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Where is Culture Now? The Place of Cultural History in Middle East Studies

RoundTable 117, 2016 Annual Meeting

On Saturday, November 19 at 8:00 am

RoundTable Description

Following publications such as Ziad Fahmy’s Ordinary Egyptians (2011) and Dana Sajdi’s The Barber of Damascus (2013), “new cultural history” became recognizable in Middle East historiography. This approach, which builds from cultural anthropology, and often focuses on non-elites, everyday life, popular culture, and the “air” of the times, has been established in European and American historiography since the 1980s. Given the newness of this sub-discipline within the field of Middle East history, and more broadly, Middle East Studies, this roundtable seeks to elaborate the recent “turn” towards culture, and evaluate merits and shortcomings of the approach. The roundtable will be interactive throughout the allotted time, addressing questions and comments as they pertain to—but not exclusively—three themes and goals: 1) discussing the relationship between cultural history and Middle East Studies, 2) assessing how to “do” cultural history of the Middle East given source specificities, and 3) brainstorming ways to build the approach, both academically and pedagogically. After an introduction where panelists discuss how cultural history “came” to the study of the Middle East (precursors and recent contributions), the first goal of the roundtable is to explore the interactions between this popular sub-discipline outside the Middle East and Middle East Studies. In other words, the panelists will address why new cultural history is not already a popular sub-discipline within Middle East history (akin to political, social and economic emphases), and more importantly, should it be? The second goal is to locate the strengths and limitations of the approach. In particular, panelists explain their own research as a means for outlining available (or unavailable) sources under a cultural history framework. Finally, the panelists consider steps towards building the approach within Middle East Studies, and best practices to incorporate cultural history into college-level Middle East survey courses. The research topics of the panelists include the roles of cultural institutions in the making of late-Qajar Iran, the mid-20th century origins of authoritarian culture in Syria, literacy and national cultures in British Egypt, and the place of culture in the political economy of mandate Palestine. Drawing on their expertise, the panelists showcase the multiple ways in which historians of the Middle East engage culture. This is for the sake of bridging the gap between agents and structures, discourses and institutions, politics and economics. Indeed, we hope that culture, as a field of analysis, and cultural history as an approach, can help link these categories.

Disciplines

History

Participants

Dr. Kevin W. Martin -- Presenter
Dr. Sherene Seikaly -- Presenter
Prof. Farzin Vejdani -- Presenter
Hoda Yousef -- Presenter
Dr. Dylan Baun -- Organizer, Chair

Presentations

Dr. Kevin W. Martin

The fabled “cultural turn” of the late twentieth century was informed, in part, by a redefinition of culture as contextually specific yet more systematic, comprehensive, and omnipresent than products like tools or the arts and letters. Taking historiography’s cultural turn thus entailed adopting a conception of culture that was broader and more elemental than a discrete sphere of social science research alongside “the economy” or “society.” Using the first systematic articulation of authoritarian culture in mid-twentieth century Syria as a case study, my presentation argues that culture is inevitably political, politics cannot be practiced outside of culture, and that the demarcation of “culture” and “politics” obscures both “objective” processes and “subjective” experiences. Such assertions are also informed by the work of Timothy Mitchell, who has argued that the academy’s disciplinary division of labor produced the “natural” objects it studies, and that it is predicated on conception of “reality” that is intertwined with the emergence of Western imperialism and colonialism.
Hoda Yousef

One of the great strengths of the cultural “turn” in historical studies is the cross-over effect it engenders among sub-fields in history and with other disciplines. This crosspollination allows historians to explore and reevaluate the cultural ramifications of political, social, and economic events, movements, and historical moments. In addition, the methodological approaches of other disciplines, such as anthropology, also allows us to think about the practices, mindsets, and “cultural work” that our sources may represent well beyond a source’s most obvious applications and uses. For this roundtable, I would like to highlight the implications of these aspects of cultural history in the latest contributions to modern Egyptian historiography. In particular, recent works have highlighted the ways in which particular cultures (national, consumer, etc.) can transcend our usual focus on the more elite strata of Middle Eastern societies. Considering the centrality of “new elites,” effendiyya, a'yan, and the like, in the historical narratives of the modern Middle East, a critical engagement with cultural provides historians with new ways of examining the contours of Middle Eastern societies beyond our traditional, privileged historical actors. In this vein, I will discuss the fruitful possibilities of what Robert Darton called the social and cultural “history of ideas.” This approach allows us to move beyond an “intellectual history” that focuses on the work of a few writers and towards a cultural history of the impact of communal ideas across time and space. Rather than focusing on the textual analysis of key texts, historians can instead look at the circulation of those texts, their resonance in other sources, and the impact they had for communities well beyond the readership of the original documents. Reevaluating the role of language, widespread literacy practices, print and media culture—among other things—can allow us to construct histories that take a more holistic look at “ideas” and their cultural practices. We can, in essence, historicize culture in a way that incorporates the intellectual life of broad communities and not just their most elite members.
Dr. Sherene Seikaly

The recent return to political economy in Middle East historiography specifically and broader historiographies more generally has invigorated a closer attention to material structures and institutions. This attention speaks to the urgent realities of the contemporary moment which have necessitated thinking capital accumulation and structural dispossession anew. Amidst this turn, the place and significance of the cultural as both an object and a method of study is once again a site of contention and debate. How do we study culture and economy as mutually constitutive? What are the lessons of the "cultural turn" and which of these lessons do we build on and depart from as Middle East historians charting new territories? My presentation addresses these questions by tracing shifting understandings of culture in early twentieth century Palestine in the context of dynamic economic transformation and ideas. I will look at how economic thought and economic culture worked in tandem to forge new class identities and expectations. In doing so, I argue that we must transgress the ostensible distinctions between the cultural and the economic, and the gendered and classed realities cultural and economic theory and practice emerge from.
Prof. Farzin Vejdani

Cultural history sits at the uneasy intersection of a number of more readily identifiable approaches to the Middle East, including (but not limited to) social, economic, and intellectual history. While cultural history is notoriously difficult to define, at its best it brings together the social and economic historians’ quest to understand societies on a broader scale through a diverse array of sources with intellectual historians’ desire to understand how individuals in the past understood and made meaning of the world around them. In the field of late Qajar and early Pahlavi studies, these approaches have often constituted worlds apart. On the one hand, social and economic historians of Iran have relied heavily on European accounts, archival or printed, to trace broader trends, often on the questionable assumption that the Persian sources do not speak to empirical issues of class, labor, economy, and trade in any systematic manner. On the other hand, intellectual historians often rely on a narrow selection of Persian texts composed by the “great men” of the era without trying to understand the circulation of ideas beyond narrow elite circles. This presentation suggests that cultural history presents fruitful avenues for breaking this methodological impasse by exploring how to access widespread social meanings and practices in late Qajar and early Pahlavi Iran through newly digitized manuscript and printed sources.