Course Readings (tentative):
1. Dale F. Eickelman. 2002. The Middle East and Central Asia: An Anthropological Approach. Fourth Edition, New Jersey: Prentice Hall.

2. Donna Lee Bowen and Evelyn A. Early, eds. 2002. Everyday Life in the Muslim Middle East. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

3. Deeb, Lara. 2006. An Enchanted Modern: Gender and Public Piety in Shi’i Lebanon. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

Course Content:
This course introduces students to some of the peoples/cultures of the Middle East, to central issues facing the region, and to some important anthropological approaches to the study of this area. We will focus on Muslim societies in the Middle East.

Anthropological approaches to Muslim communities in the Middle East value the study both of practices and sacred texts as they are understood in these communities located in particular cultural and historical contexts. Anthropologists are noted for their “grass roots” approach in studying non-Western peoples and cultures as contrasted with the primary reliance upon texts that other disciplines might employ. This ethnographic method of research, including participant observation and learning from the people studied, results in valuable perspectives not accessible through the printed word or other studies of societies from a distance. Furthermore, while we will focus on the present-day Middle East, we will attempt, whenever possible, to combine a social historical approach with an ethnographic one so that we might be able to describe and analyze the practices, experiences, values, and lives of Muslim living in a particular place and time in the Middle East AND grasp some of the dynamics of these lives, that is some of the changes that these lives have undergone over time and that continue to unfold today.

Rather than attempting to survey the entire Muslim populations in the Middle East, we will take a thematic approach. Thus we will consider issues such as the historical development of Islam in the Middle East; Western representations of Middle Eastern peoples; Muslim religious texts and practices; traditions of mysticism, religious scholarship, and religious law; media and the public sphere; and changing daily lives and identities in villages, tribal regions, and cities of the Middle East. Considerable attention will be paid to gender issues in the Middle East as well as to religio-political movements that have swept the region over the past three decades and that continue to shape local lives and to be shaped in turn by human creativity and local and global developments.

Course Presentation (tentative):
Lectures, Articles/Book Chapters on Blackboard, Films, Group Presentations, and Class Discussions.

Method of Evaluation (tentative):
2 midterm exams - each 25%; a final exam – 30%; group presentations on assigned readings – 10%; participation in class discussions – 10%.

lture majors. A basic understanding of the discipline of archaeology is essential.