Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1353/anq.2023.a915253
Fabien Cante
ABSTRACT:This article examines how local radio producers in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire made sense of audiences’ refusals to speak on the airwaves in the aftermath of armed conflict (1999–2O11). Since the 199Os, local or “proximity” broadcasting has materialized contests over popular expression in Côte d'Ivoire. After 2O11, local stations also crystallized expectations and anxieties over the role of popular voice in peacebuilding. Drawing on scholarship linking public silences, power, and insecurity, and on Édouard Glissant’s notion of opacity, I emphasize the relationality of audience refusals, as well as producers' interpretative agency in response. I show that producers deliberately made room for the opacity of refusals by acknowledging the atmospheric pressures of political violence, without making its eЛects in the social world transparent or determining. I argue that such a practice of attunement–neither witnessing nor denial—preserved opacity as a ground for possible mutuality.Résumé:Cet article interroge la (non-)prise de parole sur les ondes locales d’Abidjan en période « postcrise ». Autorisées dans les années 1990, les radios dites « de proximité » sont un vecteur privilégié de l’expression populaire dans l’espace médiatique abidjanais où celle-ci est étroitement surveillée, voire contrôlée. Or, dans les années qui suivent le conflit ivoirien (1999–2011), une partie de l’auditoire refuse de parler au micro des radios de proximité. L’article examine comment les animateurs radio interprètent ces refus. Je montre que leur interprétation fait référence principalement au ressenti, ainsi qu’à une atmosphère diffuse, plutôt qu’à des rapports socio-politiques précis. S’ils inscrivent bien ces refus de s’exprimer dans une conjoncture marquée par la violence politique, ils évitent que les effets de cette conjoncture dans le monde social ne soient ni clairement établis, ni présentés comme déterminants. Leur interprétation esquive ainsi le registre du témoignage comme celui du déni. Surtout, en accordant aux refus leur part d’opacité, telle que théorisée par Édouard Glissant, l’interprétation des animateurs préserve dans le non-dit la possibilité d’un être-ensemble.
ABSTRACT:This article examines how local radio producers in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire made sense of audiences' refusal to speak on the airwaves in the afterm of armed conflict (1999-2O11).自 19 世纪 90 年代以来，地方或 "就近 "广播在科特迪瓦实现了对民众表达的争夺。2O11 年后，地方广播电台还使人们对民众声音在建设和平中的作用的期望和焦虑具体化。借鉴将公共沉默、权力和不安全联系在一起的学术研究，以及爱德华-格利桑（Édouard Glissant）的不透明概念，我强调了受众拒绝的关系性，以及制作人在回应时的解释性能动性。我表明，制片人通过承认政治暴力的大气压力，故意为拒绝的不透明性留出空间，而不使其在社会世界中的影响透明化或确定化。我认为，这种既不见证也不否认的调适做法保留了不透明性，为可能的相互性提供了基础。 摘要：本文对 "后危机 "时期阿比让地方广播中的（非）发言提出质疑。所谓的 "地方 "广播电台于 20 世纪 90 年代获得授权，是阿比让媒体空间中大众表达的特权载体，受到密切监督甚至控制。然而，在科特迪瓦冲突（1999-2011 年）后的几年里，一些听众拒绝对着社区广播电台的麦克风讲话。本文探讨了电台主持人如何解释这些拒绝。我的研究表明，他们的解释主要是指感情和弥漫的气氛，而不是精确的社会政治关系。虽然他们确实将这些拒绝表达自己的行为置于以政治暴力为标志的背景下，但他们既没有明确地确定这种情况对社会世界的影响，也没有将其作为一个决定性因素。因此，他们的解释既避开了证词，也避开了否认。最重要的是，正如爱德华-格利桑（Édouard Glissant）所理论的那样，通过赋予拒绝以不透明的份额，阐释者的阐释保留了在不可言说中共同存在的可能性。
{"title":"Attuning to Opacity: Interpreting “Post-Crisis” Refusals on Abidjan’s Local Airwaves","authors":"Fabien Cante","doi":"10.1353/anq.2023.a915253","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2023.a915253","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:This article examines how local radio producers in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire made sense of audiences’ refusals to speak on the airwaves in the aftermath of armed conflict (1999–2O11). Since the 199Os, local or “proximity” broadcasting has materialized contests over popular expression in Côte d'Ivoire. After 2O11, local stations also crystallized expectations and anxieties over the role of popular voice in peacebuilding. Drawing on scholarship linking public silences, power, and insecurity, and on Édouard Glissant’s notion of opacity, I emphasize the relationality of audience refusals, as well as producers' interpretative agency in response. I show that producers deliberately made room for the opacity of refusals by acknowledging the atmospheric pressures of political violence, without making its eЛects in the social world transparent or determining. I argue that such a practice of attunement–neither witnessing nor denial—preserved opacity as a ground for possible mutuality.Résumé:Cet article interroge la (non-)prise de parole sur les ondes locales d’Abidjan en période « postcrise ». Autorisées dans les années 1990, les radios dites « de proximité » sont un vecteur privilégié de l’expression populaire dans l’espace