News

MES Book Award, Aslı Zengin

The Middle East Section is pleased to present Aslı Zengin with the 2025 MES Book Award for Violent Intimacies: The Trans Everyday and the Making of an Urban World (Duke University Press, 2024). Based on sustained fieldwork with trans women in Istanbul, Zengin traces how the Turkish state reaches into the textures of daily life—through touch, surveillance, and regulation—to produce what she calls “violent intimacies.” Zengin situates transness in the global south as a site of theoretical production rather than a test case for Euro-American trans and queer theorization. Violent proximities, at once physical and affective, shape not only trans lives but the very grammar of governance and belonging in urban Turkey. Zengin approaches transness not as a stable identity but as a condensed site within a wider relational economy of violence. By navigating surveillance and securitization, trans women compel the police to devise new techniques of control, thereby reshaping the very state that polices them.

Violent Intimacies is a work of uncommon depth—empirically grounded, conceptually original, and attuned to the entanglements of power and endurance that define urban life. Intervening in anthropological and feminist and queer scholarship on intimacy, Zengin shows not only how violence attaches itself to everyday life beyond heteropatriarchal relations, but also what intimacy becomes through violence—how it circulates in streets, clinics, courtrooms, and funerals as much as within homes. Her account of kinship likewise resists simple oppositions between “straight” and “queer” families, revealing that no families—cis or trans—are internally coherent or uniform. Zengin, thus, offers new perspectives on state power, securitization, and urban geography that radiate from trans life. The state’s policing of trans women and sex workers, Zengin shows, simultaneously transforms the spatial and moral order of Turkish cities, for all citizens and residents. Techniques of control developed in relation to one marginalized group circulate across others—Kurds, Roma, refugees, and non-Muslim workers as well as trans women—revealing a shared political economy of violence. This ethnography offers an elegant, grounded vocabulary for understanding how power takes sensorial and spatial form, and how, in turn, those most subject to it find ways to act upon and transform it.

MES Book Award (Honorable Mention), Emrah Yıldız

The Middle East Section recognizes Emrah Yıldız with an Honorable Mention for the 2025 MES Book Award for Zainab’s Traffic: Moving Saints, Selves, and Others across Borders (University of California Press, 2024). Through a richly textured ethnography of Shi‘i pilgrimage routes connecting Iran, Turkey, and Syria, Yıldız rethinks ritual as “traffic”—a mode of regulated improvisation that entwines devotion, commerce, and contraband. Moving through buses, bazaars, and border checkpoints, the book traces how saints, states, pilgrims, and smugglers co-produce sovereignty and value in the same circuits of movement. Zainab’s Traffic makes a theoretical intervention in the anthropology of Islam by situating the “ethical turn” within its political economy: piety and self-cultivation emerge not in isolation from capitalism, sanctions, and sovereignty, but through them. Yıldız’s account expands the anthropology of religion and borders alike, revealing mobility as a deeply moral and material practice that remakes both subjects and states.

MES Student Paper Award, Jowel Choufani

The winning paper is “The Family as/and Appeal: Negotiating Obligation amidst Chronic State Abandonment in Beirut, Lebanon.” Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Beirut, it is a sensitively written and timely study of how obligations are established and negotiated through quotidian interactions in the midst of Lebanon’s financial crisis and the precarity it has unleashed. Choufani examines in intimate detail how these global and national transformations engender everyday struggles and negotiations over what people owe to one another in the face of state abandonment, paying close attention to how familiar idioms of kinship are deployed to enact forms of connection in precarious times, although not always successfully. The committee was particularly impressed by how the author put the rich tradition of kinship studies—both in the anthropology of the Middle East and North Africa as well as more broadly in sociocultural anthropology—in conversation with the current work on governance without states, neoliberal crises, and the landscapes of violence and war that shape the lives of people in Lebanon.

MES Student Paper Award (Honorable Mention), Mine Egbatan

The honorable mention, “Blurring ‘Us’ versus ‘Them’ Dichotomy: Victim-Savior Populism, Gender, and Disability in Turkey,” is a thoughtful contribution to research on gender and disability in Turkey, connecting macro-political shifts in the country to the everyday work that disabled women do to navigate those shifts and state attempts to incorporate them into its provision of infrastructural resources. Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2023 and 2024 in Istanbul and Ankara with blind, deaf, and physically disabled women across religious, political, and class backgrounds, Egbatan proposes “victim-savior populism” as a political modality that complicates the popular secular-religious and Left-Right binaries often imposed on any analysis of politics in Turkey today. Rather, her interlocutors engage in strategic collaborations to resist being cast into the role of “victim” in need of saving by the state. The result is an articulate ethnographic piece that links burgeoning work on disability studies to a longstanding tradition of studying gender in the region.

