Anthropology of the Middle East
This MIT OpenCourseWare course looks at traditional performance among Arabic-speaking communities in the Middle East and North Africa, from oral epic and sacred narrative to Koranic chant, folktales, and solo storytelling. It opens with the history of Western scholarship on the Orient, tracing how translation and interpretation carried their own politics, then asks how performance and verbal art let people voice ideas that direct speech would make censorable. Sessions examine how modernization reshapes these practices and how culture itself becomes a site of resistance and negotiation. Materials include the syllabus, reading lists, and topic-by-topic session outlines used in the MIT course, free to access through OCW. There is no instructor video or graded certificate, but the readings and assignments give a full picture of the course as taught at MIT.