Anthropology of Hope and the Futures of the Middle East, Part I
Panel 126, sponsored byAssociation of Middle East Anthropology (AMEA), 2015 Annual Meeting
On Monday, November 23 at 11:00 am
Panel Description
How would an anthropology of hope look like in region too often studied within tropes like 'violence' and 'terror'? Hope, as a structure of feeling and a forward-looking cluster of promise, has a checkered history and genealogy in the Middle East. In colonial regimes, hope may assume the form of accommodation, opportunism and a wishful thinking to reap the benefits of collaboration with foreign powers. This was the scope of action of many Levantine minorities (Greek, Turkish, Italian, Jewish) as well as indigenous elites under French and British colonial rule from the mashriq to the maghreb (notably the Maronites in Lebanon and urban Jewish elites in Algiers). Anti-colonial struggle and Third Worldism framed hope within the national liberation movements. From Al-Wafd Party in Egypt to Nasserism and pan-Arabism, hope was predicated on political mass mobilization. From the the 1960s the PLO came to symbolize the global struggle for decolonization advancing notions such as the armed struggle (kifah musallah) and steadfastenss (Sumud). In these movements hope was framed within a series of strategies and tactics of active and passive resistance. Throughout the region universalist ideologies such as Marxism and Islamism offered alternative programs for dissolving structures of power. The postcolonial condition continues to challenge notions of resistance and hope for change as national liberation movements failed to deliver on their promise while in Palestine the colonial occupation still endures. The 2011 Arab Uprisings were yet another movement of a hopeful trans-regional mobilization which tragically shattered hopes for a better future. While the politics of hope is inevitably rooted in collective imaginaries, ethnographers cannot overlook personal agency and the ways in which life histories articulate tensions with forms of mobilization. In addition, hope is often very much about the ways in which people choose to remember the past as it is about fantasizing futurity. This panel includes papers from a variety of disciplinary approaches to address hope in theory and practice as it multiply manifests all over the MENA.
Tahrir Square during the 18-day uprising of 2011 has become mythologized as the incarnation, however transient, of a “New Egypt.” For the country’s al-du’ah al-gudud (the New Preachers) Tahrir was not just a site a political protest – it was a site of moral redemption, even godliness. These television preachers and their affiliated media producers aim, through their programs, to instill in viewers the feeling of seemingly endless possibility – and its attendant sense of hope – that marked Tahrir during this time. The revolutionary mantra “despair is betrayal” (al-ya’s khiyana) inspires their efforts. To ward off despair, producers draw on religiously-grounded notions of individual responsibility in effecting collective change as well as on the practical skills for cultivating optimism offered by American self-help literature.
Situating its claims in an ethnography of the production practices surrounding these Islamic television programs, this paper pushes against dominant accounts of self-help as technologies of neo-liberal governmentality to think about how their articulation with Islamic moral frames may be key in realizing what Ann Cvetkovich in a different context has called “the affective foundation of hope that is necessary for political action.” I argue that for Islamic media producers to sustain hope (especially, but not only) in times of pervasive polarization is to sustain the political. Hopefulness is generative of ways of acting in common to achieve the felt conditions of collective aspiration – of a certain striving togetherness – that made the “New Egypt” a dream one could just imagine was possible to make true.
At the same time, this sense of collective aspiration is rendered precarious by the vagaries of the individual life-trajectories within which dreams must unfold. I therefore end with a consideration of how viewers of Islamic television often remain indifferent to hopeful optimism and its promise of a new polity.
Death as a process of subjectification seems to be lacking in the social sciences, particularly within feminist writings of engendered notions of agency and power. Since the beginning of the latest—and arguably the cruelest--Israeli/Egyptian siege and blockade of the Gaza Strip, the extraordinary physical violence imposed by Israeli policies characteristic of the Second Intifada and which have been rendered more effectively within the domain of the mundane—the ordinary—among Palestinians confined to the small occupied enclave. Although research has generated much insights into and questions of subaltern negotiations of power through various praxes of power among Palestinians in the Occupied Territories (particularly in the form of narratives), there has been a drastic omission of analyses on such narratives among Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Indeed, these omissions represent a common, hegemonic portrayal whereby the Gaza Strip is collapsed into the West Bank as if the latter is by default Palestine. In order to problematize and expand upon such narratives from the West Bank, it is crucial to analyze narratives of self—which inform and are informed by official narratives of resistance—within the Gaza Strip. It is within the grounding of extraordinary and prolonged violence of Israeli occupation, death appears to become sanctified or “sacralized” in the form of the Shaheed and yet grounded in the mundane, the normal or ‘adi. It is through this sanctification of death that narratives of self-representation can open up the space to different questions of resistance and negotiations of power in its diverse manifestations.