médiatique abidjanais où celle-ci est étroitement surveillée, voire contrôlée. Or, dans les années qui suivent le conflit ivoirien (1999–2011), une partie de l’auditoire refuse de parler au micro des radios de proximité. L’article examine comment les animateurs radio interprètent ces refus. Je montre que leur interprétation fait référence principalement au ressenti, ainsi qu’à une atmosphère diffuse, plutôt qu’à des rapports socio-politiques précis. S’ils inscrivent bien ces refus de s’exprimer dans une conjoncture marquée par la violence politique, ils évitent que les effets de cette conjoncture dans le monde social ne soient ni clairement établis, ni présentés comme déterminants. Leur interprétation esquive ainsi le registre du témoignage comme celui du déni. Surtout, en accordant aux refus leur part d’opacité, telle que théorisée par Édouard Glissant, l’interprétation des animateurs préserve dans le non-dit la possibilité d’un être-ensemble.","PeriodicalId":51536,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Quarterly","volume":"34 1","pages":"683 - 710"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139344791","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-06-01DOI: 10.1353/anq.2023.a905308
Nikhil Pandhi
C and the Kali Yuga begins with an apology. While interviewing a 14-year-old Dalit girl in a village in northeastern Tamil Nadu about her experiences of living with the loss of her mother who has recently died of breast cancer, the author has to apologize to her interlocutor who is overcome by emotion due to the pain of the recall. It is no mere apology issued in the face of an acute ethnographic rupture. The pain of losing a mother to breast cancer, the author shares, is known to her intimately too. That moment – and the tensions it encompasses – almost makes the “obvious differences of time and place” (x) between a white American researcher of privilege and her poor “lower-caste” interlocutors appear attenuated. Yet, as the anthropologist acknowledges all along, her field is marked by insurmountable inequities of power, class, caste, religion, and a host of other complex asymmetries. The text has a careful method of accounting for some of these unbridgeable chasms — turning to the stories of young and old Dalit girls and women and letting them narrate the vicissitudes of their diseased (and hopeful) lives replete with the vitality of emic concepts, affects, histories and futurities. The author adds to this rich scaffolding of womanist reckonings and resilience her deft engagement with critical medical anthropology, gender and sexuality studies and a range of insights from subaltern studies rooted in Tamil culture. The result is a powerful, meaningful and highly readable chronicle of brown women’s precarious lives, whose “triple marginalization” at the hands of caste, gender and cancer makes their stories of disease causality and risk, their journeys of navigating cancer diagnosis, treatment and care, and their
{"title":"Cancer and the Kali Yuga: Gender, Inequality and Health in South India by Cecilia Coale Van Hollen (review)","authors":"Nikhil Pandhi","doi":"10.1353/anq.2023.a905308","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2023.a905308","url":null,"abstract":"C and the Kali Yuga begins with an apology. While interviewing a 14-year-old Dalit girl in a village in northeastern Tamil Nadu about her experiences of living with the loss of her mother who has recently died of breast cancer, the author has to apologize to her interlocutor who is overcome by emotion due to the pain of the recall. It is no mere apology issued in the face of an acute ethnographic rupture. The pain of losing a mother to breast cancer, the author shares, is known to her intimately too. That moment – and the tensions it encompasses – almost makes the “obvious differences of time and place” (x) between a white American researcher of privilege and her poor “lower-caste” interlocutors appear attenuated. Yet, as the anthropologist acknowledges all along, her field is marked by insurmountable inequities of power, class, caste, religion, and a host of other complex asymmetries. The text has a careful method of accounting for some of these unbridgeable chasms — turning to the stories of young and old Dalit girls and women and letting them narrate the vicissitudes of their diseased (and hopeful) lives replete with the vitality of emic concepts, affects, histories and futurities. The author adds to this rich scaffolding of womanist reckonings and resilience her deft engagement with critical medical anthropology, gender and sexuality studies and a range of insights from subaltern studies rooted in Tamil culture. The result is a powerful, meaningful and highly readable chronicle of brown women’s precarious lives, whose “triple marginalization” at the hands of caste, gender and cancer makes their stories of disease causality and risk, their journeys of navigating cancer diagnosis, treatment and care, and their","PeriodicalId":51536,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Quarterly","volume":"96 1","pages":"599 - 605"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47947242","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-06-01DOI: 10.1353/anq.2023.a905301
