The Middle East is once again on the global scene as a security threat to be contained by military operations, humanitarian interventions, and restrictions on immigration. International relations renders the Middle East as a bounded whole, but how did the geopolitical of the 10th Century contribute to this conception? What role does the knowledge produced by orientalists play in the perpetuation of colonial power relations in the Middle East? How can we understand emerging forms of Western intervention, state repression, and political uprisings in the contemporary Middle Eastern states and societies?
This course explores the ways in which anthropological methods can help us move beyond the geopolitical constructions of the Middles East, and understand multifaceted political subjectivities and social formations across Middle Eastern societies. Amid the current political turmoil in the Middle East that is often attributed to such factors as "failed states," "Islamic fundamentalism" or "lack of civil society," this course puts under a new light the relationship between state, society and politics through ethnographies of state and power,, body and subjectivity, and gender and sexuality in the Middle East. Case studies covered in this course will include the piety movement in Egypt, leftist revolutionaries in Iran and Kurdistan, refugee camps in Lebanon and human rights activism in Israel/Palestine.