Middle East and North Africa (Anthropology)

In historical terms, today’s Middle East coincides roughly with the three largest Muslim empires at their greatest extent (except for Spain) — the Umayyad (661—750), the early ‘Abbasid (750—c.800), and the Ottoman from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. In current usage, the Middle East encompasses the region stretching from Morocco to Turkey and Iran — many include Pakistan and Afghanistan — and it is used in this sense by the people of the region itself.

As a whole, the region is semi-arid, so that irrigation agriculture is more characteristic of many areas, including oases (such as Marrakesh in Morocco and Nizwa in Oman) and a narrow belt of cultivated land on either side of the region’s major rivers, such as the Nile, the Tigris, and the Euphrates. Elsewhere, annual rainfall varies so much in timing and quantity that even where agriculture is possible, the yields from wheat and barley, the most common rainfall-fed crops, are highly irregular. As a result, seasonal farming is often combined with transhumant pastoralism.

Most Middle Eastern countries also possess mountainous regions which have served as zones of refuge from state control. Thus the Kurds of Iraq, Iran, and Turkey, the Berber-speaking tribal groups in the mountainous regions of Morocco and Algeria, and some of the tribal groups of southern Iran remained relatively autonomous until the early twentieth century.

Traditionally, the Middle East has been a region of irrigation, agriculture, pastoralism, and long-distance trade, making important the shifting interrelations between nomads, farmers, and city-dwellers. Despite the prevailing image of the region as populated by nomadic and semi-nomadic peoples — until the 1960s most anthropological studies of the region focused on pastoralists – nomads today constitute less than 1 per cent of the population and never constituted a majority of the non-urban population in the past. Most non-urban Middle Easterners are peasants, even if some are trib-ally organized. Only in recent years, however, have studies of the region’s peasants encompassed changing international and regional economic conditions, which have often led to the substitution of cash crops for subsistence ones, and changes in gender roles as women perform agricultural tasks formerly assumed by men who have sought work elsewhere.


The popular image of the region also belies its rapidly emerging urban profile. If roughly 10 per cent of the Middle East’s population was urban in 1900, today it is nearly half. The rate of urbanization continues to increase as a result both of rapid population growth – the Middle East birth rate is one of the highest in the world – and economic transformations which make agriculture less economically viable than labour emigration. Even for countries lacking mineral wealth, oil revenues in neighbouring states have significantly altered social and material life, facilitating transnational and transre-gional patterns of labour migration. The effects are not just economic – the high density of first- and second-generation North African immigrants in France and Turks in Germany has profound religious and political implications both for countries of origin and for host countries.

Islam is the region’s predominant religion — the obvious exception is Israel – but even in other countries there are important non-Muslim minorities. Christians form significant minorities in Egypt, Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey, and European settlers gave the Maghrib states sizeable Christian populations until the end of the colonial era. Today small but often influential Jewish communities remain in Morocco, Turkey, Tunisia, and Iran. Prior to the founding of Israel in 1948, only Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf states lacked Jewish communities. Popular religious practices often coincide between the major religious traditions. Thus in North Africa, Muslim maraboutic, or saint, festivals (musims) and pilgrimages (ziyaras) have their Jewish equivalents (hillulas) (Deshen and Shokeid 1974), and some Moroccan shrines are equally venerated by both Muslims and Jews. These practices also distinguish communities from one another, including between Sunni and Shi’a Muslims (who comprise about 10 per cent of Muslims worldwide, with most located in Iran, Southern Iraq and Lebanon), and Christians from Muslims.

The region’s history is dominated by its Arabic, Turkic, and Persian-speaking peoples, but these are heavily influenced by the significant linguistic minorities throughout the region. Many Moroccans and Algerians speak one of North Africa’s several Berber languages, although as national education spreads, most adult males have become bilingual in Arabic. In Iran, many people speak Azeri Turkish, Kurdish, Arabic, and Baluch as their first language; and Kurdish is the first language of many Turks. Nor are the region’s major languages necessarily uniform. Colloquial Moroccan and Algerian Arabic, for example, are difficult for Arabs from other regions to understand, although educated speakers of Arabic readily communicate through the more standardized language of classrooms and the media. Former colonial languages continue to be widely used, especially French in North Africa, notwith-standing official Arabization policies.

