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Dreams from an Elsewhere: Muslim Subjectivities beyond the Trope of Self-Cultivation

A lecture by Amira Mittermaier, University of Toronto

Monday, March 01, 2010
3:00 PM - 5:00 PM
352 Haines Hall
UCLA
Los Angeles, CA United States

Dr. Mittermaier's anthropological approach to the role of Western psychological discourses and practices in Muslim dream interpretation is historically informed, ethnographically careful, and theoretically engaged. Her dissertation "Dreams that Matter: An Anthropology of the Imagination in Contemporary Egypt" traces how Egypt's dream landscapes have been transformed through the importation of Western psychology, Muslim reformism, and the mass media. Her postdoctoral work will expand this project through exploring in more depth how different models of the imagination can rupture epistemic outlooks that approach the world in terms of either/or. She will also begin preliminary research on a new ethnographic project that asks what might be particularly modern about contemporary Muslims' concerns with the magical, the superstitious and the irrational. Currently, she is an Assistant Professor in the Department for the Study of Religion and the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations at the University of Toronto.

Cost: Free and open to the public

For more information please contact

Amy Bruinooge, Center for Near Eastern Studies
Tel: (310) 825-1455
cnes@international.ucla.edu
www.international.ucla.edu/cnes/events