Newsletter

RICHARD ANTOUN (Anthropology Department) has just had an article accepted by the International Journal of Middle East Studies for publication in its November 2000 issue.  The title of the article is “Civil Society, Tribal Process and Change in Jordan: An Anthropological View.”  The article challenges the views of many social scientists that civil society is defined by the existence of voluntary associations such as political parties, professional associations and labor unions and by the existence of democracy as defined by elections.  Rather, civil society is defined by institutions that establish trust and cooperation and wide-ranging conflict resolution in the madafa (guest-house).  Antoun is also completing a book-length manuscript accepted for publication by Alta Mira Press.  The title of this work is  Fundamentalism in Cross-Cultural Perspective: The Cases of Islam, Christianity and Judaism. 

REINHARD BERNBECK & SUSAN POLLOCK (Anthropology Department) Report on an Archaeological Tour to Iran in January/ February 2000.  During a recent visit to Iran, we travelled through the southwestern and central regions of the country, including the provinces of Kermanshah, Khuzestan, Bushere, Shiraz and Isfahan. The tour was partly sponsored by the Iranian tourist organization "Pasargad Tours" and supported by the Iranian Cultural Heritage Organization (Mirath‑e Farhangi). Our trip took us first to some important early neolithic sites from the 7th and 6th millennia B.C. in the vicinity of Kermanshah, such as Ganj Dareh and Tappeh Sarab. These sites had been excavated by Canadian and American teams in the 1950s–1970s. On the road from Kermanshah to Qasr‑i Shirin, we saw the ongoing excavation at the important center of Chogha Gavaneh in the middle of the town of Islamabad‑e Gharbi. In Fars and Isfahan provinces, we were also able to visit some prehistoric mounds, such as Tall‑i Bakun near Persepolis, Tall‑i Nokhodi in the vicinity of Pasargadae and a number of less well known places in the Bakhtiyari Zagros southeast of Isfahan (Qal'e Afghan, Qal'e Rostam and Gird‑e Chellegah). Particularly interesting to us were sites that were settled in the late fourth/ early third millennium B.C. Architecture at Godin Tepe, near Kangavar is well preserved even though it was excavated more than 25 years ago. Structural remains from the same period are less easily discernible at Susa, where one of us (Pollock) had worked in 1978. Preservation and restoration work by the Iranian Cultural Heritage Organization of excavated sites and rock reliefs is impressive. At Ekbatana, Nushi Jan, Susa and Persepolis, efforts are being made to preserve the particularly vulnerable mudbrick architecture of the Median/ Achaemenid buildings through continuous replastering of walls and roofing. At Persepolis, the famous eastern staircase of the Apadana, with reliefs depicting the delivery of tribute from 23 satrapies, is now also protected from weather by a roof. Efforts to restrict damage of reliefs and rock inscriptions from water are currently being undertaken at the Sassanian site of Taq‑i Bustan in Kermanshah, the Achaemenid trilingual inscription of Darius at Bisutun and at his burial site in the cliffs of Naqsh‑e Rostam. A further highlight of our trip was a visit to Falak‑ol Aflak, the Qajjar‑period castle in the center of the town of Khorramabad (in the times of the Pahlavi dynasty a prison that housed religious leaders as well as Tudeh party members), which has now been turned into a museum. Some of the most important objects exhibited here are inscribed silver cups and other silver items dating to the Achaemenid period. They come from the deep cave of Kalmankarreh where these and other objects were found by villagers some 10 years ago. Unfortunately, a good deal of the even more spectacular finds seems to have been smuggled out of the country and reached the

Euro-American art market, where they were sold to collectors. Iran is a country where rural-urban migration seems to continue at a fast pace, which is especially problematic for sites that are located in the vicinity of major cities. Some tappehs are already or will soon be destroyed by housing projects unless swift action is taken. The other problem that comes with this trend is the abandonment of villages that are often built on top or on the slopes of ancient tappehs. We saw at least one early site in the Borujerd area that had been recently abandoned; archaeological layers were largely destroyed by bulldozing and dumping of trash. We were impressed with the openness with which political issues are discussed these days in Iran, and our interactions with people were marked throughout by great kindness, cultural self‑confidence and a healthy critical distance to western values.  Our meetings with officials at the Tehran Archaeological Museum (Iran Bastan) and in the Mirath-e Farhangi took place in a very friendly atmosphere and were productive.

