{"id":102737,"date":"2016-08-12T09:42:50","date_gmt":"2016-08-12T13:42:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/?p=102737"},"modified":"2024-07-01T15:57:01","modified_gmt":"2024-07-01T19:57:01","slug":"qa-with-a-new-book-loring-danforth-tries-to-prove-worthy-of-his-short-term-to-saudi-arabia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/2016\/08\/12\/qa-with-a-new-book-loring-danforth-tries-to-prove-worthy-of-his-short-term-to-saudi-arabia\/","title":{"rendered":"Q&A: Based on a Short Term to Saudi Arabia, Loring Danforth’s new book challenges ‘destructive’ Orientalism"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"<\/a>

A member of the Bates faculty since 1978, Dana Professor of Anthropology Loring Danforth has published Crossing the Kingdom: Portraits of Saudi Arabia<\/em>, based on the Short Term he led to that country in 2012. (Phyllis Graber Jensen\/Bates College)<\/p><\/div>\n

Five years ago, a Bates student made Dana Professor of Anthropology Loring Danforth an offer he couldn\u2019t refuse: Would he be interested in leading a Short Term course to Saudi Arabia?<\/p>\n

\u201cI was stunned,\u201d recalls Danforth.<\/p>\n

Few people get to visit Saudi Arabia, let alone study there. For one, the country does not issue tourist visas, the Lonely Planet<\/em> calling it \u201cone of the most difficult places on Earth to visit.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Crossing the Kingdom: Portraits of Saudi Arabia<\/em> challenges \u201cdestructive Orientalist stereotypes of Saudi Arabia,” says Dana Professor of Anthropology Loring Danforth.<\/p><\/div>\n

Meanwhile, the U.S. State Department routinely warns visitors of the \u201congoing security threat due to the continued presence of terrorist groups.\u201d<\/p>\n

Against that backdrop, the Bates trip to Saudi Arabia that Danforth and his 16 students took in the spring of 2012 enjoyed amazing access facilitated by the student who made the offer to Danforth, Leena Nasser \u201912, a politics major from Dhahran, whose father works for a multinational corporation in Saudi Arabia.<\/p>\n

The Bates group got to visit with academic and religious leaders; journalists, artists, and human rights activists; and top-level executives with the national oil company, Saudi Aramco.<\/p>\n

A few weeks after the trip, the school year was over, and Danforth was poised to embark on a sabbatical-year research project in Greece, a country whose culture and history had yielded four scholarly books over Danforth\u2019s career.<\/p>\n

But as he tried to start his intended project \u2014 studying a transborder national park in northern Greece \u2014 he felt a professional calling to “prove worthy\u201d of the \u201cpriceless gift\u201d of the experience in Saudi Arabia.<\/p>\n

So he wrote a book, C<\/em>rossing the Kingdom: Portraits of Saudi Arabia <\/em>(University of California Press, 2016), a collection of essays on Saudi topics with chapter titles such as \u201cRoads of Arabia: Archaeology in Service to the Kingdom,\u201d \u201cDriving While Female: Protesting the Ban on Women Driving,\u201d and \u201cSaudi Modern: Art on the Edge.\u201d<\/p>\n

(In fact, Danforth is using his experience with Saudi modern art to co-curate, with director Dan Mills, the exhibition Phantom Punch<\/em><\/a>, opening at the Bates Museum of Art in October.)<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s what Danforth said about a book whose major goal is to challenge \u201cdestructive Orientalist stereotypes of Saudi Arabia by offering alternative images of its people, their society, and their culture.\u201d<\/p>\n

Who should read this book?<\/h5>\n

Everybody who is interested in Islam. Everybody who is interested in the Near East. Everybody who is interested in Saudi Arabia and the Arabian Peninsula.<\/p>\n

As you put off the Greek project to write this book, who was your sounding board?<\/h5>\n

Nobody. We had just gotten back from Saudi Arabia. There was graduation, and I\u2019d moved over to Frye Street, where my office would be for my sabbatical. I\u2019m thinking, \u201cOkay, now I can start working\u201d on the Greek project. But the Saudi stuff was just so fresh and interesting.<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t fully understand it. I couldn\u2019t process it. And I felt it was so valuable and interesting that I couldn\u2019t let it go. So I figured, \u201cOkay I\u2019ll try to write a New Yorker<\/em>-style article. I started one and finished it. Then wrote another. Then I thought, \u201cMaybe I have a book.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is not a traditional academic monograph. When I spoke to a publisher about it, I said, \u201cIt\u2019s a good thing I didn\u2019t need this book to get tenure.\u201d And he said, \u201cIf you\u2019d needed this book to get tenure you wouldn\u2019t have written it.\u201d Which is unfortunately true, in a way.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a line in your introduction that says, \u201cAs an anthropologist, I felt an obligation to prove worthy of this opportunity.\u201d Why the qualifier \u201cas an anthropologist?\u201d<\/h5>\n

