Middle East studies diverged from Western social science by prioritizing ethnicity over assimilation

Evidence

It is the prevalence of such accounts in modern Middle East studies, which has given analytical primacy to ethnicity and the cultural dimension in most interpretations of sociopolitical reality. This also differentiated it from conventional Western social science, which had assumed that the assimilation of cultural and religious identities into a national society was a necessary precondition for socioeconomic and political development. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3466

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels critiques of modernization theory’s assimilationist assumptions; connects to the reader’s interests in how analytical paradigms shape what gets studied.