Photo: “Listening to the World Bloom Again” Algerian Artist Djahida Houadef

Take FG 206/AN 208/RE 200: The Anthropology of Islam in the Modern Middle East and its Diasporas this summer with Nadia Guessous

How have anthropologists complicated our understanding of Islam? How have they challenged Orientalist representations of Islam as static, homogeneous, and inherently oppressive? Through richly contextualized ethnographies of Islam in the modern Middle East and its Diasporas, this course seeks: 1) to challenge dominant representations of Islam; 2) to derive critical epistemological and analytical insights from the work of anthropologists who have taken the Islamic tradition seriously on its own diverse and shifting terms; and 3) to parochialize some of our normative assumptions about the self, agency, reason, memory, the body, politics, ethics, tradition, the modern state, and secularism.