J. Dulin, V. Dzokoto
ABSTRACT:This article examines the intersection of optimism and religion by exploring the spiritual experiences of Pentecostal Christians and Traditionalists in Cape Coast, Ghana. We argue that for both Pentecostals and Traditionalists (practitioners of indigenous Akan religion) an experience of contact with the spirit realm conditions movements between pessimistic and hopeful subjectivities. When the object of hope is definite, but uncertain, Pentecostal spiritual experiences are similar to those of traditionalists. Pentecostalism stands out as unique from traditionalist experience and practice because it also provokes states of confident expectation for a generalized object, resulting in periods of boundless optimism that shift seamlessly between confident expectancy for specific material aspirations and more abstract ends like blessing and anointing. These general states we analytically define as optimism. Pentecostal experiences generate optimistic stances that collapse the believers' economically modest presents and imagined wealthy futures, allowing for the identification of spiritual and material well-being, eclipsing actual wealth differences. For our Pentecostal interlocutors, optimism is a moment within a spectrum of states that include pessimism and variegated states of hopefulness—all of which are mediated by experiences with God/Spirit.
{"title":"\"Like it's Already Done\": Spiritual Experience, Hope, and Optimism in Southern Ghana","authors":"J. Dulin, V. Dzokoto","doi":"10.1353/anq.2023.a905301","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2023.a905301","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:This article examines the intersection of optimism and religion by exploring the spiritual experiences of Pentecostal Christians and Traditionalists in Cape Coast, Ghana. We argue that for both Pentecostals and Traditionalists (practitioners of indigenous Akan religion) an experience of contact with the spirit realm conditions movements between pessimistic and hopeful subjectivities. When the object of hope is definite, but uncertain, Pentecostal spiritual experiences are similar to those of traditionalists. Pentecostalism stands out as unique from traditionalist experience and practice because it also provokes states of confident expectation for a generalized object, resulting in periods of boundless optimism that shift seamlessly between confident expectancy for specific material aspirations and more abstract ends like blessing and anointing. These general states we analytically define as optimism. Pentecostal experiences generate optimistic stances that collapse the believers' economically modest presents and imagined wealthy futures, allowing for the identification of spiritual and material well-being, eclipsing actual wealth differences. For our Pentecostal interlocutors, optimism is a moment within a spectrum of states that include pessimism and variegated states of hopefulness—all of which are mediated by experiences with God/Spirit.","PeriodicalId":51536,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Quarterly","volume":"96 1","pages":"487 - 514"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41718439","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-06-01DOI: 10.1353/anq.2023.a905300
Ilana Feldman
ABSTRACT:This article considers the simultaneous experience and expression of disappointment and belief, and of exhaustion and commitment, in Palestinian engagement with the international community and international institutions in the years since 1948. This problem is not just a Palestinian one. Drawing from archival and ethnographic research on Palestine conducted over, and about, many years and locations, the article proposes untimely optimism as a concept to elucidate how people can sustain commitments to institutions whose failures they know well. The concept also reveals what may be accomplished through maintaining such commitment, even within a general context of failure and betrayal. Untimeliness does not always generate optimism—it frequently does not—but it may nonetheless be a prerequisite for optimism "at the end of the world."
