U.S. involvement in the Middle East has brought the region into the
media spotlight and made it a hot topic in American college classrooms.
At the same time, anthropology--a discipline committed to on-the-ground
research about everyday lives and social worlds--has increasingly been
criticized as "useless" or "biased" by right-wing forces. What happens
when the two concerns meet, when such accusations target the researchers
and research of a region so central to U.S. military interests?
This book is the first academic study to shed critical light on the
political and economic pressures that shape how U.S. scholars research
and teach about the Middle East. Lara Deeb and Jessica Winegar show how
Middle East politics and U.S. gender and race hierarchies affect
scholars across their careers--from the first decisions to conduct
research in the tumultuous region, to ongoing politicized pressures from
colleagues, students, and outside groups, to hurdles in sharing
expertise with the public. They detail how academia, even within
anthropology, an assumed "liberal" discipline, is infused with sexism,
racism, Islamophobia, and Zionist obstruction of any criticism of the
Israeli state. Anthropology's Politics offers a complex portrait of
how academic politics ultimately hinders the education of U.S. students
and potentially limits the public's access to critical knowledge about
the Middle East.