The experience was so quintessentially anthropological: where you go to another culture and you\u2019re talking to people and learning about their culture.<\/p>\n

One of the reviewers said, basically, \u201cYou think you can visit Saudi Arabia for a month and write a book?\u201d But that\u2019s what a writer like Jane Kramer of The New Yorker<\/em> does. She once visited Greece for a week, wrote an article for The New Yorker, <\/em>and it was very good. She got it.<\/p>\n

The issue is not how much time you spend in a country. It\u2019s the quality of what you have to say.<\/p>\n

What was it like being a teacher, a Bates representative, and a researcher all in a single trip?<\/h5>\n

I was most aware of juggling all those roles when we walked into an government office, say the Ministry of Education, and it was my job to hand out some Bates gear and say, \u201cHere we are from Bates, and it\u2019s a pleasure to be here.\u201d<\/p>\n

The students were watching me, and I was modeling diplomacy. But I wanted to give them the opportunity to ask questions. And I had questions myself.<\/p>\n

I am a better teacher because I am a scholar. But the reverse is not always true.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It was just an unbelievable experience, shifting from spending an hour talking with students in the evening about what we learned, then going back to my room and scribbling notes myself.<\/p>\n

I would try to get them to take notes at the level at which I did. They\u2019d ask, \u201cDo we have to write all the time?\u201d And I\u2019d say, \u201cYes, you have to write all the time.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"140916_Danforth_0090\"<\/a>

“For 40 years I\u2019ve been totally committed to the balance of teaching and scholarship that exists at Bates,” says Dana Professor of Anthropology Loring Danforth. Still, he says, there’s a tension between the two. (Phyllis Graber Jensen\/Bates College)<\/p><\/div>\n

We say that teaching and research are in balance at Bates. But in terms of your experience in Saudi Arabia, were they integrated?<\/h5>\n

For 40 years I\u2019ve been totally committed to the balance of teaching and scholarship that exists at Bates. But often at an individual level, hour by hour and week by week, there\u2019s a tension between the two.<\/p>\n

I am a better teacher because I am a scholar. But the reverse is not always true. I can\u2019t take Bates students to Greece \u2014 my research is just not set up to have students next to me as I\u2019m trying to establish rapport with an elderly Greek woman.<\/p>\n

But the Saudi Arabia trip was a total synthesis of the two, where I was there with 16 students teaching a course, and that experience was also giving me a chance to do fieldwork.<\/p>\n

You said your skills as an ethnographer and writer allow you to share new insights in the Saudi culture. What are the skills?<\/h5>\n

Part of doing fieldwork \u2014 interviewing people and observing things \u2014 is just raw commitment. Everything that happens and everything people say, you just write it down as carefully and as fully and as accurately as you can.<\/p>\n

Another really important part of it is an eye for detail. In a hotel, I saw a laundry slip that had the most amazing list of the kinds of clothing worn by the people who stayed there \u2014 from 1950s American styles to South Asian clothes to Arab clothes, and I just said to myself, \u201cThe whole world is in this list.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s the ability to notice things that are revealing and interesting.<\/p>\n

You quote anthropologist Clifford Geertz, who said that good interpretive anthropology means making \u201csmall facts speak to large issues.\u201d Isn\u2019t there a chance that a broad judgment extrapolated from small facts can be quite wrong?<\/h5>\n

Yes. An Orientalist could take a concrete fact, that 15 of the 19 terrorists on 9\/11 were from Saudi Arabia, and go off and say it\u2019s an evil country. Being concrete doesn\u2019t necessarily lead to avoiding negative generalizations.<\/p>\n

\"During<\/a>

During the 2012 Short Term to Saudi Arabia, anthropology major Devin Tatro ’14 talks with Saudi men during an outing to a desert farm in the Eastern Province. At the gathering, the Bates women got permission not to wear their abayas. (Photograph by Ana Bisaillon \u201912)<\/p><\/div>\n

Whatever issue you are trying to speak to, you can find examples that support it and you can find examples that don\u2019t support it. Either way, you need the ability to maintain that the complexity of the world throughout your interpretation.<\/p>\n

Geertz uses the phrase \u201cthick description\u201d to describe this kind of interpretive anthropology. For example, you might ask, \u201cWhat\u2019s the point of Hamlet<\/em>?\u201d Well, it has lots of points, and to make sense of it as a whole means I have to show you the complexity, depth, and meaning of the text.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s true whether it\u2019s the text of Hamlet<\/em> or a Greek ritual. The situation at hand is always more complex than people think. And often that\u2019s what good anthropology ends up arguing.<\/p>\n

