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This article examines Americans' uses of the Ottoman-Turkish past to justify different approaches to “Third World” development. Such invocations exposed tensions within American liberalism and projected them onto Middle Eastern history. One interpretation criticized Tanzimat land reform to emphasize agrarian democracy as the impetus for the development process. Another, reflecting postwar liberals' predilection for elite authority, relegated democracy to the end of that process by embracing Kemalism as its model. The article concludes by arguing that Ottoman historians influenced the modernization paradigm as much as it did them. H. A. R. Gibb and Harold Bowen transmitted Ottoman reform discourses to social scientists through Islamic Society and the West, which the authors based on reform-era writings at a time when archival research was just beginning to transform Ottoman studies. Cold War intellectuals and bureaucrats appropriated their Ottoman predecessors' temporal and spatial perspectives in the effort to manage Third World change

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Through an analysis of Foreign Office (FO) memoranda dealing with the “recovery” of Assyrian artifacts, I argue that archaeology served important diplomatic and propagandistic functions in the eastern Ottoman Empire in the years leading up to the Crimean War. Dovetailing excavation with imperial issues of defending national honor, securing commercial markets, deploying troops, and even spying, these documents represent an underground genealogy for Austen Henry Layard, the key British agent in the FO's secret plot to transport archaeological trophies to London. This evidence implicitly challenges the romantic narrative of discovery and the paternalistic ideology of Western stewardship so firmly embedded in narrative histories of British Assyriology. Comparing the Victorian experience with a contemporary instance of archaeological propaganda—the playing cards issued by the U.S. Department of Defense to troops stationed in Iraq as part of a 2007 training program in archaeological stewardship—this essay contends that archaeology continues to rationalize Western imperialism in Mesopotamia.

The Arab cultural-literary “awakening” of the late 19th century, known as the nahḍa, represented the first phase of mass printing in the Middle East, a historic development of major implications. Underlying new trends in social, political, and cultural thought, it entailed the large-scale production of printed texts, introduction of new diffusion channels, and emergence of broad reading audiences. The present study explores one facet of these dynamic changes: the advent of private publishing first centered in Egypt and Lebanon. Through the individual prism of Khalil Sarkis—a Beirut printer, publisher, bookseller, and author (1842–1915)—the article examines early book- and journal-publishing initiatives by printers, bookshop owners, and others, as well as their motivations and dilemmas. The emerging scene illustrates a vivid and rapid cultural shift, arguably a kind of “printing revolution” akin to that which had occurred in early modern Europe.

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This paper studies the intersections between military occupation and tourism in contemporary Israel. Focusing on two key moments of Israeli military engagement—the 1967 war and subsequent Israeli military occupation and the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon—the paper considers the ways that mainstream Israeli newspapers represented the conquest and/or incursion to Israeli publics through stories about Israeli tourism, consumption, and pleasure in the occupied territories in question. Drawing on postcolonial scholarship on colonial travel, I argue that these tourism stories can be read as “anticonquest narratives” that obscure the violence of the occupation by recasting it as a leisure opportunity. Both cases have been largely overlooked within the scholarly writing on Israel, and both expand our scholarly accounts of Israeli militarism by considering the quotidian, cultural avenues by which military projects have been enabled and sustained.

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This article is based on the assumption that in anthropology cultural and social organizational perspectives should be distinguished and refer to two analytically separate levels of reality, sometimes shed a different light on a single phenomenon, and have different analytical value. I demonstrate this by studying the notion of “honor” and its relation to the gender division of labor and to the status of women in northwest Tunisia, in the context of the “feminization” of agriculture. After showing the limitations of a cultural perspective that defines honor as a code—that is to say, a set of normative representations aimed at the regulation of (interpersonal) behavior—I propose an alternative, social organizational (or “groupal”) reading of honor, focused on the dynamics of the peasant household. I then test its analytical usefulness on the case at hand.