Becoming a Scholar

Budding scholars do not just pick their discipline and regional focus out of a hat. Nor do they end up studying what they study solely as the result of personal choice, as dominant US ideologies of individualism might suggest. Rather, national and global politics interweave with specific life trajectories and academic trends to shape the process of becoming a certain kind of scholar, across the humanities and social sciences. US global dominance since World War II, shifting demographics in US society, and social movements — alongside changing academic and theoretical responses to these conditions — influenced decisions to choose anthropology as a disciplinary home. Growing US engagement with MENA led more scholars to focus on the region. Such forces, and the tensions they produced in life trajectories, were a common thread through a range of experiences, any of which could be a primary force shaping a person into an anthropologist and a MENA scholar: from living through the Vietnam era to witnessing racist backlash during the 1990 Gulf War; from participating in the 1960s feminist movement to protesting apartheid in the 1980s; from growing up bicultural or in a diverse immigrant community to partaking in Orientalist popular culture; from hearing Zionist discourse at the family dinner table to traveling to the region for work, religious, or personal reasons; and from experiencing 9/11 during one's college years to living in a country saturated with the effects of the War on Terror's intensified military interventions.

When experienced during formative periods in nascent scholars' lives, these events not only shaped subsequent career foci, but also contributed to feelings of generational belonging, often sparking shifts in approaches to anthropology as well as to academic, national, and global politics. Race and gender intersect with this generational variation, as political forces affected region-related and white scholars differently. A majority of white scholars were initially drawn to discipline and region through dominant US Orientalist frameworks of demonization and/or co-optation, often via fantasy or ideas about anthropology as the exoticized study of the other. In contrast, most region-related scholars were attracted to anthropology and MENA as a result of immigration experiences that included intensified othering and surveillance of their communities across the decades. They tended to view anthropology as the discipline most suited to simultaneously understanding their cultural background and critiquing dominant US narratives about the region and its peoples. As white scholars were trained in critical approaches to imperialism within anthropology, they came to hold similar views of the discipline's potential to unpack both their own and dominant US ideas about MENA.

The idea that anthropology is conducive to political engagement, even activism, has also pulled people into the discipline differently across generations. At first, female as well as region-related scholars saw anthropology as useful for analyzing and fighting structures of inequality. This perspective grows increasingly common among all scholars who enter the field after the end of the Cold War, a shift that parallels theoretical shifts (from Marxism to poststructuralism) that deconstructed homogeneous, bounded notions of the culture concept and focused more concertedly on formations of power. Over time, Palestine becomes the main lens through which this overt political pull into discipline and region is expressed (or refused) in anthropologists' narratives — no matter where in the Middle East or North Africa a scholar works. Certainly, deepening US state involvement in MENA, together with escalating neoconservative approaches and the rampant stereotyping and warmongering of right-wing media, pushed people not only to want to use anthropology's critical tools to understand the region better, but also increasingly toward a more politicized anthropology. These conditions also contributed to the creation of a set of funding and institutional structures, as well as social networks, that enabled people to become anthropologists of MENA and sometimes motivated the social production of such scholars.

The Role of Funding, Institutions, and Networks

It would be impossible to pursue a burgeoning interest in anthropology or MENA Studies without funding for language training and fieldwork, departments with faculty interested in mentoring promising undergraduate and graduate students, broader academic networks, and institutions with which to affiliate in the field. Across generations, these factors molded the ways that all our colleagues committed to their scholarly interests, especially as these support structures increased in tandem with both US interventions in the region and MENA anthropology itself.

Language training was usually necessary for field research, and the availability of funds for this training frequently drew people into specific regional foci within anthropology. Prior to the 1970s, language study was often funded by National Defense Foreign Language (NDFL) Fellowships, which later became the Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Program grants. The Middlebury Summer Immersion Program in Arabic and the Center for Arabic Study Abroad (CASA) at the American University in Cairo have emerged as two of the most popular programs since that time. CASA was founded in 1967, the year of the second Arab-Israeli war and the height of the Cold War, in which Egypt was a strategic site. The program has been funded by the US Department of Education, Fulbright (run through the US Department of State), and the Ford and Mellon Foundations. Students have also received FLAS funding to attend CASA as well as other programs in the region and summer language schools in the United States. The same is true for Middlebury; that Arabic program launched in another significant year: 1982, on the heels of the US-Iran hostage crisis and the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. In 2006, a few years into the War on Terror, the US Department of State's Critical Language Scholarship, funded by its Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, began funding participation in Arabic immersion programs in Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Jordan, and Oman. Residential language immersion programs like Middlebury and CASA have done more than teach anthropologists language. They have nurtured their interest in the region by linking them with other graduate students and future MENA specialists, creating interdisciplinary academic cohorts. For one of our interlocutors, Middlebury triggered interest in the region because "it was always a human and personal and contemporary thing that brought [other students] to the study of Arabic."

