Daniel Martin Varisco (born 1951 in Strongsville, Ohio), is an American anthropologist and historian.
Varisco has published on the history of Orientalism, the anthropology of Islam, the history of Islamic agronomy and astronomy, agriculture and water rights in Yemen, and international development and the anthropology of cyberspace. He is the founding editor of CyberOrient, and web master of the blog Tabsir. He was Professor of Anthropology at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York. He is currently Research Professor at Qatar University.
Education and academic history
Varisco attended Wheaton College (Illinois), where he majored in Biblical Archaeology under the advisement of Prof. Al Hoerth. At the University of Pennsylvania he obtained his Ph.D. in 1982: "The Adaptive Dynamics of Water Allocation in al-Ahjur, Yemen Arab Republic," the result of ethnographic fieldwork during 1978-79 in a central highland valley of the Yemen Arab Republic on the ecology of irrigation and water resource use. He also received an M.A. in Anthropology in 1975 on the topic of "Archaeology as Apologetic: Towards an Understanding of the Fundamentalist Paradigm." In 1990-91 he was Visiting Assistant Professor in Anthropology at Stony Brook University. He began his career at Hofstra University in 1991, becoming Chair of Anthropology in 2003 and Professor of Anthropology in 2004.
In 2003 he became director of Hofstra's Middle Eastern and Central Asian Program. He has served on the boards of the American Institute for Yemeni Studies and the American Academic Research Institute in Iraq, also serving as President of the Middle East Section of the American Anthropological Association (2002–2004). Varisco is the recipient of the NDFL for Arabic, as well as grants from the American Research Center in Egypt, NEH and Fulbright fellowships. He has been editor of Yemen Update (1991–2001), CyberOrient (2006–present) and co-editor of Contemporary Islam (2006–present).
Research
Yemen
Varisco arrived in Yemen in early 1978 to begin 18 months of ethnographic and ecological research in the highland valley of al-Ahjur along with fellow anthropologist and wife, Najwa Adra. The focus of his field research was on local water rights in the springfed irrigation system in relation to the local environmental constraints and principles of Islamic water law. In the field he became particularly interested in the history of Yemen's agriculture, especially after reading a 14th-century copy of a treatise on Rasulid Yemen agriculture by al-Malik al-Afdal al-'Abbas. After finishing his thesis and returning several times to Yemen as a development consultant, his work with Prof. David A. King on an NEH-sponsored project on Islamic Folk Astronomy took him back to Yemen to work on the 13th century almanac of al-Malik al-Ashraf 'Umar, which he edited and translated in 1994. Involved with the American Institute for Yemeni Studies since its inception in 1977, Varisco has spoken at the institute on a number of research topics, as well as lectures in Arabic at Sanaa University, the Yemen Center for Research and Studies and Yemen's Ministry of Agriculture. In addition to his field research and examination of Yemeni agricultural texts, he has published on the social history of qât and coffee in Yemen, the tribal concept, the rhino horn issue, folk literature, land use, folk astronomy, indigenous plant protection methods, sailing seasons out of Aden, and the ethnography of Yemen. In 2014 he was elected President of the American Institute for Yemeni Studies and maintains the AIYS blog (aiys.org/blog). With historian G. Rex Smith, he published a facsimile edition of The Manuscript of al-Malik al-Afdal: al-'Abbâs b. 'Alî Dâwud b. Yûsuf b. 'Umar b. 'Alî Ibn Rasûl (d. 778/1377): A Medieval Arabic Anthology from the Yemen (1998) for the Gibb Memorial Trust.
Islamic Sciences
Varisco has conducted manuscript research in Egypt's Dar al-Kutub, Sanaa's Great Mosque Western Library, Istanbul's Topkapi Ahmet III Library and Süleymaniye Library and Qatar's National Library on the history of Islamic agriculture, almanacs, astronomy, astrology and medicine. Based on primary research in Cairo, he published "The Origin of the Anwa' in Arab Tradition" in Studia Islamica (74:5-28, 1991), presenting the theory that the origin of the lunar station (manazil al-qamar) concept in Arab tradition was an Islamic mixing of the zodiacal grid from India with indigenous pre-Islamic Arab folk calendars and that the system of 28 distinct markers did not exist in Arabia prior to Islam, despite the claims of later Muslim scholars. The bulk of Varisco's textual analysis has been on agricultural texts and almanacs, especially for Yemen.