Enduring Concerns, Resilient Tropes, and New Departures

Being, doing and knowing in the field: reflections on ethnographic practice in the Arab region

“…1 More specifically, and once unshackled from the limited focus on women, gender stops being a stand-alone analytic. Rather it becomes increasingly pertinent insofar as it opens up onto the interpretation of various other social realms such as labour markets, the state and citizenship, law, development, governance, social movements, revolution, violence and conflict (Kandiyoti, 2015).…”

“…Following more than half a century in Western academia (much longer within European scholarship), area studies too is waning as a fore-runner of critical ideas, even as-and perhaps because-its epistemological 'artefacts' (e.g., the Middle East, the Muslim world or Islam tout court) are increasingly co-opted by dominant political agendas (Caton, 2015;Kandiyoti, 2015). As academic interest turns towards the complexity of everyday lived experience, including its liminalities, mobilities and hybridities, the privileged vantage point of the native's point of view has met with serious challenges (Sabry, 2011).…”