The Cunning of Gender Violence focuses on how a once visionary feminist project has folded itself into contemporary world affairs. Combating violence against women and gender-based violence constitutes a highly visible and powerful agenda enshrined in international governance and law and embedded in state violence and global securitization. Case studies on Palestine, Bangladesh, Iran, India, Pakistan, Israel, and Turkey as well as on UN and US policies trace the silences and omissions, along with the experiences of those subjected to violence, to question the rhetoric that claims the agenda as a “feminist success story.” Because religion and racialized ethnicity, particularly “the Muslim question,” run so deeply through the institutional structures of the agenda, the contributions explore ways it may be affirming or enabling rationales and systems of power, including civilizational hierarchies, that harm the very people it seeks to protect. Contributors. Lila Abu-Lughod, Nina Berman, Inderpal Grewal, Rema Hammami, Janet R. Jakobsen, Shenila Khoja-Moolji, Vasuki Nesiah, Samira Shackle, Sima Shakhsari, Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Dina M Siddiqi, Shahla Talebi, Leti Volpp, Rafia Zakaria

The Cunning of Gender Violence focuses on how a once visionary feminist project has folded itself into contemporary world affairs. Combating violence against women and gender-based violence constitutes a highly visible and powerful agenda enshrined in international governance and law and embedded in state violence and global securitization. Case studies on Palestine, Bangladesh, Iran, India, Pakistan, Israel, and Turkey as well as on UN and US policies trace the silences and omissions, along with the experiences of those subjected to violence, to question the rhetoric that claims the agenda as a “feminist success story.” Because religion and racialized ethnicity, particularly “the Muslim question,” run so deeply through the institutional structures of the agenda, the contributions explore ways it may be affirming or enabling rationales and systems of power, including civilizational hierarchies, that harm the very people it seeks to protect. Contributors. Lila Abu-Lughod, Nina Berman, Inderpal Grewal, Rema Hammami, Janet R. Jakobsen, Shenila Khoja-Moolji, Vasuki Nesiah, Samira Shackle, Sima Shakhsari, Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Dina M Siddiqi, Shahla Talebi, Leti Volpp, Rafia Zakaria

First published in 1986, Lila Abu-Lughod's Veiled Sentiments has become a classic ethnography in the field of anthropology. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, Abu-Lughod lived with a community of Bedouins in the Western Desert of Egypt for nearly two years, studying gender relations, morality, and the oral lyric poetry through which women and young men express personal feelings. The poems are haunting, the evocation of emotional life vivid. But Abu-Lughod's analysis also reveals how deeply implicated poetry and sentiment are in the play of power and the maintenance of social hierarchy. What begins as a puzzle about a single poetic genre becomes a reflection on the politics of sentiment and the complexity of culture. This thirtieth anniversary edition includes a new afterword that reflects on developments both in anthropology and in the lives of this community of Awlad 'Ali Bedouins, who find themselves increasingly enmeshed in national political and social formations. The afterword ends with a personal meditation on the meaning-for all involved-of the radical experience of anthropological fieldwork and the responsibilities it entails for ethnographers.

Emotions have long been a central concern in philosophy, psychological and sociological studies. When anthropologists began to study emotion, they challenged many assumptions shared by Western academics and lay persons by exposing the cultural variability of emotional meanings. In this collection of original essays by anthropologists concerned with the relationship of language and emotion, it is argued that the key focus to the study of emotion might be the politics of social life rather than the psychology of the individual. Through close studies of talk about emotion and emotional discourses in social contexts from poetry and song to therapeutic narratives, scholars who have worked in India, Fiji, the United States, Egypt, Senegal and the Solomon Islands show how emotion is tied to politics of everyday interaction. Their arguments and cross-cultural findings will intrigue and provoke anyone who has thought about the relationship between emotion, language and social life. The book will be of special interest to those who find the boundaries between cultural, psychological and linguistic anthropology, sociology, cross-cultural psychiatry, and social psychology too confining.

