Daniel Martin Varisco
Encyclopedia
Daniel Martin Varisco anthropologist and historian
, is Professor of Anthropology at Hofstra University
in Hempstead, New York
. He has published on the history of Orientalism
, the anthropology of Islam
, the history of Islamic agronomy
and astronomy
, agriculture
and water rights in Yemen
, international development and the anthropology of cyberspace
. Varisco has presented papers at the annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association
, Middle East Studies Association
and universities and international forums around the world in English
and Arabic. He is the founding editor of CyberOrient, and webshaykh of the blog Tabsir.
(Illinois), where he majored in Biblical Archaeology under the advisement of Prof. Al Hoerth. At the University of Pennsylvania
he obtained his Ph.D. (1982) "The Adaptive Dynamics of Water Allocation in al-Ahjur, Yemen Arab Republic," the result of ethnographic fieldwork during 1978-79 in a central highland valley of the Yemen Arab Republic on the ecology of irrigation and water resource use. He also received an M.A. (1975) in Anthropology on the topic of "Archaeology as Apologetic: Towards an Understanding of the Fundamentalist Paradigm." In 1990-91 he was Visiting Assistant Professor in Anthropology at SUNY Stony Brook. He began his career at Hofstra University in 1991, becoming Chair of Anthropology in 2003 and Professor of Anthropology in 2004. In 2003 he became director of Hofstra's Middle Eastern and Central Asian Program. He has served on the boards of the American Institute for Yemeni Studies and the American Academic Research Institute in Iraq, also serving as President of the Middle East Section of the American Anthropological Association (2002–2004). Varisco is the recipient of the NDFL for Arabic, as well as grants from the American Research Center in Egypt, NEH and Fulbright fellowships. He has been editor of Y emen Update (1991–2001), CyberOrient (2006–present) and co-editor of Contemporary Islam (2006–present).
Yemen agriculture by al-Malik al-Afdal al-'Abbas. After finishing his thesis and returning several times to Yemen as a development consultant, his work with Prof. David A. King on an NEH-sponsored project on Islamic Folk Astronomy took him back to Yemen to work on the 13th century almanac of al-Malik al-Ashraf 'Umar, which he edited and translated in 1994. Involved with the American Institute for Yemeni Studies since its inception in 1977, Varisco has spoken at the institute on a number of research topics, as well as lectures in Arabic at Sanaa University, the Yemen Center for Research and Studies and Yemen's Ministry of Agriculture. In addition to his field research and examination of Yemeni agricultural texts, he has published on the social history of qât and coffee in Yemen, the tribal concept, the rhino horn issue, folk literature, land use, folk astronomy, indigenous plant protection methods, sailing seasons out of Aden, and the ethnography of Yemen. In addition to editing Yemen Update, he maintains Yemen Webdate as an online archive. With historian G. Rex Smith, he published a facsimile edition of The Manuscript of al-Malik al-Afdal: al-'Abbâs b. 'Alî Dâwud b. Yûsuf b. 'Umar b. 'Alî Ibn Rasûl (d. 778/1377): A Medieval Arabic Anthology from the Yemen (1998) for the Gibb Memorial Trust.
, Sanaa's Great Mosque Western Library, Istanbul's Topkapi Ahmet III Library and Süleymaniye Library and Qatar's National Library on the history of Islamic agriculture, almanacs, astronomy, astrology and medicine. Based on primary research in Cairo, he published "The Origin of the Anwa' in Arab Tradition" in Studia Islamica
(74:5-28, 1991), presenting the theory that the origin of the lunar station (manazil al-qamar) concept in Arab tradition was an Islamic mixing of the zodiacal grid from India with indigenous pre-Islamic Arab folk calendars and that the system of 28 distinct markers did not exist in Arabia prior to Islam, despite the claims of later Muslim scholars. The bulk of Varisco's textual analysis has been on agricultural texts and almanacs, especially for Yemen. He is currently preparing a major history of Yemen's agriculture to be called Arabia Viridis, which will include an extensive lexicon of Yemeni agricultural terms.
