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ENVIRONMENT AND SOCIETY IN THE MIDDLE EAST AND NORTH AFRICA: INTRODUCTION

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 September 2018

Tessa Farmer  and
Jessica Barnes
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Extract

From arid cities to irrigated fields, hot deserts to Mediterranean mountains, costal enclaves to verdant oases, the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) encompasses a range of environments for thinking through the relationships between nature and society, people, plants, and animals, human and nonhuman worlds. Early depictions of the region in terms of patriarchal, tradition-bound, and largely homogenous Muslim populations living in undifferentiated desert spaces has long given way to scholarship that identifies the diversity and dynamism of associational life, political subjectivities, state formations, religious practices, and gender performances. Only relatively recently, however, has a significant subset of scholarship on the Middle East and North Africa picked up newer approaches to environmental issues and taken a renewed look at older topics, such as the relationship between water and the state and local subsistence practices in arid lands. This shift in the scholarship is not necessarily a reflection of rising popular “environmental consciousness” in the Middle East and North Africa, although people of the region have always been living in and thinking about the material worlds around them. For while there have been recent efforts to connect local traditions to global environmental discourses, such as rereading religious texts for their “green” character and celebrating heat-shedding architectural design, “the environment” as a term has a more uneven resonance regionally than it does in some other parts of the world. Rather, this increasing scholarly interest stems from a growing recognition within the euromerican academy of the environment as comprising intertwined social, material, political, biological, and representational worlds, and thus constituting an important focus of study.

Type
Introduction
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 50 , Special Issue 3: Environment and Society in the Middle East and North Africa , August 2018 , pp. 375 - 382
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

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References

NOTES

1 For example, the term for environment in Arabic, al-bīʾa, is not widely used beyond government, education, policy, and NGO circles. Countries such as Turkey and Israel have established active environmental movements, which are closely tied to global environmental activism and have constructed terms that cover similar semantic domains to the English term “environment,” while in other countries in the region such movements are still nascent.

2 Two important edited collections on this topic are Mikhail, Alan, ed., Water on Sand: Environmental Histories of the Middle East and North Africa (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Davis, Diana K. and Burke, Edmund III, eds., Environmental Imaginaries of the Middle East and North Africa (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Other notable works in this field include Mikhail, Alan, Nature and Empire in Ottoman Egypt: An Environmental History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and White, Sam, The Climate of Rebellion in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 See especially Davis and Burke, Environmental Imaginaries; Jones, Toby Craig, Desert Kingdom: How Oil and Water Forged Modern Saudi Arabia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Davis, Diana K., Resurrecting the Granary of Rome: Environmental History and French Colonial Expansion in North Africa (Park Place, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2007)Google Scholar; and Sims, David, Egypt's Desert Dreams: Development or Disaster (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Gregory, Derek, “(Post)Colonialism and the Production of Nature,” in Social Nature: Theory, Practice, and Politics, ed. Castree, Noel and Braun, Bruce (Malden, UK: Blackwell Publishers, 2001)Google Scholar.

5 Mitchell, Timothy, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Technopolitics, Modernity (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2002)Google Scholar.

6 Alatout, Samer, “‘States’ of Scarcity: Water, Space, and Identity Politics in Israel, 1948–59,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 26 (2008): 959–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Harris, Leila, “Irrigation, Gender, and the Social Geographies of the Changing Waterscape in Southeastern Anatolia,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 24 (2006): 187–213CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Selby, Jan, “The Geopolitics of Water in the Middle East: Fantasies and Realities,” Third World Quarterly 26 (2005): 329–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Braveman, Irus, Planted Flags: Trees, Land, and Law in Israel/Palestine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009)Google Scholar; Tesdell, Omar, “Wild Wheat to Productive Drylands: Global Scientific Practice and the Agroecological Remaking of Palestine,” Geoforum 78 (2017): 43–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Atalan-Helicke, Nurcan and Mansfield, Becky, “Seed Governance at the Intersection of Multiple Global and Nation-State Priorities: Modernizing Seeds in Turkey,” Global Environmental Politics 12 (2012): 125–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Woertz, Eckart, Oil for Food: The Global Food Crisis and the Middle East (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sowers, Jeannie, Environmental Politics in Egypt: Activists, Experts, and the State (New York: Routledge, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 A number of anthropologists have noted this orientation of anthropological engagement with the Middle East and North Africa towards certain topics and away from others. See Deeb, Lara and Winegar, Jessica, “Anthropology of Arab-Majority Societies,” Annual Review of Anthropology 41 (2012): 537–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Inhorn, Marcia, “Roads Less Traveled in Middle East Anthropology—and New Paths in Gender Ethnography,” Journal of Middle East Women's Studies 10 (2013): 62–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Abu-Lughod, Lila, “Zones of Theory in the Anthropology of the Arab World,” Annual Review of Anthropology 18 (1989): 267–306CrossRefGoogle Scholar. One notable exception to this is the early work of Dawn Chatty on nomadic pastoralists. See, for instance, From Camel to Truck: The Bedouin in the Modern World (New York: Vantage Press, 1986); and Mobile Pastoralists: Development Planning and Social Change in Oman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

8 Limbert, Mandana, In the Time of Oil: Piety, Memory, and Social Life in an Omani Town (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 2010)Google Scholar; Barnes, Jessica, Cultivating the Nile: The Everyday Politics of Water in Egypt (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; McKee, Emily, Dwelling in Conflict: Negev Landscapes and the Boundaries of Belonging (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2016)Google Scholar; Doherty, Gareth, Paradoxes of Green: Landscapes of a City-State (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Knudsen, Ståle, Fishers and Scientists in Modern Turkey: The Management of Natural Resources, Knowledge and Identity on the Eastern Black Sea Coast (New York: Berghan Books, 2008)Google Scholar. See also Günel, Gökçe, “The Infinity of Water: Climate Change Adaptation in the Arabian Peninsula,” Public Culture 28 (2016): 291–315CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Farmer, Tessa, “Willing to Pay: Competing Paradigms about Resistance to Paying for Water Services in Cairo, Egypt,” Middle East Law and Governance 9 (2017): 3–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rignall, Karen, “Land and the Politics of Custom in a Moroccan Oasis Town,” Anthropological Quarterly 88 (2015): 941–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Shani, Liron, “Of Trees and People: The Changing Entanglement in the Israeli Desert,” Ethnos (2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2017.1304972; and Angell, Elizabeth, “Assembling Disaster: Earthquakes and Urban Politics in Istanbul,” City 18 (2014): 667–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 The idea that cities and building processes can be approached as environmental concerns is the focus of a special issue on Istanbul: Angell, Elizabeth, Hammond, Timur, and van Dobben Schoon, Danielle, eds., “Assembling Istanbul: Buildings and Bodies in a World City,” City 18 (2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Kali Rubaii's research on wartime ecologies in Iraq, which examines the material legacies of the Baʿthist regime, US military occupation, and counter-insurgency projects in the context of local projects of date farming, reproduction of human life, and scientific conservation practices, is a notable example; Rubaii, “Counterinsurgency and the Ethical Life of Material Things in Iraq's Anbar Province” (PhD diss. University of California, Santa Cruz, 2018). See also Bridget Guarasci's work on the intersection of ornithology, biodiversity conservation, and late liberal capitalism in Iraq's southern wetlands; Guarasci, “The National Park: Reviving Eden in Iraq's Marshes,” Arab Studies Journal 23 (2015): 128–53.