By early 1949, the new Israeli state was facing a conundrum: while it was largely successful in its drive to create an overwhelming Jewish majority in the territories under its control, the state also faced a fierce backlash from the international community demanding to repatriate the hundreds of thousands Palestinian refugees. This impetus is evident in UNGA resolution 194 (11 December, 1948) and in the fact Israel was initially refused UN membership unless its leaders show sincere efforts resolving the refugee crisis. Ben Gurion and his cabinet were determined to keep the displaced Palestinians outside of the country, but at the same time desired to be recognized as a nation-state among others. Therefore, they enlisted scholars in the social sciences, in particular anthropology and sociology, to draft an elaborate study of Palestinian Arabs that demonstrated their cultural and racial alterity which rendered them incompatible to the Jewish state. This classified document then goes on to forge a comprehensive program of resettlement in neighbouring Arab countries, based on ethnographic and meticulously collected economic data. Thus, for instance, the document specifies the price of a chicken in Southern Iraq, calculating the amount required to settle a family of Palestinian peasants in that area. My discussion of this elaborate, now de-classified report will reveal the significance of race to the understanding of citizenship in the Israeli and its specific forms of spatial organization which aims to maximize the number of Jews and minimize Arab presence. The report in question has since been cited by generations of Israeli diplomats and politicians, and its logic remains hegemonic today in discussions of future agreements with the Palestinians. The success of Ben Gurion and his social scientists is evident in the ways the Israeli state enshrined itself as the “only democracy in the Middle East” in popular political imagination of the west on the one hand, while successfully eliding itself from the brutal annals of colonialism, on the other.

During the first formal anthropological survey of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan in 1909, Charles and Brenda Seligman photographed a Shilluk funeral – a significant event in the experience of the two pioneering ethnologists who saw death rites as central to understanding the “politico-religious outlook of a subject race” . But this funeral, for an unnamed individual, did not happen in Shilluk territory in what is now South Sudan; it took place in urban Omdurman, the former capital of the Mahdist state (1884-1898), across the river from the new colonial capital of Khartoum, hundreds of miles to the north. Using this photograph from the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, this paper analyzes two different historical narratives emanating from the image and the centrality of slavery to each. First, it investigates the materiality and intellectual history of the photograph and the funeral it depicts, informing the Seligmans’ foundational ethnographic writings on death in Shilluk culture and the ways in which anthropologists and scholars of comparative religion – including J.D. Frazer, E.E. Evans Pritchard and David Graeber – draw from this event. Second, the photograph reveals crucial information about Shilluk culture and politics in Omdurman, such as flying a political flag at the center of the funerary ritual, and demonstrates how this photo can be an optic for understanding both the legacy of slavery and contemporary politics in the multi-ethnic, multi-cultural tapestry of urban Omdurman.

This paper focuses on the differing classes of servants and slaves that resided and worked within Nasser al-Din Shah’s royal harem in the second half of the 19th century, and traces their history in parallel to the history of both migration and slavery in late Qajar Iran. Through focusing on the archival and historiographical traces left by differing classes of maids (kaniz), servants (gholam) and eunuchs (khajeh) that resided and worked within the royal harem, I will argue that such figures are an overlooked, but primary site of shifting gender politics in late 19th century Iran. These specific classes of residents give insight into the inter-regional networks, and the various forms of migration within them during this period. The cultural and ethnic diversity within the Qajar harem was, for its time, quite unique. Many of the servants who were a part of this institution were brought to Iran either after being captured in war, or were exported through the Gulf slave trade (this is predominantly the case for the black slaves and eunuchs who originated from East Africa). While in many ways, such figures were amongst the lowest ranked members of the Gulist?n Palace, a closer look at their circumstances reveals the ways in which they were in fact deeply implicated in both the private and public affairs of the court, and held a great deal of power and influence within Gulist?n’s domestic composition and social structure. For example, servants functioned as a key connection between the women of the court and the outside public world. As such, they often occupied an ambiguous space between the public and private realms, the boundaries of which were so heavily guarded for many of the other residents of the harem. While there are many visual and textual traces of this class of constituents, there has been little scholarly work which examines their history in relation to the late Qajar court. This paper aims to offer an account that connects the themes of migration, labor, and domesticity in late Qajar Iran through focusing on the central role that this class of court constituents played in governance, social reproduction, and royal family order.