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| 1 |
ID:
174031
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article explores the changing voice of bereaved parents in Israel from 1948 to the present. Until the early 1980s, bereaved parents did not express their grief or protest publicly. Their bereavement was a strictly private matter. In 1982, shortly after the outbreak of the First Lebanon War, their grief and protest burst into the public sphere. From then on, their voice gained momentum and legitimacy and in time directly impacted the political decision-makers. The article defines four phases in the changing content, tone and style of parental bereavement – hidden, political, privatized, and moral – by analyzing and comparing six representative texts.
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| 2 |
ID:
147206
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This article explores how a sense of responsibility toward the revolutionary Bhagat Singh (1907–31) is mediated by and articulated through a relationship with the martyr's written remains. It considers how efforts to reconstruct ‘the real’ Bhagat Singh propel a polemic around the ‘proper’ subject of Indian politics, one that destabilises common sense nationalist narratives and extant autobiographies of the Indian Left. These interventions must, however, grapple with the anarchic potentiality of Bhagat Singh's self-sacrifice: empiricist efforts are tempted to engage in spectral practices of conjecture and counterfactual, building a politics of inheritance around a future that never came to pass.
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| 3 |
ID:
165932
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article examines the modern transformations of the temple of the goddess, Kāmākhyā, and her most important festival, Ambuvācī Melā, in Assam. Since at least the eighth century, Kāmākhyā has been revered as one of the most important ‘seats of power’ or centres of the goddess that dot the landscape of South Asia. However, during the last century, this temple and its festivals have undergone a series of profound transformations—first, in the context of Hindu nationalism and attempts to imagine a unified sacred landscape of ‘Mother India’, and second, in the context of spiritual tourism and efforts to develop the Northeast region as a new economic powerhouse for the twenty-first century.
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| 4 |
ID:
167409
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This article proposes a political prehistory of drone theory that traces its juridico-political evolution from the 17th century to the present day. To outline my argument, I construct a constellation between Hobbes’s theory of sovereign punishment in Leviathan and Chamayou’s critique of drone warfare in Drone Theory to illuminate the political origins of drone violence. First, I argue that Hobbes’s social contract theory lays the conceptual groundwork for Chamayou’s drone theory. Second, I contend that Hobbes’s theory of the sovereign punishment of domestic citizens preempts Chamayou’s critique of drone warfare against foreign enemies. Finally, I speculate that Hobbes’s theory of punishment is founded upon a sacrificial paradigm that returns in the phenomenon of domestic drone strikes. In summary, I argue that Hobbes might be something close to the first drone theorist insofar as his political theory systematically produces the state of exception between citizen and enemy in which the drone operates today. What, then, are the theoretical origins of drone warfare? How does the punishment of citizens prefigure drone warfare against foreign enemies? To what extent might even citizens themselves be a species of drone who may be activated by the sovereign at any point?
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| 5 |
ID:
170003
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| Summary/Abstract |
Hindu nationalist discourse articulates a link between the violence of slaughter and the notion of a violent, abject Muslim as the cruel ‘other’. However, for Muslims in Mumbai, the cruelty of slaughter is not inherent, and questions of order and propriety are heavily circumscribed by communal politics. This paper presents moments during Bakri Id (Qurbani) and everyday life when participants evoke or experience disgust. Drawing on a discursive tradition of slaughter, together with everyday observations on infrastructure, order and marginalisation by middle-class Muslims from various walks of life, focuses attention on the way disgust is and is not experienced by Muslims in the city. I argue that these instances of disgust are moments of embodied critique that secure the middle-class Muslim as subject by pointing to the histories of marginalisation, infrastructural neglect and improper religious practice.
