Cultural Identity and Social Change: An Anthropological Study of Contemporary Arab Communities
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.59675/S416Keywords:
Arab cultural identity, cultural anthropology, social change, transnationalism, diaspora studies.Abstract
In the diasporic age, Arab communities face double-bind situations as they engage in the process of globalization, digital modernity, political revolution and transnational mobility, and yet simultaneously remain much attached to religious practice, kinship relations, and language. This article is an anthropological ethnographic study of cultural identity formation and social change in three aspects of Arab community life: the urban youth identity in transition, the renegotiation of gender roles in post-uprising societies, and the experiences of the diasporic community of Arab identity outside the Arab world. The article builds on theories from cultural anthropology, postcolonial studies and the anthropology of Islam to position the concept of Arab cultural identity as a negotiated and internally contested, dynamic and context-sensitive construction that is neither a static legacy from the past nor a casualty of modernity as described by Orientalist conceptions of reduction and uncritical modernization discourses. The ethnographic fieldwork, carried out in the field in Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Morocco and in the Arab diasporic communities in Europe and North America from 2018 to 2024, is combined with secondary scholarship to describe the major lines through which contemporary identity negotiation takes place. The article joins a new body of literature that focuses on Arab agency, heterogeneity, and reflexivity in articulations of cultural change, which foregrounds Arab communities as active agents in their social transformation rather than objects of outside forces.
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