Anthropology of the Middle East

When proposing the theme ‘Rural Anthropology of the Middle East’, we never would have thought that such a variety of topics would be included in the issue. Despite the fact that a continuously decreasing proportion of people dwell in rural areas around the world, including the Middle East, rural people are proving to be resourceful in facing modernity. For this reason, a diversity of subjects can be studied in rural areas, as each village is unique and quite different from the others.

The case of a remote tribal village in southwest Iran demonstrates the circumstances conducive to positive rural development. My research suggests that since the founding of this village around 1880, its people - led by a progressive, literate young chief - successfully defended their realm against incorporation into the neighbouring chiefs' reigns of lawlessness and warfare; introduced and modernised irrigation agriculture and fruit cultivation then unique in the whole region; and embraced formal education. Discussing such adaptive strategies, I argue that a strong ethos of progress and achievement, including civic awareness, motivated local people from the beginning to pursue new ways to improve their livelihood.

Turkish society is now predominantly urban, and, in this context, villages are undergoing significant changes. The principal one is that they have become a resource. Until recently, the village - even if it had resources - was not looked on as such; rather, it was seen as a milieu with which people had to cope. This transformation, however, does not end there: the village has also become an object of desire.

Anthropological participant observation, in-depth, open-ended interviewing and oral history reveal aspects of social change and modernisation that have taken place in Aliabad, Iran, over more than half a century. These developments have transpired in interplay with economic, political and cultural processes. As a result of economic transformation from sharecropping and trading to urban-style jobs, and due to outside influences as a consequence of advances in transportation, communication, education and travel, villagers have been able to make other choices. Through bottom-up social and political change, relationships in all areas of life have become less authoritarian and hierarchical and more egalitarian and subject to negotiation and individuation.

Cairo's City of the Dead embodies the social and cultural stratification that has occurred over the course of Egyptian history. Nowadays, its syncretic culture is a mixture of urban and rural aspects - a 'rurban' culture. In an effort to escape from the poverty of their hamlets, rural migrants started to move to the capital during the last decades of Ottoman rule, ending up in the fringe zones of the city. During the second wave of migration in the twentieth century, the poorest segments illicitly occupied abandoned or rarely visited funeral courtyards. The article explores how this district has been restructured by the occupation. It analyses the meaning of the physical and cultural transformations of funerary spaces, as well as the migrants' role in the formation of the locality.

This article examines the practices of mobility and settlement of a community of Syrian Dom moving between Syria and Lebanon. I explore strategies, limitations and opportunities that defined the sphere of Dom social relations in Lebanon. While considering mainly the experience of Dom men, I argue that the scarcity of work, combined with social and political instability, affected their ability to reproduce community and family ties in Lebanon. Within these external constraints, flexibility and adaptation informed both residence patterns and the field of social interactions, which the Dom reconstituted through their cross-border mobility.

The practice of men swapping daughters for wives or nieces as daughters-in-law is evident among the Bedouin. Although this pattern has its roots in ancient Arab culture and is a unique exception to theories of exchange marriage (EM), there is little reference to the circumstances of its occurrence in the anthropological literature. This article reviews the background of and suggests explanations for this practice. EM is shown to be a strategy that largely serves the desire for upward mobility of small and hence lowly graded groups of agnates. The article demonstrates how EM operates in an olden 'urfi setting, dominated by patrilineages, while shar'i courts tend to oppose it. We argue that, although it entails structural implications, this behavioural pattern does not have a structural end.

Adopting a qualitative anthropological approach, this report discusses and critiques dominant theoretical currents in the study of poverty and presents a more qualitative analysis of the topic. Through an examination of rural Jordan, new sets of concepts and calculations on poverty - both qualitative and quantitative - have been forged. The research indicates that poverty, as an economic fact, can easily be manipulated and treated as a numerical game. As a social fact, poverty is seen in terms of complex coping strategies that are managed within a framework of social norms.

PUBLICATIONS

Chatty, Dawn and Finlayson, Bill (eds.) (2009), Dispossession and Displacement: Forced Migration in the Middle East and North Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, British Academy Occasional Paper No. 14), 298 pp.

FILMS

Jalali, Babak (2009), Frontier Blues, Iran/U.K./Italy, 95 minutes.

CONFERENCES

‘Knowledge and Value in a Globalising World’, July 2011, IUAES/AAS/ASAANZ Joint Conference, University of Western Australia