It has long been recognized that much of the richness of Muslim women's ritual lives has been found outside of both the mosque and the “five pillars of Islam,” in a wide set of devotional practices that have met with varying degrees of affirmation and censure from male religious scholars. This recognition has given rise to a valuable literature on such practices as shrine visitation, spirit-possession rituals, and Twelver Shiʿi women's domestic ceremonies. The prevalence of such noncanonical rituals in Muslim women's lives, although waning in many parts of the contemporary world, raises questions about the relationship between women's religious practices and the constitution of Islamic orthodoxies. Have women, often given lesser access to mosque-based and canonical rituals, historically resorted to autonomous and rewarding religious practices that are, nevertheless, fated to be marginalized in the male-dominated construction of Islamic normativity—a normativity that women may ultimately internalize and master only at great cost to their religious lives?

Some anthropologists can argue that it is impossible to separate the social organizational (the realm of groups or aggregates—e.g., households, lineages, and farms) from the cultural (e.g., norms, rules, values, ideologies, and the like—hereafter, normative mental representations) and that the distinction between social and cultural anthropology is therefore an artificial one. To the contrary, others can argue that the social organizational (or “groupal”) and cultural perspectives refer to two analytically separate albeit intertwined levels of reality, sometimes shed a different light on a single phenomenon, and have different analytical value. This distinction I show through the study of the notion of “honor” and its relation to the gender division of labor and to the status of women in Tunisia.

As a true litterateur of his time, Shaykh Husayn al-Marsafi composed his 1881 treatise The Eight Words as an elucidation of “the words that are constantly on the tongues of the people.” After commenting on the weighty political concepts of nation, community, government, justice, injustice, politics, and freedom, al-Marsafi ends his work with a lengthy discussion on tarbiya (education). Just months before the ʿUrabi Revolt, education occupied a vital place alongside concerns about government, authority, and politics. Marsafi's choice of “words” simply articulated a long-standing belief that roughly a decade and a half of educational reforms brought to the fore: “Once tarbiya is made perfect, everything else is also made perfect.”

On 4 August 2005 the Lebanese English-language paper the Daily Star reported that Lebanon's ancient inscriptions at Nahr al-Kalb had been accepted into the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization's (UNESCO’s) collection of “worldwide rare documents” through its Memory of the World Programme. UNESCO established the Memory of the World Programme in 1992, after realizing that its World Heritage Programme, which seeks to protect historic landscapes and architectural landmarks, did not safeguard a category of less visible, yet equally important, documents of the past: texts. The Memory of the World Programme made the preservation of “documentary heritage [which] reflects the diversity of languages, peoples and cultures” its goal, hoping that its work would help prevent “collective amnesia.” An eight-member Lebanese national committee made up of cultural and political elites affiliated with Lebanon's Ministry of Culture and Lebanese University, the country's largest public university, submitted a unanimous proposal to UNESCO's International Advisory Committee (IAC) to include Nahr al-Kalb in its collection of “documentary heritage.” The IAC reviewed and accepted the proposal in June 2005, placing the inscriptions along the river of Nahr al-Kalb in the company of 156 other universally memorable texts from around the world.

With the dust settling on Operation Iraqi Freedom in the spring of 2003, the U.S. Army 4th Psychological Operations Group developed for the occupation forces a special deck of playing cards that featured head shots of the most wanted Iraqi regime officials. Saddam Hussein figures prominently as the Ace of Spades. The experiment was repeated in the autumn of 2007, but this time the cards represented some of Iraq's and Afghanistan's archaeological sites (Figure 1).

It is perhaps self-evident to suggest that military conquest shares something with tourism because both involve encounters with “strange” landscapes and people. Thus it may not surprise that the former sometimes borrows rhetorical strategies from the latter—strategies for rendering the strange familiar or for translating threatening images into benign ones. There have been numerous studies of this history of borrowing. Scholars have considered how scenes of battle draw tourist crowds, how soldiers' ways of seeing can resemble those of leisure travelers, how televised wars have been visually structured as tourist events (e.g., the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq), and how the spoils of war can function as a body of souvenirs. These lines of inquiry expand our understanding of tourism as a field of cultural practices and help us to rethink the parameters of militarism and warfare by suggesting ways they are entangled with everyday leisure practices.