Caton contemplates working on turning his thoughts on this difficult subject into a book. Occupying Forces that occurred in the Iraqi prison of Abu Ghraib. Questions of film and visual images more generally are an enduring concern of Caton, most recently evinced in a series of articles on the events of prisoner abuse by U.S. He teaches a combined graduate and undergraduate course on the subject of film, popular culture, and Frankfurt School theory on a regular basis. In between these two books on Yemen Caton fell under the spell of Hollywood cinema and wrote Lawrence of Arabia: a Film’s Anthropology (University of California, 1999), a negative dialectical analysis of a film in the mode of the Frankfurt School. From time to time, Caton has also taught a graduate course, The Anthropology of the Event, that goes over much of the same material. It explores issues of event, time, and memory in his field research and ethnographic writing, which he now addresses in more theoretical work that engages anthropologists, historians and philosophers. Anthropological linguistics continues to be one of Caton’s main disciplinary interests, and is the focus of a combined graduate and undergraduate course on the subject every other year.ĭuring the course of fieldwork for that research, a dispute broke out in the village in which he was living–that became the subject of Caton’s third book, Yemen Chronicle (Hill & Wang, 2005). His earliest work was in anthropological linguistics and poetics which culminated in his first book, Peaks of Yemen I Summon (University of California Press, 1990), an ethnography of Arabic, oral poetry and political culture of a Yemeni highland tribe. Since the beginning of his career, Caton has been a specialist of Arabic and the Middle East, with an emphasis on Yemen and the Arabian Peninsula.

Yemen Chronicle by Steven C. Caton