HISTORY OF OUR COMMISSION
Letter to the Secretary General of the IUAES in view of the formation of an area Commission, entitled: Commission of Anthropology of the Middle East, June 27th 2009
Ever since the 1970s, when I attended a conference of the American Anthropological Association for the first time, a question had been with me: Why do anthropologists of the Middle East not have a common forum in the form of a journal or an anthropology association? These turbulent years have posed more burning questions for me, above all the following one: Has the anthropology of the Middle East played its due role as a social science dedicated to writing, describing, explaining and analyzing the everyday life of people in the Middle East? As recent political events have shown, there remains an alarming lack of awareness in most countries of life in the Middle East. Anthropologists, now more than ever, could play an important role in making social and cultural developments in the Middle East more comprehensible to a wider world.
Understanding local discourses and social actions and interpreting them in the light of specific socio-political and historical contexts are crucial processes in anthropological research and are especially urgent in times of war and social unrest. This holds particularly true if, in the long run, we aim for peace and justice. In doing so, we cannot focus exclusively on institutional power and infrastructure and ignore the actual lived experiences and voices of the people who have been suffering from oppression, marginalization and poverty. Due to our academic training and personal experiences as anthropologists working on or originating from the Middle Eastern countries ourselves, we are able and willing to take up this challenge of proposing a Commission at the heart of the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences.
In 2004 I proposed a journal with the title Anthropology of the Middle East to Berghahn Publishers and ever since we have been publishing this biannual journal regularly. Through this journal the editorial advisory board and the contributors have shown the necessity of this endeavor, and the success of the journal shows the great demand for scholars to analyze/examine through the eyes of anthropologists the reality experienced in the Middle East.
I would like to propose a number of our scientific board members as the forming members of the Commission, and the managing editor as the Executive Secretary of the Commission The latter is familiar with our scientific board and often is in touch with our list of three hundred members. This way we could have a strong beginning, and then we shall definitely form a forum of scholars from various regions of the Middle East. As our work is mainly within cultural anthropology, we would easily cross boundaries to include the cultures of Central Asia which have commonalities with Turkey and Persia. North Africa with its relations to the Arab Middle East will be the western boundaries of our region.
So my proposal at this point for the main positions of the Commission is the following:
Members of our Scientific Council
Soheila Shahshahan, Chair Person
Birgit Reinel, Executive Secretary
Jean-Pierre Digard, CNRS, Paris, France
Christian Bromberger, Aix-en-Provence, France
Soraya Tremayne, Oxford, UK
Azim Malikov, Uzbekistan
Hassan Chaabi, Tunisia
Aygen Erdentug, Turkey