Being part of a violent community in revolt can be addictive--it can be fun. This book offers a fascinating inside look at present-day political violence in Pakistan through a historical ethnography ...of the Muhajir Qaumi Movement (MQM), one of the most remarkable and successful religious nationalist movements in postcolonial South Asia. The MQM has mobilized much of the "migrant" (Muhajir) population in Karachi and other urban centers in southern Pakistan and has fomented large-scale ethnic-religious violence. Oskar Verkaaik argues that urban youth see it as an irresistible opportunity for "fun." Drawing on both anthropological fieldwork, including participatory observation among political militants, and historical analyses of state formation, nation-building, and the ethnicization of Islam since 1947, he provides an absorbing and important contribution to theoretical debates about political--religious and nationalist--violence. Migrants and Militants brings together two perspectives on political violence. Recent studies on ethnic cleansing, genocide, terrorism, and religious violence have emphasized processes of identification and purification. Verkaaik combines these insights with a focus on urban youth culture, in which masculinity, physicality, and the performance of violence are key values. He shows that only through fun and absurdity can a nascent movement transgress the dominant discourse to come of its own. Using these observations, he considers violence as a ludic practice, violence as "martyrdom" and sacrifice, and violence as "terrorism" and resistance.
ABSTRACT
In 2006, the Dutch government introduced a naturalization ceremony for foreigners wishing to become Dutch citizens. Local bureaucrats who organize the ceremony initially disapproved of the ...measure as symbolic of the neonationalist approach to migration. I analyze how their criticism is undermined in the process of designing the ritual, the form of which continues to express a culturalist message of citizenship, despite organizers’ explicit criticism or ridicule. Using the concept of “cultural intimacy,” I show how nationalism builds on a shared embarrassment among local bureaucrats, from which the new citizens are excluded by way of the ceremony.
Religious Architecture: Anthropological Perspectives develops an anthropological perspective on modern religious architecture, including mosques, churches and synagogues. Borrowing from a range of ...theoretical perspectives on space-making and material religion, this volume looks at how religious buildings take their place in opposition to the secular surroundings, how they, as evocations of the sublime, help believers to move beyond the boundaries of modern subjectivity, and how they, in their common sense definition, function as community centers in urban daily life. The volume includes contributions from a range of anthropologists working in the UK, Mali, Brazil, Spain and Italy.
The construction of new, purpose‐built mosques in Europe often stirs a number of controversies. This paper looks at one such project: a new mosque building in Almere, a town near Amsterdam. It ...focuses on two kinds of controversies: discussions between various kinds of mosque committee members about aesthetic preferences and how they relate to members’ views about Islam in Europe, and neighborhood protests against the new mosque. Although the latter kind of conflicts have attracted some scholarly attention, most of this work treats these conflicts as discursive controversies and gives little attention to the material form. On the other hand, there is a new kind of literature on creativity and architectural design that emphasizes material processes but fails to analyze how these processes are related to larger political issues. By focusing on the temporal aspects of material processes, particularly the attention to form, I seek to merge these two approaches in order to analyze the mosque controversies as at once material and political.
Nederland is in de ban van cultuur. Meer dan ooit worden culturele verschillen tussen bevolkingsgroepen benadrukt. Maar een diepgravende antropologische analyse van wat er in Nederland gaande is, ...ontbreekt tot dusver. Dit boek vult dat gat.
From the mid 1980s onwards, urban Sindh has often been in the grip of ethnic violence. The Muhajir Qaumi Movement (now known as the Muttahida Qaumi Movement), established at around the same time, has ...played a central role in these conflicts. Most analyses interpret the violence as an escalation of already-existing communal differences between various migrant groups in cities like Karachi and Hyderabad. In this paper I argue that violence itself has often been constitutive of ethnic identity and ethnic mobilisation. Tracing the background of the language of ethnicity in Pakistani politics since Independence, I analyse how ethnic identity politics and violence have often gone hand in hand, beginning with the student activism of the late 1970s and developing into full-scale ethnic conflict during the 1980s and 1990s. This enables us to move away from primordial and communal interpretations of ethnic identity towards an analysis of ethnic identity in terms of political mobilisation.
This article compares the remarkable revival of Jewish religious architecture in Germany and the Netherlands by focusing on two cases in particular: a newly built synagogue centre in Dresden and a ...renovated synagogue in a small Dutch town. Both structures contain a carefully styled ornament of imperfection that on the surface looks remarkably similar. Although in both cases the ornament can be interpreted as a symbolic comment on the post-war Jewish presence in Europe, their symbolic meaning and depth differ profoundly. In Dresden, this element primarily has a political meaning meant for the German public, to which the predominantly Russian-Jewish community is largely indifferent. In the Netherlands, the stylistic creation of imperfection is a more complex, multilayered architectural sign that speaks of aspirations of tradition, continuity, and a particular religious way of being in the world. Building upon these ethnographic reflections, as well as on Richard Sennett's work on architecture and the human body, I interpret these architectural practices as an example of a particular kind of contemporary religiosity which seeks to engage actively with fragmented and unsettled reality, both historically and existentially. This is presented as an alternative to dominant theories of contemporary religion that interpret modern religiosity in terms of authenticity, the sacralization of the self, and the desire for wholeness. L'auteur compare le remarquable renouveau de l'architecture religieuse juive en Allemagne et aux Pays-Bas, en s'intéressant en particulier à deux cas : un centre religieux récemment édifié à Dresde et une synagogue rénovée dans une petite ville néerlandaise. Ces deux constructions comportent une imperfection volontaire soigneusement élaborée, qui semble superficiellement très similaire. Bien que celle-ci puisse, dans les deux cas, être interprétée comme un commentaire symbolique de la présence juive en Europe après la guerre, sa signification et sa profondeur sont très différentes dans les deux cas. À Dresde, cet élément a principalement une signification politique, qui s'adresse au public allemand mais laisse la communauté juive, principalement d'origine russe, largement indifférente. Aux Pays-Bas, le dessin de l'imperfection est un signe architectural plus complexe, aux niveaux de lecture multiples, qui parle d'aspirations à la tradition, de continuité et d'une certaine manière religieuse d'être au monde. Sur la base de ces réflexions ethnographiques et du travail de Richard Sennett sur l'architecture et le corps humain, l'auteur interprète ces pratiques architecturales comme un genre particulier de religiosité contemporaine, qui cherche à appréhender activement une réalité fragmentée et déstabilisée, du point de vue existentiel aussi bien qu'historique. Cette approche est présentée comme une alternative aux théories dominantes sur les religions contemporaines, qui interprètent la religiosité moderne en termes d'authenticité, de sacralisation de soi et de désir de complétude.
Driven by a common critique of human exceptionalism in Western thought, the recent anthropological study of things and materiality has also developed a new perspective on buildings and how they ...interact with humans. In this review article I discuss four recent anthropological books that deal with architecture. Explicitly or implicitly all of these books move away from the representational paradigm that has dominated the study of architecture for decades. They seek new ways to conceptualize the relation between materiality and symbol, creation and cognition, space and meaning. However, they differ with respect to the role buildings play in politics and social controversies. Whereas politics seems largely absent in the more theoretically inclined studies, the more ethnographically based books show that it is perfectly possible, and even desirable, to combine a phenomenological approach with an interest in political-symbolic processes.
Although there is by now a substantial body of ethnographic work on contemporary mosques in the West, none of this engages seriously with recently developed insights from material culture and ...material religion studies. Architectural critics and religious reformists criticise what they perceive as ‘nostalgic’ and ‘Oriental’ designs, whereas others interpret contemporary mosque design in terms of politics of space and religious identity politics. Taking a more holistic approach and based on ethnographic research on the designing process, this article argues that discussions about mosque design in Europe revolve around three major concerns: identity politics, religious tradition, and affect.
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