My dissertation, Being Both: Negotiating Identity, Surveillance, and Belonging within Queer Middle Eastern and Queer Muslim Communities in the United States, explores how queer Muslims and queer Middle Eastern people in the U.S. navigate overlapping systems of Islamophobia, racialization, and homotransphobia. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in New York City and in digital spaces between 2020 and 2022, I analyze how surveillance and social scrutiny shape how people express identity and belonging across different audiences—family, friends, lovers, and online publics.
Page 99 captures the fraught intimacy of recognition online. I describe how a simple greeting—“I’m a Muslim too”—on a gay dating app can evoke both connection and fear. For queer Muslim men, such moments are charged with risk: being identified as Muslim might affirm kinship, but it can also expose them to outing, gossip, or familial shame. As one passage reads,
“Even though the risk may be small that screenshots of their Grindr profile and photos could be seen by family and friends, queer Muslim and Middle Eastern men are highly concerned about proactively managing the consequences if such a data breach were to occur. This anxiety about data insecurity shapes decisions they make about expressing ethnic and religious identity on gay dating apps and often limits their willingness to share personal information with other men who look like them until they know their interlocutor can be trusted.”
This moment distills a central theme of my project: the tension between visibility and safety. I call this dynamic observational discipline—the anticipatory awareness of being seen and the strategic effort to manage that gaze. Page 99 shows how technological infrastructures of dating and surveillance intersect with cultural and moral frameworks, producing a distinct affective terrain of cautious desire and mediated belonging.
Across the dissertation, queer Muslim and Middle Eastern participants navigate which versions of themselves can be legible and to whom. Through these micro-practices of watching and withholding, they create new possibilities for being both—queer and Muslim, Middle Eastern and American—within social worlds that often render such coexistence impossible.
Since completing the dissertation, I have been teaching business communication at Indiana University, where questions of identity, audience, and representation remain central to my work. Returning to page 99 reminds me that every act of communication, however brief, is also a negotiation of risk, recognition, and belonging.
Drew Kerr: On one reading, you’ve offered a fresh take on the exclusionary Hindu nationalist project of perpetual crisis re/creating an internal enemy in India, which we might highlight a special animation to this crisis in 1992 with the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, cemented as a model in the 2002 events of the Gujarat pogrom in your book, and now, as of January 22, 2024, in a way consecrated with the building of the Ram Mandir over the site of the destroyed Babri Masjid. You challenge us to not take these events — and major events like them across the globe — as finished and to not take them as simply destructive. Simultaneously, your work broadly challenges the idea and hope of witnessing in spaces of violence. I’m curious if you could explain the tensions you knead out between destruction and composure, and how violence forces us to rethink that relationship?
Moyukh Chatterjee: Thanks, Drew, for your question, which goes to the heart of the book and its ambition. The mise-en-scene of political violence, especially what is called communal violence and riots in South Asia, may be quite familiar to many readers and scholars – burned shops, cycles, cars, dead bodies, police marches. This violence is often categorized as religious violence and ethnic conflict, which is not very helpful at all since it assumes the violence can then be somehow sequestered within the boundaries of something called Hinduism and Islam which exists outside the secular apparatus of the courts, police, law, and elections.
But the dead bodies on the streets and the burned down shops and houses only show the destructive force of collective violence on lives and spaces. And as you mentioned, what do we do with an explicitly exclusionary project that also aims to create new forms of belonging and inclusion? What do we do when riots and pogroms are only act one, stage one, like the case of Gujarat 2002, when anti-Muslim pogroms became the launchpad for a new form of public, muscular Hinduism, a new form of majoritarian governance, and a new kind of wounded and triumphant Hindu self. In such contexts, I have suggested that composition rather than exposure may be more helpful. Since composition moves away from the framing of political violence as an event that is supposedly finished or as always ensconced within the framework of victim/perpetrator or even as something that is always already under erasure. In this way, my book builds on the work of a range of political anthropologists – Veena Das, Jonathan Spencer, Daniel Hoffman, Val Daniel, Pradeep Jeganathan – to name just a few who come to mind, who have explored this tension between the destructive and the productive in tracking the afterlives of political violence in different contexts.
In other words, composition is the answer to the problem of framing an object that does not end with the horror and brutality of subjection and humiliation, (and here I am thinking of the work of Saidiya Hartman and Fred Moten writing about racism) but continues to animate new spaces (courtroom and police station) and new forms of rule. (new laws or the use of old laws for new purposes). In a related but also different way, this helps us see the question of violence anew, not within the binary of violence/peace as if violence against minorities is an aberration or breakdown of democracy, but ask what kind of social and political relationships sublimate, organize, transform, and interrupt violence against minorities within liberal democracies.
Drew Kerr: A few different types of dialectics — for example, norm and ideology, erasure and exposure, witness and victim, majority and minority — come into being through violences that ultimately give flesh to the categories and roles of Hindu and Muslim. You clearly show us, though, none of these categories are ever fully self-evident or stable in concept for the researcher or in practice for the residents in 2002 and present-day Gujarat. I find this incredibly hopeful (thank you!) to think, write, and live beyond false and fixed dichotomies on one hand, as well as quite insidious, which, I think, plays a larger compositional role in the book and the events described. Can you tell us more about the logics of such an “impossible dialectic” (Agamben 2000) and how they showed up in, and comprised, your research?
Moyukh Chatterjee: Because I was working with paralegals and human rights activists, the dialectics you mention above, especially binaries like Hindu/Muslim, victim/perpetrator, acquittal/conviction framed my fieldwork (in almost overwhelming way) and it was a major challenge for me to not be fully absorbed or determined by them. Put another way, it seemed to me that the project of Hindu supremacy aimed to create an environment, an ethos, a background, where what you call false dichotomies appear self-evident, even experiential. So, I remember one Muslim witness telling me outside the courtroom that it was foolish to expect justice from the courts because they were Hindus. So beyond the breakdown of the law, the courts were doing something else, they were joining the wider political and social climate in Gujarat to declare to Muslims that they were outsiders, eternal outsiders.
Another example. During the pogrom in Gujarat, my interlocutors told me, it was a time when it did not matter what kind of Muslim you were – rich or poor, Shia or Sunni, apartment resident or slum dweller, judge or beggar – you were reduced to being a Muslim, and all the richness of other categories or all the differences of caste, language, sect, and region that mark the heterogeneity of Hindu/Muslim falls away. I think your question raises the larger context of social pluralism which is the norm (rather than the dichotomies) in India.
Speaking of binaries, the binary between impunity/rule of law and law/illegal also melts away when you observe the performance of trials and justice. So one day in Ahmedabad, almost a decade after the pogrom, you (Muslim witness) find yourself in front of the judge, and your neighbor is an accused, and you have to identify him as such, but the informal setting of the courtroom, or more specifically the lower courts in India, means that the accused can approach you, often in front of the NGO workers and paralegals, and ask you to forget the case, or reconcile, or otherwise intimidate you. Anthropology can reveal in such moments the human rights and statist fantasy of legal punishment, a fantasy often shared by activists, that one can move outside the social into a sanitized world of the legal.
Drew Kerr: Semiotics or signs don’t play an explicit role in the argument of the book; however, you do draw on the language of meaning-making, composing, and producing what is rendered as legible, licit, and legitimate (Das 1995) — what I might frame in one word as significant. On my read, I find the work your argument is doing to be very beneficial for also thinking through regimes of language, the entanglement of social forces and speech acts, and the interplay between political ideologies and human capacities of sign-use. I’d love to hear more about your choices, then, in composing the book’s theoretical arc, as well as composing yourself methodologically during your research.
Moyukh Chatterjee: An attention to semiotics, signs, and what you can call significance has been an integral part of my training in literature and anthropology. As a student of English literature in Delhi, I read Barthes and later in graduate school in Emory, I gravitated towards a group (or should I call them a cult?) of scholars and students who were very influenced by Deconstruction. But as an anthropologist, I felt uneasy dressing up my fieldwork in the language of deconstruction; it would mean that my fieldwork or stories would be to prove/disprove theoretical tendencies found within canonical texts by Foucault/Derrida or someone else. Nonetheless, I was deeply impressed with the readings that were offered in those classes – readings that deconstructed texts and performed incredible acts of interpretation!
So while composing the theoretical arc of the book, I thought maybe it will be a good idea to take some of the most familiar objects that frame political violence – witness, archive, trial, the unspeakable – and recast them, or attempt to recast them. To be frank, I am not sure I succeeded in doing all this in one book. And it was easier to show the limits of exposure than to compose violence. In terms of composition, I build on the literature on critique and post-critique. Composition builds on the limits of critique identified by literary scholars, for whom it is primarily a way of reading texts, which in my case becomes a way of reading violence.
And I use it in terms of assembling a heterogeneous set of actors and affects, indebted to Latour’s concept of compositionism as well.
And the question of language is quite an important part of what I have in mind with composition. And of course, there is a long tradition of attention to language in studies of violence. Unlike exposure which is perhaps indifferent to the object, and assumes that the language of exposure per se is not important (after all it is exposure that is the point) I think composition puts the question of significance at the center; it is, to paraphrase the novelist Coetzee, to wrest control from regimes of significance connected to the state/major. At the same time, I think the question of what lies beyond language, or semiotic regimes is also important; the affective charge of far-right Hindu supremacy and its performativity is a key aspect of its success. For instance, on encountering a violent image or procession, a compositional approach will ask, what are the publics formed by such images and rituals, how do actors insert themselves into its circulation and proliferation, and in that sense, make it political. I find these questions are difficult to ask within the exposure model.
Drew Kerr: Legal documents, on the other hand, do play a central role in Composing Violence and the lives of your interlocutors. Nusrat Chowdhury (2019) in Bangladesh, Akhil Gupta (2012) in North India, and Matthew Hull (2008) in Pakistan have similarly shown how other types of official documents take on lives well beyond what we might evaluate as bureaucratic failures or democratic inefficiencies, demonstrating how documents themselves become affectively charged in particular milieux. You join this conversation with a special emphasis on the human actors involved in and with the document-type of the First Information Report (FIR). Ostensibly a legal and bureaucratic tool promising legibility and due legal process, the FIR, you illustrate, actually accomplishes something quite different. Can you help us understand the FIR as a medium – in the sense of something that “makes society imaginable and intelligible to itself”(Mazzarella 2004) – and the media ecology within which it circulates?
Moyukh Chatterjee: Your question takes me back to graduate school. At the time I was writing my dissertation, some of these exciting new books had come out, and I remember that I was excited to witness the documents/paperwork turn in anthropology; in fact I almost made it the heart of the dissertation, but my advisor helped me to see the larger picture. In line with my interest in language and archives (which was also because of Subaltern Studies), I gravitated towards the power of police acts of interpretation and reporting. I was excited to find that police reports break out of context (what Derrida called iterability and Veena Das has a wonderful essay that uses this idea called the Signature of the State) and circulate in newspaper reports as public information. In fact, this discovery made me realize the extremely limited vocabulary used to describe religious violence in India and its genre-like quality that allowed violence to work like myth. This goes back to your question about the role of the FIR in making certain forms of violence against minorities intelligible as religious fervor and not state-sanctioned pogroms. David Nugent, a wonderful anthropologist of the state and also a member of my dissertation committee, would ask me pointedly, “why are the police recording the violence in the first place?” And as I describe in the book, even the blank FIRs in the archive, the blankness does political work by creating a certain time-space of violence. Overall I was struck by how a dry, technical document like the police’s first information report becomes the key ingredient of newspaper reports (and this must be based on relationships between crime reporters and police officers) that allow what Gyan Pandey has called the colonial master narrative of the communal riot to circulate as what is labeled news. And here, rather than expose the falsity and bias of the FIR (important work accomplished by activists and scholars soon after the violence) I got interested in its power to inscribe a wounded majority and a treacherous minority. In this sense, legal documents get charged by Hindu nationalist politics and are also constitutive of a milieu that produces the Muslim as outsider, communal, and destructive of the national community.
