Andrew Shryock

Arab Detroit: From Margin to Mainstream

Metropolitan Detroit is home to one of the largest, most diverse Arab communities outside the Middle East, yet the complex world Arabic-speaking immigrants have created there is barely visible on the landscape of ethnic America. In this volume, Nabeel Abraham and Andrew Shryock bring together the work of twenty-five contributors to create a richly detailed portrait of Arab Detroit. The book goes behind the bulletproof glass in Iraqi Chaldean liquor stores. It explores the role of women in a Sunni mosque and the place of nationalist politics in a Coptic church. It follows the careers of wedding singers, Arabic calligraphers, restaurant owners, and pastry chefs. It examines the agendas of Shia Muslim activists and Washington-based lobbyists and looks at the intimate politics of marriage, family honor, and adolescent rebellion. Memoirs and poems by Lebanese, Chaldean, Yemeni, and Palestinian writers anchor the book in personal experience, while over fifty photographs provide a backdrop of vivid, often unexpected, images. In their efforts to represent an ethnic/immigrant community that is flourishing on the margins of pluralist discourse, the contributors to this book break new ground in the study of identity politics, transnationalism, and diaspora cultures.

The New Jordanian Hospitality: House, Host, and Guest in the Culture of Public Display

The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan evokes a simpler time, a sense of place and a cherished way of life. A visit to Jordan brings a return to respected and hallowed tradition. Immediately upon arrival, the visitor is aware of the inherent hospitality of the Jordanian people as exemplified by the Arabic “Ahlan wa sahlan” (“I Welcome You”), heard at every turn.

Hospitality Lessons: Learning the Shared Language of Derrida and the Balga Bedouin

This essay explores thematic overlaps in Jacques Derridas writings on hospitality and stories of hospitality told by Balga Bedouin in Jordan. Why do these overlaps exist? What produces them? What can these likenesses tell us about the relationship between hospitality, politics and moral reasoning? Juxtaposing an exemplary Jordanian tale of hospitality with motifs and claims central to Derridas work, I argue that a shared and second language pervades this material. The language in question grows out of real historical relations, but it is also rooted in a desire, keenly felt among metropolitan political theorists and Bedouin social philosophers alike, to locate human interaction in idealized spaces that transcend the political and moral systems in which we live. Playing on contradictory themes of welcome and trespass, hospitality is a rich medium in which to imagine worlds that are more open, and more vulnerable, to Others.

It's this, not that: How Marshall Sahlins solves kinship

Comment on SAHLINS, Marshall. 2013. What kinship is—and is not. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Fixers in Motion. A Conversation

Since taking the editorial helm of CSSH in 2006, I have watched several intellectual trends shift and gather momentum. Postsocialist and postcolonial studies are merging into a more generalized interest in the politics of empire. Critical impulses once associated with the “post” approaches have found their way into studies of secularism, conversion, translation, and state effects. Increasingly, these topics are analyzed as transregional processes that operate across religious and political logics. In 2009, our first CSSH Conversation dealt with matters of tolerance and conversion in the Ottoman Empire, and in 2010 we filled an entire issue with essays on secularism (52-3). In each case, the ground we explored was contested, but themes of governmentality and moral transformation were central, and the terms of debate were broadly shared.

Tolerance and Conversion in the Ottoman Empire: A Conversation

Religious conversion has lately enjoyed a resurgence of scholarly interest. The topic is generating fascinating research across the social sciences and humanities, and it is well represented in recent issues of CSSH.1 Given our curatorial investment in this line of research, we were pleased to hear that the 2008 Albert Hourani Book Award the Middle East Studies Associations prize for the best new monograph in the field was shared by two CSSH authors, Marc Baer (CSSH 46-4) and Ussama Makdisi (CSSH 42-1), for books that focus specifically on conversion. Baers study, Honored by the Glory of Islam: Conversion and Conquest in Ottoman Europe (Oxford University Press, 2008), examines the reign of Sultan Mehmed IV (r. 1648-1687), who brought new European territories under Ottoman rule, laid siege to Vienna, and, as a supporter of the Kadizadelis, a pietistic reform movement, encouraged the conversion of Christians and Jews (and Muslims) to an Islam purified of false teachings. Makdisi s book, Artillery of Heaven: American Missionaries and the Failed Conversion of the Middle East (Cornell University Press, 2008), explores the attempts of American missionaries, beginning in 1822, to convert the Christians and Muslims of Greater

On containers: A forum. Introduction

ABSTRACT This forum, involving anthropologists, archaeologists and historians, lays out the theoretical groundwork for a deep history of the container. By isolating its contents from transaction, and by enabling the manipulation of time, the container serves as an engine of history.

