Anthropology of the Middle East

In this special issue, not only is the human-environment relationship addressed with a few types of environmental adaptations in rural and urban contexts, including governmental measures and disaster situations, but also the process of culture making is explored through the use of vocabularies in forming mind sets. In this way, a wide spectrum of ideas and situations is portrayed, and the role of culture in making these processes meaningful is shown. The articles in this issue concern Egypt, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan and they also consider migration. While environmental problems are partial causes for migration, yet symbolic reference to parts of that same environment can symbolise the lost land. The role of poetic language is seen here, while poetry itself becomes a means of better adaptation for a migrant.

Focusing on Turkey's nuclearisation process, which has accelerated over the past decade, this article examines the historical and contemporary relationships that the country's political decision-makers maintain with risk, the environment and health and ecological disasters. While the transition to nuclear power in the post-Fukushima period is not a dynamic specific to Turkey, it nevertheless operates, in the Turkish case, in a particular geographic, energy and political context. On the one hand, Turkey is a highly seismic country that heavily depends on its neighbours for energy and, on the other, is experiencing a creeping political authoritarianism. This article focuses on the dynamics and specificities of this post-disaster nuclear transition, which will be analysed here as ‘serene nuclearism’, positioned as the polar opposite of ‘reflexive modernisation’, as theorised by Ulrich Beck.

Among the many consequences of Iran's suffering from water shortage in recent decades, the major river of Isfahan city, Zayandeh Rud, has dried out. While experts observe this issue through environmental discourses and local farmers engage in political protests, citizens phrase the loss of the river as a cultural catastrophe. Within the environmental configuration that includes the river, historical buildings, parks, fauna, flora and humans, habitual relationships produce a sense of security and well-being. Since the drought, this configuration has been seriously affected. We suggest the drought is experienced as sociocultural disaster because Zayandeh Rud is a central element for the creation of social, cultural, economic and political relationships. Following the suggestion of Tim Ingold, we conceptualise the environment as the interplay between the German notion of Umwelt (out world) and Innenwelt (subjective world).

The article explores the particularly lively rooftops of Cairo through which interspecies intimacies unfold. On these rooftops, various animals (such as chickens, ducks, geese, turkeys, goats and rabbits) are raised to be later eaten and consumed for sustenance. I expose the various patterned modalities, terms and codes bringing these different species together in their sustained long-term relationships. I follow these interspecies relations as they narrate wonders of life and death, collaborations, various instantiations of home, social gift exchanges, marital rituals and grieving patterns. Rooftop recipes for relating slowly cook these human-non-human relations as uniquely embedded in a socioecological intricate awareness of surrounding environments of neighbours and families, but also of trees, waste, changing seasons, aging species and growing parents.

This article explores intersections between masculinity, mobility, generation and commerce through the everyday lives of Afghan men who make up trading networks that are active across Eurasia. It is based on ethnographic fieldwork among Afghan traders in Ukraine's port city of Odessa and in the international trading city of Yiwu in China. Building on recent work in anthropology concerning the ‘emergent’ nature of Middle Eastern masculinities, the article brings attention to the flexible and adaptable nature of the notions of masculinity held and performed by mobile Afghan traders. It emphasises the need for such conceptions of masculinity to be treated historically and draws attention to the forms of caregiving that are especially important to the traders’ intimate lives and self-understandings. The article also highlights the significance of complex notions of trust both to the traders’ articulation of conceptions of manliness and to their everyday modes of securing a livelihood.

This article explores how Afghan (Hazara) women negotiate and sift their religious understandings and identities over time after migrating to Germany. Migration experiences and exposure to German society has impacted their self-narration and conceptualisation of cultural change in their own identity. This ethnographic research illustrates the notion of acceptance or rejection to change among Hazara immigrant women in their lived religion in diaspora. Based on my fieldwork, three different trajectories along religious lines occur in the Afghan diaspora: a group of immigrants, enhancing Islamic values, whose relationship to and involvement in religion intensified and increased; the second group largely consider themselves secular Muslims trying to fully indulge into the new society; the third group has an elastic religious identity, blending Islamic values with Western-inspired lifestyles.

Displacement following the Iranian Revolution in 1979, and later political instability in the Middle East, has led to the increase of Iranian migrants to Australia and beyond, many of whom live in exile and can never return. This article explores how Iranian conceptualisations of the sea provide a framework for entanglements with nature and the environment that are poetic and turbulent, and provides insights into nostalgia and belonging. It explores some entanglements with the ‘sea’ in the work of classical and contemporary Persian poets, diasporic Iranian women's literature, artwork and memories of newcomers of Iranian heritage who seek asylum in Australia. The article also highlights the connections between poet and world through investigating the role of the geographical realm and nostalgia in producing the worlds of human relations and thoughts with the place.

Researchers participating in the development and training week of one of the European Union's Erasmus+ projects come forwards in this contribution and share their insights. Youth engaged in integration of refugees, migrants and asylum seekers were to be trained, their approaches made visible and their networking strengthened in a two-year project that included a seven-days get-together in Croatia. Further activities included ample desk research of relevant initiatives, dissemination conferences in the participating countries (England, Belgium, Germany, Austria, and Croatia), a research report, and a collection of training modules. A definite goal was to address and to counter rising tensions in EU countries regarding refugee and migration movements.

This contribution is based on the difficulties, challenges and stimuli faced during the months of field research conducted in Tehran for my PhD dissertation on transformations of gender roles in Iran. Therefore, it means to rethink the three main issues I faced during my ethnography in in a context characterized by peculiar social and cultural dynamics: the difficulties and advantages related to my condition of a woman who works on a topic full of nuances and complexities; my ‘accented identity’ as a researcher born and raised abroad but Iranian by affiliation; and the methodological and epistemological implications and dilemmas arisen in attempt to apply techniques and theories learned mainly within the Western academia.

As from this issue of Anthropology of the Middle East, we are planning a new section, open to all readers, to share their academic experience in the Middle East. For those of us working in the region, anthropology has been a difficult field to get established and to contribute its share to the academia of the Middle East and from there to the academia and the public in the Middle East, and to the world of anthropology at large. We have had a variety of difficulties, as you will see in this text, and when we mention them, we realise anthropologists in some other countries far and wide have had similar experiences. Here, we propose to open an arena for expression and discussion with the hope of facilitating the road for younger anthropologists. In doing so, we shall not be pointing the finger at any one person or academic institutions, but wish to adopt a more comprehensive and holistic approach in addressing and solving our problems, and suggesting some solutions.

Publications

Korangy, A., Al-Samman, H. and Beard, M. (eds), The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures: The Culture of Love and Languishing (London: I.B. Tauris, 2018).

Conferences

‘(Un)Settling Middle Eastern Refugees’ (Yale University, September 2019)