Drew Kerr: Where would you locate this book in relation to the category of the minor you develop throughout your argument? I’m curious for whatever that question might spark for you, but I’m particularly imagining a capacious archive — and the idea of the archive — that houses media about and of violences rendered as communal and religiously divisive in India.
Moyukh Chatterjee: This is such a wonderful question. I wish I could have developed the idea of the minor more expansively in my book. The minor and the minority as a concept, as you know, belongs to a long history, and I have learned from and continue to learn from the work of Talal Asad, Amir Mufti, Qadri Ismail, Ajay Skaria, Gyan Pandey, Faisal Devji, Chulani Kodikara to name only a few people who come to mind. As a concept I wanted to give a sense of the making of the minor and the minority, not simply as numerical categories, but as what does not circulate as the norm or model; that which interrupts the major or can unravel the major; and finally as a binary that is framed and re-framed within the institutional apparatuses and technologies of democracy., including the courtroom and police archive. As David Scott has argued, democracy seems to lock us into thinking that there is only the possibility of minority rule or majority rule, and if the minority position is a position without sovereignty, then part of the fantasy of right-wing movements like Hindu nationalism is to create a permanent majority and minority within a democracy. This has been framed in an earlier classical literature, as “the tyranny of the majority” (Tocqueville). But in terms of my ethnography, I have tried to work out a minor reading of violence, which is not a search for what is hidden or repressed, but what is on the surface of documents, technologies, and practices (like repetition and aggregation) and helps us understand the making of the major, and its artifice. In the book, it takes the form of the minor event, the minor characters who are often overlooked in the mise-en-scene of violence.
Your idea of a capacious archive to document and tell this story of violence is really wonderful. I think it would take the idea of composition seriously to imagine such an archive outside the limits of conventional archival thinking. By which I mean non-narrative and non-chronological ways of representing anti-minority violence or what has been called religious violence. I have been very influenced by artistic work on violence, and perhaps, composition is my way of bringing some of that sensibility into scholarly work. In my fieldsite, I have been speaking to artists and curators, more recently, and thinking with them, this question of the archive. Would it be to map the soundscapes and visual field of this violence or to move away from the archive altogether, and think about how the minor – for instance Muslims and Dalits and Tribals – imagine a life inside and outside Hindu supremacy? When I was growing up in Delhi, this work was done by an organization called SAHMAT. They would create such counter-archives and use art to counter communalism and I think it would be great to reimagine a similar project in our times. Perhaps I will be lucky enough to be part of a project like that in the future.
Thank you so much, Drew, for your questions and patience throughout. I really enjoyed our conversation.
References
Giorgio Agamben. 2000. The Remnants of Auschwitz. (New York: Zone Books).
Nusrat Sabina Chowdhury. 2019. Paradoxes of the Popular: Crowd Politics in Bangladesh. (Stanford: Stanford University Press).
Veena Das. 1995. Critical Events: An Anthropological Perspective on Contemporary India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press).
Akhil Gupta. 2012. Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Structural Violence, and Poverty in India (Durham: Duke University Press).
Matthew Hull. 2012. Government of Paper: The Materiality of Bureaucracy in Urban Pakistan. (Berkeley: University of California Press).
William Mazzarella. 2004. “Culture, Globalization, Mediation,” Annual Review of Anthropology 33, no. 1: 346.
Patrick Eisenlohr: Moral Atmospheres is not just a rich portrait of the freewheeling mediascapes of a Lahore marketplace, it is also a fascinating exploration of sensory and moral engagement with media among its traders and customers. What originally motivated you to embark on this project?
Timothy Cooper: Initially, I went to Lahore to study the circulation of Pakistani films. This was 2017 and I was new to anthropology, having previously studied experimental film and artists’ moving image media. I was interested in the image, its materiality, how celluloid ages, and how digital files glitch. I had also been working in curation and was writing for contemporary art publications. The big thing back then was the archival turn. Born out of postcolonial material and visual culture studies, this was concerned with the storage, retrieval, and possible restitution of knowledge and collective memory. I had first lived in Lahore in 2012-2013 in a professional capacity and, having previously known little about Pakistan, came to engage my new surroundings through these previous interests. If I remember correctly, my journey went from exposure to Pashto-language film music to Pashto Pakistani films, and from there onto Urdu and Punjabi-language Lollywood films made in Lahore’s studios (as Pashto films were also). This was a whole film industry, once one of the largest in the world, that I knew nothing about, but one with no national film archive, and with barely one or two books written about it. I began to look in film and electronics markets like Lahore’s Hall Road and found a dizzyingly quantity of Lollywood films of varying age, quality, and provenance. I was fascinated by how and why these films survived into the present. I was equally attracted to their visual palimpsest, overlaid with the names, companies, and logos of those who reproduced, retrieved, and appropriated them. In the economic model of this trade, celluloid films were sold to large marketplace traders for a lump sum to convert to VHS or VCD. These traders would then sell them on to smaller traders at varying price points; high for master-copies free of watermarks; low for copies watermarked with the larger traders’ logos. Unsurprisingly, the latter category quickly became fair game, a free resource for small one- or two-man traders to reproduce without owning the master-copy. Piracy didn’t seem a salient category here. But the absence of the moralizing underbelly of intellectual property discourse didn’t mean that there wasn’t a deep and pervasive concern with morality among the people who kept Pakistani films in circulation. Something else was going on, something that seemed to lie between the materiality of the media these traders moved and the various forces – religious, urban, inter-personal, technological – that shaped their ethical lives. So, I went back between 2017 and 2020 to learn what.
Patrick Eisenlohr: In the book, you describe how traders felt compelled to follow public demand in their business strategies, which they took to be an impersonal, difficult-to-locate force. On the other hand, you show how they also saw themselves as moral regulators of the public sphere. In South Asian media studies, there has been a lot of emphasis on the role of piracy and informality bypassing formal and legal regulation, so it is especially interesting to find a serious preoccupation with regulation elsewhere, in the traders’ ethical judgements of their own acquisitions and sales. Could you say a bit more about the role of traders in regulating the world of Pakistani film and other media, and what that tells us about South Asian public spheres more broadly?
