the Arab world in the 19th and 20th centuries has been marked by power
inequities between Western powers, their scientists and administrators, and
the colonized. These power inequities also effected the scientific knowledge
producedthe questions asked and the solutions proposed (Asad, 1973;
Leuenberger, 2011; Rabinowitz, 2010). As a result, “anthropologists often
‘other’ different cultures or life-forms, when in reality these are not all that
other or different,” by either magnifying the difference of others or by
failing to understand their “inner logic” (Rottenburg, 2006, p. 8). Popular
perceptions of the dangerous, irrational, primitive “other” have hereby
gone hand in hand with a repertoire of academic writing that, rather than
reflecting the diversity and complexity of the Arab world, reflected its
dominant construction by Western powers as a homogenous mass of
oriental otherness (Said, 1994). The fear of the “oriental other” thereby
constitutes a form of “practical orientalism” (Pain & Smith, 2008, p. 101).
Our fears are thus not innocent, not instinctual, but political; and we have
to interrogate why they exist, to whom they matter, how they are main-
tained, and how such categories as race, gender, age, and class may
codetermine who and what is fearful for whom.
Lastly, we have to ask: who names fears? Fears tend to be “the preroga-
tiveof the privileged” (Pain, 2009,p. 473). At the same time, there is a
conspicuous “absence of the voices of marginalized groups” (Pain, 2009,
p. 471), even though they are more likely to be victimized. For instance,
dominant social groups tend to fear the homeless, young men, and minori-
ties, yet it is such groups that are statistically more likely to become victims,
rather than perpetrators. We also hear little of Palestinians’ fears of cross-
ing Israeli checkpoints or walking the streets of Jewish West Jerusalem, but
we are all acutely aware of Israeli fears of terrorist bombings.
Instead of being “paralyzed with fear” (Wright, 2008,p. 223), we need
to therefore understand the “politics and patterns of fear” (Pain, 2009,
p. 446), and how fear is tied to power inequities across social groups.
Moreover, by recovering a sense of agency in the face of fear, and by using
fear as “an opportunity to action and empowerment” (Wright, 2008,
p. 223), we may challenge dominant stereotypes about the fearful and the
feared; resist racist and classicist assumptions underlying our fear; and pro-
vide more inclusive “emotional geographies” (Pain, 2009, p. 477; Pain,
2008) by accounting for the fears of the marginalized, the socially excluded,
and the supposedly “other.” Arguably, it is by collaborating with margina-
lized groups, that have been constructed as the “dangerous other”; by dis-
covering the “them” on their own terms, rather than perceiving them in
terms of some orientalist abstract assumptions; and by letting them “speak
Knowledge-Making and its Politics in Conflict Regions 25