Attack of the Islamophobes

I will begin with a simple claim: current forms of Islamophobia are not based primarily on a fear of Islam or hatred of Muslims. Hostility toward Muslims has a very long history in Western societies, as do admiration for the accomplishments of Islamic civilization and strategic alliances between Muslim and Christian polities.2 The variants of Islamophobia explored in this volume borrow heavily from this old complex of ideas, but they are more directly related to the ambiguities of nationalism, a modern ideology that blends fellow feeling and cultural difference in complex, often unconvincing ways. National identities are meant to be shared, yet they are always partial. Every member of a nation state has several additional identities that are not fully defined by, or contained within, the national community. A French citizen can be a Muslim or a Jew. US citizens can be black, Latino, or French. Often, the state encourages its citizens to claim additional identities, and its willingness to tolerate and equitably manage social diversity is generally taken as proof of pluralism and a commitment to civil and human rights.

The Rise of Nasir Al-Nims: A Tribal Commentary on Being and Becoming a Shaykh

This article examines local conceptions of shaykhly authority among Near Eastern tribes-people. Special attention is given to the personal history of Nasir al-Nims, a shaykh of the Murad tribe in North Yemen. The story of Nasirs rise to prominence, told by his grandson, is recounted and analyzed. A close study of this narrative reveals (1) patterns which recur frequently in the lives of shaykhs, (2) the structural conditions in which shaykhs of a certain kind emerge, and (3) a way of talking about authority and leadership in an egalitarian society which views both with ambivalence. It is argued that shaykhly authority will be better understood when tribal narrative and other forms of local expression are more fully incorporated in anthropological discourse.

On containers: A forum. Concluding remarks

You could think of these essays as six shipping containers filled with a bewildering array of goods. There are clay pots, grain silos, tombs, junk drawers, smart phones, and entire houses (round and square) to sort through. Alongside all these tangible objects are concepts and qualities that are hard to classify: questions of time travel, loss, clutter, decay, standardization, and (yes) the strength of the human neck. Suppose we break a few crates while unpacking. What falls out? Olive oil, wine, dead bodies, stolen antiquities, discarded clothing, old batteries, digitized financial records. It might seem, at first glance, that containment is an idea so capacious that it can hold just about anything. Upon closer scrutiny, however, one detects a shared assumption that gives crisper definition to these essays. Each of our authors is committed to the idea that the relationship between content and container is transformative. As Greenland puts it: ‘What comes out of the box is a different sort of thing than what entered the box’. Moreover, this transformation works in both directions, for the box itself is changed by its own experience of containing. ‘Let’s not reify containers’, Robb warns. In the relationship between container and contained, nothing is fixed. We agree that one should not generalize too freely about containers. Even so, it was illuminating for us to see howoften our authors posed ideas of secrecy and risk as both the affective and logistical context in which particular container technologies make sense. The manufacture, filling up, and emptying out of containers is, in all these essays, a moral project. It is pursued in ways that are good and bad, sustainable or destructive, and the ambivalent moods it generates are related to the fact that storage so often involves concealment and separation. A container is not alwaysmysterious, or forbidden to us, but its contents are set apart. They are closed off for a time, and this condition is invariably a social fact. Some people have a right to draw water from the well. For others, the same act is theft. Containers facilitate exchange, but they also encourageopacity anddeception. The challenges of storage are not simply mechanical, although shape, material properties, and portability are recurrent themes in these essays. Rather, the keymoral dilemma is the concentration of risk that comes withcontainment. Somethingworthkeeping isput in aplace that, almostalways, is vulnerable to breach. The desire to contain exists in an uneasy relationship with the inevitable failure of the container, hence the inadequacy of human storage cultures and our endless attempts to improve them by patchwork, or encompassment, or by scaling up. Bevan’s image of nested ‘enclosure acts’ captures the logic perfectly: ‘sealed jars in locked storerooms in walled houses/palaces within legally-bounded estates within increasingly territorial polities’. This nested hierarchy has all the qualities of an assemblage, as Robb describes it, and each enveloping relationship is a site for the cisaction of containment. To speak of cisaction is to recognize that the contents of a container are not just passively contained. Things happen