{"title":"Untimely Optimism: International Attention, Palestinian Disappointment, and the Persistence of Commitment","authors":"Ilana Feldman","doi":"10.1353/anq.2023.a905300","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2023.a905300","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:This article considers the simultaneous experience and expression of disappointment and belief, and of exhaustion and commitment, in Palestinian engagement with the international community and international institutions in the years since 1948. This problem is not just a Palestinian one. Drawing from archival and ethnographic research on Palestine conducted over, and about, many years and locations, the article proposes untimely optimism as a concept to elucidate how people can sustain commitments to institutions whose failures they know well. The concept also reveals what may be accomplished through maintaining such commitment, even within a general context of failure and betrayal. Untimeliness does not always generate optimism—it frequently does not—but it may nonetheless be a prerequisite for optimism \"at the end of the world.\"","PeriodicalId":51536,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Quarterly","volume":"96 1","pages":"461 - 485"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49030006","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-06-01DOI: 10.1353/anq.2023.a905298
Ryan Davey
ABSTRACT:In 2010s Britain, expectations for parents living on low incomes to pursue aspirations for their children's upward social mobility converged with a concentration of forcible child protection interventions in so-called "deprived" neighborhoods. This article explores the subjectivities of parents, mainly women, living on one such housing estate [housing project] in England by critically engaging Berlant's theories of optimism and intimacy. The overtly aspirational practices by which parents there sought better lives for their children are inseparable from those parents' attempts to dispel their fears of their children being removed. While the immediate prospect of child removal provoked one woman to forego an express will to retain custody, the remoter possibility of the same event incited others to comply with parental norms to which they did not subscribe or to reaffirm their existing parental aspirations ever more vocally. Conceptually the article argues that optimism can sometimes be defensive rather than aspirational, especially in the face of lawful expropriations, and that these two forms of optimism—aspirational and defensive—may interact with and reinforce one another. The article extends Berlant's analysis by showing the involvement of coercive legal force in the processes by which people cling onto hopes that wear them down. When faced with the possible expropriation of the object of an intimate attachment, people's attempts to hold onto that object may also involve reasserting the aspirations which the attachment makes possible. This suggests that research into optimism, aspirations and ethical self-formation has much to gain from careful attention to people's mundane expectations of violence and loss.