in addressing the issue of what defines an anthropology of Islam. This is an extended critical assessment of four seminal studies: Clifford Geertz
(1968) Islam Observed; Ernest Gellner
(1981) Muslim Society; Fatema Mernissi
(1987/1975) Beyond the Veil; Akbar Ahmed
(1988) Discovering Islam. The book examines Islam Observed in the light criticism of Geertz’s approach to the anthropology of religion as a cultural system. It is argued that Geertz reflects philosophical reflections on Islam rather than his ethnographic observation of Muslims in Indonesia and Morocco. Gellner’s use of Hume, Weber and Ibn Khaldun
to explain the development of Islam is addressed by going back to these original sources. Varisco states that the authority of Gellner and Geertz as ethnographers who have “been there” supersedes incorporation of ethnographic data about real Muslims. Mernissi’s Beyond the Veil is compared with early Orientalist and Arabic texts by tracing how each discusses the case of Muhammad’s marriage to his adopted son’s wife, Zaynab, a popular trope in Christian apologetic criticism of Islam in the medieval period. Like Geertz and Gellner, Mernissi is said to contribute to an essentialized ideal of Islam in which homogenized generalities substitute for the diverse behavior of Muslims in specific localities. Varisco address the problematic of the faith-based anthropology of Akbar Ahmed, specifically his concept of an "Islamic" anthropology. The book's epilogue builds on what anthropologists have learned in the past half century by observing Muslims; following the textual critique this is offered as a prolegomenon to future anthropological study within Islamic contexts and more effective sharing of ethnographic analysis with scholars outside the discipline. In addition, Varisco has argued that the term "medieval" should never be used in reference to Islam (Medieval Encounters, 2007) and that the term "Islamism" should be avoided as a successor to "Islamic fundamentalism" or "Political Islam" (in a forthcoming volume edited by Richard Martin).
's Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco (1977). The underlying question is what post-fieldwork reflections reflect meaningfully about the immediacy of ethnographic fieldwork. Point by point, Varisco examines the implications of graduate training in anthropology, culture shock, health problems, language skills and the rhetoric of narrative writing.
’s seminal polemic Orientalism (1978), examining his rhetoric of persuasion as well as the credibility and accuracy of historical claims made in representing Orientalism as a Western discourse. The research for this study includes a comprehensive search for all the major reviews of Orientalism and relevant commentaries in journal articles, books and edited volumes. The bibliography contains more than 600 references, all but a handful of which were personally examined by the author. Drawing on this extensive discussion of Orientalism, he develops a synthesis of the critical arguments pro and contra Said’s argument and style. The points made in Orientalism are contextualized with earlier and later texts written by Said, as well as his many published interviews. This assessment also provides original analysis, probing a number of issues in rhetoric and content ignored or only hinted at in previous commentaries. Reading Orientalism offers a narrative argument that engages the mind of the reader through a certain amount of playful, literary flirtation. This style revives a neglected genre in recent theoretical and methodological studies, specifically the mode of moderated critical satire to address contested problems in contemporary criticism. Varisco provides a critical analysis of Said's borrowing of the culture concept from Matthew Arnold and his lack of engagement with the variety of culture concepts current in anthropology since Edward Tylor in his "Reading Against Culture in Edward Said's Culture and Imperialism" (Culture, Theory and Critique, 2004).
Books:
2007 Reading Orientalism: Said and the Unsaid. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
2005 Islam Obscured: The Rhetoric of Anthropological Representation. Society for the Anthropology of Religion Series. New York: Palgrave.
1997 Medieval Folk Astronomy and Agriculture in Arabia and the Yemen. Variorum Collected Studies. Hampshire, England: Ashgate Publishing Limited.
1994 Medieval Agriculture and Islamic Science. The Almanac of a Yemeni Sultan. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
2007 The Tragedy of a Comic: Fundamentalists Crusading against Fundamentalists. Contemporary Islam 1(3):207-230.
2007 Turning Over a New Leaf: The Impact of Qât (Catha edulis) in Yemeni Horticulture. In Michel Conan and W. John Kress, editors, Botanical Progress, Horticultural Innovations and Cultural Changes, 239-256. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.
2007 Virtual Dasein: Ethnography in Cyberspace. CyberOrient Vol. 2, #1.
2006 Reflections on Fieldwork in Yemen: The Genealogy of a Diary in Response to Rabinow's Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco. Anthropology of the Middle East 1(2):35-62).
2004 The Elixer of Life or the Devil's Cud: The Debate over Qat (Catha edulis) in Yemeni Culture. In Ross Coomber and Nigel South, editors, Drug Use and Cultural Context: Tradition, Change and Intoxicants beyond 'The West' , 101-118. London: Free Association Books
.
2004 Reading Against Culture in Edward Said's Culture and Imperialism. Culture, Theory and Critique 45(2):93-112.
2004 Terminology for Plough Cultivation in Yemeni Arabic. Journal for Semitic Studies 49(1):71-129.
2002 September 11: Participant Webservation of the "War on Terrorism." American Anthropologist 104(3):934-938.
2002 The Archaeologist's Spade and the Apologist's Stacked Deck: The Near East through Conservative Christian Bibliolatry. In Abbas Amanat and Magnus T. Bernhardsson, editors, The United States & the Middle East: Cultural Encounters, 57-116. New Haven: The Yale Center for International and Area Studies.
