Irene Maffi is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. Her research interests include cultural heritage practices, postcolonial nation building, and the anthropology of fertility and birth in the Middle East. She is the author of Pratiques du patrimoine et politiques de la memoire en Jordanie: entre recit dynastique et narrations communautaires(2004), and co-editor (with Rami Daher) ... Read moreof Politics and Practices of Cultural Heritage in the Middle East: Repositioning the Material Past in the Present (I.B.Tauris, forthcoming). Show Less