Steven Caton

This dissertation describes basic genetic research and biobanking of ethnic populations in Israel and Qatar. I track how biomedical research on ethnic populations relates to the political, economic, legal, and historical context of the states; to global trends in genetic medicine; and to the politics of identity in the context of global biomedical research. I describe the ways biology is becoming a site for negotiating identity in ethnic genetics, in discourse over rights to citizenship, in rare disease genetics, and in personalized medicine. The core focus of this work is the way the molecular realm is an emergent site for articulations of ethnonational identities in the contemporary Middle East. This is thus a study of Middle Eastern ethnonationalism and state building through the lens of biology, specifically genetics and biobanking. In revealing the complex interdigitations of genomic technologies and articulations of ethnonational identity, this scholarship informs the biopolitics of the contemporary Middle East. I find that societal conditions (emerging national identities, immigration, demographic pressures, enskillment of citizens, biomedical capacity building, and globalization of the economy), and technological affordances (such advances in the speed and power of genomic sequencing technologies, and the entailed promises of biomedical progress), collide to overdetermine biological iterations of ethnic identity, and I show that biobanking projects serve, to varying degrees, to inculcate an imagination of shared history; a collective community; and a healthy utopian future. I argue that the Israeli and Qatari national biobanks imagine participation in ‘global science’ while at the same time they reinforce local ethnic identities. The Israeli biobank reflects pre-existing ethnic identities in Israeli society, while the Qatari biobank preferentially emphasizes the emergent national character of the Qatari population. As a comparative study of genetics and ethnic identity in the contemporary Middle East, this research, therefore, speaks both to the social theory of the co-production of science and society and to the anthropology of nation and state building.

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 influx of tens of thousands of displaced and dispossessed rural Kurds uprooted by state policies of forced migration. These policies were designed with two strategic aims in mind: eliminating rural support networks for the Kurdish armed rebellion (the PKK), and concentrating populations in less dispersed and thus theoretically more easily policed spaces. However, it is argued here that while the former ambition has perhaps succeeded, the displacement and dispossession of rural Kurds throughout the 1990s, rather than suppressing dissent, has generated new fields and new forms of political struggle. Based on two years of fieldwork in Diyarbakır, this study explores the ways in which ordinary talk about livelihoods, about how to make a living and pay the bills, is, in this context, about more than ‘the economy’ alone. The interplay of people’s efforts to rebuild life and livelihood and the semiotic interpretation of these efforts is analyzed as a rich and under-appreciated site for the everyday practical generation of the political in Kurdish Turkey. This study contributes to the anthropology of Kurdish Turkey and of the Middle East, as well as to theories of displacement and dispossession, evaluative discourse, and the pragmatics of political stance.

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 and riots. It shows how the formation of subjects, boundaries, and the "dangerous classes" in France were linked to infrastructural development. Through this examination, I argue that official French rhetoric and policies around the so-called "dangerous classes" created ideologies of contact that played out in concrete public space and came to be challenged by subjects and groups represented as dangerously different. Through encounter, overlapping boundaries--beyond the foreigner/citizen divide--became significant in the Gare du Nord, as marginalized subjects created new ways of relating spaces and bodies in this heterogeneous arena. My dissertation examines the connection between four processes that govern the station’s socio-political trajectory: 1) the government’s elaboration of the "dangerous classes" paradigm that led to expanding technologies of policing and surveillance; 2) the development of transportation infrastructure that brought migrants and goods to the capital; 3) the emergence of a railroad labor economy that created a new class of workers; and 4) the arrival and settling of immigrant groups from former colonies. I show how "dangerous" social archetypes, from the nineteenth century provincial migrant, to the early twentieth century railway worker on strike, to the African-Muslim immigrant, were summoned and reconfigured in events at the Gare du Nord and shaped the future configuration of political subjects and their struggles. I focus ethnographically on the trajectories of African immigrants at the station, the contemporary "dangerous classes." I argue that through their trans-regional networks and practices, the Gare du Nord has become a unique site of political contestation as it transforms into a node that connects the station to immigration pathways through sub-Saharan and North Africa. By offering an ethnographic approach to multidisciplinary conversations on transnational cities and postcolonial history, my dissertation builds a framework and methodology to analyze proliferating "theaters of encounter:" sites suffused with conflicting idioms, grounded in structures of human and capital circulation, and traversed by histories of struggle.