The substantially revised and updated third edition of Everyday Life in the Muslim Middle East focuses on the experiences of ordinary men, women, and children from the region. Readers will gain a grassroots appreciation of Middle East life, culture, and society that recognizes the impact of wars and uprisings as well as changes to Islamic practice due to advances in technology. The book also explores the influence of social media on politics and labor relations and the changing status of women, family values, marriage, childrearing, gender, and gay rights. This dynamic and imaginative volume continues to provide a rich resource for understanding contemporary Muslim culture in the Middle East.

Lila Abu-Lughod draws on anthropological and feminist insights to construct a critical ethnography of a small Awlad 'Ali Bedouin community in Egypt. She explores how the telling of stories of everyday life challenges the power of anthropological theory to render adequately the lives of others and the way feminist theory appropriates Third World women.

For outside observers, current events in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank are seldom related to the collective memory of ordinary Palestinians. But for Palestinians themselves, the iniquities of the present are experienced as a continuous replay of the injustice of the past.

By focusing on memories of the Nakba or "catastrophe" of 1948, in which hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were dispossessed to create the state of Israel, the contributors to this volume illuminate the contemporary Palestinian experience and clarify the moral claims they make for justice and redress.

The book's essays consider the ways in which Palestinians have remembered and organized themselves around the Nakba, a central trauma that continues to be refracted through Palestinian personal and collective memory. Analyzing oral histories and written narratives, poetry and cinema, personal testimony and courtroom evidence, the authors show how the continuing experience of violence, displacement, and occupation have transformed the pre-Nakba past and the land of Palestine into symbols of what has been and continues to be lost.

"Nakba" brings to light the different ways in which Palestinians experienced and retain in memory the events of 1948. It is the first book to examine in detail how memories of Palestine's cataclysmic past are shaped by differences of class, gender, generation, and geographical location. In exploring the power of the past, the authors show the urgency of the question of memory for understanding the contested history of the present.

Contributors: Lila Abu Lughod, Columbia University; Diana Keown Allan, Harvard University; Haim Bresheeth, University of East London; Rochelle Davis, Georgetown University; Samera Esmeir, University of California, Berkeley; Isabelle Humphries, University of Surrey; Lena Jayyusi, Zayed University; Laleh Khalili, SOAS, University of London; Omar Al-Qattan, filmmaker; Ahmad H. Sa'di, Ben-Gurion University; Rosemary Sayigh, Lebanon-based anthropologist; Susan Slyomovics, University of California, Los Angeles

Frequent reports of honor killings, disfigurement, and sensational abuse have given rise to a consensus in the West, a message propagated by human rights groups and the media: Muslim women need to be rescued. Lila Abu-Lughod boldly challenges this conclusion. An anthropologist who has been writing about Arab women for thirty years, she delves into the predicaments of Muslim women today, questioning whether generalizations about Islamic culture can explain the hardships these women face and asking what motivates particular individuals and institutions to promote their rights. In recent years Abu-Lughod has struggled to reconcile the popular image of women victimized by Islam with the complex women she has known through her research in various communities in the Muslim world. Here, she renders that divide vivid by presenting detailed vignettes of the lives of ordinary Muslim women, and showing that the problem of gender inequality cannot be laid at the feet of religion alone. Poverty and authoritarianism-conditions not unique to the Islamic world, and produced out of global interconnections that implicate the West-are often more decisive. The standard Western vocabulary of oppression, choice, and freedom is too blunt to describe these women's lives. Do Muslim Women Need Saving? is an indictment of a mindset that has justified all manner of foreign interference, including military invasion, in the name of rescuing women from Islam-as well as a moving portrait of women's actual experiences, and of the contingencies with which they live.