REPORT ON ARCHAEOLOGICAL FIELDWORK AT FISTIKLI HضYـK, SOUTHEASTERN TURKEY 

Susan Pollock and Reinhard Bernbeck

In the summer of 1999 we carried out a 2-month season of archaeological fieldwork at the small site of Fistikli Hِyük, located on the eastern bank of the Euphrates River, just south of the modern town of Birecik in southwestern Turkey.  Fistikli is one of the many archaeological sites that will be damaged or destroyed when the Carchemish Dam, located just north of the Syrian border, is completed.  Fistikli was occupied principally in the Halaf period (approximately dated to the 6th millennium B.C.) but was used again in Late Hellenistic/Roman times. The primary research goals of our excavation are twofold: (1) to investigate the extent to which Halaf households were or were not engaged in a uniform set of economic activities, and (2) to examine evidence for the degree of mobility practiced by some or all members of the Halaf community at the site.

Last year's excavation exposed several Halaf period buildings—including the characteristic one-room, round (“tholos”) architecture as well as a building with multiple small rectangular rooms—and two large garbage dumps.  Late Hellenistic/Roman period remains were confined to burials and trash‑filled pits.  We expect to return to Fistikli this summer for a second and final season before the dam is completed.  As was the case last year, our team will include several graduate students from the Anthropology Department at Binghamton as well as students from several other universities.  Reports on our work at the site are appearing in an archaeological newsletter (Neo‑Lithics), in volumes published in Turkey (in both English and Turkish) on the salvage excavations being carried out in connection with dam building, and as a web‑site (in preparation by Sarah Kielt Costello, a graduate student in the Anthropology Department; it will be linked to the anthropology home-page under our names).

In addition to our publications on Fistikli, our co-authored article on gender and ideology in Mesopotamia in the late 4th-early 3^rd millennia B.C. has just appeared in the book Reading the Body: Representations and Remains in the Archaeological Record, edited by Alison Rautman (published by University of Pennsylvania Press). Susan Pollock's book, Ancient Mesopotamia: The Eden that Never Was, was published last year by Cambridge University Press. Reinhard Bernbeck co‑edited a Festschrift for Prof. Hans Nissen (Berlin) entitled Fluchtpunkt Uruk: Archنologische Einheit aus methodischer Vielfalt. Schriften für Hans J. Nissen.

MARK BLUMLER  (Assistant Professor of Geography) participated in a “conference within a conference” on teaching about the Middle East, at the National Council on Geographic Education Annual Meeting, Boston, in November.  He presented a paper, “Teaching about Middle Eastern Ethnicity and Cultural Difference.” He also joined several Armenian scholars in a Symposium on Land Degradation and Desertification at the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers in Pittsburgh, April 5.  In May, Blumler will travel to Yerevan, Armenia, to participate in a Scientific Conference of the International Geographical Union’s Biogeography Study Group.  The conference will be on Biogeographical and Ecological Aspects of Desertification Processes in Arid and Semiarid Environments.  Blumler will present a paper, “Vegetation Dynamics in Seasonally Dry Environments.”  Blumler is a biogeographer whose Middle East research interests include: agricultural origins; human impacts on environment, especially vegetation and soils, both recently and over the millennia; impacts of environment on humans; evolution of mediterranean-type climate; plant-environment relationships; evolution of the flora; genetics of domestication; geographical aspects of the development of cultural complexity (“civilization”); and grazing management in arid regions.  He plans to offer Geography 257, the Geography of the Middle East, in Spring 2001.  Recent and forthcoming publications on Middle Eastern topics include:  “Biogeography of Land Use Impacts in the Near East,” in Zimmerer, K. S., and K. R. Young, eds., Nature’s Geography: New Lessons for Conservation in Developing Countries, pp. 215–236 (University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1998); “Evolution of Caryopsis Gigantism and the Origins of Agriculture,” in  Research in Contemporary and Applied Geography: A Discussion Series 22(1–2):1–46,  1998; “Introgression of Durum into Wild Emmer and the Agricultural Origin Question,” in Damania, A. B., J. Valkoun, G. Willcox, and C. O. Qualset (eds.), The Origins of Agriculture and Crop Domestication, pp. 252–268 (ICARDA, Aleppo)  1999; “Edaphic Ecology of the Wild Near Eastern Cereals,”  in Research in Contemporary and Applied Geography: A Discussion Series  23(3–4):1–58,  2000; “Wild Cereal Ecology and Agriculture Origins,” in Bottema, S. and R. Cappers (eds.), Proceedings of an International Workshop, The Transition from Foraging to Farming in Southwest Asia, September 7–11, (Groningen, The Netherlands, 1998); Studies in Early Near Eastern Production, Subsistence and Environment (ex oriente, Berlin; in press). 

