Islam, IVF and Everyday Life in the Middle East: The Making of Sunni versus Shi'ite Test-Tube Babies

2006 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcia C. Inhorn
Keyword(s):  
2013 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 798-800 ◽  
Author(s):  
Veena Das

An important issue in considering violence at both the conceptual and empirical levels is the question of what counts as “violence” and how it is acknowledged. In many polities of the Middle East, including Palestine, Iraq, and Afghanistan, there is no clear boundary between war and peace. Conflicts have lasted over a long period and even the project of securing a future in which the struggle for decolonization and political autonomy can be kept alive faces enormous hurdles as everyday life is corroded by betrayals, accusations, and the sheer exhaustion of keeping political energies from waning. Most acute observers of prolonged conflicts recognize the corrosive effects of these conflicts on everyday life. In this brief thought piece, I want to reflect on one aspect of the problem: that of the relation between sexual violence as an aspect of dramatic and spectacular violence—in wars (including modern ones), pogroms against ethnic or religious minorities, or episodes of lethal riots between sectarian groups—and everyday forms of sexual violence that could be both part of the public domain and constitutive of domestic intimacy. Said otherwise, I am interested in how experience of violence travels from one threshold of life to another.


AJS Review ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 363-378
Author(s):  
Gilead Morahg

The Liberating Bride (2001) figures as the most discursive of A. B. Yehoshua's novels. It follows the comings and goings of Yochanan Rivlin, an aging Middle East scholar, as he tries to discover the untold cause of his son's failed marriage and struggles to breathe life into his own moribund study of the causes of internal violence in contemporary Algiers. The novel abounds in the minutiae of everyday life and the often inane nature of human conversation. Its progression is intermittently impeded by eruptions of social comedy and political parody. It dwells on the myriad routines of marital, familial, and social transactions and gives ample scope to arcane academic disputations. But this seemingly sprawling narrative surface generates a carefully crafted deep structure by means of which the novel conducts a wide-ranging exploration of personal and political conundrums. As in many of his previous novels, Yehoshua's practice of constructing analogies between family situations and national issues enables him to engage psychological motivations, moral considerations, and ideological determinants that affect both the private and the public spheres of life.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 263-276
Author(s):  
Grzegorz Pełczyński ◽  
Adam Pomieciński

Yezidis is a religious group of Yezidi faith, sometimes identifying with Kurds or considering themselves a separate ethnic group. Parts of the Yezidi diaspora are scattered mainly in the countries of the Middle East. In Armenia, they are the largest minority in this country, with a population of around 30,000. The article presents the process of Yezidi acculturation in Armenia. The concept of acculturation of D. Sam and J. Berry, which takes into account the degree to which people want to preserve their identity and culture, and the degree to which they want to be in contact with people outside their own group and participate in everyday life within the framework of wider society, turned out to be helpful here. In the case of the Armenian Yezidis, the acculturation process is quite diverse, as it extends between integrating with the Armenian society and remaining on the margins of it.


2017 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 215-232
Author(s):  
David Selim Sayers

AbstractThe sociosexual world of the premodern Middle East has been studied through a variety of sources ranging from legal documents to shadow theater. Most such sources are either prescriptive or transgressive: they uphold or subvert a normative framework, telling us more about the framework itself than about how it was inhabited by subjects in everyday life. This study introduces the Tıfli stories as a descriptive source that transcends the prescriptive–transgressive dichotomy. An Ottoman-Turkish genre of prose fiction produced at least from the 18th to the 20th century, the Tıfli stories were a protorealist form of “pulp fiction.” Where most sources sought to stabilize specific sociosexual roles, the Tıfli stories explored the ambiguities inherent in these roles. This study employs the Tıfli stories to interrogate understandings of the Ottoman sociosexual world that rely strongly on normative sources and to stage an approximation of how norms were negotiated in practice.