{"title":"Defensive Optimism: Parental Aspirations and the Prospect of State-Enforced Child Removal in Britain","authors":"Ryan Davey","doi":"10.1353/anq.2023.a905298","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2023.a905298","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:In 2010s Britain, expectations for parents living on low incomes to pursue aspirations for their children's upward social mobility converged with a concentration of forcible child protection interventions in so-called \"deprived\" neighborhoods. This article explores the subjectivities of parents, mainly women, living on one such housing estate [housing project] in England by critically engaging Berlant's theories of optimism and intimacy. The overtly aspirational practices by which parents there sought better lives for their children are inseparable from those parents' attempts to dispel their fears of their children being removed. While the immediate prospect of child removal provoked one woman to forego an express will to retain custody, the remoter possibility of the same event incited others to comply with parental norms to which they did not subscribe or to reaffirm their existing parental aspirations ever more vocally. Conceptually the article argues that optimism can sometimes be defensive rather than aspirational, especially in the face of lawful expropriations, and that these two forms of optimism—aspirational and defensive—may interact with and reinforce one another. The article extends Berlant's analysis by showing the involvement of coercive legal force in the processes by which people cling onto hopes that wear them down. When faced with the possible expropriation of the object of an intimate attachment, people's attempts to hold onto that object may also involve reasserting the aspirations which the attachment makes possible. This suggests that research into optimism, aspirations and ethical self-formation has much to gain from careful attention to people's mundane expectations of violence and loss.","PeriodicalId":51536,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Quarterly","volume":"96 1","pages":"409 - 436"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44861199","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-06-01DOI: 10.1353/anq.2023.a905307
George Mantzios
I Radical Resilience Othon Alexandrakis develops an ethnographically compelling account of resilience by conveying the forms of political disengagement and social isolation through which his Athenian interlocutors navigate the everyday and compounding injuries of neoliberal austerity and state abandonment in Greece. These are highly variable stories, gathered over more than a decade of ethnographic research in Athens (2006–2018). In them, injury and undoing become the operative terms with which Alexandrakis guides his readers through the “compounding and accumulating minor moments and small locations” (6) where the lives of his interlocutors unravel only to be reconfigured in unexpected and potentially radical ways. Across the text, we follow Niko, a disaffected Greek anarchist organizer (Chapters 1 and 5), George, a Romani adolescent boy (Chapter 2), Amalia, a young nurse (Chapter 3), and Taj and Samba, two undocumented migrants eking out their living in Athens as scrap metal collectors (Chapter 4), as each struggle to make sense of the psycho-social, political, and/or economic upheavals upturning their life worlds. Resilience is located in their respective attempts to salvage or else reconfigure a life-sustaining relationship to the social, and through it, to some sense of a shared world, political or otherwise. Crucially, this ethnography is not really about people successfully finding their way back from crisis by “making sense” of misfortune through the invocation of shared cultural resources such as historical memories of hardship or collective political identities of resistance. Rather, it is about
{"title":"Radical Resilience: Athenian Topographies of Precarity and Possibility by Othon Alexandrakis (review)","authors":"George Mantzios","doi":"10.1353/anq.2023.a905307","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2023.a905307","url":null,"abstract":"I Radical Resilience Othon Alexandrakis develops an ethnographically compelling account of resilience by conveying the forms of political disengagement and social isolation through which his Athenian interlocutors navigate the everyday and compounding injuries of neoliberal austerity and state abandonment in Greece. These are highly variable stories, gathered over more than a decade of ethnographic research in Athens (2006–2018). In them, injury and undoing become the operative terms with which Alexandrakis guides his readers through the “compounding and accumulating minor moments and small locations” (6) where the lives of his interlocutors unravel only to be reconfigured in unexpected and potentially radical ways. Across the text, we follow Niko, a disaffected Greek anarchist organizer (Chapters 1 and 5), George, a Romani adolescent boy (Chapter 2), Amalia, a young nurse (Chapter 3), and Taj and Samba, two undocumented migrants eking out their living in Athens as scrap metal collectors (Chapter 4), as each struggle to make sense of the psycho-social, political, and/or economic upheavals upturning their life worlds. Resilience is located in their respective attempts to salvage or else reconfigure a life-sustaining relationship to the social, and through it, to some sense of a shared world, political or otherwise. Crucially, this ethnography is not really about people successfully finding their way back from crisis by “making sense” of misfortune through the invocation of shared cultural resources such as historical memories of hardship or collective political identities of resistance. Rather, it is about","PeriodicalId":51536,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Quarterly","volume":"96 1","pages":"593 - 597"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43202341","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-06-01DOI: 10.1353/anq.2023.a905305
