Graduate Student Wins Leslie White Award For Research

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. - How people shape a sense of national identity — especially those who live far from their homelands — is a subject of intense interest to cultural anthropologists such as David Chaudoir, who studies Jordanian American culture in Michigan in order to understand the intricacies of Arab American identity.

Chaudoir, a Ph.D. student in anthropology at the University of Arkansas, has won the Central States Anthropological Society’s Leslie White Award, named after one of the most prominent

anthropologists of the 20th century. Chaudoir will use the award to fund his research this summer among the Ajarmeh tribe in north-central Jordan. It’s the beginning, he says, of a project that

will include future ethnographic and archival work in Jordan, southeast Michigan, and the Arabian Gulf states.

"Given the world’s renewed, intensified attention to the United States’ foreign policy and interventions in the Arab Middle East, there is a growing need for better understandings of often

misrepresented and misunderstood Arab American communities," Chaudoir writes in "National Identity in Transnational Spaces: Jordanian American National Identity in Michigan," a paper published in the Michigan Academician this fall.

Chaudoir believes that "by thinking about our neighbors in a more productive and enlightened way, we may better understand the places, people, and cultures of Arabs and the Middle East — especially in a global context." To do so, he says, requires rejecting deeply embedded stereotypes and ethnic archetypes propagated by "lazy and often biased Western media."

Originally from Berrien Springs, Michigan, Chaudoir earned his M.A. in anthropology from Western Michigan University.

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