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| 6 |
ID:
153015
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| Summary/Abstract |
Writing in the period 1765–79, John Zephaniah Holwell, temporary governor of Bengal, was one of the first British writers to attempt a scholarly engagement with Hinduism. Despite being an important source for several Enlightenment writers, his work has been misrepresented by current scholarship. In particular, his account of ‘voluntary sacrifice’, or sati, has been misunderstood as an example of eighteenth-century rationalism. This article will correct this by situating the account in a much fuller appreciation of Holwell's ‘project’, which can be broadly understood as an attempt to reconcile his own heterodox Christianity with what he termed ‘Gentoo’ doctrines. It will show how Holwell's insistence on the essential truth of ‘metempsychosis’ reveals an account of sati that is far more invested in presenting a particular reading of Indian religious principles than has hitherto been appreciated. This analysis challenges certain assumptions in the historiography of eighteenth-century European encounters with India, with a particular emphasis on intellectual culture.
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| 7 |
ID:
170178
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| Summary/Abstract |
Case studies of male–female ascetic couples in Haridwar in North India complicate the widespread knowledge that male Hindu renouncers are supposed to observe celibacy. Based on extended ethnographic work, this article investigates specifically how female ascetics tackle the dominant androcentric discourses and practise celibacy from a female point of view, focussing on their practice of sevā or spiritual service. The article argues that while female ascetics do not object to the androcentric ideology of celibacy, they follow it only partly, switching their focus from sexual abstinence to devotional sevā. Doing this, female ascetics value controlling emotion more than controlling sexual desire. Through the practice of sevā, they aim for fostering an attitude of devotion as a feminised manifestation of their efforts towards reaching spiritual attainment.
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| 8 |
ID:
114192
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2012.
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| Summary/Abstract |
The Queen's Diamond Jubilee occasions a recognition of her unique contribution to the development of the Commonwealth, especially the pervasive theme of service. The author also reflects on the role of faith in a multicultural and perhaps increasingly secular society. The Jubilee is, he argues, an occasion to look forward as well as back with clear heads and warm hearts.
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| 9 |
ID:
080584
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2007.
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| Summary/Abstract |
The Heraka or Gaidinliu Movement among the Zeme Nagas of the North Cachar Hills, Assam, provides a case of millenarian activities based on agrarian reforms. The movement is associated with opposing British rule during the 1930s until India's Independence in 1947 under the guidance of Jadonang and later Gaidinliu. I examine the genesis of the movement which was based on agrarian reform by linking it with the influx of Kuki people and the effect of British land policy on Zeme agricultural practices which caused land shortages and famine. I argue that the Heraka Movement provided an alternative by abolishing certain rituals associated with the agricultural cycle and this in turn changed the social hierarchies and the worldview of the Zeme.
1 This paper was first presented at the 2006 European Conference of Modern South Asian Studies, organised by the European Association for South Asian Studies (EASAS) at Leiden University (Panel 28: Ethnicity and Development: Tribes and Small Peoples of India). I am grateful to Tahulung and Adeule for helping me understand the 'Zeme world'. I am thankful to Paul Streumer, Mohan Gautam, Lindsay Graham, Jeanne Openshaw, Amanda Bowden, Mark Turin, Steven Sutcliffe, Vibha Joshi and Erik de Maaker for their comments and feedback
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| 10 |
ID:
110477
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| Publication |
2011.
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article starts from two interventions made at the 2008 Millennium Roundtable Discussion on Gender and International Relations: Vivienne Jabri's suggestion that feminist IR might benefit from a closer engagement with the constitution of 'the international' and 'the political' in feminist texts and Christine Sylvester's call for incorporating 'difficult feminisms' that challenge dominant understandings of which political and analytical perspective should be adopted. In response, this article lays out a more concrete research agenda focused on feminist texts that takes an empirically open view of what 'feminism' is and which incorporates factual genres and disciplines beyond political science and philosophy. To provide an example of a reading of 'the international' and 'the political' in a (difficult) feminist text, I turn to Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, a non-fiction genre-hybrid tome of almost 1200 pages published in 1941. Known to an IR audience mainly through its alleged impact on the Bosnian War, I draw upon works in literary theory and women's studies to bring out West's gendered vision of international politics, giving particular attention to her constitution of the relationship between national, international and women's security. The analysis is divided into four parts which examine the gendering and embodying of empires, the politics of art and aesthetics, sacrifice and submission, and the feminist politics of writing.
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| 11 |
ID:
114017
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| Publication |
2012.