How do people come to think of themselves as part of a nation? "Dramas of Nationhood" identifies a fantastic cultural form that binds together the Egyptian nation--television serials. These melodramatic programs--like soap operas but more closely tied to political and social issues than their Western counterparts--have been shown on television in Egypt for more than thirty years. In this book, Lila Abu-Lughod examines the shifting politics of these serials and the way their contents both reflect and seek to direct the changing course of Islam, gender relations, and everyday life in this Middle Eastern nation.
Representing a decade's worth of research, "Dramas of Nationhood" makes a case for the importance of studying television to answer larger questions about culture, power, and modern self-fashionings. Abu-Lughod explores the elements of developmentalist ideology and the visions of national progress that once dominated Egyptian television--now experiencing a crisis. She discusses the broadcasts in rich detail, from the generic emotional qualities of TV serials and the depictions of authentic national culture, to the debates inflamed by their deliberate strategies for combating religious extremism.

"After years of avoiding the subject, anthropologists have finally discovered that media can be profitably studied ethnographically and that anthropology of media is not only possible but essential. "Media Worlds is a collection of groundbreaking essays by top-notch scholars."--Jay Ruby, author of "Picturing Culture: Explorations of Film and Anthropology

"Not just a book, but "the book on the anthropology of the media. The collection works not just as an assemblage but from a sense that every paper adds another perspective to the whole."--Danny Miller, co-author of "The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach

"The anthropology of media is in many ways the most dynamic domain of the discipline today. "Media Worlds will establish itself immediately as the canonical volume in this long overdue area of study. Its rigorous ethnographic studies of the production, distribution, and reception of film, television, and electronic media around the world will also encourage media and cultural studies to relinquish the exclusivity they afford to the 'text' and to attend to the global social practices of media in toto. An outstanding work."--Lucien Taylor, co-author of "Cross-Cultural Filmmaking: A Handbook for Making Documentary and Ethnographic Films and Videos

"The strength of this lovely collection is in the diversity and range of the case materials that it brings together under one cover."--Michael M. J. Fischer, coauthor of "Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences

"Contemporary media studies allow us to continue examining anthropology's traditional subjects in promising new ways. This strong and comprehensive collection by the key figures who havepioneered media studies in anthropology both focuses and surveys the field. As a much needed teaching resource, it will stimulate the proliferation of culture and media courses and will transform the many courses that are built on the identification of peoples as indigenous, minority, or ethnic."--George E. Marcus, editor of the series "Late Editions: Cultural Studies for the End of the Century

""Media Worlds is a compelling argument for how and why media matters in anthropology and the contemporary world. The exciting array of field-defining work bridges anthropology and film, TV, and radio media. Critically revising earlier paradigms for an anthropology of (visual) communication, the authors argue for new and forceful concerns with media activism, representation, nationalism and transnationalism, diasporas, and social engagements with technology."--Steven Feld, Producer of "Voices of the Rainforest and Professor of Music and Anthropology, Columbia University

"It is amazing that this is the first book of its kind. One would think that an anthropological approach, placing the media squarely within the rich and diverse contexts of social relations and everyday life, would long have been integral to media studies. Not so! This wonderful book provides an overdue correction. As the essays here show, we cannot understand lives and societies without understanding the mediascapes we inhabit. This is compulsive reading!"--Ien Ang, author of "Living Room Wars: Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

"This landmark collection maps and motivates the anthropological voice in media studies by locating the media in worlds of practice, sentiment, debate, and dissent. Using such vividexamples as the image management of the Dalai Lama and the social organization of Nigerian cinema theatres, the authors remind us that media machineries are no more magical than the social worlds they inhabit and project. "Media Worlds will be a boon to scholars and teachers in media studies, anthropology, and global cultural studies."--Arjun Appadurai, author of "Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization

Frequent reports of honor killings, disfigurement, and sensational abuse have given rise to a consensus in the West, a message propagated by human rights groups and the media: Muslim women need to be rescued. Lila Abu-Lughod boldly challenges this conclusion. An anthropologist who has been writing about Arab women for thirty years, she delves into the predicaments of Muslim women today, questioning whether generalizations about Islamic culture can explain the hardships these women face and asking what motivates particular individuals and institutions to promote their rights. In recent years Abu-Lughod has struggled to reconcile the popular image of women victimized by Islam with the complex women she has known through her research in various communities in the Muslim world. Here, she renders that divide vivid by presenting detailed vignettes of the lives of ordinary Muslim women, and showing that the problem of gender inequality cannot be laid at the feet of religion alone. Poverty and authoritarianism--conditions not unique to the Islamic world, and produced out of global interconnections that implicate the West--are often more decisive. The standard Western vocabulary of oppression, choice, and freedom is too blunt to describe these women's lives. Do Muslim Women Need Saving? is an indictment of a mindset that has justified all manner of foreign interference, including military invasion, in the name of rescuing women from Islam--as well as a moving portrait of women's actual experiences, and of the contingencies with which they live.

Contrary to popular perceptions, newly veiled women across the Middle East are just as much products and symbols of modernity as the upper- and middle-class women who courageously took off the veil almost a century ago. To make this point, these essays focus on the "woman question" in the Middle East (most particularly in Egypt and Iran), especially at the turn of the century, when gender became a highly charged nationalist issue tied up in complex ways with the West. The last two decades have witnessed an extraordinary burst of energy and richness in Middle East women's studies, and the contributors to this volume exemplify the vitality of this new thinking. They take up issues of concern to historians and social thinkers working on the postcolonial world. The essays challenge the assumptions of other major works on women and feminism in the Middle East by questioning, among other things, the familiar dichotomy in which women's domesticity is associated with tradition and modernity with their entry into the public sphere. Indeed, "Remaking Women" is a radical challenge to any easy equation of modernity with progress, emancipation, and the empowerment of women.

The contributors are Lila Abu-Lughod, Marilyn Booth, Deniz Kandiyoti, Khaled Fahmy, Mervat Hatem, Afsaneh Najmabadi, Omnia Shakry, and Zohreh T. Sullivan.The book is introduced by the editor with a piece called "Feminist Longings and Postcolonial Conditions," which masterfully interfaces the critical studies of feminism and modernism with scholarship on South Asia and the Middle East.

For outside observers, current events in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank are seldom related to the collective memory of ordinary Palestinians. But for Palestinians themselves, the iniquities of the present are experienced as a continuous replay of the injustice of the past.

By focusing on memories of the Nakba or "catastrophe" of 1948, in which hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were dispossessed to create the state of Israel, the contributors to this volume illuminate the contemporary Palestinian experience and clarify the moral claims they make for justice and redress.

The book's essays consider the ways in which Palestinians have remembered and organized themselves around the Nakba, a central trauma that continues to be refracted through Palestinian personal and collective memory. Analyzing oral histories and written narratives, poetry and cinema, personal testimony and courtroom evidence, the authors show how the continuing experience of violence, displacement, and occupation have transformed the pre-Nakba past and the land of Palestine into symbols of what has been and continues to be lost.

"Nakba" brings to light the different ways in which Palestinians experienced and retain in memory the events of 1948. It is the first book to examine in detail how memories of Palestine's cataclysmic past are shaped by differences of class, gender, generation, and geographical location. In exploring the power of the past, the authors show the urgency of the question of memory for understanding the contested history of the present.

Contributors: Lila Abu Lughod, Columbia University; Diana Keown Allan, Harvard University; Haim Bresheeth, University of East London; Rochelle Davis, Georgetown University; Samera Esmeir, University of California, Berkeley; Isabelle Humphries, University of Surrey; Lena Jayyusi, Zayed University; Laleh Khalili, SOAS, University of London; Omar Al-Qattan, filmmaker; Ahmad H. Sa'di, Ben-Gurion University; Rosemary Sayigh, Lebanon-based anthropologist; Susan Slyomovics, University of California, Los Angeles