Timothy Cooper: Among Hall Road film traders, public demand is a political sensibility. There is a rich body of literature – Aasim Sajjad Akhtar’s work springs immediately to mind or the legal activism of Asma Jahangir – on the lasting impact of post-secular movements in Pakistan’s 1970s and 1980s. These movements and the legal changes they brokered, brought into public life the possibility that women, minorities, or secular entertainment could offend or endanger Islam. This is paired with the notion, central to the election strategies of major political parties, that the united awaam – the people or public – should be taken as moral exemplars. In mercantile Lahore, middle-class traders and their unions and associations are important sources of votes and are often keen to leverage their unique position to further the aims of their particular Islamic movement or school of thought. The common sense that seems to guide the notion of public demand is a sensory domain bracketed on all sides by an acute awareness of how one is being perceived as a Muslim mediator of film, music, and other kinds of media. The logic is that while everything is up for grabs on Hall Road – everything can be retrieved and little is out of bounds – the existing repertoire of what is in circulation is shaped by what people want. These wants and needs are expected to have been filtered through the moral sensibilities and ethical lives of the awaam. Media traders are the final interface in this chain. Their priority is not to be seen as (only) traders in sexually suggestive films or pornography or media pertaining to an Islamic movement or denomination beyond their own. So, the transactions that take place between customer and trader are both events removed from the web of public demand and its interface. These are moments when one person takes stock of another and curates the transaction accordingly. What does the idea of traders as regulator tell us about South Asian public spheres? That if the idea of a public continues to offer itself up as an idealized democratic image of impactful agency, it becomes meaningful through figural and diffuse, rather than only discursive, flows. In South Asia, public spheres can also be spaces of mutual sensing born of the understanding that the affects that find surface and the objects that give them form can be illusory, particularly when this mutual sensing comes to exceed or fall out of step with the institutions that once authorized them.
Patrick Eisenlohr: The notion of atmospheres is central to your book. In European philosophy, from which this notion has spread into a range of other academic fields, including anthropology, atmospheres are less about subjectivity, let alone interior feelings, but are above all taken to be aesthetic and multisensory forces spreading in space. In your view, how can atmospheres as material and motional phenomena also be moral? And how did atmospheres become central to your research, how were you led to them as a tool to make sense of a Lahore marketplace?
Timothy Cooper: Other than when it refers to the biophysical, the way the Hindustani term mahaul (a term I translate as atmosphere) is used is almost always morally situated. It is both the effect and means with which one is affected. While usually a judgement that refers to negative influences, mahaul is moral because one defines values, behaviours, and attitudes in relation to it, even in normative inversion. When an atmosphere isn’t negatively defined, its identification can acknowledge its effects are ephemeral, thus inviting all at hand to sustain it, as this also furthers the well-being or dignity of those affected. In the book I describemahaul as a container for values, but I also describe it as mutually entangled with another important concept, thresholds. In my ethnography, what I call a threshold refers to the sense of magnitude that precedes a moral judgement. This is both an emic term – from the everyday use of the Islamic theological term hadd (plural: hudood) meaning the social location of divine boundaries – and my own descriptor. When you have a public sphere saturated with concerns about moral performance, about what is seen to be right and what external markers might help you see through the opacity of other people’s intentions, that’s when you get people talking about atmosphere in moral terms. These moral atmospheres allow allyship or means of exclusion. Atmospheres can also coexist and intersect, leading to unexpected or awkward alliances that can explain things that seem contradictory or hypocritical. An example of this is the paradox that the book revolves around; film traders who find film morally impermissible.
Atmospheres became central to this research because all my interlocutors talked about mahaul,and my main interlocutor told me that I wouldn’t be able to understand how film or media moves in Pakistan without coming to grips with the notion. In the back of my mind, I also must have thought it was a salient term of analysis for the things I was interested in: film, sound, and moving-image media. People had been writing about the atmosphere of film since the earliest days of cinematography, in the coming together of light, the bodies of strangers in a confined space, real and imagined movement, and the intermittence between sound and silence. When I realized this was going to be important, I looked beyond atmosphere as a purely aesthetic category. For mahaul, I looked to Nida Kirmani’s work, and for atmosphere to your own. Your book Sounding Islamhad been published while I was in the field and it proved very influential for me, as had your work on the dialectic of mediation and immediacy before I went to the field.
Patrick Eisenlohr: One of the many things I really like about your book is how it juxtaposes your interlocutors’ analytic of mahaul (atmosphere) with the notion of atmospheres current in academic theorizing, which mostly derives from German neo-phenomenology. Your book shows plenty of resonance but also some difference between these two conceptualizations of atmosphere. In other words, you do not follow the increasingly criticized but still common approach to frame an ethnography with a concept taken from European or North American philosophy or social theory, and “apply” it somewhere the world. Uses of the related notion of affect as derived from Spinoza’s affectus via Deleuze are one standard example for this tendency. Against the background of Moral Atmospheres, is there also a chance to at least partially invert the flow of theory and abstraction?
Timothy Cooper: As with the others, thank you such a generous and perceptive question. The possibility of, as you say, inverting the flow of abstraction, is what initially drew me towards anthropology from my background in contemporary art, film, and media studies. The kind of social theory you mention is great to think with but should always be taken as one set of ideas among others, rather than a master key that unlocks the vastness of human difference. What I found illuminating about atmosphere was how the two differing trajectories in German neo-phenomenology seem to follow the two differing strands of the anthropology of ethics. Do we locate atmosphere in human agency and reflection, or in the ambient, embodied, or transcendent forces that affect us? As in the anthropology of ethics, looking to the intellectual lives of our interlocutors and their situated analytics of atmosphere widens the frame of how we might understand the environmental and the affective. It also helps us take forward an interesting recent turn in contemporary media studies and the environmental humanities that argues that biophysical forms can store, transmit, and transform information. It also helps us take the current dialogue between anthropology and theology in a new direction. By taking atmosphere as one of the key analytics for discussing public morality and ethical life, my interlocutors held true to a core tenet of Islamic metaphysics. That is, that the environment provides a constellation of signs that not only provide proof for the miracle of creation, but encourage interpretation, reflection, and speculation.
