Anthropology of the Middle East

<p>This course examines traditional performances of the Arabic-speaking populations of the Middle East and North Africa. Starting with the history of the ways in which the West has discovered, translated and written about the Orient, we will consider how power and politics play roles in the production of culture, narrative and performance. This approach assumes that performance, verbal art, and oral literature lend themselves to spontaneous adaptation and to oblique expression of ideas and opin…

The syllabus, on MIT OpenCourseWare

The full course — syllabus, assigned readings, problem sets, exams, and lecture notes — lives on OCW. These open the real thing: