Ethnography and the Politics of Storytelling

Why do we write ethnography? And for whom? What are the forces that we address while writing? In this course, we will read ethnographic accounts that cover various issues in Egypt in specific and the Middle East in general. In doing so, we will grapple with two schools of thought that relate to the broader questions of why we write and whom we criticize when we set our arguments:

First, there is the school that is connected to the white man’s colonial legacy that politically, culturally, and economically still controls and produces images about the “other.” This school gives attention to hegemonic (i.e., orientalist) Western perceptions about the Middle East. Hence, scholars who belong to this school put on their shoulders the responsibility to highlight modes of resistance and living that do not fit into the Western secularist understanding of the Middle East as essentially repressive and non-modern.

Second, there are the scholars who situate their arguments within theoretical frameworks that address modes of resistance against other non-Western social and political forces. Members of this school emphasize that while some of their interlocutors might be critical of the West and its hegemonic discourses, others care about different struggles that are not necessarily linked to the West and to its imagination of the people of the Middle East and the Arab regions.

In this course, we put the concerns of these two schools in consideration while thinking about the haunting effects of writing about nationalist liberation, anticolonial resistance, religious revivals, minority rights, queer rights, and alternatives economies. While thinking about how these stories counter and speak to hegemonic Western perceptions about peoples of the Middle East and the Arab world, we also make sense of their political and social (mis-)representations via ‘critical’ literature, academic writings, and activist work.