Ethnography in the Middle East

This anthropology course centers on ethnographic research conducted in and about the Middle East, but it also trains students in the practice of ethnographic field research methods. Ethnography is at the heart of the discipline of cultural anthropology. In this course, we will study what ethnography is, where ethnographic fieldwork has been conducted in the Middle East, and why, and what political and social conditions have shaped knowledge of the region. We will ultimately discover the ways in which ethnography is a complex embodied human practice.
This class has two primary learning objectives. First, to teach students how to do ethnographic fieldwork about the Middle East through assignments that mobilize various techniques, including participant observation, mapping a field-site, interviews, “deep hanging out,” gathering documents, producing genealogies and writing up field-notes. Over the course of the semester students will draw on these short assignments to produce a final ethnographic research paper on some aspect of social life. Second, alongside short fieldwork assignments, students will study the history and theoretical debates of ethnography in the Middle East, such as discussions about the politics of representation, the construction of ‘otherness’ in knowledge, colonialism and its relationship to the social sciences, gender and race theory, and the ethics of conducting research among different vulnerable groups.