Syllabus/achievement requirements

Week 34

Monday Seminar 1: Intro to Middle Eastern Studies

• Mitchell, Timothy. "The Middle East in the Past and Future of Social Science." In The Politics of Knowledge: Area Studies and the Disciplines, edited by David L. Szanton. (Berkeley: University of California Press), pp 74-118. 

• Khalidi, Rashid. ¡°The Middle East as a Framework of Analysis: Re-mapping a region in the Era of Globalization,¡± Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa & The Middle East, 28:1 (1998): pp. 74-81.

• Moallem, Minoo. ¡°Middle Eastern Studies, Feminism, and Globalization,¡± Signs vol. 26. No. 4 (2001): pp. 1265-1268. JSTOR

• Asad, Talal. "The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam." Qui Parle 17, no. 2 (2009): pp. 1-30. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20685738.

Wednesday Seminar 2: Historicity: contexts, traditions, and time

• Gadamer, Hans Georg. Truth and Method, Supplement II: To What Extent Does Language Perform Thought? pp. 172-195. 

• Ricouer, Paul. A Ricoeur Reader: Reflection and Imagination. Section 1: ¡°Philosophical Context for a Post-Structuralist Hermeneutics.¡± pp. 43-86; 99-117.

• Kaviraj, Sudipta. "An Outline of a Revisionist Theory of Modernity." European Journal of Sociology / Archives Europ¨¦ennes De Sociologie / Europ?isches Archiv F¨¹r Soziologie 46, no. 3 (2005): pp. 497-526. JSTOR

Week 35

Monday Seminar 3: On Representation

• Said, Edward. Orientalism, Intro and first chapter

• Guha, Ranajit. Dominance without Hegemony, Part 1, Colonialism in South Asia: A Dominance without Hegemony and its Historiography

• Memmi, Albert. The Colonizer and the Colonized, Part II, Portrait of the Colonizer. pp. 3-76.

• Omer Seyfeddin, ¡°The Secret Temple.¡± pp. 270-274.

Wednesday Seminar 4: Structure

• Levi-Strauss, Claude. Structural Anthropology, Ch. 1, Introduction: History and Anthropology

• Althusser, Louis. ¡°Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,¡± in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays

• Barthes, Roland. 'The structural activity' in Critical Essays.

• Jameson, Frederic. The Prison-house of Language, Preface and Part III, The Structuralist Projection

Week 36

Monday Seminar 5: Discourse

• Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things, Part 1, Chapter 3 Representing, pp. 51-85.

• Fahmy, Khaled. In Quest of Justice: Islamic Law and Forensic Medicine in Modern Egypt. Ch. 1:Medicine, Enlightenment and Islam. pp. 39-80.

• Hacking, Ian. Historical Ontology, Chapter 1, Historical Ontology

• Volosinov, M. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, Part 1 (Chapters 1 & 2), The Philosophy of Language and its Significance for Marxism, pp. 9-24.

Wednesday Seminar 6: Gender and Sexuality

• Lazreg, Marnia. The Eloquence of Silence: Algerian Women in Question. London:    Routledge, 1994. Chapter 1 ¡°Decolonizing Feminism,¡± pp. 6-19.

• Lorde, Audre. ¡°Age, Race, Class and Sex: Women Redefining Difference,¡± in Sister Outsider (Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1984): pp. 114-123

• Mikdashi, Maya. ¡°How Not to Study Gender in the Middle East.¡± Jadaliyya.

• Shohat, Ella. ¡°Area Studies, Transnationalism, and the Feminist Production of Knowledge.¡± Signs vol. 26 (4): pp. 1269-1272. JSTOR

• El-Ghobashy, Mona. ¡°Quandaries of Representation.¡± In Rabab AbdulHadi, Evelyn Al-Sultany and Nadine Naber (eds.) Arab and Arab American Feminisms: Gender, Violence, and Belonging (Gender, Culture, and Politics in the Middle East) Syracuse U Press. 2011., pp. 97-103.

• Gole, Nilufer. "Islam in Public: New Visibilities and New Imaginaries." Public Culture 14, no. 1 (2002): 173-190. 

Week 37 (Retreat: Two nights in Granavolden) Seminars 7 thru 12

Monday Seminar 7:  Ideology and Nationalism

• Dawisha, Adeed. Arab nationalism in the twentieth century: from triumph to despair Chap 1, Defining Arab Nationalism, pp 1-14.

• Khalidi, Rashid. "Arab nationalism: historical problems in the literature."The American Historical Review (1991): pp. 1363-1373.