Anthropologists in the Middle East

In the latter part of the nineteenth century, the Middle East inspired major anthropological thought. A prominent example is the polymath Biblical scholar, William Robertson Smith (1846—1894), who used ethnographic and historical texts and ideas to formulate explicit assumptions about the interrelated evolutionary stages of kinship, religion, and political organization (Smith 1889). His work had a major impact on subsequent anthropological thinking, notably inspiring Evans-Pritchard’s analysis of the social structure of the feud and of seg-mentary lineage systems and the French sociologist, Emile Durkheim. However, because of the region’s complexities, the Middle East receded to the periphery of the specifically anthropological imagination for the first half of the twentieth century, when the central concern of social anthropology was so-called ‘elementary’ or ‘primitive’ societies (Vatin 1984).

The first major synthesis of the region’s ethnography appeared with Carleton Coon’s Caravan, first published in 1951 and revised several times over the next decade.Coon writes that the region’s ‘mosaic’ pattern becomes clear only if the ‘little pieces of plastic and broken glass are removed’. By plastic and broken glass he meant everything which was modern or in transition: ‘a culture in transition is hard to describe and harder to understand; we must find some period in history when the culture was, relatively speaking, at rest’ (Coon 1951: 8). The result was to juxtapose and inventorize cultural and social forms, rather than unravel their shifting dynamics, a concern of later interpretive essays on the region’s ethnography (Eickelman 1989, with extensive bibliography; also Abu-Lughod 1989).

Until the 1960s, Middle Eastern ethnography concentrated on anthropological puzzles, such as "fpatrilateral parallel cousin marriage. By the 1970s this ‘problem’ gave way to recognition of the multiple marriage strategies by which both peasants and elite in the Middle East, as elsewhere, seek to control property and persons. Likewise, if earlier studies of tribal and pastoral groups stressed segmentation theory, or how groups supposedly without formal political structures could maintain social order, later studies, including those by Emrys Peters (1990) on the Cyrenaican bedouin, ^Fredrik Barth (1965) on the Basseri nomads of Southern Iran, "fTalal Asad (1970) on the Sudan, and Richard Tapper (1990) on pastoralists in Iran and Afghanistan, focused on the complex relationships between access to resources and the subtle relationships between tribal leadership and ‘external’ authority. Recent studies such as Paul Dresch (1989) on tribes, government, and history in Yemen, Steven Caton (1990) on the cultural rhetoric of tribal poetry and its relation to politics and moral authority, and John Davis (1987) on contemporary Libya, have de-exoticized studies of tribes and placed them in the mainstream of anthropological studies.

The Middle East has also been a locus for innovative studies of gender and person. Boddy (1989), for example, shows how Sudan’s spirit (zar) cults, far from being confined to women’s religious imagination and practice, provide a conceptual matrix for both men and women to imagine alternate social and moral realities, much as did saint cults in early Latin Christianity. Far from treating the zar cults of the Sudan as specific to women, she indicates how they complement male-dominated ‘orthodox’ religious practices and are inseparable from wider discussions of gender as it relates to ideas of person, community, and religion.

The multiple loyalties, pervasive multilingual-ism, and complex, often transnational, ties characteristic of the Middle East could rarely be encompassed in the earlier framework of locality-specific anthropological studies. Since the 1970s, however, studies of transregional religious orders and pilgrimage centres in the Middle East have contributed significantly to the study of complex societies, as have efforts to explore the permutations of cultural order in economic, kinship, and regional ties, and the pivotal role of literacy and religious education in creating new forms of communication, community, and authority. Such studies have also collapsed the prior conventional assumption of a "f’great divide’ separating the region’s ‘tribal’ and urban, non-literate and literate populations. This trend has been further accelerated as scholars from the Middle East increasingly join anthropological discussions of its societies — and representations of their pasts (e.g. Elboudrari 1985; Hammoudi 1993).

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