Patrick Eisenlohr: In the chapter on the circulation of Shi‘i media in the month of Muharram, mahaul also emerges as central to some of your interlocutors’ religious experiences and engagements. Could you say more about the potential of mahaul/atmosphere for an anthropology of religion, especially when it comes to media practices and entanglements?
Timothy Cooper: The chapter you mention marked the epiphanic halfway point in my ethnography where everything changed, where what I thought I knew before going to the field was overturned, and a new way of looking at the matter at hand took root. I met the founder of one of the country’s first Islamic videography firms, whose recordings I’d seen circulate on Hall Road. This videographer told me that what his customers find so special about his recordings are the ways they capture his community’s mahaul, that word I was hearing all the time on Hall Road. He told, me “Liveness has an atmosphere of its own”, explaining that the unedited aesthetics, sudden zooms, and visual noise captured more of the community’s passion and piety, their commitment to public disclosure and openness to being seen. Rather than being a term of critique that denigrates and excludes, liveness makes atmosphere open to anyone willing to be moved by the sufferings of early Islamic martyrs.
When delineated by media practices and concepts, atmosphere allows religious communities to be entangled in space and feeling, while the issues that divide them remain unprovoked by its impermanence. Since completing Moral Atmospheres my research has turned entirety towards Pakistani Shi‘ism, where I study the liveness of Shi‘i commemorations of death. This is rooted firmly in the anthropology of religion because what atmosphere and liveness do here is provide theological precepts with a surge of magnitude that lends renewed significance to existing rituals and commemorations. I think that the analytic of atmosphere could play an interesting role in both theologically-engaged anthropology and religious environmentalism, particularly as these domains come together around topics like divine sovereignty, guardianship and stewardship, and apocalyptic thinking.
Kamala Russell: Your book is a deep investigation of the values, practices, and ambivalences that make up the everyday experience of social change. Could you tell us a bit about the focus of the book, and its argument? I’d be interested in hearing more as well about how you settled on this framing for the book, coming out of your many years of fieldwork. As someone who is at that stage, I am interested in hearing more about the process of how you dream up a book from a dissertation.
Sarah Hillewaert: The book is an ethnographic study of the everyday lives of Muslim youth living on the Indian Ocean island of Lamu (Kenya). A previously cosmopolitan center of trade and Islamic scholarship, Lamu is currently marginalized in both economic and political terms yet forms the focus of international campaigns against religious radicalization and is also at the center of touristic imaginings of the untouched and secluded. The book examines what happens when narratives of self-positioning change: what happens when signs of cosmopolitanism, respectability, and civility come to be read as indices of remoteness, backwardness, or religious radicalization? And what implications do these shifts in signification have for everyday interactions, self-fashionings, and conceptions of appropriate conduct? I explore these questions by documenting the discursive and embodied production of difference, and examine the seemingly mundane practices through which Lamu youth negotiate what it means to be a ‘good Lamu resident’ in contemporary Kenya. I specifically ask what happens when signification fails – when people are no longer sure how to read signs or when they differ in their reading of material forms as signs of, for example, either piety or social transgression. By documenting apparently mundane practices, and the ideologies that inform their evaluations, I show how easily-overlooked, fleeting moments represent some of the most vital points through which larger scale transformations touch down concretely in community life, and by which they receive local inflection and resonance. Through its ethnographic detail, the book demonstrates the intersubjective and dialogic nature of meaning-making processes and illustrates how projects of personal cultivation function as political projects as well. In doing so, it offers a linguistic anthropological approach to discussions on ethical self-fashioning and the everyday lives of Muslim youth in Africa.
In terms of the framing of the book, the focus shifted from a more explicit attention to verbal interactions and language use to a broader semiotic approach. And this happened mostly through ongoing interactions with peers, through talks and people’s feedback to them, and through ongoing conversations with my interlocutors in Lamu. However, the ethnographic focus did not change significantly from the dissertation to the book. It was more the theoretical argument that became more nuanced, with more attention to the political significance of seemingly situated interactions and practices. I think talking about my research – writing talks and articles – made me think more about what I really wanted people to take away from my research, both theoretically and ethnographically.
Kamala Russell: What I appreciated most about the book is the way you take a very open-ended approach to this study of social change, not just treating social development and peripheralization in and of Lamu as well as instability in indices of value pessimistically, but also tracing opportunities for new kinds of fulfilment and relationships to oneself (for example, professionalism). What stuck out to me across these chapters, and particularly in the final chapter ‘The Morality of the Senses and the Senses of Morality’, was the importance of gaze and the audience. In your focus on people’s performances and negotiations of what kind of individual they are, I wondered who the imagined audience or public for this differentiation is and how does that relate to the sociopolitical changes you describe in Lamu?
Sarah Hillewaert: I appreciate you mentioning the careful deliberation and negotiation of new opportunities and perspectives that I tried to convey in the book. In doing so, I tried to move beyond discussions on the so-called ambivalences or inconsistencies that previously have been highlighted in discussions of Muslim or African youth. I wanted to convey that shifting perspectives on respectability are not a mere generational change or gap, informed by globalization, for example. And rather than talk about resistance to, for example, what people call tradition, I tried to highlight the agency in young people’s calculated inhabiting of certain norms and their deliberation of the proper mediation of others. For Lamu youth, the question is not whether you should be respectable or not, but rather what respectability should look like, given, on the one hand, the development Lamu desperately needs, and on the other, the significance of respectability to Lamu residents’ distinctive identity and the political load it carries.