• Chaterjee, Partha. The Nation and its Fragments. Princeton University Press. Chapter 1. Whose Imagined Community, (1993). pp 1-13.

• Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. Verso. 2006. Revised Edition. Introduction.  pp 1-8.

• Lashi?n, Mahmud Tahir. ¡°Village Small Talk¡± [1929, an English translation of Hadith al-Qaryah]

Monday Seminar 8: Intro to Research Workshop

• The Craft of Research 

Monday Seminar 9:  Intro to Research and Writing Workshop

• The Craft of Research 

• Bhabha, Homi. Location of Culture, The Commitment to Theory

Tuesday Seminar 10: From Topics to Questions

• The Craft of Research

• AbuLughod, ¡°Fieldwork of a Dutiful Daughter.¡± In Soraya Altorki and Camillia Fawzi El-Solh eds., Arab Women in the Field: Studying Your Own Society. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, pp. 139-162.

• Clifford, James. ¡°On Ethnographic Authority.¡± Representations, No. 2. (Spring, 1983), pp. 118-146. JSTOR

• Dresch, Paul. 2000. ¡°Wilderness of Mirrors: Truth and Vulnerability in Middle Eastern Fieldwork.¡± In Paul Dresch, Wendy James and David Parkin eds., Anthropologists in a Wider World: Essays on Field Research. Oxford: Berghan Books, pp. 109-127.

Tuesday Seminar 11:  Research Ethics Guest Lecture by Berit Thorbj?rnsrud

• The Norwegian National Research Ethics Committees. "Guidelines for Research Ethics in the Social Sciences, Humanities, Law and Theology." Oslo, 2016.

• Lee Ann Fujii, "Research Ethics 101: Dilemmas and Responsibilities", PS: Political Science & Politics 45, No. 4 (2012): pp. 717-723. 

Wednesday Seminar 12:  Negotiating Agency: Revolutions and Social Movements

• Wiktorowicz, Quintan. ¡°Islamic Activism and Social Movement Theory: A New Direction for Research.¡± Mediterranean Politics 7, no. 3 (2002): pp. 187-211.

• Hirschkind, Charles. ¡°What is Political Islam?¡± MERIP. Vol. 27, Winter (1997).

• Leenders, Reinoud. ¡°Social Movement Theory and the Onset of the Popular Uprising in Syria." Arab Studies Quarterly 35, no. 3 (2013): pp. 273-289.

• Bayat, Asef. ¡°The ¡°Street¡± and the Politics of Dissent in the Arab World,¡± in Middle East Report,  No. 226 (Spring 2003) pp. 10-17.

• Nasser, Gamal Abdel. ¡°The Egyptian Revolution,¡± in Foreign Affairs, Vol.33, No.2 (Jan., 1955) pp. 199-211.

• Moruzzi, Norma. ¡°Gender and the Revolutions.¡± MER268. Middle East Research and Information Project: MERIP. Vol 43, Fall 2013. Available in this link: http://www.merip.org/mer/mer268/gender-revolutions Online

Week 38

Monday Seminar 13: Authorities: on Tribes, Castes, Kinship, and Sects

• Crone, Patricia. ¡°Tribes and States in the Middle East.¡± Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 3, no. 3 (1993): pp. 353-76. JSTOR

• Antoun, Richard T. ¡°Civil Society, Tribal Process, and Change in Jordan: An Anthropological View.¡± International Journal of Middle East Studies 32, no. 4 (2000): pp. 441-463. JSTOR

• Ilaiah, K. Why I Am Not a Hindu: A Sudra Critique of Hindutva Philosophy, Culture and Political economy (Calcutta: Samya, 1996), Chapter One: Childhood Formations, pp. 1-19.

• Dirks, Nicholas. B. Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. Introduction, pp. 3-18.

Seminar 14: Review and Wrapping up

MODULES

Text and Discourse Analysis

(by Associate Professor Jacob H?igilt)

• Blommaert, Jan. ¡°Context Is/as Critique.¡± Critique of Anthropology 21, no. 1 (2001): 13¨C32.

• Fowler, Roger. Language in the News. Discourse and Ideology in the Press. London: Routledge, 1991. [Chapters 1, 5, 7] [Electronically available via Canvas].

• H?igilt, Jacob. Islamist Rhetoric: Language and Culture in Contemporary Egypt. London: Routledge, 2011. [Chapter 4] [Electronically available via Canvas].

• McKee, Alan. Textual Analysis. London: SAGE Publications Ltd, 2003.

• Skinner, Quentin. Visions of Politics: Regarding Method, Volume 1. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2002. [Chapters 5-6] [Electronically available via Canvas].

