This session of the American Anthropological Association annual meeting will present current ethnography with basis in historical consideration of concepts of race in the Arab and Muslim Worlds including Turkey, Iran, and Central Asia. Apart from some scant attention to slave descendants as a social category, the salience of the category of race as a form of social classification and/or self-identification remains largely unexamined in Middle East anthropology. Wide denials of the existence of "racism" in Middle Eastern societies belie the impact of nineteenth and twentieth century racialist discourses from the biological and social sciences leading to the equation of biological race with culture and social status along with standards of beauty valuing lightness. While everyday evaluations of beauty often hinge on racialized preferences for lightness against darkness in appearance, popular music of the Arab World for example at the same time extols samara, or the dark beauty.

Approaching how Middle East ethnography has dealt with discourses of race and ethnicity, three main issues emerge. First, the problematic relationship between social science categories applied by scholars in the region and indigenous forms of social and cultural identification; second, defining the relationship between terms such as race and ethnicity and the multiplicity of referents attached to them such as language, religion, region, sect, etc., along with variables of number, power, and status (majority vs. minority); and third, how the colonial and national contexts within which such contested categories are situated affect both self-identification and research.

The impact of colonialism and European racialist systems provides the most fertile grounds for examining colonial categories and their interaction with local categories of stratification and nationalists struggles, influenced by religion and class structures and hierarchies. This session invites submissions examining such issues and more. Questions may include for example: