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Deciphering Dissent and Resistance: Student Activism and Gender in Georgia and India
No full textAbstract -- Acknowledgment -- List of Figures -- List of Abbreviations and Acronyms -- Chapter 1. Introduction -- Chapter 2. Theoretical Framework and Literature Review -- Chapter 3. Methodology -- Chapter 4. Inception – Student Organizations -- Chapter 5. Encounter – “Making an Activist” -- Chapter 6. Transcending vs. Preserving – “Becoming an Activist” -- Chapter 7. Gender Battleground – Student Organizations’ Feminist Stance and Activism -- Chapter 8. Conclusion -- Bibliography -- Annexe
Sacrifice, Ahimsa, and Vegetarianism: Pogrom at the Deep End of Non-Violence
Get PDFJames T. Siegel
Benedict Anderson
Bernd Lambert
David LelyveldThis dissertation explores the relation of ahimsa (non-violence) and vegetarianism to sacrificial logic in post-independence Ahmedabad. It follows the transformation of ahimsa--from a protection of the sacrifier against the revenge of the animal victim; to a doctrine of renunciation, self-reform, and prohibition of animal sacrifice; to Gandhi?s famous tool for nonviolent resistance to colonial domination; and finally, to the ritualization of violence itself in the organized persecution of minorities in a secular state.
Central Gujarat is often called the ?laboratory of Hindutva.? Hindutva offers an interpretation of ?Hinduism? as a historical subject threatened by Islam and Christianity. It portrays Hindus as victims of Muslim barbarism, slaughtered and humiliated, butchered and raped, and demands a response that redefines the relation of violence to ahimsa. Its electoral success can be traced to a claim to unify Adivasi, lower, and intermediary caste groups with the Savarnas (high castes) as ?Hindus? in opposition to Muslims and Christians, who are positioned as foreigners.
As ethno-religious identifications have become integral to representation in a secular democratic system, traditional practices relating to diet and worship are simultaneously reconfigured. This research investigates the embodiment and experience of disgust among members of upwardly mobile castes, who are encouraged both to externalize their own low caste practices and to distance themselves from Muslims and Christians in new ways.
In the 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom in Ahmedabad, an event around which this dissertation turns, I witnessed a mimetic reversal of Hindutva?s claim. Violence returns as legitimate punishment of Muslims. The contemporary conjuncture of sacrificial language, beef prohibition, and vegetarianism makes explicit a subliminal criminalization of the dietary practices of minorities positioned permanently outside Hindutva identity. Most criminalized among these groups is the unabashed meat-consuming Muslim. The excessive expenditure of phantasmatic projections onto the Muslim is expressed in a m?lange of culinary and sacrificial idioms. The putatively excessive sexuality, violence, and power of the Muslim are themselves transformations of the symbolics of food and ingestion. The pogrom and reactions to it reveal how a notion of nonviolence becomes implicated in violence that has a sacrificial character.Social Science Research Council
Wenner Gren Foundatio
Erotic apprehension in Syrian and German encounters
No full textThe presence of new arrivals from the global South has provoked shifts in Stimmungen (collective moods) and a political backlash against social incorporation in Germany. This long-term study explores erotic apprehensions between Syrian refugees and Germans that inaugurate and form part of processes of incorporation after 2015. It focuses on thick forms of incorporation, based not on shared values or rights to membership but on forms of mutual belonging in which erotic dynamics arise and projections are open to modification. A sense of mutual belonging and long-term incorporation is unlikely without opportunities for encounters in which Germans feel desired and newcomers feel affirmed in their singularity
“The People! Demand! Social Justice!:” About Social Change in Israel and Palestine
Get PDFWritten in the midst of an 18 months ethnographic fieldwork conducted among religiously motivated Jewish settlers and Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, this field notes article engages with the question of social change. I anchor the article around cases of settlement expansion and settlers\u27 violence as a means to discuss the Jewish settlement movement in the occupied territories vis-à-vis the recent Israeli mass-protest movement for social change. Pondering upon the problematics of social change as a constant, the juxtaposition of the two social movements enables me to frame the question of social change as inextricably tied to violence and its normalization
Landscapes of extraction: labor, belonging, and social policy in northern Cauca, Colombia
No full textFor centuries, alluvial gold extraction and plantation labor have been central sources of income for people living in Norte del Cauca. Located in Western Colombia where the Andes open up to the Cauca River Valley, scholars have described this region as a landscape of proletarization, commoditization, and urbanization. Narratives that oscillate between teleological images of agrarian and urban transition on the one hand, and essentialized views of resistance and autonomy on the other, have long characterized social scientific studies of the region. This dissertation critically examines these narratives and shows how they have foreclosed important political and theoretical debates. This ethnography is thus not the tale of how enslaved populations became “free peasants” and later plantation and factory workers, or even how they became urban dwellers as promised in most modernization narratives. Nor is it one where people find their “ancestral” identity and belonging though concerted action against oppressive structures. Drawing on twenty-four months of anthropological fieldwork and archival study conducted between 2011-2016, the dissertation diverges from these views stressing the stories of mutual constitution and often overlapping and ambivalent paths I encountered in this land of gold and sugarcane. There is no doubt that there is little to glorify about the history of colonialism, state formation, and capitalist development in this region. However, I argue that people who are imagined by activists of the black ethnic organizing in Colombia, and the global peasant and environmental movements to be dreaming with alternative forms of political, economic and ecological becoming, are also dreaming with state recognition, infrastructure improvements, entrepreneurial success, and development projects. Moving along the upper Cauca river with its hydroelectric dam and gold mines, and across the Pan-American highway with its sugarcane plantations and industrial areas, this dissertation develops an analytic of entanglement in order to examine how historically racialized production relations, long-standing extractive practices, and an emergent entrepreneur subjectivities exist alongside “ancestral live-visions” of well-being and autonomy, and notions of “traditional” belonging and production mobilized by small farmers, miners, and rural workers. I argue that what is left of the racialized and extractive labor regimes, is not just a history of proletarization and destruction of the environment, but also the important experience of people who have sought to belong to the region and have come to know themselves precisely through inhabiting and working theses same landscape of exploitation and extraction. Ph.D.Includes bibliographical referencesby Enrique Jaramillo Buenaventur
