Anthropology and Empire in the 21st Century: Revisiting Questions of Representation and Methodological Crevices in Cross-Cultural Knowledge Production about the MENA region.

Abstract (English)

In the last two decades of the 20th century, Orientalist anthropological narratives largely portrayed Muslim and Arab societies through the reductive lens of terrorism. The cultural diversity of the region was reduced to essentialist portrayals of extremist Islamist doctrines, setting the whole area outside the bounds of modernity. In constructing the MENA region as the 'Other,' juxtaposing it against a supposedly civilized and rational Western norm, these accounts helped reinforce and legitimize neocolonial discourses of intervention, domination, and cultural superiority. The 21st century seems to have ushered in a paradigm change in Western ethnographic studies of these communities: they have been given agency and portrayed as key actors shaping social and political change processes. They have also become mediators in cross-cultural knowledge production processes. This paper studies paradigm shifts in Western ethnographic studies about the Muslim world and their ideological underpinnings. It takes stock of multidisciplinary conceptual and analytical frameworks but draws heavily on the conceptual frameworks of socio-narrative translation theory and postcolonial theory. The study analyzes a corpus of diverse, yet mutually reinforcing, ethnographic accounts that straddle linguistic and cultural boundaries with the mediation of a native translator and/or co-author. The research stakes out a distinct scholarly perspective by mounting a countervailing narrative grounded in insider ethnographic research in Tunisia, the cradle of sociopolitical changes in the region in the 21st century.