MES Photography Prize, Elif Irem Az

Elif Irem Az’s photo essay offers the viewer visually striking scenes of women toiling in tobacco fields and of various stages of the tobacco harvest in Western Turkey. The photo series is ethnographically rich in depicting the dynamism of agricultural work, the gendered labor behind it, and the passage of time. Az’s photography also has an intimate quality that reflects the textures of her ethnographic fieldwork in Turkey, fieldwork during which she got to know and work alongside the women and children who are featured in some of them.

Photographs should speak broadly to the idea of “Ghosts” the theme of the 2025 AAA conference.

Each submission can include 1-5 photos each with a caption (50-100 words) that explains the date, location, context, and the process through which the photograph was taken. Photos may be submitted as stand-alone images or a short image series meant to be viewed together (please specify). Submissions should be in jpg or tiff.

We encourage submissions from anthropologists and anthropologists-in-the-making, especially from the MENA region. Each person is limited to one submission of five photographs. We ask that those submitting be members of the Middle East Section, except for students, non-tenure track faculty or scholars in the Global South if membership imposes a significant hardship.
The winners will each receive a modest cash prize ($100). Their photos will be used on the MES AAA website and social media and will be credited each time they are used.

Please make your submission here by our deadline of Monday, September 15, 2025 Wednesday, October 1, 2025:
 https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeeipr9eqs8iIk_tpReMMhgihm_-b9LQXhwdbzTobLoO3rljA/viewform?usp=pp_url

The Middle East Section of the American Anthropological Association invites submissions for our Student Paper Award. Both undergraduate and graduate students (who have not defended at time of submission) are eligible. The winner will receive a prize of $500, plus a chance to summarize the award-winning paper at the 2025 MES business meeting (either virtual or in-person in New Orleans) and to have a summary published on the MES website. Papers should: be ethnographically grounded or engaging with anthropological literature; focused on peoples and cultures of the Middle East and North Africa and/or its diasporas; not exceed 10,000 words (not including notes and bibliography); and have been completed no earlier than January 1, 2024. Chapters from a thesis are welcome but should be able to stand alone (they can be revised to do so). Papers should not have been published or yet accepted for publication. The paper should include a cover page with the name of the professor and class for which the paper was written (if applicable) and email addresses for both the student and professor.

Student paper award submissions should be emailed to the committee chair, Dr. Timothy Loh (timloh [at] princeton [dot] edu). The subject line must say “MES Student Award.”

The deadline is Friday, September 5, 2025 Sunday, September 7, 2025.

Deadline: All submissions must be received by May 15, 2025.

The Middle East Section invites nominations for its bi-annual book award, which recognizes outstanding anthropological scholarship—single- or co-authored (but not edited volumes)—of significance to the field of Middle Eastern Studies.

Evaluation Criteria
The committee will consider books that are:
*Ethnographically rich
* Theoretically generative, advancing knowledge of the anthropology of the Middle East
* Relevant beyond the subfield of Middle East anthropology
* Clearly argued, with well-substantiated interventions
* Original in their contributions to anthropology and/or Middle Eastern studies.
* Well-written

Eligible books must be published in 2023 or 2024. Submissions should include a brief note indicating that the book is being nominated, so the committee can track nominations. Please send this note, along with a copy of the book (hard copy or digital), to each committee member. The nomination note and the book may arrive separately—nominators or authors can contact the press directly to arrange delivery.

Awardees will be announced in Fall 2025.

Inquiries & Committee Member Mailing Address Requests:
MES Book Award Chair
Eda Pepi
eda.pepi@yale.edu

Committee Members:
Allison Mickel
Associate Professor, Lehigh University

Eda Pepi
Assistant Professor, Yale University

Nomi Stone
Assistant Professor, University of Texas at Dallas

Past MES Book Award Winners:
2023: Pinelandia: An Anthropology and Field Poetics of War and Empire, Nomi Stone
2021: Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine, Sophia Stamatopolou-Robbins
Sacrificial Limbs: Masculinity, Disability, and Political Violence in Turkey, Salih Can Açiksöz [Honorable Mention]
2019: Islands of Heritage: Conservation and Transformation in Yemen, Nathalie Peutz
Bureaucratic Intimacies: Translating Human Rights in Turkey, Elif Babül [Honorable Mention]
2017: The Pearl of Dari: Poetry and Personhood Among Young Persons in Iran, Zuzanna Olszewska
Sovereignty in Exile: A Saharan Liberation Movement Governs, Alice Wilson
2015: Refugees of the Revolution: Experiences of Palestinian Exile, Diana Allan

Distinguished Service Prize, Zeina Zaatari

We award the 2024 MES Distinguished Service prize to Zeina Zaatari, Director of the Arab American Cultural Center at the University of Illinois at Chicago for her extraordinarily generous and visionary service to the field of Middle East Anthropology: her institution-building at a time of emergency, her teaching and training of scholars over many years including through workshop organizing and public events programming, her caring mentoring of students at UIC and beyond, and her brave and pathbreaking scholarship on multifaceted women’s activism in Southern Lebanon. She is a founding and leading member of the Arab Families Working Group. She is President-Elect of the Association for Middle East Women’s Studies (AMEWS). Perhaps most importantly in this moment, she has built the ARABAMCC into an exemplary campus cultural center in the United States. Not only does it serve the needs of Arab and Muslim American students, but also it educates faculty, staff, students, and other local groups about the Middle East and its diasporas—a massive contribution that goes beyond the usual responsibilities of university cultural centers. It serves as a model for this urgent work for universities across the country. At a critical time for Arab American and Muslim students, Dr. Zaatari has been a life-changing mentor whose work addresses and embraces the tremendous diversity within our Arab and Muslim American communities. She is an “utterly committed” teacher, as one letter-writer remarked. In the last year, she has served as a kind of “first responder similar to COVID-19 medical first responders.” As another letter-writer said, “Zeina has worked non-stop to support our students and community, and to create a safe, welcoming, and comfortable place for Arabs, Muslims, and others to talk, process, and grieve.” We are proud to recognize Dr. Zaatari’s incredible work.

2024 MES Student Paper Award, Thayer Hastings 

We award the MES student paper prize to Thayer Hastings for “The Inheritances of Non-Citizenship: Immobility and the Family in the Bir Ona Borderland.” Drawing from a broader doctoral project, Hastings investigates the entrenched issue of non-citizenship among Palestinian residents of Jerusalem. The chapter vividly traces how this precarious status of exclusion and disenfranchisement is inherited across generations, leaving Palestinian families in a perpetual quest for the “center of life” criteria imposed by governing Israeli authorities. Bringing together political and legal anthropology with historical analysis, Hasting’s ethnography is attentive to the nuanced distinctions of non-citizenship, highlighting the specific repercussions of ‘statuslessness’ of Palestinians for whom this lack of personal status constitutes an immanent and everyday condition of statelessness, restricting access to healthcare, education, employment, and freedom of movement. Arriving at a critical time when the lethal consequences of non-citizenship for Palestinians are in full display worldwide, Hastings advances our understanding of statelessness, particularly Palestinian statelessness, as a global phenomenon. 

2024 MES Student Paper Award Honorable Mention, Leen Alfatafta

Our honorable mention goes to Leen Alfatafta for “Motherly Affects: Coming Together with Iman Mersal’s How to Mend: Motherhood and Its Ghosts.” Leen Alfatafta offers a well-crafted, theoretically sophisticated, and persuasively argued paper that examines the ways mothering/hood emerges as a “relationally dispossessive” practice in Iman Mersal’s How to Mend, challenging traditional binaries that limits prevailing understandings of what it means to be a mother. Informed by feminist studies, terrorism studies, and theories of embodiment and affect, Alfatafta reads Mersal’s work as an “archive of affect” deftly illustrating how the meaning of mothering/hood is not contained but is co-produced through the speculative, affective act of reading. While tracing this speculative exchange between the reader and the text, this paper also locates it within broader sociocultural histories and power structures such as capitalism, patriarchy, and racism. Ultimately, Alfatafta aims to shift the scholarly discussions from what mothering/hood is to what it might be(come). 