Field Work Methods

(by Professor Berit Thorbj?rnsrud)

• Tedlock, Barbara. ¡°From Participant Observation to the Observation of Participation: The Emergence of Narrative Ethnography¡±. Journal of Anthropological Research 47, no. 1 (1991): 69-94.

• El-Solh, Camillia Fawzi. ¡°Gender, Class, and Origin. Aspects of Role During Fieldwork in Arab society¡±. In Arab Women in the Field. Studying Your Own Society, edited by Soraya Altorki & Camillia Fawzi El-Solh. 91-115. Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 1988.

• Romano, David. ¡°Conducting Research in the Middle East¡¯s Conflict Zones¡±. Political Science and Politics 39, no. 3 (2006): 439-441.

• Sanghera, Gurchathen S. and Suruci Thapar-Bj?rkert. ¡°Methodological dilemmas: gatekeepers and positionality in Bradford¡±. Ethical and Racial Studies 31, no. 3 (2008): 543-562.

• Roulston, Kathryn; Kathleen deMarrais and Jamie B. Lewis. ¡°Learning to Interview in the Social Sciences¡±. Qualitative Inquiry 9, no. 4 (2003): 643-668.

• Lund-Johansen, Marie Brokstad. Fighting for Citizenship in Kuwait. MA Thesis. University of Oslo, 2014. [Chapter 1.5-1-7: ¡°Explaining Bidoon mobilisation: Methodological approach¡±, page 16-30].

• Brown, Michael F. ¡°Cultural Relativism 2.0¡±. Current Anthropology 49, no. 3 (2008): 363-383.

• Abdel-Fadil, Mona. Living the ¡®Message¡¯ and Empowering Muslim Selves: A Behind the Screens study of Online Islam. PhD dissertation. University of Oslo, 2012. [Only ¡°¡®Studying sideways¡¯: reflections on methodology¡±, page 9-61].

• Narayan, Uma. ¡°Cross-Cultural Connections, Border-Crossings, and ¡®Death by Culture¡¯. Thinking About Dowry-Murders in India and Domestic-Violence Murders in the United States¡±. In Dislocating Cultures: Identities, Traditions, and Third-World Feminism (New York: Routledge, 1997), 81-118.

• Suleiman, Yasir and Paul Anderson. "Conducting Fieldwork in the Middle East¡¯: Report of a Workshop held at the University of Edinburgh on 12 February 2007". British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 35, no. 2 (2008): 151-171.

• Aberbach, Joel D. and Bert A. Rockman. ¡°Conducting and Coding Elite Interviews", PS: Political Science and Politics 35, no. 4 (2002): 673-676.

• McNeill, Desmond. ¡°Statistics¡ªthe Development Researcher's Guilty Secret¡±, Forum for Development Studies 27, no. 1 (2000): 145-150.

• Valenzuela, Dapsury & Pallavi Shrivastava. ¡°Interview as a method for qualitative research¡±. Arizona State University (undated). Student presentation.

Historical Methods

(By Professor Brynjar Lia)

Methods in Historical Research (Seminar 1 & 2)

¡¤       Howell, Martha and Walter Prevenier. From Reliable Sources: An Introduction to Historical Methods. Ithaca & London: Cornell Univ. Press, 2001, 17-150 [Chapter 1-5].

¡¤       Carr, David. ¡°Narrative Explanation and Its Malcontents¡±. History and Theory 47, no. 1 (2008): 19-30.

¡¤       Dibble, Vernon K. ¡°Four Types of Inference from Documents to Events¡±. History and Theory 3, no. 2 (1963): 203-221.

¡¤       Skocpol, Theda and Margaret Somers. "The Uses of Comparative History in. Macrosocial Inquiry." Comparative Studies in Society and History 22, no. 2 (1980): 174-197.

• James Mahoney, "Strategies of Causal Assessments in Comparative Historical Analysis." In Comparative Historical Analysis in Social Sciences,¡± edited James Mahoney and Dietrich Rueschemeyer. 337-372. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), [In Canvas]..

¡¤       Findlay, Cassie. "People, records and power: what archives can learn from WikiLeaks." Archives and Manuscripts 41, no. 1 (2013): 7-22.

Sources, Archives and Archival Research in the Middle East and South Asia (Seminar 3 & 4)

¡¤       Amour, Philipp O. ¡°Practical, Theoretical, and Methodological Challenges of Field Research in the Middle East.¡± Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History 45, no. 3 (2012): 143-149.

¡¤       Omar, Hussein. ¡°The State of the Archive: Manipulating Memory in Modern Egypt and the Writing of Egyptological Histories.¡± In Histories of Egyptology: Interdisciplinary Measures, edited by William Carruthers, 175-83. New York, Abingdon: Routledge, 2015. [In Canvas].

