Anthropology of the Middle East

This issue of AME focuses on the critical political anthropology of the Middle East. Studies of tribes and states have been on the agenda of political anthropology of the Middle East for decades, and in this issue we have various articles related to this topic. What is particularly informing in this issue are the brilliant articles concerned with informal politics going beyond statistical and formal studies, showing how power works through access to resources, and particularly the reproduction of political systems and hierarchies, and finally how modern legal systems within certain political structures are exercised in everyday life. Other fields of anthropology such as the anthropology of children and the anthropology of law may also benefit from this issue.

This article aims to analyse the patron–client relationship through a detailed ethnography of the everyday life of Walid Junblat's followers in Lebanon. It reveals how intimate people are with political figures, talking to them (in the form of their pictures), talking about them, thinking through them, playing off this intimacy to enter the political competition. Patrons also play their part in this relationship. The weekly political gatherings held at Junblat's Palace are the apex of this aesthetic of power. Detailed observations indicate how the lord orchestrates and varies the tempo of his interactions with the ritual audience, adding complexity and fluidity to the relation.

Studies of immigrants in Kuwait focus on structural aspects overlooking sociohistorical elements and meso-level relationships that develop through migration. This ethnography shows that the immigrant's perspective and the history of the relationship between the receiving society and the immigrant community are both essential for establishing broader and thicker analyses of reality. It argues that because Hadramis and Kuwaiti sponsors were historically linked in personal exchanges originating in the Kuwaiti domestic realm, the meaning and practices of sponsorship comprise a unique migratory and work experience. Normally the immigrant–sponsor relationship is conveyed in terms of pseudokinship, yet references to moral debts and dependency reveal forms of exploitation and dominance. Hadrami–Kuwaiti relationships do not produce significant economic outcomes for the sponsor. Rather, Hadramis are symbolically valued within local hierarchies. This symbolic value has sustained a solid Hadrami presence in Kuwait and secured an income for retiring immigrants at home.

The article examines the welfare policy in Israel concerning 'minors at risk', mainly the cancellation of parents' custody over their offspring and their placement in welfare institutions. I suggest that the ideological discourse plays a major role in this context and terms like 'minor's well-being' are widely used for achieving public legitimacy of the social workers' control of this field. Describing and analysing case studies which I attended and followed since the beginning of the 1990s reveal the consequences of taking away children from their families and placing them in state institutions. The analysis focuses on the organised bureaucratic violence towards children and their parents which accompanies the legally enforced procedures. It also discusses the forceful means used by the staff in the institutions towards the inmates, as part of maintaining order and discipline. I suggest that violent behaviour of officials and organisations which use the state's organised power of coercion against minors and their parents is linked to personal, organisational and political motives.

Khawlān and Jumā'ah are two out of eight tribes of the Khawlān b. 'Āmir confederation in Southwest Arabia, the territories of five of them being in Yemen and three in Saudi Arabia. Whereas the Yemeni tribes Munabbih, Sahār and Rāzih are well explored, little is known about the tribal structures of Jumā'ah and the homonymous tribe Khawlān. This article provides an overview of the present-day tribal structures of Khawlān and Jumā'ah, and traces their historical formation through comparison with the respective information available in the historical and geographical works of the Yemeni geographer and historian al-Hasan al-Hamdānī, dating back to the tenth century AD. The results of this study show that Jumā'ah and Khawlān were historically open to processes of social, spatial and genealogical changes. Whereas Jumā'ah can trace its lineage directly back to the ancestor Khawlān b. 'Āmir, Khawlān tribe represents a much looser entity of mutual alliances, which corresponds to its lack of genealogical coherence. Among Khawlān and Jumā'ah, the rhetoric of shared 'ancestry' is thus to a greater or a lesser extent a statement of identity and follows the general Middle Eastern practice in conceptualising groups as kin.

The Tâlesh population is divided between Twelver Shi'a and Shafi'ite Sunnis. Here, the relations between the two 'communities' are harmonious and interfaith marriage is frequent. Family descent in Tâlesh is patrilineal (property, name and social status are transmitted along paternal lines) but the transmission of religious affiliation differs from that of property and social status and is governed, in the words of Meyer Fortes, by 'complementary descent': boys will adopt the religious affiliation of the father and girls that of the mother. So confessional affiliation is bilinear. However, there are exceptions that are as often linked to specific context as they may be to personal 'choice'.

Hegland, Mary Elaine (2014), Days of Revolution: Political Unrest in an Iranian Village (Stanford: Stanford University Press), 316 pp., two maps, nine photographs; glossary, notes, bibliography, index, ISBN: 978-0-8047-7570 (cloth) U.S. $95.00; ISBN: 978-0-8047-7568-7 (pbk.) U.S.$27.95.

Hush, Girls Don’t Scream by Pouran Derakhshandeh (2013)

Membre du bureau éditorial d’Anthropology of the Middle East, Pierre Bonte s’est éteint le 4 novembre 2013 à l’âge de soixante-et-onze ans. Né le 25 août 1942 dans le nord de la France, au sein d’une famille de mineurs et d’instituteurs laïcs – il eut un grand-père, mineur, qui fut député communiste–, Pierre Bonte obtint son baccalauréat à Lille en 1960, puis une licence de sociologie et plusieurs certificats de psychologie à Paris en 1964. Intéressé par l’ethnologie, Pierre Bonte commença par étudier les Touaregs Kel Gress du Niger auxquels il consacra sa thèse de doctorat en ethnologie préparée sous la direction d’André Leroi-Gourhan puis de Robert Cresswell et soutenue à l’Université Paris V-Sorbonne en 1970.

The editorial board of Anthropology of the Middle East is pleased to announce that starting in 2015 the journal will award a yearly Zubaydah Ashkanani Prize for the best article that has been published in the journal in the previous year.