"This is not the soldier you know": treason trials and the unmaking of Turkey’s military
No full textMy dissertation project is an ethnographic examination of the controversial civilian trials of military officers accused of treason and coup plotting in contemporary Turkey. Since 2008, hundreds of officers of the Turkish Armed Forces have been on trial in multiple cases with allegations ranging from forming a terrorist organization within the state to leaking of state secrets for purposes of military espionage and plotting a coup to overthrow the government. Controversial from beginning to end, the trials of these military officers have been unprecedented in the country’s history where the military has had persistent involvement in politics with rather strong legal immunity. The trials, therefore, constitute a momentous attempt to challenge the military’s legitimacy and debunk its authority. Yet, despite being portrayed as a switch from a historically pervasive military exceptionalism to the rule of law, the whole process has been enmeshed in a web of legal complexity with unclear allegations, multiple waves of police operations, internments and arrests of hundreds of people, and indictments totaling thousands of pages of documents. My dissertation focuses on one of these cases in particular–the Sledgehammer coup trial, an alleged coup plot dating back to 2003, in which 365 officers were indicted in 2010, all of whom were later acquitted in 2015 (despite initially being sentenced to 16-20 years in prison) due to the presence of fabricated evidence. Aiming to capture the tension between a historically pervasive military exceptionalism and the notion of the rule of law, as well as the actors caught between that tension, my dissertation project analyzes what the trials have meant for the military members who, once privileged representatives of the state often situated outside and above civilian legal frameworks, have had to step into the public arena and grapple with their social downfall in multiple realms. Through an eighteen-month ethnographic research that goes from the courtroom and prison to the public protests on the streets of Istanbul and Ankara, and from the private opinion of military officers in good standing to the disrupted lives of the families of the accused servicemen and the public reaction against them, this dissertation project analyzes how, and to what effect, the rhetoric of the rule of law can become a tool to dismantle militaries, revert the exceptional status under which they operate, and in so doing, rearticulate the nation anew.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical referencesby Senem Kapta
Disenchanted lives: apostasy and ex-Mormonism among the Latter-day Saints
No full textThis dissertation ethnographically explores the contemporary phenomenon of religious apostasy (that is, rejecting ones religious faith or church community) among current and former members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (aka Mormons). Over the past decade there has been increasing awareness in both the institutional church and the popular media that growing numbers of once faithful church members are becoming dissatisfied and disenchanted with their faith. In response, throughout Utah post-Mormon and ex-Mormon communities have begun appearing offering a social community and emotional support for those transitioning out of the church. Through fifteen months of ethnographic research in the state of Utah I investigated these events as they unfolded in people’s everyday lives living in a region of the country wholly dominated by the Mormon Church’s presence. In particular, I conducted participant observation in church services, ex-Mormon support group meetings, social networks and family events, as well as in-depth interviews with current and former church members. Each chapter of this dissertation explores the causes and effects of religious disenchantment as they reverberate across multiple registers: how an overabundance of memory about Mormonism’s sacred history has led to people’s estrangement from its religious life-world; how despite rejecting beliefs on a cognitive basis the effects of those beliefs can still linger in people’s sense of embodied self; how apostates’ uncanny familiarity provokes current church members’ attempts to expel them from families and neighborhoods; and how the loss of belief is negotiated through attempts to both identity and dis-identify with the Mormon community.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical referencesby Edward Marshall Brooks II
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Do Germans smell like a rose? Phagia, philia, phobia
No full textResponse to comments on Borneman, John, and Parvis Ghassem- Fachandi. 2017. “The concept of Stimmung: From indifference to xenophobia in Germany’s refugee crisis.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7 (3): 105–135
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The concept of Stimmung: From indifference to xenophobia in Germany’s refugee crisis
No full textThis article deals with the German concept of Stimmung, which does not allow a translation into the English notion of “affective mood,” but rather is simultaneously an internal and external state, subjective (involving the “I”) and objective (involving attunement [einstimmen] to others), enveloping both content and form. To understand the essential imbrication of individual and collective moods summoned by the term, we examine three empirical cases of Stimmungswechsel, or “mood shifts”—from indifference to ambivalence, to xenophilia and xenophobia—as they shaped the September 2016 German regional electoral campaigns. Following Sally Falk Moore, we focus on the “diagnostic events” which triggered these shifts, observed in fieldwork encounters with Germans concerning migrants and refugees who entered Germany in 2015. How did the perception and experience of “the refugee” become internal to the “mood shifts”? How is Stimmung linked to relations to refugees as psychic attachments that either echo an originary collective experience of losing home or promise submission to an experience of self-transformation
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