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"Deeb, Lara"
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Practicing sectarianism : archival and ethnographic interventions on Lebanon
Practicing Sectarianism explores the imaginative and contradictory ways that people live sectarianism. The book's essays use the concept as an animating principle within a variety of sites across Lebanon and its diasporas and over a range of historical periods. With contributions from historians and anthropologists, this volume reveals the many ways sectarianism is used to exhibit, imagine, or contest power: What forms of affective pull does it have on people and communities? What epistemological work does it do as a concept? How does it function as a marker of social difference?
Examining social interaction, each essay analyzes how people experience sectarianism, sometimes pushing back, sometimes evading it, sometimes deploying it strategically, to a variety of effects and consequences. The collection advances an understanding of sectarianism simultaneously constructed and experienced, a slippery and changeable concept with material effects. And even as the book's focus is Lebanon, its analysis fractures the association of sectarianism with the nation-state and suggests possibilities that can travel to other sites. Practicing Sectarianism, taken as a whole, argues that sectarianism can only be fully understood—and dismantled—if we first take it seriously as a practice.
eBook
Beyond sectarianism
Based on interviews with Lebanese in over 150 mixed-religion marriages and their extended family members, I argue that sect may conceal or stand in for other forms of difference, including ideas about status and hierarchy related to class and regional origin in Lebanon. Because it is the most readily available discourse for understanding social difference, parents often use sectarian rhetoric to describe their concerns about a variety of problems they see in their children's chosen partners. By listening between the lines of parental objections, I suggest that expressions of bias against people of other sects may mask concerns with other forms of social difference, in effect reducing a complex and shifting social field of multiple axes of difference into sect. Rather than assume sectarianism's a priori importance, this approach allows me to bring other discourses of difference and analytic lenses to the foreground.
Journal Article
Thinking piety and the everyday together
Meditation on Fadil, Nadia and Mayanthi Fernando. 2015. \"Rediscovering the 'everyday' Muslim: Notes on an anthropological divide.\" HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 5(2): 59-88
Journal Article
Anthropology's politics : disciplining the Middle East
U.S. involvement in the Middle East has brought the region into the media spotlight and made it a hot topic in American college classrooms. At the same time, anthropology—a discipline committed to on-the-ground research about everyday lives and social worlds—has increasingly been criticized as \"useless\" or \"biased\" by right-wing forces. What happens when the two concerns meet, when such accusations target the researchers and research of a region so central to U.S. military interests?
This book is the first academic study to shed critical light on the political and economic pressures that shape how U.S. scholars research and teach about the Middle East. Lara Deeb and Jessica Winegar show how Middle East politics and U.S. gender and race hierarchies affect scholars across their careers—from the first decisions to conduct research in the tumultuous region, to ongoing politicized pressures from colleagues, students, and outside groups, to hurdles in sharing expertise with the public. They detail how academia, even within anthropology, an assumed \"liberal\" discipline, is infused with sexism, racism, Islamophobia, and Zionist obstruction of any criticism of the Israeli state. Anthropology's Politics offers a complex portrait of how academic politics ultimately hinders the education of U.S. students and potentially limits the public's access to critical knowledge about the Middle East.
eBook
Anthropologies of Arab-Majority Societies
This article reviews recent anthropological scholarship of Arab-majority societies in relation to geopolitical and theoretical shifts since the end of the Cold War, as well as conjunctures of research location, topic, and theory. Key contributions of the subfield to the larger discipline include interventions into feminist theorizing about agency; theories of modernity; analyses of cultural production consumption that destabilize the culture concept; approaches to religion that integrate textual traditions with practice, experience, and institutions; and research on violence that emphasizes routinization and affect. Emerging work in the areas of race and ethnicity, secularism, law, human rights, science and technology, and queer studies has the potential to strengthen anthropology of the region as well as to contribute to the discipline more broadly.
Journal Article
Emulating and/or embodying the ideal: The gendering of temporal frameworks and Islamic role models in Shi'i Lebanon
In this article, I discuss two of the major temporal frameworks that pious Shi'i Muslims in Lebanon draw on, as seen through the example of the Battle of Karbala, its annual commemoration during Ashura, and the work that the religious figures Imam Husayn and Sayyida Zaynab do in linking history to the contemporary moment. I suggest that, to fully understand how these two temporalities work, it is necessary to attend to the ways in which they are differently gendered. I conclude by proposing explanations for that gendering that take into account both the Ashura history itself and contemporary local and transnational political contingencies.
Journal Article
Piety politics and the role of a transnational feminist analysis
This paper draws on the ethnographic case of pious Shi'i Muslim gender activists in Lebanon in order to argue for the necessity of considering transnational discourses on gender and Islam in our analyses of piety. Based upon field research conducted in al-Dahiya -- the southern suburb of Beirut -- since 1998, the paper examines pious Shi'i women's engagements with transnational discourses about gender roles and stereotypes about Muslim women. The paper excavates a Hizbullah Women's Committee seminar during which reformulated Islamic models of womanhood as well as models associated with 'the West' were discussed in relation to women's participation in the public sphere. The paper suggests that political and social contexts are critical aspects of modern formations of piety, and that scholarship should aim towards multifaceted and non-reductive analyses that incorporate transnational discursive and political-economic contexts into discussions of piety politics in ways that are not necessarily constitutive and that are always contextually contingent. /// Le présent article est consacré au cas ethnographique de féministes chiites pieuses au Liban et se veut un plaidoyer pour la prise en compte des discours transnationaux sur le sexe et l'islam dans les analyses de la piété. Sur la base de recherches sur le terrain menées à al-Dahiya, dans la banlieue sud de Beyrouth, depuis 1998, l'auteur examine l'engagement de femmes chiites pieuses dans le discours transnational sur les rôles et stéréotypes de genre concernant les femmes musulmanes. L'analyse prend appui sur un séminaire du Comité des femmes du Hezbollah, au cours duquel des modèles islamiques reformulés de la condition féminine et des modèles associés à \"l'Occident\" étaient débattus en relation avec la participation des femmes aux affaires publiques. L'auteur suggère que les contextes politique et social sont cruciaux dans la formation moderne de la piété et que les études doivent tendre vers des analyses non réductrices, portant sur de multiples aspects, qui intègrent les contextes discursifs et politico-économiques transnationaux dans la discussion de politiques de la piété, selon une approche qui ne soit pas nécessairement constitutive et toujours contextualisée.
Journal Article
Thinking piety and the everyday together
Meditation on Fadil, Nadia and Mayanthi Fernando. 2015. “Rediscovering the ‘everyday’ Muslim: Notes on an anthropological divide.” Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 5(2): 59–88
Journal Article