How did your group park their Western perspectives when looking at Saudi Arabia?<\/h5>\n

Well, our group wasn\u2019t all Western. We had students from Lithuania, Nepal, China, as well as Saudi Arabia itself.<\/p>\n

We were in a hotel and some Chinese businessmen arrived. I said to the Chinese student, \u201cWhy don\u2019t you talk to them?\u201d She said, \u201cIn China, you can\u2019t just go up and start talking to people.\u201d I said, \u201cWe\u2019re not in China. Go talk to them.\u201d<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s totally accurate that we have assumptions that come from our own cultural background, and we have to bracket those, put those aside, and then decide whether they\u2019re relevant.<\/p>\n

We had an encounter with a Saudi woman who argued that homosexuality is evil. Sodom and Gomorrah being buried in lava showed that God punished homosexuality.<\/p>\n

My feeling is that if you aren\u2019t going to talk to people that you disagree with, then you might just as well stay home.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Our students \u2014 one with two mothers and another whose uncle is gay and had just adopted a child with his partner \u2014 were just shaking listening to this stuff. In that situation, do you say, \u201cOh, homophobia. Gee, how interesting\u201d? Or do you say, \u201cI disagree with that\u201d?<\/p>\n

The students expressed their disagreement politely and respectfully. One was in tears afterwards, fearing she\u2019d insulted the woman. I said, \u201cNo, you spoke up and expressed your opinion.\u201d<\/p>\n

My feeling is that if you aren\u2019t going to talk to people that you disagree with, then you might just as well stay home. But it\u2019s a challenge to navigate this path, when to be relativistic and when to say, \u201cThis is not how I would want my country run.\u201d<\/p>\n

You describe how you feel when you experience a new culture, calling it almost like a secular conversion experience. Is it what the Greek philosophers might\u2019ve called enthusiasmos<\/em>?<\/h5>\n

Enthusiasmos<\/em>: \u201cGod in you.\u201d Like spirit possession. Yes. It\u2019s a motivator. You have this overwhelmingly powerful experience \u2014 what are you going to do with it? You can\u2019t just forget about it or let it pass or ignore it. You want to do something worthwhile with it or share it.<\/p>\n

In a note to your students at the end of the course, you said the experience in Saudi Arabia might prove to be \u201cineffable\u201d \u2014 inexpressible.<\/h5>\n

I told them that they do not have<\/em> to be able to share the experience. A transcendent, ineffable experience can enrich your life. I told them to hold on to it as long as they can.<\/p>\n

\"During<\/a>

During the 2012 Short Term to Saudi Arabia, a group of Saudi boys cavort for the camera during a desert outing to the Eastern Province. (Photograph by Gintare Balseviciute \u201913)<\/p><\/div>\n

It\u2019s really hard to share such an experience with somebody who wasn\u2019t there. People are going to say, \u201cHow was Saudi Arabia?\u201d And you\u2019re going to want to talk for an hour, and they\u2019re going to say, \u201cSo what happened at the faculty meeting yesterday?\u201d<\/p>\n

But from a teaching perspective, you do want your students to be able to communicate what they experienced, right?<\/h5>\n

Yes, and there are good ways to do it. Theses, presentations, and talking to your friends are all ways to try to keep it alive. You just have to work hard to find people who have a genuine interest.<\/p>\n

Bates does a good job at giving students a serious chance to communicate their abroad experiences, whether formally through thesis and coursework or informally through continued get-togethers between faculty and students. Until the students on the trip all graduated, we had dinner once a month, if only so they could say, \u201cWow, remember when we did that?\u201d<\/p>\n

We talk about purposeful work at Bates. An anthropological experience like this can inspire you to commit yourself long-term to helping people understand Islam or helping people understand the Near East or working for peace in the Near East. And several students on the trip have done so.<\/p>\n

How does the book reflect what it was like watching your students experience Saudi Arabia?<\/h5>\n

That was a struggle because I didn\u2019t want it to be a book about \u201cOur Trip to Saudi Arabia,\u201d or \u201cthis is what it\u2019s like to travel with a group of students to Saudi Arabia.\u201d I had no desire to write that kind of book.<\/p>\n

But the last chapter, \u201cWho Can Go to Mecca?\u201d has a section about a dilemma that arose during the trip.<\/p>\n