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 potential scientific ('elmi ) inquiry that must be distinguished from approaches usually ascribed to the rural, the uneducated, and the poor, often deemed as either superstitions (khorafat) or parochically religious (dini). By examining a range of encounters with the supernatural – such as attempts to explain communications with the souls of the dead, make sense of spirit possession, and differentiate real magic from charlatanism – I highlight the varied modalities through which perspectives and forms of reasoning imagined to be rational and scientific are brought to bear on matters that are understood to lie, at least partially, within the purview of religious knowledge. I situate such supernatural encounters against a backdrop of state disciplinary and coercive measures, thereby illuminating important shifts in Iran's politico-religious landscape in the past two decades, such as the waning of the religious authority of the Shi'i ulama among certain sections of society. This declining authority does not necessarily imply a weakened interest in Islam (although this is sometimes the case). Rather, it has opened up a space for reception and deliberation of a multiplicity of sources of religious knowledge, both Islamic and non-Islamic. These include forms of Western-imported spirituality and occultism that have been entering Iran for over a century, with their most recent wave consisting of translated texts of New Age spirituality, self-help success literature, and popular psychology that have gained popularity since the end of the war with Iraq. The metaphysical models on offer through these spiritual systems are usually promoted and understood as scientific rather than religious. That is, rather than being seen as contradicting Islamic notions, these formulations are often viewed as parallel to them. By attending to such notions and their everyday manifestations, my project brings into focus various hybrid forms of religious-scientific knowledge, experience, and discourse that have largely been ignored in the study of modern Muslim societies.

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 attempting to impose rigid forms of Islam on local “moderate” Muslim populations, be it in BiH, Afghanistan, Chechnya, or other sites of conflict with non-Muslim powers. By illuminating some of the many diasporic and imperial circuits linking BiH with other parts of the world, this dissertation provides a richer historical and sociological context in which transnational activist movements no longer seem so aberrational. This study argues that the mobilization to join the “jihad” alongside Bosnian Muslims can be usefully understood as a universalist project: an attempt to incarnate a worldwide Muslim community (umma) theoretically open to all of humanity, in which activists struggle through the experience of racial, cultural, and doctrinal difference vis-à-vis Bosnian and other Muslims. This approach opens up two broad avenues of inquiry. First, it allows an analysis of how Muslims of different backgrounds interacted in contexts of fighting, intermarriage, and doctrinal disputation. Second, it helps analytically situate the jihad in relation to other forms of armed intervention also acting in the name of humanity, most importantly UN peacekeeping and the U.S.-led “Global War on Terror.” This study is based on approximately 12 months of fieldwork in BiH between 2006 and 2012, mostly in Sarajevo, Zenica, Tuzla, and Bugojno. Open-ended life-history interviews were conducted in Arabic and English with Arab residents of BiH and their Bosnian comrades, kin, and critics. Additional interviews took place in Yemen, France, and Egypt. The study also draws extensively on archival materials culled from various sources, including Bosnian army and intelligence documents gathered by the UN war crimes tribunal, U.S. State Department cables disclosed by Wikileaks, and extensive printed and online materials by participants in and supporters of the jihad written in Arabic, the language formerly known as Serbo-Croatian, and Urdu.

This dissertation examines the transmission of Islamic legal knowledge in modern Egypt. It is based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork in Cairo among formally trained Islamic scholars. With governmental permission, I was able to attend classes at both al-Azhar’s Faculty of Sharīʿah and Cairo University’s Dār al-ʿUlūm. I also participated in the network of traditional study circles operating in and around al-Azhar mosque. Combining ethnographic data with extensive archival research, I trace the effects of government-led initiatives over the past century and a half to reform traditional religious learning. Such have revolved around increased incorporation of Western educational methods. There are two themes on which I focus. The first centers on ethics and subjectivity. Talal Asad has suggested that for pre-modern Muslim jurists, accurate understanding of sacred texts presupposed an appropriate "habitus". Drawing on Wittgenstein and Bourdieu, I elaborate Asad’s brief remarks along the following lines. Given that how a text is read depends upon the attributes of the reader, religious authorities insisted that proper interpretations could only be generated by proper character. The way in which to produce proper character was to mold it through a suitable program of ethical discipline. I demonstrate that pre-modern Islamic educational techniques were structured with the aim of imparting a particular habitus (modeled on that of the Prophet) by enjoining meticulous and constant imitation of the Prophet’s personal habits (Sunnah). By transforming themselves into living replicas of the Prophet, jurists believed that they acquired the ability to mirror his textual interpretations. I then describe how traditional linkages between knowledge and ethics have been eroded by the importation of Western learning techniques, scrutinizing the effects of these changes on substantive legal doctrine. The second overarching theme of my research examines how changes in pedagogical methods have produced a corresponding shift in "episteme". Using Foucault, I argue that premodern religious learning was dominated by an episteme centered on language and grammar. I proceed to describe how modern educational reforms have succeeded in inaugurating a new episteme modeled on the natural sciences. I assess the impact of this shift on modes of legal reasoning.

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 nation. Miracle accounts are one way by which a religious community constructs itself along moral lines and maintains, contests, and negotiates the social boundaries between self and other. An emphasis on materiality is intended to make a critical intervention in ongoing debates about belief by illuminating how religiously charged objects and language are constitutive of the relationship between inter-religious politics and faith as embodied practice.