1970 ◽  
pp. 30-31
Author(s):  
Wafa Stephan Tarnowski
Keyword(s):  

Everyday Life in the Muslim Middle East Edited by Donna Lee Bowen and Evelyne A. Early


2018 ◽  
pp. 651-660
Author(s):  
Rangga Eka Saputra

A PPIM’s junior researcher together with 13 young Indonesian Muslim intellectuals participated in Life of Muslims in Germany Program organized by Goethe Institut during 8-21 July 2018. This event explored Muslim everyday life in Germany through academic and cultural discussions in universities, research and cultural centres, and state officials. Therefore, this document is his insight to describe Muslim life in Germany and its contextualisation for Indonesian Muslim based on experiences in this program. This document article depicts two main issues which are happening in Germany: Muslim integration after the wave of refugees as a result of bloodiest conflict in Middle East and German government’s policy in religious pluralism issues. This program had been initiated in order to bridge cultural understanding for Indonesia, as the most populous Muslim country in the world, toward Muslim life in Germany. Indonesia has been considered as a strategic country which stands for disseminating moderate Islam. In addition, Dr. Heinrich Blomeke, Goethe-Institut, Institute and Regional Director Southeast Asia/Australia/New Zealand, said “the participants will engage in academic discussions and visit Muslim cultural organisation to obtain an insight about Muslim everyday life in German secular state. This program gives an opportunity for them and some Germany’s institutions to share their ideas regarding the experiences of Muslim life in Germany and Indonesia”.


2010 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 125-127
Author(s):  
Edith Szanto

Diane King captures the sentiment undergirding this book by quoting VirginiaDominguez and “returning to ‘bonds of affection for people or places’”(p. 10) in the conclusion of her introduction. She sums up the book’s chaptersas “hav[ing] in common attention to various ways of belonging in (and,in the case of the European headscarf debates, adjacent to and with referenceto) the Middle East. All treat Middle Eastern collectives as sites of what Herzfeld(2005: 6) calls the ‘cultural intimacy’ of nationalism, in which particularnationalisms are composed of ‘the details of everyday life – symbolism, commensality,family and friendship’” (p. 1). Each chapter shows how “belonging”is contested and destabilized in and by imagined communities andfragile states. By addressing questions of violence, moreover, each articlehighlights “both belonging’s messiness and its joys” (p. 10).King’s edited volume ties together six articles and an introduction, allof which previously appeared in Identities, a peer-reviewed cultural anthropologyjournal published by Routledge. With the exception of the fiftharticle, which appeared in a separate volume, the articles were published asa special edition, also entitled “Middle Eastern Belongings.” ...


Author(s):  
Omar Dewachi

Decades of war and western interventions in Iraq have produced toxic legacies of wounding and affliction that have redefined geographies and everyday experiences of vulnerability and care. Building on what I call anthropology of wounding, I explore a number of methodological insights related to conducting ethnographic research on war injury across conflict landscapes in the Middle East. Taking the “wound” as a method, I explore what is “revealed” in such wounds as they map the incongruent trajectories, terrains and relations of vulnerability and care in everyday life. Anchoring my analysis in a deeper understanding of the changing ecologies of war, I show how an anthropology of wounding further unravels the biosocial relations of distress and care, and provides a deeper understanding of the lived experiences of war and the body, as well as the inscription of a history of war in the molecular and genetic makeup of the environment.


Author(s):  
William A. Callahan

Visual images are everywhere in international politics. But how are we to understand them? Callahan uses his expertise in theory and filmmaking to explore not only what visuals mean, but also how visuals can viscerally move and connect us in “affective communities of sense.” Sensible Politics explores the visual geopolitics of war, peace, migration, and empire through an analysis of photographs, films, and art. It then expands the critical gaze to consider how “visual artifacts”—maps, veils, walls, gardens, and cyberspace—are sensory spaces in which international politics is performed through encounters on the local, national, and world stages. Here “sensible politics” isn’t just sensory, but looks beyond icons and ideology to the affective politics of everyday life. This approach challenges the Eurocentric understanding of international politics by exploring the meaning and impact of visuals from Asia and the Middle East. Sensible Politics thus decenters our understanding of social theory and international politics by (1) expanding from textual analysis to highlight the visual and the multisensory; (2) expanding from Eurocentric investigations of IR to a more comparative approach that looks to Asia and the Middle East; and (3) shifting from critical IR’s focus on inside/outside and self/Other distinctions. It draws on Callahan’s documentary filmmaking experience to see critique in terms of the creative processes of social-ordering and world-ordering. The goal is to make readers not only think visually, but also feel visually—and to creatively act visually for a multisensory appreciation of politics.


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