The Arab Folklorist in a Postcolonial Period

Abstract

In many Arab countries, both in the Maghrib and the Arab Middle East, some of the disciplines of the social sciences such as sociology, anthropology, and folklore have either been entirely absent in the universities, or only taught superficially (basically as part of the teaching of history). Indeed, they have hardly been encouraged and have even been forbidden subjects of field research. One of the main reasons for the absence or superficial teaching of and official ban on these disciplines has been to some extent simply an official fear of censorship and political persecution. Moreover, the researchers of these disciplines have suffered from double deficiencies: some have been censored by the regimes, and the few who are critically minded have been marginalized or co-opted. In the last two decades, however, the focus on the study of the relationship between the above mentioned fields of research and the “attitudes” of the authorities in power has been a recent development in Academia as a result of human rights activism, the demand of free thought and speech, and the rights of the minorities to free expression and cultural entity.¹ Yet, this research has been hindered by a scarcity of library materials relevant to social sciences and folklore.²