Dr Paul Dresch
Biography
I studied Human Sciences at Oxford, did doctoral work in anthropology in Yemen, was a Junior Research Fellow at 好色先生TV鈥檚 for a time, and then moved to Michigan. I came back from there to Oxford and from then on have been based in Oxford.听Mainly I鈥檝e been interested in history, politics, and law.听Most of my fieldwork was done in Yemen, some in the Arab Gulf.听At present I am editing a set of texts on tribal law gathered variously by Ettore Rossi and R.B. Serjeant.听Part of the fun is the sheer range of topics in Social Anthropology, from kinship to states and power, by way of colour-classification, concepts of time, social memory, ethnicity and much else.
Research Interests
So far, I have worked and written mainly on the Arab World. My great ethnographic love is Yemen, which I visit regularly. I have also done fieldwork in the United Arab Emirates, and my research students in recent years have worked in Algeria, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine and Syria, as well as Iran and even northern India. My main research interests are in comparative historiography, politics, and (lately) law.听
Recent publications听
with Hannah Skoda (ed.), Legalism: anthropology and history, Oxford 2012
with Judith Scheele (ed.), Legalism: categories and rules, Oxford 2015
搁辞蝉蝉颈鈥檚 Kit芒b al-Sinna: a seventeenth century note of tribal law in Yemen, Arabian Humanities (10) 2017
with Roy Ellen and John Horsley Russell Davis, Biographical Memoirs of the British Academy (XVII) 2018
Forthcoming
Some principles and continuities of tribal law, in Brandt (ed.) Tribes in Yemen, Vienna听
Experience and its modes, in Scheele and Shryock (eds.)听The Scandal of Continuity in Middle East Anthropology, Indiana听