Abdellah Hammoudi is a tenured professor of anthropology at Princeton University. His main areas of interest are religion, colonialism, symbols of power, French ethnographic theory, history and anthropology, Islam, the Middle East and North Africa. He has done extensive work on the Social History of Morocco and North Africa including fieldwork in Morocco, Libya and Saudi Arabia. He has also participated in major development projects in these countries.
Hammoudi has been a professor at the Agronomic Institute of the Mohammed V. University in Rabat, Morocco, and was named the first Faisal Visiting Professor for Anthropology at Princeton University. He was also the first director of Princeton’s Institute for the Transregional Study of the Contemporary Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia, which was founded with the support of Prince Moulay Hicham Benabdallah of Morocco. Hammoudi has been a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin and the Max Planck Institute, Berlin. He is also a member of the Review Committee of the National Science Foundation, USA, and the Ecole des Sciences Sociales, Paris.
His publications include books on agrarian policy and the relation of tribal organization to religion. He has published books in Arabic, French and English. His most recent work is A Season in Mecca(2006), which got the Lettra International Prize [Berlin]. First published in Fench, it was translated into English, Arabic, German and several other European languages. Other translations from French include The Victim and Its Masks: An Essay on Sacrifice and Masquerade in the Maghreb (1993) and Master and Disciple: The Cultural Foundations of Moroccan Authoritarianism in Comparative Perspectives (1997). More recently, he edited Democratizing the South Shore: Between Persuasion and Invasion (2007; in French). His book Changing Tradition and the Challenge of Culture, in Arabic, was published in 2012.
He has also been involved in the production of several films for television based on his ethnographic work. He teaches courses on Islamic movements, Middle East society, colonialism, French ethnographic theory and political anthropology.
He held the Kothari Chair in the year 2010 and delivered the Annual Rajni Kothari Lecture titled 'Giving and Receiving Yeast: Or How to Keep Radically Differing Identities Together' on 15 December 2010.
