Daniel Martin Varisco

Education and academic history

Varisco attended Wheaton College (Illinois), where he majored in Biblical Archaeology under the advisement of Prof. Al Hoerth. At the University of Pennsylvania he obtained his Ph.D. in 1982: "The Adaptive Dynamics of Water Allocation in al-Ahjur, Yemen Arab Republic," the result of ethnographic fieldwork during 1978-79 in a central highland valley of the Yemen Arab Republic on the ecology of irrigation and water resource use. He also received an M.A. in Anthropology in 1975 on the topic of "Archaeology as Apologetic: Towards an Understanding of the Fundamentalist Paradigm." In 1990-91 he was Visiting Assistant Professor in Anthropology at SUNY Stony Brook. He began his career at Hofstra University in 1991, becoming Chair of Anthropology in 2003 and Professor of Anthropology in 2004.

In 2003 he became director of Hofstra's Middle Eastern and Central Asian Program. He has served on the boards of the American Institute for Yemeni Studies and the American Academic Research Institute in Iraq, also serving as President of the Middle East Section of the American Anthropological Association (2002–2004). Varisco is the recipient of the NDFL for Arabic, as well as grants from the American Research Center in Egypt, NEH and Fulbright fellowships. He has been editor of Yemen Update (1991–2001), CyberOrient (2006–present) and co-editor of Contemporary Islam (2006–present).

Yemen

Varisco arrived in Yemen in early 1978 to begin 18 months of ethnographic and ecological research in the highland valley of al-Ahjur along with fellow anthropologist and wife, Najwa Adra. The focus of his field research was on local water rights in the springfed irrigation system in relation to the local environmental constraints and principles of Islamic water law. In the field he became particularly interested in the history of Yemen's agriculture, especially after reading a 14th-century copy of a treatise on Rasulid Yemen agriculture by al-Malik al-Afdal al-'Abbas. After finishing his thesis and returning several times to Yemen as a development consultant, his work with Prof. David A. King on an NEH-sponsored project on Islamic Folk Astronomy took him back to Yemen to work on the 13th century almanac of al-Malik al-Ashraf 'Umar, which he edited and translated in 1994. Involved with the American Institute for Yemeni Studies since its inception in 1977, Varisco has spoken at the institute on a number of research topics, as well as lectures in Arabic at Sanaa University, the Yemen Center for Research and Studies and Yemen's Ministry of Agriculture. In addition to his field research and examination of Yemeni agricultural texts, he has published on the social history of qât and coffee in Yemen, the tribal concept, the rhino horn issue, folk literature, land use, folk astronomy, indigenous plant protection methods, sailing seasons out of Aden, and the ethnography of Yemen. In 2014 he was elected President of the American Institute for Yemeni Studies and maintains the AIYS blog (aiys.org/blog). With historian G. Rex Smith, he published a facsimile edition of The Manuscript of al-Malik al-Afdal: al-'Abbâs b. 'Alî Dâwud b. Yûsuf b. 'Umar b. 'Alî Ibn Rasûl (d. 778/1377): A Medieval Arabic Anthology from the Yemen (1998) for the Gibb Memorial Trust.

Islamic Sciences

Varisco has conducted manuscript research in Egypt's Dar al-Kutub, Sanaa's Great Mosque Western Library, Istanbul's Topkapi Ahmet III Library and Süleymaniye Library and Qatar's National Library on the history of Islamic agriculture, almanacs, astronomy, astrology and medicine. Based on primary research in Cairo, he published "The Origin of the Anwa' in Arab Tradition" in Studia Islamica (74:5-28, 1991), presenting the theory that the origin of the lunar station (manazil al-qamar) concept in Arab tradition was an Islamic mixing of the zodiacal grid from India with indigenous pre-Islamic Arab folk calendars and that the system of 28 distinct markers did not exist in Arabia prior to Islam, despite the claims of later Muslim scholars. The bulk of Varisco's textual analysis has been on agricultural texts and almanacs, especially for Yemen.

