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Fadwa El Guindi

El Guindi, Fadwa

El Guindi, Fadwa

Retiree Anthropologist, University of California, USA; Trustee, World Academy of Art and Science

Job Title

Retiree Anthropologist, University of California, USA; Trustee, World Academy of Art and Science

After graduating from AUC with a Bachelor of Arts in political science (cum laude), Fadwa El Guindi ’60 embarked on a long and distinguished career in the field of anthropology. An acclaimed author, documentary filmmaker, anthropologist and scholar with a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Texas at Austin, El Guindi has produced international, award-winning visual ethnographies on Arab and Muslim culture, including El Sebou’: Egyptian Birth Ritual, El Moulid: Egyptian Religious Festival and Ghurbal. These films were produced by the U.S.-based El Nil Research, a nonprofit ethnographic laboratory and visual research center founded by El Guindi. As an anthropologist, her research involves fieldwork with Arab, Nubian and Zapotec cultures and Arab-Americans.

A prolific author, El Guindi has more than 80 publications in English, Italian, French, Russian, Arabic, German and Spanish, and serves on the editorial boards of prominent scholarly journals. Her book, Veil: Modesty, Privacy and Resistance, has become an anthropological classic and has been translated into several languages. El Guindi is also the author of The Myth of Ritual: A Native’s Ethnography of Zapotec Life Crisis Rituals, where she adopts the innovative methodology of native ethnography. Other groundbreaking anthropological books she has authored include Visual Anthropology: Essential Method and Theory and By Noon Prayer: The Rhythm of Islam.

Past president of the Society for Visual Anthropology, El Guindi previously served as distinguished professor of anthropology and head of the Department of Social Sciences at Qatar University. She was also a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles and taught anthropology at the University of Southern California; University of California, Santa Barbara; and Georgetown University. Her expertise on the Middle East brought her to the Clinton White House, and she frequently gave lectures to diplomats assigned to the Middle East at the Foreign Service Institute of the U.S. Department of State. El Guindi currently lectures internationally and has recently been elected as a fellow of the World Academy of Art & Science.

ARTICLES BY THIS AUTHOR

Reflections on Education and Employment: Relevance to Sustainability   ( Education )
Get Full Text in PDF Abstract This essay deems education and employment as the two separate but interrelated spheres of socioeconomic life which have consistently been the subject of observation and analysis in the fields of education, sociology, anthropology and development. The focus is on how education relates to employment, women’s status, and more recently on the sustainability of development. Recently, critical observations were made of education, charging it with a) irrelevance to the...
‘Human Security’ Relativized: Insights from Six Recent Global Events   ( Human Security ), ( Peace and Security ), ( Global Governance & Law )
Get Full Text in PDF Abstract This article argues, on the basis of insights1 drawn and generalized from six recent global events identified as relevant in this analysis, that the notion of Human Security as currently presented needs further refinement. The six global events (2019-2023) are: The COVID-19 Pandemic, The Ukraine War, COP-27 in Egypt, The World Cup in Qatar, The Arab-China Summit in Saudi Arabia, and the Syria-Turkey Earthquake. Based on my analysis, the conventional concept of...
From US to Qatar University Teaching: Contextualized Knowledge Communication for Future Education   ( Human Security ), ( Education ), ( Peace and Security )
Get Full Text in PDF Abstract While the overall theme selected by the World Academy of Art and Science (WAAS) for the 2023 6th Future Education Conference was that of Human Security, the particular panel* in which I contributed the presentation upon which this article is based focused more explicitly on Education and less obviously on Security, with a particular emphasis on experimental ways in which anthropology can contribute better to education. However, the link between anthropology and...
Globalization Weaponized, Dominance Fragmented, World Stability Ruptured   ( War in Ukraine ), ( Knowledge, Science & Values ), ( Peace and Security )
Get Full Text in PDF Abstract The current Russia-Ukraine military conflict reveals how the laws established by the United Nations to guide “war behavior” need to be realistically reconsidered in light of the changes since WWII that now characterize military conflicts. Today dominant nations circumvent rules of engagement by resorting to new tactics. It also unmasks a prevalent “global dominance by the West” favoring marketplaces for military weapons disguised in humanitarian rhetoric which...
Reflections on Education, Employment & Sustainability   ( Education ), ( Employment ), ( New Economics ), ( Sustainable Development )
Get Full Text in PDF A dichotomy emerged about a little over a decade and a half ago polarizing the view of academic disciplines into two polarities: inter (cross, trans) disciplinarity, to aim for, versus autonomous fields of research & teaching, which have come to be labelled “silos”, a term which I consider derogatory and manipulative, deployed to bias valuation and attempts at reform. The notion of “Silos” was turned into a negative characterization deployed to undermine disciplinary...
Reflections on Future Education: Ideas for a Model*   ( Education ), ( Knowledge, Science & Values )
Get Full Text in PDF Abstract A rapid change in technology is creating pressure on education to meet employment needs. Two overarching points are discussed in this article: first, rather than fearing the robotization of humans we should humanize technology to serve humanity and second, any educational reform must be contextualized: in particular social and cultural traditions, values and worldviews, considering the population size, demographics and special developmental challenges, instead of...
Toward a New Paradigm of World Governance
 Get Full Text in PDF Abstract The article presents a critical analysis of the existing order of globalism, which imposes Western values and constructs on the human universe. This in turn leads to adverse results. It produces tensions, wars, conflicts and racial and cultural divides. Alternatively, this analysis puts together ideas from the Ancient Egyptian vision of world order and universal stability with contemporary experimental modes of governance, as represented by Egypt’s post-...