Journal special issues/sections/forums by Nathalie Peutz
Perspectives from the Margins of Arabia,” in “Theorizing the Arabian Peninsula
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory , 2025
Whether we call it globalized, postmodern, cosmopolitan, hybrid, or Anthropocene, the scholarly c... more Whether we call it globalized, postmodern, cosmopolitan, hybrid, or Anthropocene, the scholarly consensus holds that the contemporary world is characterized by increasingly intense social relations, connections, fluxes, dis/emplacements, and time-space compression. Moreover, most anthropologists today acknowledge that understanding the entanglement of global processes within local and regional contexts requires moving beyond the problematic of scale. Patterns of social organization, power relations, and matters of intersectionality are essential to account for the contextual, asymmetric, directional, dynamic, and relative nature of translocal fluxes. These fluxes affect local and regional contexts in distinct ways, carrying something of these contexts with them wherever they pass through, eventually transforming and adapting them. Anthropology has long been departing from conventional notions of locality and self-containedness, opting instead to fully embrace the diverse methods of engagement and interaction with the world. Yet, while the discipline is at the forefront of pioneering this shift, evolving over decades to explore beyond closed “containers,” its theoretical frameworks to account for this shift often lag behind the effort. This forum seeks to tackle this problem by reconfiguring these limitations through a kaleidoscopic engagement with thirteen ethnographic accounts of Arab encounters.
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Journal special issues/sections/forums by Nathalie Peutz