The greater availability of US government and private foundation funds for language learning as well as area studies research more broadly — beginning with the 1958 National Defense Education Act and continuing with Fulbright, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and Social Science Research Council, among others — has strengthened some scholars' interest in particular regions, if not motivated them. One senior colleague discussed benefiting from the big boons in funding right after the 1973–1974 oil embargo and then again in 1979 because of the Islamic revolution in Iran and the war in Afghanistan:

There was no real reason necessarily within the discipline to pick that area of study and, to tell you the truth, I think it was largely the fact that the U.S. government at this time ... poured in a lot of money into the study of the Middle East. ... So I think that politics had a lot to do with it. Cold War politics, but also the politics of the region of the Middle East to encourage the formation of this field and to put real money into it. ... And I was the beneficiary of one of these National Defense Language Fellowships ... and I took Arabic, which I learned to love. ... But there was no a priori reason to think this would be the language I would choose.

Likewise, someone who entered the field more recently said she was drawn to the region because of the immense funding (much of it nongovernment related) that was available after 9/11.

Other institutional structures were also important. In the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, when MENA was frequently associated with archaeology (a subfield of anthropology that already had an institutional apparatus there) some new scholars became interested in the region's contemporary cultures through initial work on excavations. Jon Anderson has noted how anthropologists also used the resources of archaeological institutions to conduct their studies. Similarly, participation in the editorial collective of the Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP) fostered interdisciplinary connections to the region and its scholars, especially for people trained in the 1970s and 1980s before there existed a critical mass of MENA anthropologists.

As with any academic specialization, the subfield of MENA cultural anthropology grew when established scholars began recruiting new ones. More people teaching MENA cultural anthropology meant more students delving into it, a reflection of both intergenerational inspiration and the greater availability of MENA-related undergraduate courses. These additions to college curricula across the country jumped considerably once again after 9/11. The narratives of people trained in the 1990s and especially the 2000s contain mentions of particularly memorable readings, professors, and classes (e.g., the professor who walked into lecture, held up a tampon, and asked why it was taboo. Our interlocutor said, "That was it. She had me at hello.") Mentors supported undergraduate study abroad in the region, which grew ever more popular in the 1990s and after and was another key means by which some people cemented their interest in MENA and anthropology. Increased integration into disciplinary networks in particular highlighted for new scholars the attraction of anthropologists' forms of sociability. A senior female scholar recalled someone asking her, as she tried to decide on a field, "Who do you want to talk to for the rest of your life? Anthropologists or nurses?" And in a delightfully funny example (that might not be that unusual), another told us: "I was studying chemistry ... and the year I was to graduate, I was hanging out with a bunch of anthropologists because they had better chemicals than the chemistry group!"

Nonacademic institutions and networks sometimes cultivated developing scholars' interests in discipline and region as well and were often themselves part and parcel of dominant US encounters with MENA. Before graduate school, some anthropologists joined the Peace Corps, while others worked in the region through development NGOs, high schools, or oil companies. In some cases, intimate partners or friends related to either the region or discipline piqued nascent scholars' interest. A few white anthropologists had traveled to MENA as part of their (or their family's) participation in religious organizations, or their parents had hosted church friends who had spent time in the region and regaled them with stories about it. Not only did these early experiences with institutionalized religion spark interests in MENA, but they could also lead a person to anthropology (which served, as one person put it, as "an intellectualized response to a set of personal conflicts" involving religion).

Making Sense of Discomfort: Finding Anthropology

A vast majority of our interlocutors expressed something akin to this "set of personal conflicts" as an impetus to joining the discipline. A circulating folk theory holds that people who end up as anthropologists grew up feeling like outsiders in their own society, which makes them curious about otherness in general. Addressing this idea, Steven Caton writes,

Like the bohemian artist, the anthropologist has been constructed in various discourses as an individual who as a child felt alienated or even excluded from ... certain norms or conventions. If they have any genuinely artistic talents, these individuals might become artists; or if inclined to scholarly pursuits, historians, and when combined perhaps with a yearning for adventure, anthropologists. ... Anthropology, or so it is maintained, is one of the vocations an alienated individual in society might imagine himself or herself pursuing because its practice — known as fieldwork — has, however temporarily, taken the person out of his or her own milieu.

