An ACOR Blog article by recent ACOR fellow Felicia De Peña on her research into stone tool making and experimental archaeology. Felicia was awarded the Kenneth W. Russell Fellowship (2017-2018). For years, I have been drawn to stone tools and the stories that they can tell us about our prehistoric ancestors; from subsistence strategies to…
Zachary Sheldon is a Ph.D. Candidate in Anthropology at the University of Chicago and an ACOR-CAORC Fellow in fall 2017. His research project is titled “Guests in the ‘Garden’: An Ethnography of the National Present among Iraqi Residents of Amman, Jordan” and it is an exploration of young Iraqis whose families left Iraq and have come…
Sarah Islam is a Ph.D. candidate in History at Princeton University and an ACOR-CAORC pre-doctoral fellow for 2015–2016. In order to complete her research project, which deals with the evolving historical discourse on blasphemy as an Islamic legal category, from the medieval period until the fall of the Ottoman Empire, Islam needed to painstakingly…
Susynne McElrone, a historian studying late-Ottoman Palestine, is interested in rural socioeconomic history, land tenure, and the implementation of property-tenure reforms following the promulgation of the 1858 Land Code. Significantly, Ottoman property-tenure reforms in the second half of the 19th century continue to influence land tenure in the Levant today. They institutionalized individually held, centrally…
Geoffrey Hughes is a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) fellow at ACOR and an anthropologist and lecturer at the London School of Economics. He is residing at ACOR during summer 2017 while he pursues his project entitled, “Nation and Agnation: Kinship, Conflict, and Social Control in Contemporary Jordan.” His essay below is a brief…
Ms. Vivian A. Laughlin is a Ph. D Candidate in the Institute of Archeology at Andrews University with a concentration in Ancient Near Eastern Archeology and Anthropology. She is the Bikai fellow at ACOR for 2017-2018. Her field research, entitled “Serapis in Hisban: A Historical Narrative of Enculturation of an Ancient Jordanian City,” deals with…
Dr. Geoffrey Hughes, a teaching fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the London School of Economics, is an NEH (National Endowment for the Humanities) fellow at ACOR for the summer of 2017. The project he is undertaking is titled “Nation and Agnation: Kinship, Conflict, and Social Control in Contemporary Jordan.” Through his project Dr….
Dr. Gary Rollefson, professor emeritus of Anthropology at Whitman College, is a 2017 National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) fellow at ACOR. Dr. Rollefson’s NEH Fellowship project, titled “Lithic Technologies and Social Identities: A Comparative Analysis of Chipped Stone Tool Production in Jordan’s Badia,” examines the stone tools associated with the remains of Neolithic houses…
Political scientist and ACOR-CAORC fellow Rana B. Khoury was in Jordan during fall 2016 researching networks of Syrian activists. She writes below about her research methodology. As researchers, we ask many questions related to the characteristics of populations. How many voters plan to go to the polls on election day? How satisfied are citizens with…
Recent ACOR-CAORC senior fellow Michael Perez writes below about his recent research on ex-Gaza refugees who are currently living without citizenship in Jordan. Dr. Perez is a professor of anthropology at the University of Washington in Seattle. The Gaza camp is unique in Jordan. Located just a few kilometers from the ancient ruins of Jarash, it…
Archaeologist and recent ACOR-CAORC Fellow Andrew M. Smith II writes below about his ongoing research at the important Nabataean-Roman site of Bir Madhkur in Jordan’s Wadi Araba and how USAID SCHEP has been supporting efforts to increase awareness of the site’s important remains. During my recent fellowship at ACOR, I was pursuing two interrelated and…
Sarah Islam is a Ph.D. candidate in the History department at Princeton University and a CAORC Fellow at ACOR in the fall of 2016. Her research project, “The Evolution of Blasphemy as Legal Category in Medieval Islamic History,” examines how interpretations of blasphemy—known as sabb— in Islam have varied based on time period, geography and…
Brittany Barrineau is a Ph.D. candidate in Geography at the University of Kentucky and an ACOR-CAORC Fellow in the fall of 2016. Her research project, “Exporting Heritage and Highlighting Politics: Extra Virgin Olive Oil Production in Jordan,” examines how state power, international geopolitics and place based identities converge in the complex relationship between farmers, their…
Dr. Michael Vincente Perez is a professor of anthropology at the University of Washington in Seattle and in the fall of 2016 he is an ACOR-CAORC Senior Fellow. His research project, titled “Surviving Statelessness: Gaza Refugees and the Politics of Living in Jordan,” is focused on the community of Gaza refugees and their descendants in…
How do regular people respond and adapt to “major structural changes that upend normal social processes?” This question is at the heart of Rana B. Khoury’s work, which explores the new “normal” that civilians in Syria have created in response to the Syrian civil war. Inspired to “tell the stories of individuals and communities experiencing…