Carolina Fuentes
{"title":"Graciela: One Woman's Story of War, Survival, and Perseverance in the Peruvian Andes by Nicole Coffey Kellett and Graciela Orihuela Rocha (review)","authors":"Carolina Fuentes","doi":"10.1353/anq.2023.a905305","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2023.a905305","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51536,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Quarterly","volume":"96 1","pages":"583 - 586"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46776492","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-06-01DOI: 10.1353/anq.2023.a905302
Anja Kublitz
ABSTRACT:Danish Muslims who have returned from jihad in Syria describe the Arab Spring as a miracle—a divine intervention that called upon them to radically change their lives. From one day to the next, they turned towards God and decided to travel to the Middle East to take up arms. According to the interlocutors, the miracle of the Arab Spring made them wake up to find themselves as part of the Muslim umma—the community of the last prophet Mohammed—that is, the prophet of the time of the end—but also to find that maybe the end of time had arrived and that they could choose to join the Great Battle between infidels and believers. Based on long-term fieldwork, this article investigates my interlocutors' practices of struggling in the way of Allah. Arguing against Olivier Roy's central thesis that European jihadists are violent nihilists, I contend that we need to reinstate God and the relation between divine determination and my interlocutors' agency to explain why jihadists act as they do. To understand this relation, I draw on anthropological studies of Islam and Christianity, as well as Agamben's distinction between "the time of the end" (messianism) and "the end of time" (apocalypse). My interlocutors believe that they live in End-times: they know that the world is about to end but they do not know when, and I suggest that it is exactly this gap that their jihadists' practices strive to bridge. Struggling to bring about what they believe is already God-given, I argue that jihadists are optimists, not nihilists.
{"title":"Optimism at the End of Time: Jihadists' Struggles","authors":"Anja Kublitz","doi":"10.1353/anq.2023.a905302","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2023.a905302","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:Danish Muslims who have returned from jihad in Syria describe the Arab Spring as a miracle—a divine intervention that called upon them to radically change their lives. From one day to the next, they turned towards God and decided to travel to the Middle East to take up arms. According to the interlocutors, the miracle of the Arab Spring made them wake up to find themselves as part of the Muslim umma—the community of the last prophet Mohammed—that is, the prophet of the time of the end—but also to find that maybe the end of time had arrived and that they could choose to join the Great Battle between infidels and believers. Based on long-term fieldwork, this article investigates my interlocutors' practices of struggling in the way of Allah. Arguing against Olivier Roy's central thesis that European jihadists are violent nihilists, I contend that we need to reinstate God and the relation between divine determination and my interlocutors' agency to explain why jihadists act as they do. To understand this relation, I draw on anthropological studies of Islam and Christianity, as well as Agamben's distinction between \"the time of the end\" (messianism) and \"the end of time\" (apocalypse). My interlocutors believe that they live in End-times: they know that the world is about to end but they do not know when, and I suggest that it is exactly this gap that their jihadists' practices strive to bridge. Struggling to bring about what they believe is already God-given, I argue that jihadists are optimists, not nihilists.","PeriodicalId":51536,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Quarterly","volume":"96 1","pages":"515 - 544"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49148915","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-06-01DOI: 10.1353/anq.2023.a905299
L. Segal
ABSTRACT:This article offers a reading of contemporary life in Palestine that interrogates the braiding of hope and despair through an examination of expressions of optimism and madness in Palestinian everyday life. Whereas I neither aim to define what madness nor optimism could be taken to mean, I examine vernacular notions of how, when, and why the notion of madness is used in ordinary language, anchored in ethnographic fieldwork in occupied Palestine as well as conversations with Palestinian interlocutors over the last sixteen years. The aim being to explore the experiential and linguistic abyss between a collective feeling of Israel's occupation as a maddening force and, on the other hand, the accompanying call on part of the Palestinians to act as if it was not, the will to endure and resist being unwavering. Ultimately, I pursue the argument that the chasm between these two different pressures causes a feeling of skepticism due to the braided struggle of finding a language that can both acknowledge the occurrence of mental disorder as a consequence of the military occupation simultaneously as Palestinians carve out a space to sustain an ordinary in the wake of maddening oppression. Concludingly, I argue that gender is at the heart of how we might understand, even locate the refusal to end in Palestine—the maddening consequences intrinsic to such a refusal being the locus of my inquiry.
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