Books in the Public Cultures of the Middle East and North Africa series

Reveals the historical links between these two world regions, describes the emergence of South-South solidarities, and offers methodologies for the study of transnationalism, global culture, and international relations.

Despite a rich history of ethnographic research in Middle Eastern societies, the region is frequently portrayed as marginal to anthropology. The contributors to this volume reject this view and show how the Middle East is in fact vital to the discipline.

Despite a rich history of ethnographic research in Middle Eastern societies, the region is frequently portrayed as marginal to anthropology. The contributors to this volume reject this view and show how the Middle East is in fact vital to the discipline.

Following the story of one middle class family as they work, eat, love, and grow, Everyday Life in Global Morocco provides a moving and engaging exploration of how world issues impact lives. Rachel Newcomb shows how larger issues like gentrification, changing diets, and nontraditional approaches to marriage and fertility are changing what the everyday looks and feels like in Morocco. Newcomb's close engagement with the Benjelloun family presents a broad range of responses to the multifaceted effects of globalization. The lived experience of the modern family is placed in contrast with the traditional expectation of how this family should operate. This juxtaposition encourages new ways of thinking about how modern the notion of globalization really is.

Professor Julie Peteet believes that the concept of mobility is key to understanding how place and space act as forms of power, identity, and meaning among Palestinians in Israel today. In Space and Mobility in Palestine, she investigates how Israeli policies of closure and separation influence Palestinian concerns about constructing identity, the ability to give meaning to place, and how Palestinians comprehend, experience, narrate, and respond to Israeli settler-colonialism. Peteet's work sheds new light on everyday life in the Occupied Territories and helps explain why regional peace may be difficult to achieve in the foreseeable future.

Facing rising demands for human rights and the rule of law, the Moroccan state fostered new mass media and cultivated more positive images of the police, once the symbol of state repression, reinventing the relationship between citizen and state for a new era. Jonathan Smolin examines popular culture and mass media to understand the changing nature of authoritarianism in Morocco over the past two decades. Using neglected Arabic sources including crime tabloids, television movies, true-crime journalism, and police advertising, Smolin sheds new light on politics and popular culture in the Middle East and North Africa.

The years 1954-1958 in Syria are popularly known as "e;The Democratic Years,"e; a brief period of civilian government before the consolidation of authoritarian rule. Kevin W. Martin provides a cultural history of the period and argues that the authoritarian outcome was anything but inevitable. Examining the flourishing broadcast and print media of the time, he focuses on three public figures, experts whose professions-law, the military, and medicine-projected modernity and modeled the new Arab citizen. This experiment with democracy, however abortive, offers a model of governance from Syria's historical experience that could serve as an alternative to dictatorship.

Mara A. Leichtman offers an in-depth study of Shi'i Islam in two very different communities in Senegal: the well-established Lebanese diaspora and Senegalese "e;converts"e; from Sunni to Shi'i Islam of recent decades. Sharing a minority religious status in a predominantly Sunni Muslim country, each group is cosmopolitan in its own way. Leichtman provides new insights into the everyday lives of Shi'i Muslims in Africa and the dynamics of local and global Islam. She explores the influence of Hizbullah and Islamic reformist movements, and offers a corrective to prevailing views of Sunni-Shi'i hostility, demonstrating that religious coexistence is possible in a context such as Senegal.

With its new political and cultural affiliations with the Middle East and the renewed visibility of the country's millions of practicing Muslims and those with Middle Eastern roots, Brazil may offer useful lessons for countries transformed by the "Arab Spring." This collection reveals the historical links between these two world regions.

The sacred calls that summon believers are the focus of this study of religion and power in Fez, Morocco. Focusing on how dissemination of the call through mass media has transformed understandings of piety and authority, Emilio Spadola details the new importance of once-marginal Sufi practices such as spirit trance and exorcism for ordinary believers, the state, and Islamist movements. The Calls of Islam offers new ethnographic perspectives on ritual, performance, and media in the Muslim world.

Examines the many ways in which music has been a force of representation, nation building, and social action.

Examines the many ways in which music has been a force of representation, nation building, and social action.

Introduces readers to life in this North African country through vivid accounts of fieldwork as personal experience and intellectual journey

Rethinking place and history in Northwest Africa

Muslim-Christian co-existence through public art

Reveals the underlying causes of the revolts by identifying key trends during the last two decades leading up to the recent insurrections

Reveals the underlying causes of the revolts by identifying key trends during the last two decades leading up to the recent insurrections

Addresses contemporary debates about modernity, nation building, and the link between the ideology of power and the production of knowledge

Addresses contemporary debates about modernity, nation building, and the link between the ideology of power and the production of knowledge

Global goods, class, and identity in urban Egypt

Survivors of the Armenian genocide of 1915 and their descendants have used music to adjust to a life in exile and counter fears of obscurity. In this nuanced and richly detailed study, Sylvia Angelique Alajaji shows how the boundaries of Armenian music and identity have been continually redrawn: from the identification of folk music with an emergent Armenian nationalism under Ottoman rule to the early postgenocide diaspora community of Armenian musicians in New York, a more self-consciously nationalist musical tradition that emerged in Armenian communities in Lebanon, and more recent clashes over music and politics in California. Alajaji offers a critical look at the complex and multilayered forces that shape identity within communities in exile, demonstrating that music is deeply enmeshed in these processes. Multimedia components available online include video and audio recordings to accompany each case study.