Anthropology of Islam

Varisco's Islam Obscured: The Rhetoric of Anthropological Representation (2005) builds on the earlier work of Abdel Hamid El-Zein and Talal Asad in addressing the issue of what defines an anthropology of Islam. This is an extended critical assessment of four seminal studies: Clifford Geertz (1968) Islam Observed; Ernest Gellner (1981) Muslim Society; Fatema Mernissi (1987/1975) Beyond the Veil; Akbar Ahmed (1988) Discovering Islam. The book examines Islam Observed in the light criticism of Geertz’s approach to the anthropology of religion as a cultural system. It is argued that Geertz reflects philosophical reflections on Islam rather than his ethnographic observation of Muslims in Indonesia and Morocco. Gellner’s use of Hume, Weber and Ibn Khaldun to explain the development of Islam is addressed by going back to these original sources. Varisco states that the authority of Gellner and Geertz as ethnographers who have "been there" supersedes incorporation of ethnographic data about real Muslims. Mernissi’s Beyond the Veil is compared with early Orientalist and Arabic texts by tracing how each discusses the case of Muhammad’s marriage to his adopted son’s wife, Zaynab, a popular trope in Christian apologetic criticism of Islam in the medieval period. Like Geertz and Gellner, Mernissi is said to contribute to an essentialized ideal of Islam in which homogenized generalities substitute for the diverse behavior of Muslims in specific localities. Varisco address the problematic of the faith-based anthropology of Akbar Ahmed, specifically his concept of an "Islamic" anthropology. The book's epilogue builds on what anthropologists have learned in the past half century by observing Muslims; following the textual critique this is offered as a prolegomenon to future anthropological study within Islamic contexts and more effective sharing of ethnographic analysis with scholars outside the discipline. In addition, Varisco has argued that the term "medieval" should never be used in reference to Islam (Medieval Encounters, 2007) and that the term "Islamism" should be avoided as a successor to "Islamic fundamentalism" or "Political Islam" (in a forthcoming volume edited by Richard Martin).

Middle East Ethnography

Varisco has published the results of his own ethnographic observations in Yemen and reviewed many of the published ethnographies on Yemen. In his "Reflections on Fieldwork in Yemen: The Genealogy of a Diary in Response to Rabinow's Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco," (Anthropology of the Middle East, 2006) he compares and contrasts his personal field diary, written in 1978-79, with Paul Rabinow's Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco (1977). The underlying question is what post-fieldwork reflections reflect meaningfully about the immediacy of ethnographic fieldwork. Point by point, Varisco examines the implications of graduate training in anthropology, culture shock, health problems, language skills and the rhetoric of narrative writing.

Orientalism

In Reading Orientalism: Said and the Unsaid (2007) Varisco presents an in-depth, critical analysis of Edward Said’s seminal polemic Orientalism (1978), examining his rhetoric of persuasion as well as the credibility and accuracy of historical claims made in representing Orientalism as a Western discourse. The research for this study includes a comprehensive search for all the major reviews of Orientalism and relevant commentaries in journal articles, books and edited volumes. The bibliography contains more than 600 references, all but a handful of which were personally examined by the author. Drawing on this extensive discussion of Orientalism, he develops a synthesis of the critical arguments pro and contra Said’s argument and style. The points made in Orientalism are contextualized with earlier and later texts written by Said, as well as his many published interviews. Varisco provides a critical analysis of Said's borrowing of the culture concept from Matthew Arnold and his lack of engagement with the variety of culture concepts current in anthropology since Edward Tylor in his "Reading Against Culture in Edward Said's Culture and Imperialism" (Culture, Theory and Critique, 2004).

Internet and CyberOrient

In 2006 Varisco launched CyberOrient, an online journal devoted to representation of Islam and the Middle East in cyberspace and the impact of the Internet. This is sponsored by the Middle East Section of the American Anthropological Association. In 2002 he published "September 11: Participant Webservation of the 'War on Terrorism,'" (American Anthropologist, 2002), which provides analysis of the coverage of 9/11 on the Internet, including "participant webservation" of online video games involving Osama Bin Laden. In "Virtual Dasein: Ethnography in Cyberspace" (CyberOrient, 2007) Varisco suggests that one way of approaching the ethnography of cyberspace is to treat it as virtual Dasein, in which the issue becomes being there in something-like-a-world yet still being in the world. Ethnographers now need to consider the impact of the Internet on the people they study, even in the remotest villages. Their involvement with the Internet demands a reflexivity that goes beyond musing over the mutant prospect of becoming cyborgs to assessing an evolving recombination of humans, technology and information.

Experience in International Development

Since 1981, Varisco has participated in development projects as a consultant in Yemen (18 assignments), Egypt, Guatemala, and the Dominican Republic, serving as a Team Leader on several projects. The range of issues covered in these assignments include: Agricultural Sector Analysis, Biodiversity and Environmental Impact Assessment, Community Participation, Evaluation, Household Survey, Integrated Pest Management, Irrigation, Participant Training, Participatory Rural Assessment, Project Design, Resettlement issues, Scoping, Social Soundness Analysis, Sustainable Livelihoods Analysis, and Water Supply and Sanitation.

Tabsir: Insight on Islam and the Middle East

This academic blog, created by Varisco in 2006, includes a dozen scholars concerned about stereotypes, misinformation and propaganda spread in the media and academic forums on Islam and the Middle East. The scholars involved are committed to fair, open-ended scholarly assessment of the current political issues of terrorism, gender inequality and intolerance. They also believe in active involvement as public intellectuals communicating the best of available research. The current writers include Jon Anderson, Magnus Bernhardsson, miriam cooke, El Sayed El Aswad, George el-Hage, McGuire Gibson, Amir Hussain, Bruce Lawrence, Ronald Lukens-Bull, Gabriele Marranci, Gregory Starrett and Daniel Martin Varisco.