A career path to the Orient, by Occident

Dr Kathy Glavanis-Grantham is a lecturer in UCC's department of sociology.She brings expertise as an Middle-East scholar, as a historian and as a social scientist to her position. Anne Byrne reports.

Thin, wired, politicised, comfortable talking about her personal life and how it meshed into her career, Kathy Glavanis-Grantham must be American.

She is, but that's not the full story. Glavanis-Grantham is a fluent Arabic speaker. She comes to Ireland and UCC's department of sociology via Egypt, Palestine and Britain. She has spent a total of 16 years in the Middle East.

Her first career ambition was to become a pathologist, but a few months spent working as a lab assistant made her realise that the loneliness of lab life was not for her. So she graduated as a history major.

"We had to do American history, European history and one non-western region.

"From a choice of Latin America, Asia and the Middle East, I chose the Middle East. That flukey decision was to fundamentally change my life." She went to Princeton to do an MA in Near Eastern Studies, but she was "not enamoured with the place politically, socially or academically. I was a Californian girl. I thought it was bizarre to see these Americans aping the British, wearing black gowns, dining at a high table with prayers in Latin." Glavanis-Grantham was berated for not wearing the black robe to dinner. But that was only the beginning of her run-ins with the authorities. "I went there in '69. It was the era of Vietnam. I was politically conscious, against the war, and participated in student activities. The invasion of Cambodia took place in 1970. The students went on strike and organised alternative education." She completed a thesis on Egyptian women in the short stories of Nobel Prize winner Nagib Mahfuz. Glavanis-

Grantham was interested in the contemporary Arabic world, but the courses she took on the Koran, history, and Arabic literature tended to focus on events and literature prior to the 15th century.

"I realised that if I wanted to learn Arabic and to understand the Arab world, I needed to go there." The Centre for the Study of Arabic Abroad, at the American University in Cairo, was to provide her with a "fantastic one-year programme that included field trips. We learned calligraphy. By the end of that year I wrote three substantial papers in Arabic." She stayed at the centre, for a further year to study Egyptian literature, theatre, poetry, novels and short stories.

"At that point, I started to become interested in the social component of literature as opposed to style or rhetoric and I began taking sociology courses." Talal Asad, an anthropology professor from the University of Hull, was taking a sabbatical there and he was to become a mentor for Glavanis-Grantham.

From a background that included a Saudi Arabian mother and an Austrian Jewish father, Professor Asad was a Marxist. "I came with a critical approach, but it was he who taught me to deconstruct a text." Glavanis-Grantham registered for a PhD at Hull, focusing on agrarian change in Egypt. "What emerged from the critical literature was that Egypt's incorporation into the capitalist world had lead to polarisation between the landless and rich peasants." She went there to find that the majority of peasants appeared to be small landholders. "So I had to switch my focus, to look at the survival strategies of small peasant landholdersit was one of the most remarkable experiences of my life. I lived with small peasant households, sleeping on the floors, and sitting out in the fields talking to peasants. When I had to leave, I cried and cried. It was total immersion and the people were so generous."

Back in Hull, she worked as a tutor, before moving to the University of Durham, as a Middle-eastern librarian. "I saw an ad for a job at Birzeit University in the West Bank and was appointed to a teaching position in the department of sociology and anthropology. I taught my classes through Arabic. However, my colloquial Arabic was Egyptian and the students thought it was a howl to hear this American speaking colloquial Egyptian.

"I ended up staying nine years. It was lifechanging to see the impact of the Israeli occupation on Palestine. The university was continually being cleared. We had to have work permits from the Israelis. These were three-month permits. The Israelis did deport a number of lecturers. It was tiring and nerve-racking.

"I went to Palestine in the fall of '82, just after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Palestinians were faced with the reality that liberation would not come from outside. It was a real renaissance with the emergence of various committees such as health, agriculture and voluntary labour. Some people have focused on the splits. I would focus on the positive side. There was a blooming of activity within civil society at committee level." Many of her students were graduates of Israeli prisons where reading circles thrived.

Coming back to Ireland in 1991 was a temporary solution to her personal life (Glavanis-Grantham didn't want to leave the Middle East) . . . her husband was working in England (they have since separated). She stayed in UCC since her return. Personal tragedy struck in the form of the death of a close friend in a car accident followed by the death of another friend from lung cancer. Glavanis-Grantham decided to use a forthcoming sabbatical to Palestine to look at the literature on death and dying.

"Along with two colleagues in folklore, I arranged a conference here last November - Death, dying, bereavement, Irish perspectives. There is a lot of formality around death here, but once that has passed, the ability to express that grief and bereavement is very much contained . . . I think that we need to have space to grieve, to understand death and how people die, and how to care for people. Very sadly, my mum died last summer, but I think my reading and research helped me to understand and to be better able to be there for her."

Glavanis-Grantham is currently teaching a course in the sociology of death, dying and bereavement, to 35 students in UCC. She says biomedicine has taken away much of our knowledge of dying and we often don't know how to care for or interact with the dying.

"I think these issues need to be opened up in discussion. The more these issues are opened up, the better off we are. I am very interested in the politics of death. In a way, I've come full circle. I was interested in pathology . . . looking at death from biological perspective. Now I'm looking at death from a sociological perspective."