Whose terms? The politics of ethnographic knowledge-making with Syrian Jewish Mexicans

 

What happens when a scholar’s analytic categories or political values clash with perspectives of community members?  In this talk, Evelyn María Dean-Olmsted explores this question through a “behind the scenes” discussion of the analytic choices made in writing her book Coming of Age as Syrian Jewish Mexicans: The Pragmatics of Diaspora (Brill, 2025). A linguistic ethnography of Syrian Jewish life in Mexico City, the book illuminates how young adults use language to craft diasporic identities that occupy the fraught intersection of Jewish, Arab, and Mexican. Throughout the research process, moments emerged in which the researcher’s categories—such as “Arab” as an identity label or relajo to characterize ethnic joking—did not align with participants’ own understandings. Foregrounding issues of naming, translation, and representation, Dean-Olmsted discusses how tensions between scholarly and community frameworks can be engaged as central to the production of knowledge. In an era marked by heightened political sensitivities around Arab, Jewish, and Arab Jewish identities, the stakes of such decisions are high for scholars and communities alike.    

 

Evelyn María Dean-Olmsted is an anthropologist and applied researcher based in Miami, FL.  She currently serves as Project Lead at Rosov Consulting, where she contributes to community studies, program evaluation, and other research services for Jewish non-profit organizations.  She previously worked in health outcomes research at Nicklaus Children’s Hospital (Miami, FL) and as Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras. Dean-Olmsted serves on the editorial board of the journal Latin American Jewish Studies; the advisory board of the Jewish Language Project; and the advisory board of Olamim, a grassroots organization for Latinx Jewish families in the Bay Area.

 

 

 

This event is free and open to the public.