2000 Islamic Folk Astronomy, In The History of Non-Western Astronomy. Astronomy Across Cultures, pp. 615–650. Edited by Helaine Selin. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
2000 Yemen Geographicalized [review article]. Yemen Update 42:63-67.
1998 TAKWIM. 2. Agricultural almanacs, The Encyclopaedia of Islam (second edition), 9:146-148.
1997 Why a Peach is not a Plum . . . An Author Responds to a Review That's the Pits. Yemen Update 39:42-45.
1996 Water Sources and Traditional Irrigation in Yemen. New Arabian Studies 3:238-257.
1995 The Tribal Paradigm and the Genealogy of Muhammad. Anthropological Quarterly 68(3):139- 156.
1995 Indigenous Plant Protection Methods in Yemen. GeoJournal 37(1):27-38.
1995 The Astrological Significance of the Lunar Stations in the 13th Century Rasulid Text of al-Malik al-Ashraf, Quaderni di Studi Arabi 13:19-40.
1994-5 The Prophet's Medicine: Part 1, The World & I, 9(12):262-271, December; Part 2 published in 10/1:263-271, January.
1993 The Agricultural Marker Stars in Yemeni Folklore. Asian Folklore Studies 52:119-142.
1993 Texts and Pretexts: The Unity of the Rasulid State in the Reign of al-Malik al-Muzaffar, Revue du Monde Musulman et de la Méditerranée 67(1):13-21.
1991 The Future of Terrace Farming in North Yemen: A Development Dilemma. Agriculture and Human Values (Gainesville, FL) 8(1&2):166-172.
1991 A Royal Crop Register from Rasulid Yemen, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 34:1-22.
1991 The Origin of the Anwâ in Arab Tradition. Studia Islamica 74:5-28.
1990 Folk Astronomy and the Seasons in the Arabian Gulf. al-Ma'thurat al-Sha'biyya (Doha, Qatar) 19:7-27.
1989 The Anwâ' Stars According to Abû Ishâq al-Zajjâj. Zeitschrift für Geschichte der Arabisch-Islamischen Wissenschaften 5:145-166.
1989 Beyond Rhino Horn—Wildlife Conservation for North Yemen. Oryx 23(4):215-219.
1989 From Rhino Horns to Dagger Handles. Animal Kingdom (NY), May/June 92(3):44-49.
1989 Al-Hisâb al-zirâ'î fî urjuzat Hasan al-'Affârî. Dirâsat fî al-taqwîm al-zirâ'î al-Yamanî. al- Ma'thûrât al-Sha'biyya 16:7-29.
1989 Land Use and Agricultural Development in the Yemen Arab Republic. In Anthropology and Development in North Africa and the Middle East, M. Salem Murdock and M. Horowitz, editors, pp. 292-311. Boulder: Westview Press.
1988 Folk Tales from South Arabia. [Folk Tales from South Arabia, The World & I 3(7):503-509, July. The World & I] 3(7):503-509, July.
1988 Rhinoceros Horn is also the Animal's Achilles' Heel. The Christian Science Monitor (June 28):19-20.
1987 The Rain Periods in Pre-Islamic Arabia. Arabica 34:251-266.
1987 The Segment-Dairy Lineage System of the Yort Nomads, MERA Forum (Berkeley)10(1):12-14.
1986 On the Meaning of Chewing: The Significance of Qât (Catha edulis) in the Yemen Arab Republic. Int. Journal of Middle East Studies 18/1:1-13.
1986 The Meaning of Chewing. Harper's (NY) 273:1639:27-28.
1985 The Production of Sorghum (Dhurah) in Highland Yemen. Arabian Studies 7:53-88.
1985 Al-Tawqî'ât fî taqwîm al-zirâ'a al-majhûl min 'asr mulûk Banî Rasûl. Dirâsât Yamaniyya (Sanaa, YAR) 20:192-222.
1984 Affluence and the Concept of the Tribe in the Central Highlands of the Yemen Arab Republic. In Affluence and Cultural Survival, R. Salisbury and E. Tooker, editors, pp. 134-149. Washington, DC: American Ethnological Society. [with Najwa Adra]
1983 Sayl and Ghayl: The Ecology of Water Allocation in Yemen. Human Ecology (NY) 11:365-383.
1982 The Ard in Highland Yemeni Agriculture. Tools and Tillage (Copenhagen) 4(3):158-172.
1982 The Recent Evolution of "Scientific Creationism." In Confronting the Creationists, S. Pastner and W. Haviland, editors,12-26. Northeastern Anthropological Association Occasional Proceedings, 1.
