This dissertation is an ethnography of transnationalism in recent working-class migration from Pakistan. Using multi-sited research, I track the state-subject relationship present in the process of transnational migration. This study focuses on Pakistan as a sending country and …
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This study in linguistic and sociocultural anthropology examines how efforts to promote "traditional medicine" in postcolonial Senegal have opposed but ironically borrowed from Western biomedicine, redefining the role of the healer and the therapeutic process. In typical encount…
Historians agree that "childhood" is not an unchanging, natural phenomenon but is a social and cultural construct. This has been a much-debated topic in the history of Europe, particularly in France where scholars such as Philippe Ariès, founder of the field the history of child…
The signal characteristic of Syrian society in the post-WWII period was the transformation of its political economy. Between 1946 and 1963, the old order, based on arrangements between the landed urban notables, traditional leaders of ethnic and religious groupings, and large in…
This dissertation is about a town in Southern Arabia and the ways that gendered sociality and infrastructural transformation meet and become mediated through peoples' understandings of local history and religious values. Focusing on the mundane social world of neighborhood women…
This dissertation examines the impact of modernity, in the form of modernization, rapid industrialization and the introduction of Western ideas about nationalism and female emancipation, on gender and gender relations in contemporary Malaysian film and literature. Drawing upon t…
This dissertation explores the connections between colonialism and nationalism in the making of modernity and gender in Egypt. Specifically, it tracks the emergence of a particular kind of middle class masculinity, a discursive field I have labeled effendi masculinity, from 1870…
Since the appearance of Edward W. Said's Orientalism, the cultural politics of colonialism has been a subject of intense debate among scholars. It has frequently been argued that Said's critique of colonial representations of the Orient falls to acknowledge the diversity of West…
Focusing on a corpus of mid- and late-19th century travel accounts by Moroccan, French and British travelers, this dissertation reassesses two critical assumptions that formulations of modernity often accept as unquestionable and established truths: (1) that modernity was consti…
Struggles over modernity, while often about political and economic power, rely on a process of othering to justify violence and relations of domination. My aim in this study is to show how representations of Moroccan women and control over their bodies are central to these strug…
This dissertation examines the relationship between women and property during the last phase of Ottoman rule in Greece and the early decades of the independent modern Greek Kingdom. It focuses on four locales that would be part of the Greek state from the beginning, each distinc…
How do middle-class Muslims make sense of their religion and of their own selves as Muslims, while occupying the position of highly stigmatized religious minorities? How do they live with and attempt to resolve the contradiction of an Islam that is the source of all that is good…
This dissertation examines how the introduction of new technologies such as the railway, tramway, and telegraph generated in Egypt unique practices of timekeeping, personhood, and conviviality between the 1830s and 1930s. However, this project cannot be seen as an attempt to "pr…
The nineteenth century marked a new era in the history of Cairo and Egypt as a whole. This dissertation examines the implementation of the project of modernizing Cairo in the second half of the nineteenth century. Although Egypt at that time was still part of the Ottoman Empire,…
This dissertation asks why art education was introduced in modern schools. Whether in the Western world, in Japan, or in Egypt, drawing education began as a functional skill. It aimed at preparing children for such tasks as map making, manufacturing design, or scientific imaging…
Empire is not a supreme entity controlling high-level policies in metropolises: it is a reality translated into the daily lives of the subalterns at the periphery of the periphery of empire, as this microhistory of Qina province during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries arg…
This dissertation ethnographically examines the dynamic relationship between cultural change, psychiatry, and subjective experience among women in Morocco. Over the past fifteen years, unprecedented socio-economic reform in this postcolonial Muslim society has unsettled local ge…
This dissertation examines how women in the Muslim Student Association (MSA) at the University of Colorado at Boulder respond to the negative stereotypes of Islam and Muslims that have proliferated since 9/11. The media's positioning of Muslim women as "backwards" and "un-Americ…
This study is an analysis of contemporary Turkish performance, framed within the theory of the work of sacrifice, which examines the concepts of gender performativity, modernity and Islam. The idea of sacrifice is primarily used as a lens to critically explore issues of religion…