Undergraduate Module Descriptor

ARA2134: Ethnography of the Middle East

This module descriptor refers to the 2018/9 academic year.

Indicative Reading List

This reading list is indicative - i.e. it provides an idea of texts that may be useful to you on this module, but it is not considered to be a confirmed or compulsory reading list for this module.

Soraya Altorki and Camillia El-Solh, Arab Women in the Field: Studying your Own Society (Syracuse, Syracuse University Press, 1988).

Donna Lee Bowen and Evelyn Early (eds.), Everyday Life In The Muslim Middle East (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2002, 2nd ed.).

Dale Eickelman, The Middle East and Central Asia: An Anthropological Approach (Upper Sadder River, NJ, Prentice Hall, 2002, 4th ed).

Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History (London, Routledge, 1967).

Richard Lawless, The Middle Eastern Village: Changing Economic and Social Relations (London: Croom Helm, 1987).


Supplementary readings

Abu-Lughod, L. (1999) Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society. University of California Press, Berkeley.

Chatty, D. (1996) Mobile Pastoralists: Development, Planning and Social Change in Oman. New York: Columbia University Press.

Deeb, L. (2006) An Enchanted Modern: Gender and Public Piety in Shi’i Lebanon. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Fernea, E. (1965) Guest of the Shaykh. Anchor Books.

Friedl, Erika (1989) Women of Deh Koh: Lives in an Iranian Village. Penguin Books, New York.

Lavie, S. (2002) The Poetics of Military Occupation. University of California Press.

Kanaaneh, R. A. (2002) Birthing the Nation: Strategies of Palestinian Women in Israel. University of California Press, Berkeley.

Özyürek, E. (2006). Nostalgia for the Modern: State Secularism and Everyday Politics in Turkey. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press

Singerman, D. (1997) Avenues of Participation: Family Politics, and Networks in Urban Quarters of Cairo. Cairo: AUC Press.

Navaro-Yashin, Y. (2002) Faces of the State : Secularism and Public Life in Turkey. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Spellman, K. (2004) Religion and Nation: Iranian Local and Transnational Networks in Britain (Studies in Forced Migration), Berghahn Books.