This folk theory, like all folk theories, reflects many anthropologists' lived experiences. Senses of personal conflict, alienation, and liminality often stemmed from feeling at odds with the modes of othering or co-optation that dominated US encounters with the Middle East, and/or dissonance with the prevailing social or political forces in one's environment writ large.

Our interviews began with an open-ended question about why and how scholars came to the field of anthropology. For some, anthropology was not a conscious choice. It instead felt like a random confluence of events or circumstances. Nonetheless, most people constructed their responses in relation to their life histories, beginning with stories of discomfort with dominant social contexts in early life. In the manner of Edward Said's intellectual exile, they described themselves as "individuals at odds with their society" whose marginality contributed to their desire and ability to see the familiar as unfamiliar and grapple with questions of difference. This sense of not (quite) belonging, as they narrated it, was experienced in ways notably marked by race, ethnicity, religion, social class, and the location and/or movement of one's family home.

Many scholars were drawn to anthropology because they felt othered as young people — whether they lived in contexts of significant diversity or they felt out of place in relatively homogeneous places. They viewed the discipline as a way to make sense of diversity and difference and their consequences in the world. One senior anthropologist told us:

I was an anthropologist long before I knew there was such a thing, before I could spell it. ... I grew up in an Orthodox Jewish family in a Catholic neighborhood with a father whose small business employed guys in the shop who were Black, Hispanic, and Appalachian, so I grew up with their otherness as well as my own. When a teacher would ask me to write an essay in grammar school about a religious holiday, I always wrote about somebody else's. At [my undergraduate school] then, I majored in anthropology.

A midcareer scholar reflected that a sense of uncomfortable disjuncture, related to growing up middle class in a small town with farming and working class families, led them to anthropology's focus on difference and inequality. Another who grew up in a mixed-ethnicity family in the Middle East described similar feelings leading them to the field.

The sense of feeling betwixt and between is, not surprisingly, most pronounced for anthropologists whose families immigrated to the United States. Many people, of a variety of backgrounds and across generations, detailed experiences of never quite feeling at home due to the movement of their family. In addition to immigration, this movement could be related to international or domestic travel for work. Several spoke about moving frequently while growing up, sometimes due to a parent who worked for the military or a church, and how this involved, in the words of one, having to constantly "learn the local scene." This created both an interest in new environments and embryonic ethnographic skills for understanding them. Immigrants tended to express a more pronounced discomfort with movement as an unsettling process, but also commented on the kinds of ethnographic aptitude it eventually provided. A midcareer scholar displaced by regional wars said that frequent displacement "had a lot to do" with the decision to become an anthropologist and that "it gave me skills that were useful for an anthropologist, [such as] shifting registers."

Caton has written eloquently about his immigration to the United States from Germany at age nine as a "formative experience" that in part brought him to anthropology. He, like other anthropologists who immigrated, described the "adjustments, linguistic and cultural" as "difficult, at times traumatic." Like so many others who describe their discovery of the discipline as a moment when things "clicked" or "made nothing but sense" in relationship to early life experiences, Caton writes: "In [cultural anthropology] courses it seemed that I had found a professionalization (through fieldwork) of the predicaments of cultural liminality and travel that had been part of my childhood. Their subject matter seemed painfully self-evident to me: there were norms of behavior and symbols and fairly stable patternings of both that differed from place to place. Hadn't I hit my head against that wall before? Now in my academic major I had a name for it: cultural relativism."

When immigration situated a scholar as a racialized ethnic or religious minority in the United States, the experience of liminality was compounded. For many region-related anthropologists, family movement produced a struggle to understand both their difference within US society and the non-US parts of their backgrounds, and they recognized the discipline as a good way to do that. A senior anthropologist who immigrated to the United States as a child described the culture concept as particularly useful to that process: "The concept of culture opened up all kinds of doors and windows to my own engagement with the experience of being bicultural. Having come here as a child but being treated by my family as though I was still in [the Middle East], and never really fully navigating that entry into American society ... I'd always felt ... marginal to American culture, but I didn't have that word [culture]. I didn't have that way of understanding it." Another slightly younger scholar explained that returning to the United States after spending most of their childhood in the region made them feel "different, marginalized." They described always being "slightly an outsider" and, in the same sentence, being "in love with understanding the ways people behaved with each other." And another trained in the 2000s remarked that anthropology is a "refuge" for minorities growing up in the United States because it helps people to find "a space [for] questions that is very open to this drawing from very different traditions and backgrounds, and being very kind and thoughtful about what our relationship as a nation or as citizens is to both individuals within our own country who are different from us and also across the sea."