The dynamic of miracles and materiality is further complicated by the mystery that emerges and is cultivated in this intersection. I employ the concept of mystery as an umbrella term for encounters with things not seen, or seen but not quite understood, encounters that seem always to elude capture in semiotic form, and yet can only be captured in semiotic form. A revelation is made in material form, yet the revelation itself conceals something from the religious practitioner. Gestures toward a largely invisible world, made by signs of the miraculous, are used to create relationships between heavenly beings and those on earth. These relationships, in turn, are taken by pious Copts as reflecting their moral superiority in the context of Muslim Egypt.

After introducing the concepts of mystery, materiality, and miracles in Chapter One, Part I of the dissertation examines the historical background that frames the current investment in the miraculous that one today finds among Copts. Chapter Two discusses the figure of Baba (Pope) Kyrillos VI (pope 1959-1971) who is widely considered a saintly man by contemporary Copts, and the current Coptic Pope, Shenouda III (1971-present) with a particular emphasis on the changing Church-State relationship over the last four decades. Chapter Three offers an analysis of the 1968 apparition of the Virgin Mary in a neighborhood of Cairo highlighting how the current political atmosphere, especially in terms of Muslim-Christian tensions, is imposed on a retrospective view of the apparition.

Part II explores the materiality of difference and piety. Chapter Four examines the increasing Coptic mobility around Egypt to Coptic holy sites and the ways in which the places visited and the very materiality of these places shape a particular mode of moral being all the while discreetly cultivating, on the one hand, a sense of mystery in encounters with the relics of holiness (such as the bones of saints), and, on the other hand, a sense of difference from the Muslim Other. Chapter Five expands on the previous chapter by specifically looking at two Coptic interlocutors' encounters with saints and the Devil through material objects. Of particular concern are the signs that for some Copts are taken to be indications of their piety.

Part III consists of one chapter (Chapter Six), which is a theoretical reflection on the relationship between faith and skepticism wherein I argue that not only are these facets of religious practice two sides of the same coin, but that it is perhaps in the space between them, between one's simultaneous embrace of the tenets of her religion and the skepticism that creeps up behind her, where mystery resides. To invoke, with a twist, a popular Biblical passage, faith without skepticism is dead.

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 phenomenon linked to citizenship, most Ismailis do not see it as necessarily connected to the nation-state and see no conflict between faith and citizenship. For them, service is a 1400 year tradition entailing the balance between the spiritual and material aspects of life. This dissertation is about one Nizari Ismaili diasporic group called Khoja Ismailis, originally a trading caste from western India that converted from Hinduism to Ismailism around the 11th century. It explores how Khoja Ismailis in Houston, Texas, view and practice seva, or voluntarism, as part of a mediated Islamic moral economy as well as a civic economy, thus binding them with Imam, state, and society. Complicating these moral economies are a hierarchy of service linked to knowledge, class, and symbolic proximity to the Imam, and a hierarchy of gender linked to culturally-based patriarchal logics. Voluntarism reinforces a historical and transnational pan-Ismaili identity, and it becomes a mode through which pious and civic subjectivities are produced. The Ismaili community's institutional structures, transnational character, and authority of the Imam shape their voluntarism. This dissertation contributes to literature on philanthropy and voluntarism, moral economies, subjectivity, and native anthropology. It draws on participant-observation, formal and informal interviews, and archival work conducted in Houston, Washington D.C., and New York, United States; Vancouver, Canada; Karachi, Pakistan; Mumbai, Chennai, and Bhuj, India; and Khorog, Tajikistan from 2003–2005.

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 sociology of the boom"; and to develop the connection between anthropology's concerns with the concrete and everyday, and (Frankfurt School) critical theory's dialectical analysis of the processes of the "aestheticization" of the everyday.

The Arabian Gulf region has been largely ignored by scholars interested in cultural and social processes. Although there are a few notable exceptions, anthropologists, historians, and sociologists have generally conceded the debate to policy-driven scholars with rather specialized agendas focusing on the development of the "Oil State." The work here is based on approximately fourteen months' fieldwork in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Dubai is a peculiar example of boom urbanization. With a population that has increased nearly twenty-fold since the late 1960s, a majority expatriate population working in the service industries, and a national minority jealously guarding its relative wealth, the semi-independent city-state has been undergoing a rapid and radical, if not fundamental, change in its urban form and morphology. The city fathers, who form a super-elite class in control of powerful holding corporations, have been embarking upon a program of remaking the city from a regional re-export node into a world city whose image jostles the likes of Sydney, Hong Kong, and even New York.

City inhabitants, meanwhile, have not been passively going along with this program. I look, mainly, at three different groups: locals who are proponents of these changes; locals who are critical; and South Asian expatriates, the largest group in Dubai, and also one of its most politically and economically marginalized. My results point toward the important role of idioms of time and space in everyday attempts to grapple with these often traumatizing circumstances: from nostalgic idylls of "a village that is no more," to futuristic idylls of a "brave new city," to South Asians' idioms of transience and uncertainty.