TAYSEER GOMAA  (Visiting Research Fellow, Anthropology Department, Faculty of Arts, Alexandria University, Egypt).  Professor Gomaa is a specialist in cultural anthropology and has done field work in the desert as well as the rural and urban areas of Egypt.  She has worked on the production of two Egyptian-based ethnographic films as part of her research.  During her affiliation with Binghamton University she has been undertaking post-doctoral research on museology, visual anthropology, and Western images of Egypt and the Middle East.  She has also attended various lectures in her fields of interest and participated in seminar courses.  Professor Gomaa’s MA dissertation is on medicine in ancient Egyptian society and its relation to folk medicine in modern Egypt.  The focus of her Ph.D. research was on material culture.  Her doctoral dissertation is an anthropological study of the material culture of Egypt as manifested in its arts and crafts, and especially traditional textiles. 

KEVIN LACEY (Chair, Classical & Near Eastern Studies Department) has just concluded editing a second volume of articles with a North African focus.  The 300-page work is entitled The Arab-African and Islamic Worlds: Interdisciplinary Studies.  It will be published in the summer by Peter Lang Publishing, Inc. and is co-edited and introduced by Professor Ralph Coury (Middle East History, Fairfield University).  Professor Lacey also contributed an article to the volume (“Western Movie Representations of Arab-African North Africa: The Sheltering Sky and the Question of Orientalism”).  On November 10, 1999 Professor Lacey prepared a lecture on “Islam and Muslims: Representations and Misrepresentations in the United States” as part of Ithaca College’s Fall 1999 Discussion Series on Islam.  This spring, along with Professor Dorit Naaman of Cinema, Professor Lacey has organized and coordinated the MENA program’s Middle East and North African Film Series. 

ALI MAZRUI (Institute for Global Cultural Studies) As founder‑chair of the newly established Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy (CSID), Ali A. Mazrui presided at his first CSID Board meeting in Washington, D.C.  He also made a presentation on “Islam and Democracy” at a special session on that theme jointly sponsored by CSID and the Middle Eastern Studies Association in Washington.

Dr. Mazrui was keynote speaker at an international conference on “Islam and the West in the 21st Century” held at Walton Park in Sussex, England, in November 1999.  The conference was attended not just by scholars but also by diplomats, civil servants, and Middle Eastern princes.

In December 1999 Ali Mazrui was Commencement Speaker at a special graduation ceremony of the Graduate School of Islamic and Social Sciences in Leesburg, Virginia.  His theme was “The Sacred Origins of Secular Knowledge.”

Abissab’s book reviews include:  Dilip Hiro, Dictionary of the Middle East (New York, 1996), MESA Bulletin (Winter, 1999); and  “The Enchanting and Ossified Past: Visiting Lebanon with Roseanne Sa’ad Khalaf,” a review of  Roseanne Sa’ad Khalaf, Lebanon: Four Journeys to the Past (Beirut, 1998). This review was published in al-Jadid: A Review and Record of Arab Culture and Arts (Fall, 1999).

CECELIA HITTE (Anthropology Department) will be completing her MA degree in Anthropology over the summer based on her two research topics of 1) creation of alternative texts for British soap operas by American viewers, and 2) community networking among NGOs.  She recently reviewed “In Search of Islamic Feminism” by Elizabeth Warnock Fernea for the MESA Bulletin (Winter issue).  Over the past six months, Cecelia has also been conducting interviews among the local migrant community to assess unrecognized skills, particularly agricultural, that may be useful for entrepreneurial activities such as raising of goats for halal/kosher meat.  Cecelia is currently deciding on a doctoral research focus. She will choose either issues of power, identity and health care access in Muslim communities or a comparison of gendered public work space in north and south Yemen. 

