By refuting the commonplace depiction of Islamists' anti-Westernism as a "war against modernity," this dissertation argues that modernization and emulating the West are two distinct socio-economic and political processes. Its central question is whether Islamism can be regarded …
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This dissertation examines the history of merchant capitalism in the Southwest from the end of the Civil War to the beginnings of the Great Depression. Rather than studying one mercantile family only, it examines the variety of traders who lived in New Mexico and Arizona. The di…
In this dissertation, based on 25 months of anthropological fieldwork, I examine activists and activism in Palestinian nongovernmental organizations in Israel. I concentrate on the ways organizations enable certain processes of self-identification based on activists' constructio…
This dissertation discusses the role of Balinese women, especially in the tourism business. It begins by surveying studies of gender in Southeast Asia and Bali, many of which claimed to find a type of gender egalitarianism. Other scholars pointed out such characteristics as patr…
Esta tesis estudia la obra orquestal de Enrique Iturriaga Romero (1918), uno de los grandes compositores peruanos de la Generación del 50. La figura de Iturriaga se destaca por la calidad artística de su música y también por su gran labor pedagógica, ambas cualidades avaladas po…
The growth of a nationalist consciousness in the literature of the late colonial period in India dates back to the 1880s, when both native and European Orientalists began to suggest the idea that the uniqueness of a “nation” was a function of the living cultural forms of the sub…
In the popular Nigerian imagination, as well as in anthropological literature, the Igbo people are renowned for their receptivity to change. In contemporary Nigeria, Igbo people aspire to strikingly modern lives—they want education for their children, development for their commu…
This dissertation examines the consequences of the (post)colonial experience in the Caribbean and nationhood in Israel as represented in the contemporary fiction and essays of Édouard Glissant and Aharon Appelfeld. The works of both Glissant and Appelfeld, I argue, represent a c…
This is an historical ethnography of the Uyghurs of the Ili valley, a stateless Muslim nation lodged between Russian and Chinese spheres of influence in Central Asia. The central questions that the study addresses are how and why peoples such as the Uyghurs persist in asserting …
In asking the question, “Which way to the modern art museum?” this dissertation explores how the Moroccan cultural elite of the 1960s and 70s engaged with global discourses on art, modernity and the cultural infrastructures that support them. After Moroccan independence from Fra…
This study examines the performance of the longitudinal media exposure measures used in the 1958 Passing of Traditional Societies in the Middle East by Daniel Lerner and the 1966 cross-sectional study of Causes and Consequences of Individual Change in Six Developing Countries by…
This dissertation is concerned with Enlightenment in a colonial and postcolonial setting. Its premise is that minority is a fundamental category of experience in post-Enlightenment liberal societies. It attempts a genealogy of secularism in colonial and postcolonial South Asia b…
“Performing Modernity” examines the intimate relationship between politics and culture in debates over identity and modernity in Egypt. Tracing changes in theater and performance, from the opening of the Khedivial Opera House and Suez Canal (1869) to a flourishing Cairene theatr…
This dissertation examines late 19th- and early 20th-century Arabic literary texts on China to challenge the Eurocentric scholarly assumption that writers in the Nahda period drew their models of modernity solely from Europe. Surviving only in fragmented and unexplored archives,…
This dissertation tackles one central problem: What were the intellectual and social origins of New Order Indonesia (1966-1998)? The analytic lens that this study employs to examine this society is the Indonesian middling classes' pursuit of modernity. The dissertation comes in …
This dissertation examines the gradual process by which Mexico came to prohibit marijuana in 1920, thereby giving birth to a war on drugs in that country. Using diverse sources ranging from colonial administrative documents to scientific publications, literature, lithography, an…
One of the core debates of the Muslim intellectuals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was on the question of whether Islam could or should embrace change. If so, then how would this change take place in meeting the current challenges, while also staying faithful to the p…
Egypt has long been a presence in Western culture, and images of Egypt have been a mass-culture staple since the nineteenth century. Based upon information gleaned from isolated artifacts and fanciful travelers' tales, the "Egypt" known to the West was primarily a product of the…
This study is a first attempt to understand how a Baha'i community was permanently established in West Africa, from the time of the arrival of the first Baha'i pioneers (missionaries) there in 1953 until about 1963. There are currently about one-million Baha'is in Africa. The st…