In this essay, we examine how MERIP has navigated the frictions between the political economic critique of extraction and domination in the region, and more semiotic models which center “culture,” variously understood, in their analyses of power and inequality. Broadly speaking, MERIP authors have addressed four dimensions of culture writ large: aesthetic expressions and artistic performances; everyday practices and ordinary life in their various multisensorial, affective experiences; identity performance along intersectional terrains of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and race; and discursive formations in which the very categories of the “political” and the “economic” are produced and reproduced within shifting fields of power. In all its dimensions, culture is embedded and entangled in material conflicts over production, distribution, and consumption, and thus necessarily political, but not merely so. How to approach cultural politics and political culture without reducing them to a play of hegemony and resistance has been a persistent challenge in cultural analysis. By exploring how MERIP authors have negotiated this fraught terrain—by outlining MERIP's effective culture concept with a focus on its aesthetic dimensions—we offer a window into a central tension within the broader field of Middle East studies.

During the late 1960s, left-wing American activists faced challenges when trying to find out about what was happening in the Middle East and what their government was doing there. Yet overall, some activists still felt that by 1970 the American Left suffered from an overall dearth of solid information and regular, independent, critical analysis of the Middle East. As a result, the Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP) and its publication, MERIP Reports, were established in 1971 to fill that void. However, in many ways a major impetus for MERIP's formation was not just its founders’ hunger for better analysis of the region, but also the deep impressions made on them by a dramatic and influential trip several of them took to Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan in August and early September 1970. Thus, while it is true that, since its inception, MERIP has shaped the study of the Middle East, it is also true that it was the Middle East that first shaped those who formed MERIP.

In anticipation of the fiftieth anniversary of its founding, past and present members of the Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP) organized a roundtable for the annual meeting of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) entitled “MERIP's Impact on Middle East Studies.” Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, on October 14, 2020, the roundtable was conducted as a virtual webinar. The participants included Joe Stork, Judith Tucker, Zachary Lockman, Ted Swedenburg, Norma Claire Moruzzi, Jacob Mundy, and Stacey Philbrick Yadav. The roundtable was moderated by Waleed Hazbun and offered reflections about MERIP's original mission, explained how its model for “research and information” evolved, and explored how over fifty years MERIP's contributions have helped transform Middle East Studies scholarship. The following is a transcript that has been edited for clarity and length.