¡¤       Peled, Kobi. "Oral testimonies, archival sources, and the 1948 Arab-Israeli War: A close look at the occupation of a Galilean village". Journal of Israeli History: Politics, Society, Culture 33, no. 1 (2014): 41-61.

¡¤       Sayigh, Rosemary. ¡°Oral history, colonialist dispossession, and the state: the Palestinian case¡±. Settler Colonial Studies 5, no. 3 (2015): 193-204.

¡¤       ?zok-G¨¹ndo?an, Nilay. ¡°The Archive as a ¡®Collective Project¡¯.¡± International Journal of Middle East Studies 49, no. 3 (2017): 529-533

¡¤       Frampton, Martyn and Ehud Rosen. ¡°Reading the Runes? The United States and the Muslim Brotherhood as seen through the Wikileaks Cables¡±, The Historical Journal 56, no. 3 (2013): 827-856.

¡¤       Lebovich, Andrea. ¡°The Challenge of Contemporary Historical Research in Algeria¡±. Textures du temps (10 August 2015). [5 pages].

¡¤       Gould, William. "Paper, public works and politics: tracing archives of corruption in 1940s¨C1950s Uttar Pradesh, India." Contemporary South Asia 25, no. 1 (2017): 38-55.

¡¤       Dirks, Nicholas B.. "Annals of the archive: ethnographic notes on the sources of history". In From the Margins: Historical Anthropology and Its Futures, edited by Brian Keith Axel, 49-65. Duke University Press, 2002. [In Canvas].

Topics in Linguistic Studies

(by Professor Stephan Guth)

Seminar I: General / Language Families 

• Eifring, Halvor, and Rolf Theil. 2005. Linguistics for Students of Asian and African Languages, Ch. 4: ¡°Linguistic typology¡±. (14 pp.)

Seminar II: Language Typology 

• Eifring, Halvor, and Rolf Theil. 2005. Linguistics for Students of Asian and African Languages, Ch. 6: ¡°Language Contact¡±. (30 pp.)

Seminar III: Sociolinguistics I 

• Coulmas, Florian. 2005: Sociolinguistics: The Study of Speakers¡¯ Choices, Ch. 1: ¡°Introduction: Notions of language¡±. (14 pp.)
• Walters, Keith. ¡°Language attitudes¡±. EALL online (Brill References). (ca. 15 p.)
• Ferguson, Charles. 1959. ¡°Diglossia¡±. Word 15: 325-40. (16 pp.)
• Coulmas, Florian. 2005. Sociolinguistics: The Study of Speakers' Choices, Ch. 8: ¡°Diglossia and bilingualism: Functional restrictions on language choice¡±. (20 pp.) 

Seminar IV: Sociolinguistics II 

• Mejdell, Gunvor. 2006. ¡°Codeswitching¡±. EALL online (Brill References). (ca. 8 pp.)
• Palva, Heikki. 2006. ¡°Arabic dialects: classification¡±. EALL online (Brill References). (ca. 12 pp.)
• Ibrahim, Muhammad H. 1986. ¡°Standard and Prestige Language: A Problem in Arabic Sociolinguistics¡±. Anthropological Linguistics, 28.1: 115-126. (12 pp.)
• Ismail, Manal A. 2012. ¡°Sociocultural Identity and Arab Women¡¯s and Men¡¯s Code-Choice in the Context of Patriarchy¡±. Anthropological Linguistics, 54.3: 261-279. (19 pp.)
• Brendemoen, Bernt. 2012. ¡°Prestige register vs. common speech in Ottoman Turkish¡±. In: Gunvor Mejdell and Lutz Edzard (eds.), High vs. Low and Mixed Varieties, 123-132. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.

Optional:

• Alvestad, Silje, and Lutz Edzard. 2009. ¡°The evidence of the living language: normative forms vs. spoken modern Hebrew¡±. In: Silje Alvestad and Lutz Edzard, Sonority, Optimality and the Hebrew p"ch Forms (eds.), 163-201. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.

Topics in Literature Studies (all syllabus material available from Canvas)

(by Professor Stephan Guth)

Seminar 1 - Fact versus fiction. The ¡°added value¡± of narrative, or: Why literature matters. The role of the writer in the MENA region.