And this gets me to your question. Most challenging in writing this book was conveying precisely the hyper-sensitivity to semiotic misconstrual that informs young Lamu residents’ moral self-fashionings. With this I mean that young people were very much aware that a range of differently situated people observe their everyday behavior – their peers or elders from different parts of town, for example, but also immigrants from Kenya’s mainland, government administrators, military police, and so on. They understand very well that their intended professional behavior can be misread as social transgression by some, or still overly conservative by others. And as your question points to, these presentations of self, while locally situated, carry a political significance as well. Now, the political stance implied in everyday practices is not always necessarily for non-locals to be noticed. It’s not about an explicit expression of political opinion that one hopes gets noticed. And in fact, mainland Kenyans are often oblivious to many of the nuances in everyday practices that I focus on in the book. Yet, Lamu residents observing situated behaviors can take those as signs of an individual’s political orientation as well – to what extent is an individual upholding a distinctive Lamu identity? Or to what extent are they forsaking their values to get ahead in an economy controlled by the Kenyan government? So, a young woman critiquing local social divisions at a town meeting will do so while only speaking the local Swahili dialect and paying close attention to proper address forms and greetings, to thereby negotiate a need for change while evidently displaying her pride of her Lamu identity in an attempt to avoid critiques from local elders (or even her peers). Yet, her doing so does risk her getting perceived as backward or less educated by mainland government officials present at that gathering, for example.
Kamala Russell: Heshima is a key concept in the book. You translate this as ‘respectability’. A key argument I saw in the book is that though how respectability is embodied is hotly contested, heshima as a regime of value continues to structure the ways Lamu residents understand themselves and others. I was struck by the way that this concept seems to revolve around differentiation. Is this the only semiotic process (or the key one) that heshima participates in and if so, why might that be? Are there other means and ends than moral distinction in play?
Sarah Hillewaert: Heshima is an intensely moral value, and thus plays a central role in moral distinctions, but as I discuss in Chapter 1, this is very much linked to social class distinctions and genealogy as well. Claims to embodied respectability are often linked to social class identities as well. And this is precisely part of what is being renegotiated nowadays. The hegemonic ideology of former upper-classes – of what practices are viewed as respectable and thus indicative of higher status – is being challenged as the social hierarchy is being reshuffled in a context of economic and social change.
Kamala Russell: Can you say a bit more about the methodological challenges you worked with in doing your fieldwork, particularly around recording, as linguists would say, putative naturalistic interaction. Though clearly you were able to record some interviews, did you face other difficulties in producing recorded data? Did working this way affect the way you think about embodiment and non-verbal signs with relation to more typical approaches to text and context?
Sarah Hillewaert: In short: yes, but not entirely. I wasn’t able to record partially because women didn’t want their voices recorded, but also because people were quite suspicious of recordings, in light of anti-terrorism investigations led by the Kenyan and US governments. So, I often refrained from recording, and took detailed notes during interviews. But during everyday interactions, such detailed note-taking was equally difficult, since people wondered why I would be writing down things they said. That did force me to be more attentive during everyday interactions, trying to pay attention to nuances in language use that may otherwise pass me by (and that I couldn’t go back to in a recording). But I wouldn’t say that this led me to be more conscious of non-verbal aspects of interactions perse. It was a combination of things that made me be conscious of the seemingly mundane details of people’s everyday practices. First, people would comment on others’ behaviors all the time – the way someone wore a headscarf, what kind of abaya a young women wore, where someone walked at which time of day. Second, people instructed me quite explicitly on what conduct was proper, and how I ought to act within a particular context. I talk about this in the preface of the book. And third, in public, much couldn’t be expressed verbally, but rather had to be communicated in other ways. While mobile phones have changed much of this, when I was doing fieldwork many young men and women didn’t have much opportunity to interact in public. And much was communicated through subtle behavioral details – when you would go to a certain place, the route you took, the way you walked, how you wore your abaya. And older interlocutors would often reminisce about how they used to communicate with, for example, their girlfriend through subtle signs when she happened to walk by. So, it really was a combination of factors that led me to zoom in on these minute details.
Kamala Russell: Why do you think in this case it is Islamic life, and ethical life, that is the means through which the challenges of development and the political position of Lamu are being negotiated? The book has this great historical angle where you describe the disenfranchisement and marginalization of what was effectively an elite class as Lamu became more incorporated into Kenya, it seems like status reasserts itself through a politics centered on the choice of signifiers of pious value. Can you say more about what you think is the politics in play? How do you position your work and interventions with respect to work that foregrounds Islamic movements as well as individual self-cultivation?
Sarah Hillewaert: I suggest from the onset of the book that negotiations of respectable conduct are informed by tensions surrounding what it means to be from Lamu in contemporary Kenya – a question informed by objections to the Kenyan State, economic marginalization, impositions by mainland outsiders etc. And this is something that cannot be considered outside of a historical context in which coastal and island residents have distinguished themselves from the Kenyan mainland, reluctantly (or unwillingly) having been incorporated into an independent Kenya. While it’s partially a question of a majority Muslim coast not wanting to be governed by a Christian majority government, it also ties into the moral values I focus on throughout the book – notions of distinction centered around respectability, honor, civility, and cosmopolitanism that Lamu residents believe separate themselves from mainland Kenyans. These situated ideological meanings of cosmopolitanism and respectability, and the role they historically have played in developing a distinct Lamu identity form the background against which to understand the seemingly mundane projects of self-fashioning that form the focus of this book. Rather than be condemned for ignoring a particular notion of religious uprightness, young people can be critiqued for forsaken moral norms that are seen to be at the heart of a distinctive Lamu identity and that separate Lamu residents from mainland Kenyans. Like other scholars who have built on, but simultaneously critiqued the work of people like Saba Mahmood, I show that projects of individual self-cultivation are then not just directed inward, but are always informed by broader social political processes, and directed outward, to a range of differently situated others. What I find interesting about Lamu, however, is that these everyday negotiations of respectability and the working toward differently embodying respect is not part of some Islamic revival movement. This is not about becoming a better Muslim, and actively working toward properly embodying piety – and here I mean, having a clear idea of what it is you are striving toward, clear and shared understanding of what pious behaviour looks like, for example. The question is not whether one should or should not be pious or respectable, or what obstacles one needs to overcome to achieve piety. The question for Lamu youth is: what does piety or respectability look like in contemporary Lamu? It is about deliberations of the proper mediation of this moral value.
Kamala Russell: If any of these questions don’t resonate with you, one of my favorite moments in the book was your explication of the proverb that someone who leaves their mila (tradition) is a slave. This is an interesting positioning of agency with respect to culture and I wonder if you can say more about the consequences of this way of thinking for the way we approach and teach dilemmas of structure and agency, or as linguistic anthropologists, type and token.
Sarah Hillewaert: I really like this question. And, to be honest, I hadn’t really thought of it this way. The way people in Lamu use the proverb really refers to a person’s desire to appropriate other’s practices. “If you forsake your traditions in favor of the appropriation of someone else’s you’re a slave.” So rather than seeing some form of liberation, if you will, in abandoning traditional or cultural practices for the appropriation of other habits, it is perceived as being enslaved to one’s desires in a way. In the book, I link this to the history of slavery in Eastern Africa, and slaves’ positions in Lamu society in the past. Former slaves worked their way up in Swahili societies by appropriating the habits of upper classes, in an attempt to display respectability. But in its current usage, the proverb does speak back at the idea of being “enslaved,” or held back, by traditions, and at the idea of modernization and secularization as being freed from the load of tradition. One of the young women in the book lays this out quite nicely, where she emphasizes that blindly following others’ practices desiring development or modernity is a type of enslavement. But she stresses that this also doesn’t mean blindly upholding local traditions. Rather, it is a careful consideration of which cultural practices are, in their eyes, outdated and which ones are part of their cultural and religious identity as residents of Lamu. And maybe that’s one of the things that I’d like people to take away from this book – what we can learn from paying attention to these seemingly small but incredibly significant negotiations that happen in politically marginalized communities like Lamu. It is not about resistance to outdated practices, nor about a clinging on to distinctive traditional or religious habits out of evident political protest. It is not necessarily about an outward rejection of religious norms nor a conservative preservation of them in the context of religious revival, but rather a working within –an ethnographic illustration of agency within structure that changes the structure, not abruptly, but over time.
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Kamala Russell: Your book is a deep investigation of the values, practices, and ambivalences that make up the everyday experience of social change. Could you tell us a bit about the focus of the book, and its argument? I’d be interested in hearing more as well about how you settled on this framing for the book, coming out of your many years of fieldwork. As someone who is at that stage, I am interested in hearing more about the process of how you dream up a book from a dissertation.
Sarah Hillewaert: The book is an ethnographic study of the everyday lives of Muslim youth living on the Indian Ocean island of Lamu (Kenya). A previously cosmopolitan center of trade and Islamic scholarship, Lamu is currently marginalized in both economic and political terms yet forms the focus of international campaigns against religious radicalization and is also at the center of touristic imaginings of the untouched and secluded. The book examines what happens when narratives of self-positioning change: what happens when signs of cosmopolitanism, respectability, and civility come to be read as indices of remoteness, backwardness, or religious radicalization? And what implications do these shifts in signification have for everyday interactions, self-fashionings, and conceptions of appropriate conduct? I explore these questions by documenting the discursive and embodied production of difference, and examine the seemingly mundane practices through which Lamu youth negotiate what it means to be a ‘good Lamu resident’ in contemporary Kenya. I specifically ask what happens when signification fails – when people are no longer sure how to read signs or when they differ in their reading of material forms as signs of, for example, either piety or social transgression. By documenting apparently mundane practices, and the ideologies that inform their evaluations, I show how easily-overlooked, fleeting moments represent some of the most vital points through which larger scale transformations touch down concretely in community life, and by which they receive local inflection and resonance. Through its ethnographic detail, the book demonstrates the intersubjective and dialogic nature of meaning-making processes and illustrates how projects of personal cultivation function as political projects as well. In doing so, it offers a linguistic anthropological approach to discussions on ethical self-fashioning and the everyday lives of Muslim youth in Africa.
In terms of the framing of the book, the focus shifted from a more explicit attention to verbal interactions and language use to a broader semiotic approach. And this happened mostly through ongoing interactions with peers, through talks and people’s feedback to them, and through ongoing conversations with my interlocutors in Lamu. However, the ethnographic focus did not change significantly from the dissertation to the book. It was more the theoretical argument that became more nuanced, with more attention to the political significance of seemingly situated interactions and practices. I think talking about my research – writing talks and articles – made me think more about what I really wanted people to take away from my research, both theoretically and ethnographically.
Kamala Russell: What I appreciated most about the book is the way you take a very open-ended approach to this study of social change, not just treating social development and peripheralization in and of Lamu as well as instability in indices of value pessimistically, but also tracing opportunities for new kinds of fulfilment and relationships to oneself (for example, professionalism). What stuck out to me across these chapters, and particularly in the final chapter ‘The Morality of the Senses and the Senses of Morality’, was the importance of gaze and the audience. In your focus on people’s performances and negotiations of what kind of individual they are, I wondered who the imagined audience or public for this differentiation is and how does that relate to the sociopolitical changes you describe in Lamu?
Sarah Hillewaert: I appreciate you mentioning the careful deliberation and negotiation of new opportunities and perspectives that I tried to convey in the book. In doing so, I tried to move beyond discussions on the so-called ambivalences or inconsistencies that previously have been highlighted in discussions of Muslim or African youth. I wanted to convey that shifting perspectives on respectability are not a mere generational change or gap, informed by globalization, for example. And rather than talk about resistance to, for example, what people call tradition, I tried to highlight the agency in young people’s calculated inhabiting of certain norms and their deliberation of the proper mediation of others. For Lamu youth, the question is not whether you should be respectable or not, but rather what respectability should look like, given, on the one hand, the development Lamu desperately needs, and on the other, the significance of respectability to Lamu residents’ distinctive identity and the political load it carries.