LEYLA KEOUGH (Anthropology Department) has been exploring issues of transnational migration by interviewing Turkish women migrants to Binghamton.  She has investigated their migration in relation to the Turkish phrase “nerden nereye,” meaning literally “from where, to where.”  She explains that this phrase has two related definitions, “it is a small world” and “look how far we have progressed”; and it is commonly employed when Turks  who may or may not have known each other in Turkey meet abroad unexpectedly.  Among the Turkish women with whom Layla has spoken in Binghamton, both veiled and unveiled, Leyla found that the phrase “nerden, nepreye” becomes ironic: these women do not seem to live in similar worlds, let alone a small world, nor do they share the same conceptions of “progress.”  This investigation extends Layla’s work on how both the secular nationalist and the Islamist movement in Turkey have played themselves out on the bodies of women in the streets of Istanbul.  She has also found that veiling behavior and acculturation were not correlated in the cases that she investigated.  She looks forward to exploring this topic further in the future. 

CENGIZ KIRLI (History Department) has been appointed assistant professor of History at Purdue University and will begin his teaching duties in the Fall 2000.  He will defend his Ph.D. dissertation (“Coffeehouses and Coffeehouse Culture”) this summer.  He is also the author of “Coffeehouses and Spies: Social Control in the Ottoman Empire,” in TOPLUM ve BILIM (Winter 1999–2000).

 JOYCE MATTHEWS (History Department)  contributed an article to the volume Consumption Studies and the History of the Ottoman Empire (1550–1922): An Introduction, edited by Donald Quataert and published January 2000 by SUNY Press. Joyce’s article is  titled “Toward an Isolario of the Ottoman Inheritance Inventory, with Special Reference to Manisa (ca. 1600–1700).”

SAMAR ATTAR ‘73 (Semitic Studies Department, Univ. of Sidney, Sidney, Australia) is a Visiting Scholar at Harvard University (September 1999‑June 2000).  She is working on a project entitled “The Influence of Arabic on Early Medieval Thought and Literature.”

In early Spring she participated in Middle East 2000: An Interdisciplinary Conference. This event was sponsored by the Institute on Global Conflict & Cooperation, the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, the College of Letters & Sciences and the University of California Office of Research. It was organized and hosted by the Islamic & Near Eastern Studies programs at the University of California, Santa Barbara, on March 25, 2000. Samar presented a paper on Ibn Tufayl, the well-known 12th-century Arab-Spanish philosopher.

On April 3, Dr. Attar was invited to give a lecture at the University of Cordoba, Spain. Her lecture was entitled “Beyond History, Religion and Language: The Construction of the Cosmopolitan Identity in a Twelfth‑Century Arabic‑Spanish Philosophical Novel.”

On May 11, 2000, Dr. Attar will be participating as a poet and a novelist in a reading held at the Library of Congress (“Life Lines: The Literature of Women’s Human Rights”). This event is organized by the Library of Congress and the Women’s Learning Partnership.

Dr. Attar has recently published a book in Arabic (Sydney, 1999; English translation of title: Visions from the Underworld) in which she exposes the plight of Australian Aborigines and migrants to Australia.

TAYSIR NASHIF ‘74 (PhD Political Science) made a presentation at the 26^th annual Third World Conference, which was held in Chicago between 15–18 March, 2000. His paper was entitled “Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflicts, with Particular Reference to Children in Africa.”  Nashif’s Arabic book Mufakkirun Filastiniyun fi al-Qarn al-’Ishrin (Palestinian Thinkers in the Twentieth Century) was published in late 1999 by At-Talai’ Publishing in Nazareth. 

FILM SERIES

Under the direction of Professor Lacey (Chair, Classical and Near Eastern Studies) and Professor Naaman (Cinema), MENA in conjunction with the Cinema Department and the Institute for Global Cultural Studies recently sponsored a Middle East and North African Film series at Binghamton University.  Six films were shown in the series: Cup Final (Israel), The Milky Way (Palestine), Gabbeh (Iran), Bab El Oued City (Algeria), Halfaouine (Tunisia), and Destiny (Egypt).  All the films contained English subtitles.  Each film was preceded by a brief introduction and followed by a discussion.  Guest speakers for the series included Livia Alexander (Middle East Studies, New York University), Asma Barlas (Chair, Political Science, and Director, Center for the Study of Culture, Race, and Ethnicity, Ithaca College), and Tayseer Gomaa (Department of Anthropology, Alexandria University, Egypt, and Visiting Research Fellow, Binghamton University).

PUBLISHING