2024 MES Photography Prize, jointly to Shonara Awad, Oklahoma State University, and Hanan Awad

Our 2024 MES Photography Prize is awarded to Shonara Awad and Hanan Awad. We Shonara Awad and Hanan Awad’s photography captures the militarization of Palestinian life on an everyday basis in Israeli-occupied Hebron, and the tensions and fears that this creates for Palestinians of all ages. Nevertheless, Palestinians insist on praying, going to school, and moving through their own city. They also show us the complex visual textures of Hebron, including Palestinian vernacular architecture—old, new, and patched together—as well as the infrastructures of occupation as materially contested and critiqued through anti-apartheid graffiti.

Photographs should speak broadly to the idea of “Praxis,” the theme of the 2024 AAA conference.

Each submission can include 1-5 photos each with a caption (50-100 words) that explains the date, location, context, and the process through which the photograph was taken. Photos may be submitted as stand-alone images or a short image series meant to be viewed together (please specify). Submissions should be in jpg or tiff.

We encourage submissions from anthropologists and anthropologists-in-the-making, especially from the MENA region. Each person is limited to one submission of five photographs. We ask that those submitting be members of the Middle East Section, except for students, non-tenure track faculty or scholars in the Global South if membership imposes a significant hardship.

The winners will each receive a modest cash prize ($100). Their photos will be used on the MES AAA website and social media and will be credited each time they are used.

Please make your submission here by our final extended deadline of Monday, September 16, 2024: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeeipr9eqs8iIk_tpReMMhgihm_-b9LQXhwdbzTobLoO3rljA/viewform?usp=pp_url.

The undersigned sections of the American Anthropological Association (AAA), the largest professional association of anthropologists in the world, condemn Israel’s ongoing genocidal war against the Palestinian people, most visible in its unprecedented bombardment of Gaza since October 7, 2023. The International Court of Justice describes Israeli actions in Gaza as “capable of falling within the provisions of the [Genocide] Convention”. We join ever-growing calls for an immediate and permanent ceasefire. We feel a special obligation to stand with our sister organization, Insaniyyat, the Society of Palestinian Anthropologists, which is committed to “work[ing] against ongoing and various besiegements of occupation, corruption, and statelessness, to take a measure of responsibility for knowledge produced and disseminated about and in Palestine.” We stand with academics of Gaza, who call upon us to help them rebuild their universities and to resist scholasticide.

As of June 2024, the United Nations confirmed that Israel had killed more than 37,000 Palestinians, a number that keeps rising. About 10,000 more people are assumed dead under the rubble. The Israeli Army generates targets for killing, including by AI, without regard for civilian death. Wanton use of imprecise and massive munitions in densely populated areas, including 2000-pound bombs and chemical weapons, has led to the destruction of more than 70,000 homes. Recent horrors include bombing and setting fire to tents of Palestinians taking refuge in supposed “safe zones.” 1.7 million Palestinians out of Gaza’s pre-war population of 2.2 million people – the vast majority of whom are refugees who lost their homes in the 1948 Nakba and their descendants – have been internally displaced.

These horrors demand response from all educators. United Nations experts, building on the work of legal scholar Karma Nabulsi, have defined scholasticide as the “systemic obliteration of education through the arrest, detention or killing of teachers, students and staff, and the destruction of educational infrastructure.” Israel has destroyed all major universities in Gaza and devastated over 500 primary and secondary schools. Israel has killed more than 5,479 students, 261 teachers, and 95 university professors. It has wounded at least 7819 students and 765 teachers. All kinds of knowledge infrastructure are under attack. More than 100 journalists, frontline knowledge producers upon whom the world relies, have been killed.

As noted by the Brookings Institution, there is no safe place in Gaza. Endless siege, active destruction of aid, and intense military campaigns are matched by an escalating situation of “manufactured famine” at levels unseen “since the second world war.” Catastrophic levels of hunger now face more than one million Palestinians in Gaza. Meanwhile, 45% of Gaza’s agricultural land has been destroyed, making the restoration of food security difficult or even impossible. At the same time, Gaza’s health infrastructure has been destroyed: every hospital in Gaza has been impacted and close to 500 health workers have been killed by Israel.

