Revolution, Occupation, and Love: The 2011 Year in Cultural Anthropology

  What does anthropology have to offer for making sense of the events that have come to be known as the “Arab Spring”? In this article, I use this question to organize my discussion of the prominent scholarly conversations occurring in cultural anthropology for the year 2011. The topics I consider in this review are the critical study of secularism and liberalism; affect, intimacy, and care as registers of politics and economy; space, place, and time; and indigeneity. I will suggest that last year's publications, while by no means anticipating such revolutionary transformations, do offer us a rich body of conceptual approaches and methodological innovations for productively engaging the emergent conceptual and worldly horizons being associated with the “Arab Spring.”[ secularism and liberalism, affect, place, indigeneity, Arab Spring ]