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| Summary/Abstract |
In most general terms, hathayoga involves the internalisation and embodied literalisation of the Vedic fire sacrifice. Reflecting on the place of sacrifice in anthropological theory, and on the way in which sacrifice structures the relationship between humans and gods in terms of gift obligations, this paper explores the theoretical implications of hathayoga's embodied literalisation of a profoundly symbolic act. Although similar to various forms of ascetic renunciation, hathayoga is unique, it will be argued, in being structured as the physiological antithesis of religious ritual. Self-realisation based on the internalised yajna sacrifice undermines the binary structure of the sacred and the profane and makes god irrelevant. This raises theoretical questions concerning the social significance of a ritual that is anti-social on a number of different levels.
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| 12 |
ID:
113827
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| Publication |
2012.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Democratic theorists have increasingly turned to Aeschylus' Oresteia as a resource for challenging the shortcomings of liberal theory, but I argue that this particular return to Greek tragedy should be treated with a healthy dose of skepticism. Defenders of Aeschylean justice have underplayed the sacrificial aspects of his solution to the problem of civil strife, mistaking the consent of the Furies for a resolution that escapes the cycle of violence. Drawing on elements of Greek ritual practice, I contend that Aeschylus folds the consent of the Furies into a sacrificial framework which denies the violence it enacts by directing this violence toward nonhumans. As a consequence Aeschylean justice is complicit in continuing the sacrificial economy it seems to subvert, and Aeschylean politics relies on the suffering of nonhumans (and humans) to secure its conception of order.
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| 13 |
ID:
140132
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| Summary/Abstract |
Globalisation and post-colonialism have created new religio-cultural geographies and articulations in many countries. Many aspects of Hindu religion have been transnationally stretched and (re)enacted within new migrant and diasporic spaces, in turn reshaping and somewhat changing how ritual and religious enactments come to be enunciated. This article focuses on the yajna as a plastic and symbolic resource that is enacted in a transnational context and within new idioms and vocabularies of religious expression. The article engages with Lubin’s (2001) thesis that the ‘public’ and visible aspect of yajna functions as a civic ‘spectacle’ and probes the performance element of this so-called ‘spectacle’, and looks at how it becomes re-ritualised and re-enacted to fit the contemporary needs of transnational and diasporic Hindu communities.
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| 14 |
ID:
191956
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| Summary/Abstract |
In this article, we argue in favour of a conceptual expansion of the Just War idea of ‘due care’, to include the foreseeable, but indirect harm generated by Western force protection. This harm includes the phenomenon of ‘casualty displacement warfare’ – circumstances in which the prioritisation and relative success of Western force protection incentivises some Western adversaries to redirect more of their own violence away from Western soldiers and onto civilians. Primary moral responsibility for such violence should be allocated to those who violate the principle of non-combatant immunity, whatever their motivations. Critically though, we argue that Western militaries do bear some indirect culpability for the conflict conditions that structure such violence. These same militaries, we argue, are morally duty bound to do what they feasibly can to reduce the risks of casualty displacement, even if this necessitates a relaxation of their own commitment to force protection.
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| 15 |
ID:
184162
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article examines the practices and discourses surrounding the ikrar oaths by which some Alevis in Turkey and the Turkish diaspora are initiated into their spiritual path. I examine a contemporary revival of this Alevi oath complex, which is a historical product of the same messianic trends in post-Mongol Sufism that shaped the Mughal imperial idea of sulh-i kull, or ‘Peace with All’ religions. I argue that the ikrar oaths are paradigmatic examples of ‘post-Islam’ or Islam after the messianic suspension of its scriptural law. I show how Alevis seek to maintain their suspension of monotheism through ritual practices of animal sacrifice and music as well as the replacement of standard monotheistic oaths with post-Islamic oaths. Focusing on a recent liturgical reform movement led by the shrine of Hacı Bektaş in central Turkey, I demonstrate how the shrine works to maintain Alevis’ suspension of monotheism within the constraints of modern secularism, in part by reinterpreting secular constraints in terms of post-Islamic Alevi values, thereby highlighting elective affinities between post-Islam and secularism.
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