe” of the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin, where she is preparing her book manuscript, tentatively titled, Modernizing Charity: Property, Law, and Religion in Modern Beirut for publication.
Jessica Newman is a doctoral student in socio-cultural anthropology in the Department of Anthropology at Yale University. She specializes in critical medical anthropology, anthropology of the body, gender and sexuality studies, and post-colonial studies. At the time of this writing, she is conducting a 24-month doctoral dissertation research study in Casablanca and Rabat, Morocco. Her dissertation focuses on abortion and unwed motherhood in Morocco, and the political, moral, and rhetorical landscapes surrounding these deeply linked and contested issues. She was awarded the Fulbright-Hays Fellowship for Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research Doctoral Dissertation Grant, the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale Dissertation Research Grant, and the National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant (declined). She first began working in Morocco in 2008 when she received a Fulbright IIE Fellowship. She has served as the president of the student association of the American Institute for Margrib Studies (2012–2104). She has several articles forthcoming, including “Sex Toys and the Politics of Pleasure in Morocco,” which will be published by Vanderbilt University Press in Emerging Reproductive Health Technologies in the Middle East and North Africa, edited by Lisa Wynn and Angel Foster.
Michelle Obeid is a lecturer in social anthropology at the University of Manchester. She has carried out fieldwork in the town of Arsal on the northern border of Lebanon with Syria, researching changing kinship relations and political life at the border of the nation-state. Her ongoing research focuses on the mundane experiences of mobility among Arab immigrants in London, and the social and political projects they undertake in the process of building new lives and homes.
Mark Allen Peterson is professor and chair of anthropology and professor of international studies at Miami University. He is the author of Connected in Cairo: Growing Up Cosmopolitan in the Modern Middle East (Indiana University Press, 2011) and Anthropology and Mass Communication: Media and Myth in the New Millennium (Berghahn, 2003), and co-author of Introduction to International Studies: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Global Issues (Westview, 2014). He blogs at connectedincairo.com.
John Philip Rode Schaefer is an assistant professor of anthropology at Miami University. His current project, The Black Sahara: Gnawa Music and Spiritual Work in Morocco, explores the way African culture is packaged and marketed in Morocco by low-income and working-class musicians for national and global audiences, and how in the process Moroccans have come to reframe their own identities to reflect transformations in the social imagination. He received a PhD in anthropology with emphasis in folklore and public culture from the University of Texas at Austin (2009) and was previously assistant professor at the American University in Cairo. He has conducted fieldwork in Morocco, Ghana, and Egypt.
Ella Shohat teaches at the departments of Art and Public Policy and Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University. She has lectured and written extensively on issues having to do with postcolonial and transnational approaches to cultural studies. Her award-winning publications include: Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices (Duke University Press, 2006); Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation (University of Texas Press, 1989; new updated edition with a new postscript chapter, I.B. Tauris, 2010); Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age (MIT and the New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1998); and Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation and Postcolonial Perspectives (co-edited, University of Minnesota Press, 1997); and, with Robert Stam: Unthinking Eurocentrism (Routledge, 1994); Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality, and Transnational Media (Rutgers University Press, 2003); Flagging Patriotism: Crises of Narcissism and Anti-Americanism (Routledge, 2007); and Culture Wars in Translation (forthcoming, New York University Press, 2011). Shohat’s co-edited volume, The Cultural Politics of “the Middle East” in the Americas (forthcoming, University of Michigan Press, 2011). Her writing has been translated into diverse languages, including: French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, German, Arabic, Hebrew, Turkish, Polish, and Romanian. Shohat has also served on the editorial board of several journals, including: Social Text; Critique: Critical Middle Eastern Studies; Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism; Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies; and Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication. She is a recipient of fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University, where she also taught at the School of Criticism and Theory. She was recently awarded a Fulbright research/lectureship at the University of São Paulo, Brazil, for working on the cultural intersections between the Middle East and Latin America.
Paul A. Silverstein is professor of anthropology at Reed College (Portland, Oregon, USA). He is author of Algeria in France: Transpolitics, Race and Nation (Indiana University Press, 2004), and co-editor (with Ussama Makdisi) of Memory and Violence in the Middle East and North Africa (Indiana University Press, 2006) and (with Jane Goodman) of Bourdieu in Algeria: Colonial Politics, Ethnographic Practices, Theoretical Developments (Nebraska University Press, 2009). A 2008 Carnegie Scholar, his current research focuses on Berber (Amazigh) ethno-politics within Morocco and the North African diaspora. He also co-edits the book series Public Cultures in the Middle East and North Africa (Indiana University Press).
