In the years that followed the U.S. invasion of Iraq, millions of Iraqis fled their homes to neighboring countries, Europe, and the United States. Concentrated in the Nineveh Plains region of northern Iraq, Chaldean Catholics became a particularly vulnerable group—at risk of persecution not only because of their religion but also because many served as interpreters for the U.S. military. Chaldeans’ unique intercultural military encounter set the stage for a specific type of migration tied to U.S. imperial expansion. Through their support of the U.S. military and their Christian faith, Chaldeans were able to successfully lobby for the Refugee Crisis in Iraq Act. Effective in 2008, the bill created special visas for two classes of Iraqis: those who worked with the U.S. military and religious minorities. Although there was a large Chaldean community in Detroit, the bill spurred the growth of another Chaldean community in southern California. The second largest concentration of Chaldeans now resides in El Cajon, a city fifteen miles east of San Diego. As the Chaldean population in El Cajon has grown, signs on the city’s Main Street have changed from English and Spanish to Arabic. While some locals welcome the new refugees, others are frustrated with their new neighbors and feel they are losing their city. Despite the mixed response, Chaldeans remain loyal patriots. What types of networks of obligation does the military encounter between the United States and Chaldeans create, and what are its limits? How does this encounter render the Chaldean body in interactions with white Americans? Through interviews with Chaldeans and local news articles, I will investigate moments of hopeful encounters between Chaldeans and the United States. I argue that Chaldeans leveraged their work as interpreters for the U.S. military as a debt owed, successfully securing them resettlement in the United States. Additionally, they catered to U.S. Christian exceptionalism to obtain visas as a persecuted religious minority. However, Chaldeans are also precarious subjects not immune to white American backlash. Using Ghassan Hage’s concept of the nation as a distributor of hope, I argue that Chaldeans were admitted to the United States at a time when there was little hope to go around. Therefore, when U.S. obligations come into conflict with the hopes of its white citizens, the United States defaulted on its debts to Chaldeans.

The transmigration of the souls (taqammus) is a common part of the belief-system of the Druze communities in the Middle East. The human body is considered a mere “shirt” (qamis), with the soul putting on a new “shirt” when someone dies. That is, every time a person dies, his or her soul immediately moves to a new body where it completes a new “life-circuit” (dawr or jil). As a result, each human being is only the current manifestion of a soul that had taken, and will take, its place in the world with other identities. Normally, a soul’s present and previous identity do not become enmeshed because souls do not remember their previous lives. But sometimes children start to speak about a previous life. According to Druze discourse, such “speaking” (nutq) indicates that a soul is still clinging to its previous life identity and place, remembers elements of its former life, and often the moment of death itself. Time and again, stories are told about “speaking” children who insist that they are someone else, maybe want to be with another family, or talk about how they died. This paper is based on an ongoing research project involving interviews with Druze communities in Lebanon and Israel, and with Syrian Druze refugees in Austria. It examines the Druze discourse on transmigration and explores how transmigration relates to personal and social identity. More specifically, this paper examines the phenomenon of “speaking” and the discourse about it. How do typical cases develop? Do they necessarily come to a closure? Most importantly, in cases of “speaking,” one soul may become associated with two families (the previous-life and the present-life family). This often results in various types of confusion, conflict, and disorder. What is personal identity under these circumstances? To which family does the particular child belong? Which difficulties and responsibilities arise, or at least are often reckoned with or anticipated? How do those involved deal with this double belonging? In light of such problems, what are those whose child “speaks” supposed to do? Should they listen to the “speaking” child and try to enable him or her to find the loved and lost previous life? Or should the child be “silenced”?

Tucked behind her house, Nora is running a very popular and tasty Druze restaurant that caters to the culinary desires of Jewish-Israeli tourists, IDF soldiers, and students on school field trips. The establishment she runs, part restaurant and part cultural curiosity, is off the beaten path, as it sits inside a neighborhood far from the main road into Daliyat al-Carmel, Israel. Nora and her sister Fareda have decorated the walls of her home-restaurant with photographs of Old Jerusalem, from Israeli and Druze culture. In this paper, I analyze the culinary space and practices found in Nora's Kitchen as they relate to the surrounding and competing national narratives produced by the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Utilizing interventions made by linguistic and cultural anthropologists in performance and food studies, I consider Nora's Kitchen, both in its culinary consumption and embodied experience, to be interdiscursive (Goodman et al 2014) with discourses of ethnicity and the nation-state. I argue that to cultivate a unique positionality within Israeli society and ideals (and away from Palestinian ones), Nora's Kitchen must signal dominant Israeli discourse in a highly localized manner. Using ethnographic data collected from 2016-2017, I specifically interrogate Nora's "authentic Arab" food practices and the restaurant's material culture to illuminate Druze place within narratives of nationalism. I find that the interdiscursivity between hegemonic Israeli culture and ideology and Druze foodways do two things. First, it draws subtle attention to the orientalist paradigm that structures Israeli society and promotes ethnic exclusion (Khazzoom 2003). Second, and more insidious, it undermines the legitimacy of Palestinian nationalism and erases internal Palestinian Israeli dissonance by creating a space where people can safely engage with and consume exotic culture without being ideologically threatened. Druze, then, serve as a unique case study for which to evaluate Israel's ethnodemocracy and the food politics which are endemic to identity formation.

Located between European colonial racial constructs of a “civilized” whiteness and an “inferior” blackness, Egyptian identity has long occupied a liminal status. The internalization of these constructs led to the alienation of Egypt from its African neighbors, and to a perpetual cultural and political detachment from Africa and Africans, both on the continent and in the diaspora. In this essay I will use the anthropological concept of liminality to investigate what may have caused a lack of translatability of the African American struggle to Egyptians, and the failure of the pan-African movement to take hold in Egypt. I will analyze how the race and ethnicity of both modern and ancient Egyptians were described and mobilized by rival colonial powers: France, England and the waning Ottoman Empire. I will highlight certain strands of counter-colonial nationalism of Egyptian intellectuals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including ‘Abbas Mustafa ‘Ammar’s Arabism/Egyptianism, Salama Musa’s Pharoanicism, and Sayyid Qutb’s pan-Islamism, to demonstrate an internalization of European colonialist attitudes towards race. Applying this approach might help us understand what may have caused Brent Edwards’ décalage—or the “resistance to crossing over”—of African American struggle into the Egyptian consciousness.

This paper examines colonial reports, legal cases, and judicial decisions following the legal abolition of slavery in India – enacted by the Indian Slave Act of 1843. Examining documents collected from both the India Office Records at the British Library, as well as on the ground in Sindh, Pakistan, this paper traces the process whereby slavery comes to be defined vis-à-vis the multiple varieties of social and labor relationships that characterized Indian society. Situating this process as part of the global, order making goals of empire, this paper examines the legal codification of categories in general, and “slavery” and “free” labor in particular. Focusing on the coastal region of Sindh, embedded in Indian Ocean slave trade networks, of good, ideas, and of course, peoples, gives us fresh analytical insight into how this definition emerges relationally, providing a case where multiple “slaveries” coexisted, overlapped, and were worked out. Two figures and tropes emerge from these cases: the native Indian bondsman, and the foreign African slave. What role does “race” play in the visibility or lack thereof of conditions of servitude, dictating which side of the moral boundary they fall on separating the free from the unfree? How do these distinctions become enshrined in law in this crucial post abolition moment? In addition, by focusing on depositions of slaves, attentiveness to the identities of litigants, and the narratives of witnesses, I interrogate the extent to which these cases might be able to uncover a social history of the experience of slaves both within India, and those traversing the wider Indian Ocean region.