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Lois Beck

URL: http://news-info.wustl.edu/sb/page/normal/490.html

Media Assistance:

Neil Schoenherr
News Writer; Assoc. Record Editor
nschoenherr@wustl.edu
(314) 935-5235

Professor of Sociocultural Anthropology in Arts and Sciences

Expertise: Qashqa'i nomadic pastoralists, Iran, Islam, political anthropology, history, tribe-state relations, gender, Middle-East, Europe, United States, Iranian society, Islamic Republic, nomads, social change, Muslim, anthropology of gender, women and Islam

Bio: Beck conducts anthropological field research among Qashqa'i nomadic pastoralists in Iran, and combines the results of this research with her on-going historical study of the Qashqa'i tribal confederacy as it emerged and has changed during the past two centuries. In addition to using archival sources, she especially relies on her collection of oral histories from Qashqa'i people in Iran and in exile in Europe and the United States. As part of her research in Europe in the past seven summers, she has interviewed members of the Qashqa'i tribal elite in exile. They discuss Qashqa'i history and especially the participation of these elite in the rapidly changing political climate in Iran. In 1995, 1996, and 1997 she continued her research in Iran among Qashqa'i nomadic pastoralists in their winter and summer pastures. She is currently revising a previously published book on Qashqa'i history and is writing several new books, one on tribal politics and another on the strategies of nomads in the postrevolutionary period. Partly because only several Americans have been allowed to conduct research in Iran since the revolution in 1979, she also writes about changes in Iranian society in general, particularly the rural sector and the role of women in the Islamic Republic.

WUSTL Contact Information:
Work:(314) 935-5290
Fax:(314) 935-8535
E-mail:lbeck@wustl.edu
Address:Campus Box 1114
One Brookings Drive
St. Louis, MO 63130

Education:

Additional Background: Beck offers the following description of her research interests (downloaded from her Web page 10/03):

The research foci of students whom I assist include: Islam and politics, ecological adaptations among nomads and settlers in eastern Iran, and the implications of the introduction of formal education for Qashqa'i nomads. The graduate student who recently conducted research in Iran on formal education was funded by research grants from NSF, the Social Science Research Council, and Sigma Xi.

I am part of the Center for the Study Islamic Societies and Civilizations, a diverse group of people in many disciplines.

My courses include political anthropology, social change, Islam and politics, peoples and cultures of the Middle East, ethnicity and religion in the Muslim world, and the anthropology of gender. In my favorite course, writing culture, students do short-term ethnographic research projects in St. Louis and experiment with different ways of writing about their observations.

Courses

Islam and Politics, Political Anthropology, Social Change, Ethnicity & Religion in the Muslim World, Women and Islam, Writing Culture

Selected Publications

Beck, Lois and Nikki Keddie, eds.

1978 Women in the Muslim World. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Beck,Lois

1986 The Qashqa'i of Iran. New Haven: Yale University Press.

1990 Tribes and the State in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-century Iran. In Tribes and State Formation in the Middle East. Philip Khoury and J. Kostiner, eds. Berkeley: University of California Press.

1991 Nomad: A Year in the Life of a Qashqa'i Tribesman in Iran. Berkeley: University of California Press; London: I. B. Tauris.

1993 Rostam: Qashqa'i Rebel. In Struggle and Survival in the Modern Middle East. Edmund Burke, ed. Berkeley: University of California Press.

1998 Use of Land by Nomadic Pastoralists in Iran, 1970-1998. In Bulletin of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies 103: 58-80.

2000 Local Histories: A Longitudinal Study of a Qashqa'i Subtribe in Iran. In Iran and Beyond: Essays in Middle Eastern History in Honor of Nikki R. Keddie, Rudi Matthee and Beth Baron, eds. Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers. Pp. 262-288.


Related Information


Related Links:
•Department of Anthropolgy Web site (http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~anthro/)
•Beck's Web site (http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~anthro/blurb/b_beck.html)

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