Historian
A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the study of all history in time. If the individual is...
, is Professor of Anthropology at Hofstra University
Hofstra University
Hofstra University is a private, nonsectarian institution of higher learning located in the Village of Hempstead, New York, United States, about east of New York City: less than an hour away by train or car...
in Hempstead, New York
Hempstead (village), New York
Hempstead is a village located in the town of Hempstead, Nassau County, New York, United States. The population was 53,891 at the 2010 census.Hofstra University is located on the border between Hempstead and Uniondale.-Foundation:...
. He has published on the history of Orientalism
Orientalism
Orientalism is a term used for the imitation or depiction of aspects of Eastern cultures in the West by writers, designers and artists, as well as having other meanings...
, the anthropology of Islam
Islam
Islam . The most common are and . : Arabic pronunciation varies regionally. The first vowel ranges from ~~. The second vowel ranges from ~~~...
, the history of Islamic agronomy
Agronomy
Agronomy is the science and technology of producing and using plants for food, fuel, feed, fiber, and reclamation. Agronomy encompasses work in the areas of plant genetics, plant physiology, meteorology, and soil science. Agronomy is the application of a combination of sciences like biology,...
and astronomy
Astronomy
Astronomy is a natural science that deals with the study of celestial objects and phenomena that originate outside the atmosphere of Earth...
, agriculture
Agriculture
Agriculture is the cultivation of animals, plants, fungi and other life forms for food, fiber, and other products used to sustain life. Agriculture was the key implement in the rise of sedentary human civilization, whereby farming of domesticated species created food surpluses that nurtured the...
and water rights in Yemen
Yemen
The Republic of Yemen , commonly known as Yemen , is a country located in the Middle East, occupying the southwestern to southern end of the Arabian Peninsula. It is bordered by Saudi Arabia to the north, the Red Sea to the west, and Oman to the east....
, international development and the anthropology of cyberspace
Cyberspace
Cyberspace is the electronic medium of computer networks, in which online communication takes place.The term "cyberspace" was first used by the cyberpunk science fiction author William Gibson, though the concept was described somewhat earlier, for example in the Vernor Vinge short story "True...
. Varisco has presented papers at the annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association
American Anthropological Association
The American Anthropological Association is a professional organization of scholars and practitioners in the field of anthropology. With 11,000 members, the Arlington, Virginia based association includes archaeologists, cultural anthropologists, biological anthropologists, linguistic...
, Middle East Studies Association
Middle East Studies Association of North America
Middle East Studies Association of North America is a learned society, and according to its website, "a non-political association that fosters the study of the Middle East, promotes high standards of scholarship and teaching, and encourages public understanding of the region and its peoples...
and universities and international forums around the world in English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
and Arabic. He is the founding editor of CyberOrient, and webshaykh of the blog Tabsir.
Education and Academic History
Varisco attended Wheaton CollegeWheaton College (Illinois)
Wheaton College is a private, evangelical Protestant liberal arts college in Wheaton, Illinois, a suburb west of Chicago in the United States...
(Illinois), where he majored in Biblical Archaeology under the advisement of Prof. Al Hoerth. At the University of Pennsylvania
University of Pennsylvania
The University of Pennsylvania is a private, Ivy League university located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. Penn is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States,Penn is the fourth-oldest using the founding dates claimed by each institution...
he obtained his Ph.D. (1982) "The Adaptive Dynamics of Water Allocation in al-Ahjur, Yemen Arab Republic," the result of ethnographic fieldwork during 1978-79 in a central highland valley of the Yemen Arab Republic on the ecology of irrigation and water resource use. He also received an M.A. (1975) in Anthropology on the topic of "Archaeology as Apologetic: Towards an Understanding of the Fundamentalist Paradigm." In 1990-91 he was Visiting Assistant Professor in Anthropology at SUNY Stony Brook. He began his career at Hofstra University in 1991, becoming Chair of Anthropology in 2003 and Professor of Anthropology in 2004. In 2003 he became director of Hofstra's Middle Eastern and Central Asian Program. He has served on the boards of the American Institute for Yemeni Studies and the American Academic Research Institute in Iraq, also serving as President of the Middle East Section of the American Anthropological Association (2002–2004). Varisco is the recipient of the NDFL for Arabic, as well as grants from the American Research Center in Egypt, NEH and Fulbright fellowships. He has been editor of Y emen Update (1991–2001), CyberOrient (2006–present) and co-editor of Contemporary Islam (2006–present).
Yemen
Varisco arrived in Yemen in early 1978 to begin 18 months of ethnographic and ecological research in the highland valley of al-Ahjur along with fellow anthropologist and wife, Najwa Adra. The focus of his field research was on local water rights in the springfed irrigation system in relation to the local environmental constraints and principles of Islamic water law. In the field he became particularly interested in the history of Yemen's agriculture, especially after reading a 14th century copy of a treatise on RasulidRasulid
The Rasulid was a Muslim dynasty that ruled Yemen and Hadhramaut from 1229 to 1454. The Rasulids assumed power after the Egyptian Ayyubid left the southern provinces of the Arabian Peninsula....
Yemen agriculture by al-Malik al-Afdal al-'Abbas. After finishing his thesis and returning several times to Yemen as a development consultant, his work with Prof. David A. King on an NEH-sponsored project on Islamic Folk Astronomy took him back to Yemen to work on the 13th century almanac of al-Malik al-Ashraf 'Umar, which he edited and translated in 1994. Involved with the American Institute for Yemeni Studies since its inception in 1977, Varisco has spoken at the institute on a number of research topics, as well as lectures in Arabic at Sanaa University, the Yemen Center for Research and Studies and Yemen's Ministry of Agriculture. In addition to his field research and examination of Yemeni agricultural texts, he has published on the social history of qât and coffee in Yemen, the tribal concept, the rhino horn issue, folk literature, land use, folk astronomy, indigenous plant protection methods, sailing seasons out of Aden, and the ethnography of Yemen. In addition to editing Yemen Update, he maintains Yemen Webdate as an online archive. With historian G. Rex Smith, he published a facsimile edition of The Manuscript of al-Malik al-Afdal: al-'Abbâs b. 'Alî Dâwud b. Yûsuf b. 'Umar b. 'Alî Ibn Rasûl (d. 778/1377): A Medieval Arabic Anthology from the Yemen (1998) for the Gibb Memorial Trust.
Islamic Sciences
Varisco has conducted manuscript research in Egypt's Dar al-KutubEgyptian National Library and Archives
The Egyptian National Library and Archives in Cairo is the largest library in Egypt. The second largest are the libraries of Al-Azhar University and the Bibliotheca Alexandrina ....
, Sanaa's Great Mosque Western Library, Istanbul's Topkapi Ahmet III Library and Süleymaniye Library and Qatar's National Library on the history of Islamic agriculture, almanacs, astronomy, astrology and medicine. Based on primary research in Cairo, he published "The Origin of the Anwa' in Arab Tradition" in Studia Islamica
Studia Islamica
Studia Islamica is an Islamic studies journal focusing on the history, religion, law, literature and language of the Muslim world, primarily south-western Asia and Mediterranean lands. According to its publisher it has published the works of well-known Orientalists such as Robert Brunschvig,...
(74:5-28, 1991), presenting the theory that the origin of the lunar station (manazil al-qamar) concept in Arab tradition was an Islamic mixing of the zodiacal grid from India with indigenous pre-Islamic Arab folk calendars and that the system of 28 distinct markers did not exist in Arabia prior to Islam, despite the claims of later Muslim scholars. The bulk of Varisco's textual analysis has been on agricultural texts and almanacs, especially for Yemen. He is currently preparing a major history of Yemen's agriculture to be called Arabia Viridis, which will include an extensive lexicon of Yemeni agricultural terms.
Anthropology of Islam
Varisco's Islam Obscured: The Rhetoric of Anthropological Representation (2005) builds on the earlier work of Abdel Hamid El-Zein and Talal AsadTalal Asad
Talal Asad is an anthropologist at the City University of New York.Asad has made important theoretical contributions to post-colonialism, Christianity, Islam, and ritual studies and has recently called for, and initiated, an anthropology of secularism...
in addressing the issue of what defines an anthropology of Islam. This is an extended critical assessment of four seminal studies: Clifford Geertz
Clifford Geertz
Clifford James Geertz was an American anthropologist who is remembered mostly for his strong support for and influence on the practice of symbolic anthropology, and who was considered "for three decades...the single most influential cultural anthropologist in the United States." He served until...
(1968) Islam Observed
Ernest Gellner
Ernest André Gellner was a philosopher and social anthropologist, described by The Daily Telegraph when he died as one of the world's most vigorous intellectuals and by The Independent as a "one-man crusade for critical rationalism."His first book, Words and Things —famously, and uniquely...
(1981) Muslim Society
Fatema Mernissi
Fatema or Fatima Mernissi is a Moroccan feminist writer and sociologist.-Biography:Mernissi was born into a middle-class family in Fes in 1940. She received her primary education in a school established by the nationalist movement, and secondary level education in an all-girls school funded by the...