Martin Stokes is an ethnomusicologist with a particular interest in the Middle East and the Islamic world, particularly Turkey and Egypt. He received a DPhil from the University of Oxford in 1989, and has held posts at the Queen’s University of Belfast, University of Chicago, and University of Oxford before becoming King Edward Professor of Music at King’s College, London in 2013. He has published extensively on the music of the Middle East, and on various other topics in the history and theory of ethnomusicology. His most recent book is The Republic of Love: Cultural Intimacy in Turkish Popular Music (University of Chicago Press, 2010), which won the Merriam Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology. He was elected a fellow of the British Academy in 2013.
Mayssoun Sukarieh is a Cogut Postdoctoral Fellow in international humanities and modern Arab culture and society at Brown University. She has extensive ethnographic field experience in Lebanon, Jordan, the Gulf States, Iraq, and Egypt. Her work examines the flow of ideas between global centers of power and capitals through the Arab region, with a particular critical emphasis on the construction and transformation of neoliberal ideology and power. She has served as a postdoctoral fellow at Colombia University, and as a visiting assistant professor at the American University of Cairo and the American University of Beirut. She holds a PhD in anthropology and education from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MA and BA from the American University of Beirut.
Livia Wick is an assistant professor of anthropology at the American University of Beirut. Her work has explored the political and cultural dimensions of medicine and childbirth in Palestine. Her research has focused on the organization of medicine in times of crisis, specifically during the Second Intifada, as well as on the emergence of new practices and experiences of childbirth, family, and motherhood. Her research in Palestine has generated writings on the oral history of the Palestinian health infrastructure, on the cultural politics of NGOs, and on the Israeli restrictions on mobility and its effects on gender and family relations. Her articles have appeared in Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, City and Society, and Global Public Health, as well as in an edited volume entitled Public Health in the Arab World. Her current work excavates the cultural history of sumud (perseverance) in its Palestinian and Arab dimensions.
Zeina Zaatari is an independent lecturer, researcher, and consultant focusing on gender and sexuality in the Middle East and North Africa. Previously, she worked as the regional director for the MENA program at Global Fund for Women (2004–2012). She earned her PhD in cultural anthropology with an emphasis in feminist theory from the University of California, Davis, with dissertation fieldwork focusing on women’s groups and activists in South Lebanon. She is currently working on a book titled Interrogating Heteronormativity in Lebanon: Family, Citizenship, and Access to Adulthood. Her publications include “Desirable Masculinity/Femininity and Nostalgia of the ‘Anti-Modernity’: Bab el-Hara Television Series as a Site of Production,” in Sexuality and Culture (2014); “Re-Imagining Family, Gender, and Sexuality: Feminist and LGBT Activism in the context of the 2006 Invasion of Lebanon,” co-written with Nadine Naber in Cultural Dynamics: Insurgent Scholarship on Culture, Politics, and Power (2014); “Arab Feminist Awakening: Possibilities and Necessities,” in Arab Feminisms: A Critical Perspective (Bahithat, 2012, in Arabic); “In the Belly of the Beast: Struggling for Non-Violent Belonging,” in Arab and Arab American Feminisms (2011); and “The Culture of Motherhood: An Avenue for Women’s Civil Participation,” in Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies (2006). She currently serves as secretary of the board of the Association for Women’s Rights in Development, and is a core group member of the Arab Families Working Group.
My home institution, the American University in Cairo, generously allowed me release time from teaching so that I could devote the needed time to work on this volume, A Companion to the Anthropology of the Middle East. The Ford Foundation offered the requisite financial support to facilitate this. I thank them both for their support, which was indispensable to completing the project and seeing it through to publication.
I am also grateful to Lila Abu-Lughod, Talal Asad, Kevin Dwyer, and Laura Nader for their advice as I was conceptualizing the project and also for their careful reading and comments on my own chapter in this volume. Other individuals with whom I met and who were kind enough to “brainstorm” with me in the earlier stages were Hakem Al-Rustom, John Schaefer, Mayssoun Sukarieh, and Ana Vinea. I thank them all for their patience and collegial support. Finally, I thank all the contributors of this volume for their forbearance, support, and scholarship.