Chairs: PD Dr. Claudia Liebelt (Associate Professor in Social Anthropology, University of Bayreuth) and Dr. Melike Şahinol (Senior Research Fellow, Orient Institute Istanbul)

Discussant: Dr. Sertaç Sehlikoglu (Senior Research Associate, Institute for Global Prosperity, UCL)

The human body can be explored as both a product and an active producer of society. On the one hand, media images, public discourses and social norms affect the ways in which we perceive, shape and enact our bodily existence. On the other, human bodies are a major tool for world-making, fundamental to our understanding not only of our selves, but also of the ways we conceptualize our material interrelatedness and more-than-human being in the world. Ever since the bodily turn in the social sciences, a plethora of concepts have theorized the human body at the junction between individual and society, self and other. For example, in concepts such as the “flexible body” (Martin 1994), the “bugged body” (Lachmund 1997), or the “body multiple” (Mol 2002) scholars have reflected on the plasticicity, materiality and relationality of the human body. Within Middle Eastern studies, the body has been studied in relation to ethical formation (Mahmood 2005), sensorial cultivation (Hirschkin 2006) and more recently, as a site and source of leisure (Deeb and Harb 2014) as well as desire (Sehlikoğlu 2021). Drawing on anthropological research on aesthetic body modification (Liebelt 2019) and neuroscientific cyborg studies (Şahinol 2016), in this panel we wish to reflect on the role of cultural, historical and political constellations and peculiarities for bodily practices and beings from an interdisciplinary perspective. Critical of earlier orientalist assumptions, we wish to provocatively ask: Is there a Middle Eastern body?