(1987/1975) Beyond the Veil
Akbar S. Ahmed
Akbar Salahuddin Ahmed, Sitara-i-Imtiaz, or Akbar Ahmed, is currently the Ibn Khaldun Chair of Islamic Studies, American University in Washington, D.C., the First Distinguished Chair of Middle East and Islamic Studies at the US Naval Academy, Annapolis, and a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the...
(1988) Discovering Islam. The book examines Islam Observed in the light criticism of Geertz’s approach to the anthropology of religion as a cultural system. It is argued that Geertz reflects philosophical reflections on Islam rather than his ethnographic observation of Muslims in Indonesia and Morocco. Gellner’s use of Hume, Weber and Ibn Khaldun
Ibn Khaldun
Ibn Khaldūn or Ibn Khaldoun was an Arab Tunisian historiographer and historian who is often viewed as one of the forerunners of modern historiography, sociology and economics...
to explain the development of Islam is addressed by going back to these original sources. Varisco states that the authority of Gellner and Geertz as ethnographers who have “been there” supersedes incorporation of ethnographic data about real Muslims. Mernissi’s Beyond the Veil is compared with early Orientalist and Arabic texts by tracing how each discusses the case of Muhammad’s marriage to his adopted son’s wife, Zaynab, a popular trope in Christian apologetic criticism of Islam in the medieval period. Like Geertz and Gellner, Mernissi is said to contribute to an essentialized ideal of Islam in which homogenized generalities substitute for the diverse behavior of Muslims in specific localities. Varisco address the problematic of the faith-based anthropology of Akbar Ahmed, specifically his concept of an "Islamic" anthropology. The book's epilogue builds on what anthropologists have learned in the past half century by observing Muslims; following the textual critique this is offered as a prolegomenon to future anthropological study within Islamic contexts and more effective sharing of ethnographic analysis with scholars outside the discipline. In addition, Varisco has argued that the term "medieval" should never be used in reference to Islam (Medieval Encounters, 2007) and that the term "Islamism" should be avoided as a successor to "Islamic fundamentalism" or "Political Islam" (in a forthcoming volume edited by Richard Martin).
Middle East Ethnography
Varisco has published the results of his own ethnographic observations in Yemen and reviewed many of the published ethnographies on Yemen. In his "Reflections on Fieldwork in Yemen: The Genealogy of a Diary in Response to Rabinow's Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco," (Anthropology of the Middle East, 2006) he compares and contrasts his personal field diary, written in 1978-79, with Paul RabinowPaul Rabinow
Paul Rabinow is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California , Director of the Anthropology of the Contemporary Research Collaboratory , and former Director of Human Practices for the Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center...
's Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco (1977). The underlying question is what post-fieldwork reflections reflect meaningfully about the immediacy of ethnographic fieldwork. Point by point, Varisco examines the implications of graduate training in anthropology, culture shock, health problems, language skills and the rhetoric of narrative writing.
Orientalism
In Reading Orientalism: Said and the Unsaid (2007) Varisco presents an in-depth, critical analysis of Edward SaidEdward Said
Edward Wadie Saïd was a Palestinian-American literary theorist and advocate for Palestinian rights. He was University Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and a founding figure in postcolonialism...
’s seminal polemic Orientalism (1978), examining his rhetoric of persuasion as well as the credibility and accuracy of historical claims made in representing Orientalism as a Western discourse. The research for this study includes a comprehensive search for all the major reviews of Orientalism and relevant commentaries in journal articles, books and edited volumes. The bibliography contains more than 600 references, all but a handful of which were personally examined by the author. Drawing on this extensive discussion of Orientalism, he develops a synthesis of the critical arguments pro and contra Said’s argument and style. The points made in Orientalism are contextualized with earlier and later texts written by Said, as well as his many published interviews. This assessment also provides original analysis, probing a number of issues in rhetoric and content ignored or only hinted at in previous commentaries. Reading Orientalism offers a narrative argument that engages the mind of the reader through a certain amount of playful, literary flirtation. This style revives a neglected genre in recent theoretical and methodological studies, specifically the mode of moderated critical satire to address contested problems in contemporary criticism. Varisco provides a critical analysis of Said's borrowing of the culture concept from Matthew Arnold and his lack of engagement with the variety of culture concepts current in anthropology since Edward Tylor in his "Reading Against Culture in Edward Said's Culture and Imperialism" (Culture, Theory and Critique, 2004).
Internet and CyberOrient
In 2006 Varisco launched CyberOrient, an online journal devoted to representation of Islam and the Middle East in cyberspace and the impact of the Internet. This is sponsored by the Middle East Section of the American Anthropological Association. In 2002 he published "September 11: Participant Webservation of the 'War on Terrorism,'" (American Anthropologist, 2002), which provides analysis of the coverage of 9/11 on the Internet, including “participant webservation” of online video games involving Osama Bin Laden. In "Virtual Dasein: Ethnography in Cyberspace" (CyberOrient, 2007) Varisco suggests that one way of approaching the ethnography of cyberspace is to treat it as virtual Dasein, in which the issue becomes being there in something-like-a-world yet still being in the world. Ethnographers now need to consider the impact of the Internet on the people they study, even in the remotest villages. Their involvement with the Internet demands a reflexivity that goes beyond musing over the mutant prospect of becoming cyborgs to assessing an evolving recombination of humans, technology and information.Experience in International Development
Since 1981, Varisco has participated in development projects as a consultant in Yemen (18 assignments), Egypt, Guatemala, and the Dominican Republic, serving as a Team Leader on several projects.The range of issues covered in these assignments include: Agricultural Sector Analysis, Biodiversity and Environmental Impact Assessment, Community Participation, Evaluation, Household Survey, Integrated Pest Management, Irrigation, Participant Training, Participatory Rural Assessment, Project Design, Resettlement issues, Scoping, Social Soundness Analysis, Sustainable Livelihoods Analysis, and Water Supply and Sanitation.Tabsir: Insight on Islam and the Middle East
This academic blog, created by Varisco in 2006, includes a dozen scholars concerned about stereotypes, misinformation and propaganda spread in the media and academic forums on Islam and the Middle East. The scholars involved are committed to fair, open-ended scholarly assessment of the current political issues of terrorism, gender inequality and intolerance. They also believe in active involvement as public intellectuals communicating the best of available research. The current writers include Jon Anderson, Magnus Bernhardsson, miriam cooke, El Sayed El Aswad, George el-Hage, McGuire Gibson, Amir Hussain, Bruce Lawrence, Ronald Lukens-Bull, Gabriele Marranci, Gregory Starrett and Daniel Martin Varisco.Select bibliography
For the full academic cv of books, articles and more than 125 book reviews, click here.Books:
2007 Reading Orientalism: Said and the Unsaid. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
2005 Islam Obscured: The Rhetoric of Anthropological Representation. Society for the Anthropology of Religion Series. New York: Palgrave.
1997 Medieval Folk Astronomy and Agriculture in Arabia and the Yemen. Variorum Collected Studies. Hampshire, England: Ashgate Publishing Limited.
1994 Medieval Agriculture and Islamic Science. The Almanac of a Yemeni Sultan. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
Selected Articles
2007 Making "Medieval" Islam Meaningful. Medieval Encounters 13(3):385-412.2007 The Tragedy of a Comic: Fundamentalists Crusading against Fundamentalists. Contemporary Islam 1(3):207-230.
2007 Turning Over a New Leaf: The Impact of Qât (Catha edulis) in Yemeni Horticulture. In Michel Conan and W. John Kress, editors, Botanical Progress, Horticultural Innovations and Cultural Changes, 239-256. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.
2007 Virtual Dasein: Ethnography in Cyberspace. CyberOrient Vol. 2, #1.
2006 Reflections on Fieldwork in Yemen: The Genealogy of a Diary in Response to Rabinow's Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco. Anthropology of the Middle East 1(2):35-62).
2004 The Elixer of Life or the Devil's Cud: The Debate over Qat (Catha edulis) in Yemeni Culture. In Ross Coomber and Nigel South, editors, Drug Use and Cultural Context: Tradition, Change and Intoxicants beyond 'The West' , 101-118. London: Free Association Books
Free Association Books
Free Association Books is an innovative project started in 1980s London. It arose as the brainchild of Bob Young and colleagues, who, disillusioned by the decline of the liberatory movement, began a search using psychoanalysis to understand the problems of liberation...
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2004 Reading Against Culture in Edward Said's Culture and Imperialism. Culture, Theory and Critique 45(2):93-112.
2004 Terminology for Plough Cultivation in Yemeni Arabic. Journal for Semitic Studies 49(1):71-129.
2002 September 11: Participant Webservation of the "War on Terrorism." American Anthropologist 104(3):934-938.
2002 The Archaeologist's Spade and the Apologist's Stacked Deck: The Near East through Conservative Christian Bibliolatry. In Abbas Amanat and Magnus T. Bernhardsson, editors, The United States & the Middle East: Cultural Encounters, 57-116. New Haven: The Yale Center for International and Area Studies.
