Steven Caton

Oman’s borderlands with the United Arab Emirates (UAE) are beset with curiosities. At a time when the Omani state has been pursuing policy to incorporate peripheral, non-coastal regions into the Sultanate of Oman’s national territory, inhabitants of the...

In this dissertation, my primary aims are threefold: to contribute to the anthropological and regional studies' discussion about the Arabian-Persian Gulf region; to investigate the concrete manifestations of what Mike Davis (1992) has called "the...

North African art and material culture -- textiles, pottery, jewelry and other objects -- have been exhibited and sold in France since the nineteenth century. Today these objects are central to both state-run museum projects and to projects of self...

Voluntarism in the multi-ethnic, transnational Shia Imami Nizari Ismaili Muslim community provides a window into the complex interactions of religious ethics, the subject, and the state. While most studies argue that voluntarism is a distinctly American...

An ethnographic account of Coptic Orthodox Christians in Egypt, Cultivating Mystery argues that an anthropological study of miracles can help to explain the social world of a religious minority that perceives itself as beleaguered in the midst of a Muslim...

This dissertation examines uncertainties about the supernatural among members of the urban middle class in Tehran, Iran. In particular, I attend to the ways in which the category of the supernatural (mavara) has become, for some people, an object of...

This dissertation analyzes everyday talk about livelihoods, or about the challenges of work and getting by, among displaced Kurds in the city of Diyarbakır in southeastern Turkey. Over the past two decades, Diyarbakır has grown dramatically with the...

This dissertation builds a socio-cultural biography of Paris's Gare du Nord, Europe's largest railway station, from its transnational aims to connect Europe in the nineteenth century, to early twentieth century strikes, to twenty-first century immigration...

This dissertation uses the experiences of Arab Islamist fighters in the 1992-1995 war in Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH) to rethink prevailing notions of world order. These actors are frequently glossed as “foreign fighters”: rootless, unaccountable extremists...