We had met Dr. Sami Angawi, an inspiring religious leader. I think of him as a Muslim Quaker or a Muslim Unitarian Universalist, a concept I didn\u2019t think could exist, but I was wrong. He told me that he\u2019d be happy to arrange for me to visit Mecca. I said that I wasn\u2019t a Muslim. He said, \u201cThat\u2019s between you and God. If you\u2019d like to go to Mecca, I can arrange it.\u201d I said, \u201cThank you but I don\u2019t think that would be appropriate.\u201d<\/p>\n

But some of the students saw him the next day. Afterward they told me that they were going to go to Mecca.<\/p>\n

I said, \u201cBut you\u2019re not Muslim.\u201d They said, \u201cThat doesn\u2019t matter.\u201d I said, \u201cOh, yes, it does,\u201d and they said that Dr. Angawi was going to arrange it.<\/p>\n

It turned out that they were planning to go to the Islamic Education Foundation in Jeddah and sign a statement that would make it possible for them to go to Mecca. I asked about the statement, which, it turned out, was the Shahada, the Muslim declaration of faith: \u201cThere is no God but God, and Muhammad is his messenger.\u201d<\/p>\n

I had individual meetings with two of the three and said, \u201cAre you really going to convert to Islam?\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So I said, \u201cYou\u2019re going to convert to Islam?\u201d No, they told me. \u201cWe\u2019re just going to say<\/em> that and then go to Mecca. I said, \u201cWell, you are<\/em> going to convert to Islam. Do you really want to convert to Islam?\u201d<\/p>\n

I asked our hosts, and I asked people at Bates: \u201cWhat should I do?\u201d I was responsible for their safety. I didn\u2019t feel I could just say to them, \u201cYou can\u2019t convert to Islam.\u201d But I wanted them to know that was what they were doing. So I had individual meetings with two of the three and said, \u201cAre you really going to convert to Islam?\u201d The details are in the book, but it was really uncomfortable and painful and awkward, and they were angry at me.<\/p>\n

Ultimately, I didn\u2019t say, \u201cYou can\u2019t go.\u201d I said, \u201cIf you do this you\u2019re converting to Islam, at least as I understand it.\u201d And I said that if they went to Mecca and missed the plane \u2014 this was the last day of the trip \u2014 they were on their own. In the end, for a combination of reasons, they didn\u2019t go.<\/p>\n

To me that was really interesting. I was taking a harder line than Dr. Angawi\u2019s more inclusive approach. I was defending the Saudi government\u2019s position that only Muslims can go to Mecca, which is a position I don\u2019t agree with individually.<\/p>\n

When you challenged the students, were you challenging them as their teacher, as a researcher, as the leader of a Bates contingent in country?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Not as a researcher, no. It was as a teacher in the broadest sense, and as a Bates official in a narrower sense. I didn\u2019t want an article in The New York Times<\/em> about some Bates students arrested for going to Mecca.<\/p>\n

What I was more focused on, and what I was taking really seriously, was what the right thing to do was morally. And I had a firm belief that from my perspective it was morally wrong for them to go to Mecca.<\/p>\n

As a teacher, are you teaching morals?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I was teaching the issues that came out of that dilemma, which were directly related to the question of what it means to convert.<\/p>\n

As a teacher and Bates official, I decided that it was not my position to forbid them from converting to Islam. But I wanted them to know that in my opinion they were really converting to Islam. They needed to think seriously about it, and if they wanted to read and study the Qur\u2019an for a couple years, then convert, and then<\/em> go to Mecca, that made perfect sense.<\/p>\n

But if they want to go to Mecca now because they think they might maybe think about becoming a Muslim \u2014 it just struck me as irresponsible.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Danforth’s new book, Crossing the Kingdom<\/em>, is based on his 2012 Short Term that enjoyed amazing access inside Saudi Arabia.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":104,"featured_media":102742,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_hide_ai_chatbot":false,"_ai_chatbot_style":"","associated_faculty":[],"_Page_Specific_Css":"","_bates_restrict_mod":false,"_table_of_contents_display":false,"_table_of_contents_location":"","_table_of_contents_disableSticky":false,"_is_featured":false,"footnotes":"","_bates_seo_meta_description":"","_bates_seo_block_robots":false,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_id":0,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_twitter_id":0,"_bates_seo_share_title":"","_bates_seo_canonical_overwrite":"","_bates_seo_twitter_template":""},"categories":[4,224,11012],"tags":[12356,5395,9798,10845],"class_list":["post-102737","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-academic-life","category-society-culture","category-student-life","tag-center-for-purposeful-work","tag-loring-danforth","tag-saudi-arabia","tag-short-term"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102737","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/104"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=102737"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102737\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":102770,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102737\/revisions\/102770"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/102742"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=102737"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=102737"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=102737"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}