2000 Islamic Folk Astronomy, In The History of Non-Western Astronomy. Astronomy Across Cultures, pp. 615–650. Edited by Helaine Selin. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
2000 Yemen Geographicalized [review article]. Yemen Update 42:63-67.
1998 TAKWIM. 2. Agricultural almanacs, The Encyclopaedia of Islam (second edition), 9:146-148.
1997 Why a Peach is not a Plum . . . An Author Responds to a Review That's the Pits. Yemen Update 39:42-45.
1996 Water Sources and Traditional Irrigation in Yemen. New Arabian Studies 3:238-257.
1995 The Tribal Paradigm and the Genealogy of Muhammad. Anthropological Quarterly 68(3):139- 156.
1995 Indigenous Plant Protection Methods in Yemen. GeoJournal 37(1):27-38.
1995 The Astrological Significance of the Lunar Stations in the 13th Century Rasulid Text of al-Malik al-Ashraf, Quaderni di Studi Arabi 13:19-40.
1994-5 The Prophet's Medicine: Part 1, The World & I, 9(12):262-271, December; Part 2 published in 10/1:263-271, January.
1993 The Agricultural Marker Stars in Yemeni Folklore. Asian Folklore Studies 52:119-142.
1993 Texts and Pretexts: The Unity of the Rasulid State in the Reign of al-Malik al-Muzaffar, Revue du Monde Musulman et de la Méditerranée 67(1):13-21.
1991 The Future of Terrace Farming in North Yemen: A Development Dilemma. Agriculture and Human Values (Gainesville, FL) 8(1&2):166-172.
1991 A Royal Crop Register from Rasulid Yemen, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 34:1-22.
1991 The Origin of the Anwâ in Arab Tradition. Studia Islamica 74:5-28.
1990 Folk Astronomy and the Seasons in the Arabian Gulf. al-Ma'thurat al-Sha'biyya (Doha, Qatar) 19:7-27.
1989 The Anwâ' Stars According to Abû Ishâq al-Zajjâj. Zeitschrift für Geschichte der Arabisch-Islamischen Wissenschaften 5:145-166.
1989 Beyond Rhino Horn—Wildlife Conservation for North Yemen. Oryx 23(4):215-219.
1989 From Rhino Horns to Dagger Handles. Animal Kingdom (NY), May/June 92(3):44-49.
1989 Al-Hisâb al-zirâ'î fî urjuzat Hasan al-'Affârî. Dirâsat fî al-taqwîm al-zirâ'î al-Yamanî. al- Ma'thûrât al-Sha'biyya 16:7-29.
1989 Land Use and Agricultural Development in the Yemen Arab Republic. In Anthropology and Development in North Africa and the Middle East, M. Salem Murdock and M. Horowitz, editors, pp. 292-311. Boulder: Westview Press.
1988 Folk Tales from South Arabia. [Folk Tales from South Arabia, The World & I 3(7):503-509, July. The World & I] 3(7):503-509, July.
1988 Rhinoceros Horn is also the Animal's Achilles' Heel. The Christian Science Monitor (June 28):19-20.
1987 The Rain Periods in Pre-Islamic Arabia. Arabica 34:251-266.
1987 The Segment-Dairy Lineage System of the Yort Nomads, MERA Forum (Berkeley)10(1):12-14.
1986 On the Meaning of Chewing: The Significance of Qât (Catha edulis) in the Yemen Arab Republic. Int. Journal of Middle East Studies 18/1:1-13.
1986 The Meaning of Chewing. Harper's (NY) 273:1639:27-28.
1985 The Production of Sorghum (Dhurah) in Highland Yemen. Arabian Studies 7:53-88.
1985 Al-Tawqî'ât fî taqwîm al-zirâ'a al-majhûl min 'asr mulûk Banî Rasûl. Dirâsât Yamaniyya (Sanaa, YAR) 20:192-222.
1984 Affluence and the Concept of the Tribe in the Central Highlands of the Yemen Arab Republic. In Affluence and Cultural Survival, R. Salisbury and E. Tooker, editors, pp. 134-149. Washington, DC: American Ethnological Society. [with Najwa Adra]
1983 Sayl and Ghayl: The Ecology of Water Allocation in Yemen. Human Ecology (NY) 11:365-383.
1982 The Ard in Highland Yemeni Agriculture. Tools and Tillage (Copenhagen) 4(3):158-172.
1982 The Recent Evolution of "Scientific Creationism." In Confronting the Creationists, S. Pastner and W. Haviland, editors,12-26. Northeastern Anthropological Association Occasional Proceedings, 1.
External links
- Hofstra Faculty Page
Indigenous Plant Protection in Yemen, 1992 [Report prepared for GTZ, Yemen German Plant Protection Project, Sanaa]
Online Qur'an Resources (with Bruce Lawrence)
Tabsir: Insight on Islam and the Middle East [blog]
Yemen Webdate Archive