Envious Ethnography and the Ethnography of Envy in Anthropology's “Orient”: Towards A Theory of Envy

Abstract

Drawing on prevalent Euro-American folk models, extant theories of envy in the social sciences tend to reduce it to an emotion embodied in individual subjects, who are believed to envy those who have more and those who are hierarchically superordinate. Yet envy can also be viewed as a social, intersubjective phenomenon—one potentially incorporating humans and various other-than-human entities into complex and unpredictable relationships involving occult phenomena like witchcraft and the evil eye as well as entire families, regions, and abstract identity categories of ethnicity, gender, and class. The tension between ethnographic accounts of envy in the Middle East and Middle Eastern accounts of envy provides an opportunity to explore the phenomenon of “envying down” and an underappreciated, recursive dimension of envy: envying the efficacy of other people's envy. Envy is revealed to be reflexive, relational, and often institutionalized—even within the institution of ethnography itself.