• Culler, Jonathan. 2007. Literary Theory: A very short introduction, Ch. 2: ¡°What is Literature and Does it Matter?¡± Oxford Univ. Press. (24 pp.)
• Abbott, H. Porter. 2008. The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, 2^nd ed., Ch. 11: ¡°Narrative and Truth.¡± Cambridge Univ. Press. (15 pp.)
• Klemm, Verena. 2000. ¡°Different Notions of Commitment (iltiz¨¡m) and Committed Literature (al-adab al-multazim) in the Literary Circles of the Mashriq¡±. Arabic and Middle Eastern Literatures, 3.1: 51-62.
• Mehrez, Samia. 1994. Egyptian Writers between History and Fiction, ¡°Introduction¡±. Cairo: AUC Press. (17 pp.)

Seminar 2 - Literary history (overview), themes and genres in modern Arabic fiction

• Guth, Stephan. 2013. ¡°Novel, Modern Arabic¡±. In: Encyclopedia of Islam, 3^rd edition (online) (Brill References). (ca. 10 pp.)
• Guth, Stephan. 2011. ¡°From Water-Carrying Camels to Modern Story-Tellers, or How ¡°riw¨¡ya¡± Came to Mean ¡®novel¡¯: A History of an Encounter of Concepts.¡± In: K. Eksell & S. Guth (eds.), Borders and Beyond: Crossings and Transitions in Modern Arabic Literature, 147-79. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. (33 pp.)

Optional:

• Casini, Lorenzo. 2011. ¡°The Nation, the Narrative Subject, and the European Theme in the Development of the Egyptian Novel¡±. In: S. Guth & G. Ramsay (eds.), From New Values to New Aesthetics: Turning Points in Modern Arabic Literature, vol. I: From Modernism to the 1980s, 59-70. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. (12 pp.)
• Hafez, Sabry. 1976. ¡°The Egyptian Novel in the Sixties¡±. Journal of Arabic Literature, 7: 68-84. (23 pp.)
• Guth, Stephan. 2011. ¡°Literary Currents in Egypt since the Beginning/Mid-1960s¡±. In: S. Guth and G. Ramsay (eds.), From New Values to New Aesthetics: Turning Points in Modern Arabic Literature, vol. 1: From Modernism to the 1980s, 85-112. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. (28 pp.)
• Guth, Stephan. (2007). ¡°Individuality Lost, Fun Gained: Some Recurrent Motifs in Late Twentieth-Century Arabic and Turkish Novels¡±. Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies, 7: 25-49. (23 pp.)

Seminar 3 - West reads East reads West: Orientalism/Occidentalism. Relation to the West in MAL

• El-Enany, Rasheed. 2009. ¡°Theme and Identity in Postcolonial Arabic Writing¡±. In: Doris Jedamski (ed.), Chewing over the West: Occidental Narratives on Non-Western Readings, 1-36. Amsterdam: Rodopi. (36 pp.)
• Casini, Lorenzo. 2008. ¡°Beyond Occidentalism: Europe and the Self in Present-Day Arabic Narrative Discourse¡±. EUI Working Papers RSCAS 2008/30.
• Holmberg, Bo. 2006. ¡°Adab and Arabic Literature¡±. In: A. Pettersson [et al.] (eds.), Literary History: Towards a Global Perspective, vol. 1: Notions of Literature Across Cultures, 181-205. Berlin [etc.]: de Gruyter. (25 pp.)
• Rooke, Tetz. 2011. ¡°The Emergence of the Arabic Bestseller: Arabic Fiction and World Literature¡±. In: S. Guth & G. Ramsay (eds.), From New Values to New Aesthetics: Turning Points in Modern Arabic Literature, vol. II: Postmodernism and thereafter, 201-213. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. (13 pp.)
• Allan, Michael. 2012. ¡°How Adab Became Literary: Formalism, Orientalism and the Institutions of World Literature¡±. Journal of Arabic Literature, 43: 172-196. (25 pp.)

Seminar 4 - Starter kit for the analysis of narrative texts

• Culler, Jonathan. 1997. Literary Theory: A very short introduction, ch. 6: ¡°Narrative¡±. Oxford UP. (12 pp.)
• Propp, Vladimir. 2008. Morphology of the Folktale, ch. 3: ¡°The functions of Dramatis Personae¡±. Austin, TX: UT Press, 19^th pb. ed. (41 pp.)
• Abbott, H. Porter. 2009. ¡°Story, plot, and narration¡± = ch. 3 in David Herman (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Narrative, 3^rd ed., Cambridge UP. (13 pp.)
• M. Jahn, M. 2009. ¡°Focalization¡± = ch. 7 in David Herman (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Narrative, 3^rd ed., Cambridge UP. (15 pp.).
• Guth, Stephan. [n.d.]. Working sheet ¡°How to analyze a piece of fiction¡±. (1p.)