Culture and Dignity: Dialogues Between the Middle East and the West

“The collection reflects the many lasting contributions Nader has made to understanding and improving the human condition. Summing Up: Recommended. All levels/libraries.”  (Choice, 1 July 2013)

“Laura Nader is an intellectual national treasure.  Culture and Dignity is an important synthesis of anthropological theory and practice.  Laura Nader shows how ethnography transforms would be observers and subjects into active participants in larger processes and power relations.  From critiques of corporate fundamentalism to inverting Western notions of the control of women in the Middle East, Nader's brilliant analysis shows the promise of anthropology to break through dominant Western narratives.  Culture and Dignity is a vital and timely work that should be read by all interested in cutting through the cultural fog enshrouding policy discussions of corporatism, building peace in the Middle East, and human rights issues.”
- David H. Price, author of the books Weaponizing Anthropology and Anthropological Intelligence

“It is the best book I have read that deconstructs the myths of the East/West binary and brings much needed clarity into the blurred and complex borders that ‘separate’ the two.”
- George Saliba, Professor of Arabic and Islamic Science, Columbia University

“In Culture and Dignity, Laura Nader poses a challenge to her colleagues in the field of cultural anthropology, and the rest of us, to shed our hubris and bias and see the world and ourselves with new eyes. Nader's work is ambitious. And it succeeds. Not since Edward Said's Orientalism have I read a work with the same potential to transform an entire discipline. In one reading, I came to a new understanding of the role of family, of the ‘women's rights’ movement, of religious fundamentalism, and of my own political work.”
- James J. Zogby, The Arab American Institute

“These essays by Laura Nader--on law, nonviolence, terrorism, women's status, the Middle Eastern culture--are passionate arguments against ‘the hypocrisy of our age.’ An anthropologist with decades of fieldwork experience, Nader challenges with great intellectual rigor and political courage the pieties of current Western hegemonic thought with consequences that are breathtaking.”
- Joseba Zulaika, University of Nevada

“This book of challenging, intelligent, and provocative essays on a variety of topics can be read with great profit by students, colleagues, and a general public. It made me think in new ways about the role of anthropology and many social and cultural questions, including the position of women, on a comparative world scale, as I expected from such a deservedly distinguished writer.”
- Nikki Keddie, University of California, Los Angeles