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| 1 |
ID:
117196
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2012.
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| Summary/Abstract |
This paper traces the emergence of folklore studies and ethnography in interwar Iran. It argues that these disciplines were part of larger nationalist projects of representing and speaking for the "masses." The first part of the paper explores how and why a number of Iranian intellectuals engaged in folklore studies after a period of prolonged political activism in the first few decades of the 20th century. The second part of the paper examines cultural institutions established by the state, mainly in the late 1930s, in an attempt to appropriate and institutionalize folklore studies and ethnography for the purposes of nation building. These efforts were fraught with ambivalences because the "masses" were simultaneously praised as repositories of "authenticity" and looked down upon as a potential source of "backwardness."
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| 2 |
ID:
117191
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2012.
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article analyzes two accounts of the Hispano-Moroccan War of 1859-60 in light of scholarly debates about historiography, translation, and modernity in the colonial context. The first text is Ahmad b. Khalid al-Nasiri's Kitab al-Istiqsa (1895), which explores the organization of the Spanish army in an effort to understand the military technology and state apparatus behind colonial domination. The second text, Clemente Cerdeira's Versión árabe de la Guerra de África (1917), is framed as an annotated Spanish translation of al-Nasiri's text, but Cerdeira suppresses key passages from al-Nasiri's account in order to undermine any hint that the Moroccan historian's thinking is reformist or modern. By comparing these two accounts of the same war, the article aims to situate al-Nasiri's text within the reform movements that spread through the Muslim Mediterranean in the 19th century and to use al-Nasiri's historical thinking as a model for theorizing Moroccan modernity.
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| 3 |
ID:
117193
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2012.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Notwithstanding its promotion as a vehicle for the decolonization and modernization of knowledge in Morocco, the policy of Arabization has been caught in an ongoing competition with the pedagogical visions of the French Protectorate-visions that have been recycled by nationalist and international development agendas. This competition has subtly classified the sciences and the humanities into Francophone and Arabophone disciplines, respectively, at a moment when national development is understood as technological advancement. School participants endure this linguistic, disciplinary, and, effectively, social hierarchy and put their awareness of the system at the service of its circumvention. The anxiety of teachers over the future of state-educated youth indicates that the legitimacy of the school itself has become highly doubted. This article approaches both the public school and its relationship to knowledge through a historically informed ethnographic lens, arguing that centralized theories of pedagogy, the sociological category of class, and the assumed dichotomy between state agendas and international patronage are unsatisfactory frames for the interpretation of the phenomena in question.
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| 4 |
ID:
117192
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2012.
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| Summary/Abstract |
In this historically and anthropologically oriented article, we situate the recent wave of Jewish-themed Moroccan films within the context of the liberalizing transformations and associated nationalist narratives promoted by the current Moroccan regime. Reflecting Mohammed VI's commitment to widening the space of civil society, the task of enacting these transformations and producing these narratives devolves increasingly to nonstate agents in the public sphere. Previously monopolized and managed more comprehensively by the state, the "Jewish Question"-that is, contestations over representations of Jews as authentic members of the Moroccan body politic-is now taken up in a range of public media less subject to direct government control. We demonstrate that the role of cinema in this process reflects the shifting relationship between state and civil society in the late postcolonial period. More specifically, we argue that the production, circulation, and reception of Jewish-themed films is diagnostic of the state's ability to open new spaces of public representation and debate that foster precisely those images of the state and nation promoted by the current regime in regional and global contexts.
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| 5 |
ID:
117194
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2012.
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| Summary/Abstract |
The paper will draw the contours of the intellectual project of Mahdi ?Amil (1936-87), a prominent Lebanese Marxist. It will start by relocating ?Amil's work in the general problématique of the adaptation and adoption of theories in the periphery, looking at the process of translation he deploys in his construction of an "Arab Marxism." After presenting his project, the paper will focus on its diachronic dimension, by presenting two developments that threatened ?Amil's overarching project, namely, the Lebanese civil war in the 1970s and the rise of a new register of critique in the 1980s, epitomized by the work of Edward Said. The paper will conclude with a discussion of the contemporary relevance of ?Amil's work to the historiography of modern Arab political thought.
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| 6 |
ID:
117195
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2012.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Vote buying and vote selling are prominent features of electoral politics in Lebanon. This article investigates how vote trafficking works in Lebanese elections and examines how electoral rules and practices contribute to wide and lively vote markets. Using original survey data from the 2009 parliamentary elections, it studies vote selling with a list experiment, a question technique designed to elicit truthful answers to sensitive questions. The data show that over half of the Lebanese sold their votes in 2009. Moreover, once we come to grips with the sensitivity of the topic, the data show that members of all sectarian communities and political alliances sold their votes at similar rates.
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