Impacts of this war on Palestine extend far beyond Gaza. The forced displacement of Palestinians, especially in rural communities, has drastically accelerated since October 2023. This displacement is carried out through banal bureaucratic measures and coordinated settler/ military violence alike, in areas ranging from the West Bank to the Naqab/Negev. Carceral violence has intensified, stealing lives and destroying community safety. Queer people in Palestine struggle to be recognized and remembered in the context of annihilation, and women face massive reproductive violence. Palestinian scholars and students in Israel who are critical of the genocide have faced expulsion, censorship, and arrest. In all areas of historic Palestine, institutions of learning and scholarship, social infrastructure, and life itself are under attack.

With this statement, we join calls of the Middle East Studies Association (in November and March), the National Women’s Studies Association, the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, and the American Sociological Association for an immediate and permanent ceasefire. As subsections of an association of largely US-based anthropologists, we have a special responsibility to speak out. This aggression would be impossible without US diplomatic, economic, and military support. As subsections of an association of largely US-based American anthropologists, we condemn the funding and sanction of this genocide by the United States government.

Our discipline is deeply entangled with colonialism. Given that history, we have ethical and political commitments to amplifying the demands for freedom voiced by the historically disenfranchised peoples we work and live with, learn and come from. This ethical responsibility has long been recognized by the American Anthropological Association and its membership, including in the AAA’s 2020 Statement on Anthropology & Human Rights. It disturbs us that we must still insist that Palestinians include those to whom human rights “should be applied equally.” We agree that anthropologists have a special obligation to “inform the public in matters of human rights via specific guidelines and procedures approved by the Association.” We acknowledge the 2015 Task Force on AAA Engagement on Israel-Palestine’s Report to the Executive Board that reaffirmed “a commitment to human rights” and “a critical awareness of US complicity in the region” (viii). We recognize that on July 24 2023, 71% of those who voted in an AAA election supported an academic boycott of Israeli academic institutions because Israel “operates an apartheid regime from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, including the internationally recognized state of Israel, the Gaza Strip, and the West Bank” and because Israeli academic institutions are complicit in Israel’s oppressive regime. This resolution built on reports by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, B’Tselem, and the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Finally, we note that at the November 2023 AAA meetings in Toronto, attendees at the (non-quorum) AAA Business Meeting voted for this resolution calling for the AAA to explicitly support immediate ceasefire.

Across the United States and the world, our students have set up protest encampments to demand that their colleges and universities divest from Israeli companies as well as arms manufacturers who contribute directly and indirectly to the murder of civilians in Palestine. On several campuses, their demands for accountability from their own universities have been met with removal of financial aid, academic suspension, police brutality, and arrest. We note that Palestinian students and scholars in particular have faced surveillance, censorship, threats to employment, and violence. We support our students’ rights to speak up for these ethical demands that are in alignment with the values of our profession. We insist that their safety be ensured and their demands heard. As anthropologists and teachers, we note that a permanent ceasefire is a necessary first step towards a decolonized future that can be vibrant and safe for all.

Anthropologists have long documented the multifaceted violence and racism of settler colonialism in Palestine. As Francesca Albanese, Special Rapporteur of Human Rights in the Palestinian Territory said while presenting a report at the Human Rights Council in March of this year: “the genocide in Gaza is the most extreme stage of a long-standing settler colonial process of erasure of the native Palestinians.” Anthropologists have also shown how, over decades of dispossession and across geographies of steadfastness and dispersal, Palestinians support family and community members each day, uphold love and persistence each day, revitalize Palestinian lifeways and traditions each day, all on an unstoppable pathway towards liberation. A permanent ceasefire is a necessary first step towards a decolonized future that can be vibrant and safe for all.

Middle East Section Board

Association for Queer Anthropology Board

Society for Cultural Anthropology Board

Association of Indigenous Anthropologists Executive Board

Archaeology Division Executive Board

Association for the Anthropology of Policy Board

General Anthropology Division Board

Critical Urban Anthropology Association Board

Association of Black Anthropologists Executive Board

Society for the Anthropology of North America Executive Board

Association for Africanist Anthropology Board

Association for Political and Legal Anthropology, Board

Anthropology and Environment Society Board

This statement represents the view of the boards of the Sections listed above and should not be construed as representing the American Anthropological Association (AAA) as a whole. The AAA is a voluntary, non-profit, scholarly association with membership worldwide. It has diverse sections representing specialized interests within the field.