And this gets me to your question. Most challenging in writing this book was conveying precisely the hyper-sensitivity to semiotic misconstrual that informs young Lamu residents’ moral self-fashionings. With this I mean that young people were very much aware that a range of differently situated people observe their everyday behavior – their peers or elders from different parts of town, for example, but also immigrants from Kenya’s mainland, government administrators, military police, and so on. They understand very well that their intended professional behavior can be misread as social transgression by some, or still overly conservative by others. And as your question points to, these presentations of self, while locally situated, carry a political significance as well. Now, the political stance implied in everyday practices is not always necessarily for non-locals to be noticed. It’s not about an explicit expression of political opinion that one hopes gets noticed. And in fact, mainland Kenyans are often oblivious to many of the nuances in everyday practices that I focus on in the book. Yet, Lamu residents observing situated behaviors can take those as signs of an individual’s political orientation as well – to what extent is an individual upholding a distinctive Lamu identity? Or to what extent are they forsaking their values to get ahead in an economy controlled by the Kenyan government? So, a young woman critiquing local social divisions at a town meeting will do so while only speaking the local Swahili dialect and paying close attention to proper address forms and greetings, to thereby negotiate a need for change while evidently displaying her pride of her Lamu identity in an attempt to avoid critiques from local elders (or even her peers). Yet, her doing so does risk her getting perceived as backward or less educated by mainland government officials present at that gathering, for example.
Kamala Russell: Heshima is a key concept in the book. You translate this as ‘respectability’. A key argument I saw in the book is that though how respectability is embodied is hotly contested, heshima as a regime of value continues to structure the ways Lamu residents understand themselves and others. I was struck by the way that this concept seems to revolve around differentiation. Is this the only semiotic process (or the key one) that heshima participates in and if so, why might that be? Are there other means and ends than moral distinction in play?
Sarah Hillewaert: Heshima is an intensely moral value, and thus plays a central role in moral distinctions, but as I discuss in Chapter 1, this is very much linked to social class distinctions and genealogy as well. Claims to embodied respectability are often linked to social class identities as well. And this is precisely part of what is being renegotiated nowadays. The hegemonic ideology of former upper-classes – of what practices are viewed as respectable and thus indicative of higher status – is being challenged as the social hierarchy is being reshuffled in a context of economic and social change.
Kamala Russell: Can you say a bit more about the methodological challenges you worked with in doing your fieldwork, particularly around recording, as linguists would say, putative naturalistic interaction. Though clearly you were able to record some interviews, did you face other difficulties in producing recorded data? Did working this way affect the way you think about embodiment and non-verbal signs with relation to more typical approaches to text and context?
Sarah Hillewaert: In short: yes, but not entirely. I wasn’t able to record partially because women didn’t want their voices recorded, but also because people were quite suspicious of recordings, in light of anti-terrorism investigations led by the Kenyan and US governments. So, I often refrained from recording, and took detailed notes during interviews. But during everyday interactions, such detailed note-taking was equally difficult, since people wondered why I would be writing down things they said. That did force me to be more attentive during everyday interactions, trying to pay attention to nuances in language use that may otherwise pass me by (and that I couldn’t go back to in a recording). But I wouldn’t say that this led me to be more conscious of non-verbal aspects of interactions perse. It was a combination of things that made me be conscious of the seemingly mundane details of people’s everyday practices. First, people would comment on others’ behaviors all the time – the way someone wore a headscarf, what kind of abaya a young women wore, where someone walked at which time of day. Second, people instructed me quite explicitly on what conduct was proper, and how I ought to act within a particular context. I talk about this in the preface of the book. And third, in public, much couldn’t be expressed verbally, but rather had to be communicated in other ways. While mobile phones have changed much of this, when I was doing fieldwork many young men and women didn’t have much opportunity to interact in public. And much was communicated through subtle behavioral details – when you would go to a certain place, the route you took, the way you walked, how you wore your abaya. And older interlocutors would often reminisce about how they used to communicate with, for example, their girlfriend through subtle signs when she happened to walk by. So, it really was a combination of factors that led me to zoom in on these minute details.
Kamala Russell: Why do you think in this case it is Islamic life, and ethical life, that is the means through which the challenges of development and the political position of Lamu are being negotiated? The book has this great historical angle where you describe the disenfranchisement and marginalization of what was effectively an elite class as Lamu became more incorporated into Kenya, it seems like status reasserts itself through a politics centered on the choice of signifiers of pious value. Can you say more about what you think is the politics in play? How do you position your work and interventions with respect to work that foregrounds Islamic movements as well as individual self-cultivation?
Sarah Hillewaert: I suggest from the onset of the book that negotiations of respectable conduct are informed by tensions surrounding what it means to be from Lamu in contemporary Kenya – a question informed by objections to the Kenyan State, economic marginalization, impositions by mainland outsiders etc. And this is something that cannot be considered outside of a historical context in which coastal and island residents have distinguished themselves from the Kenyan mainland, reluctantly (or unwillingly) having been incorporated into an independent Kenya. While it’s partially a question of a majority Muslim coast not wanting to be governed by a Christian majority government, it also ties into the moral values I focus on throughout the book – notions of distinction centered around respectability, honor, civility, and cosmopolitanism that Lamu residents believe separate themselves from mainland Kenyans. These situated ideological meanings of cosmopolitanism and respectability, and the role they historically have played in developing a distinct Lamu identity form the background against which to understand the seemingly mundane projects of self-fashioning that form the focus of this book. Rather than be condemned for ignoring a particular notion of religious uprightness, young people can be critiqued for forsaken moral norms that are seen to be at the heart of a distinctive Lamu identity and that separate Lamu residents from mainland Kenyans. Like other scholars who have built on, but simultaneously critiqued the work of people like Saba Mahmood, I show that projects of individual self-cultivation are then not just directed inward, but are always informed by broader social political processes, and directed outward, to a range of differently situated others. What I find interesting about Lamu, however, is that these everyday negotiations of respectability and the working toward differently embodying respect is not part of some Islamic revival movement. This is not about becoming a better Muslim, and actively working toward properly embodying piety – and here I mean, having a clear idea of what it is you are striving toward, clear and shared understanding of what pious behaviour looks like, for example. The question is not whether one should or should not be pious or respectable, or what obstacles one needs to overcome to achieve piety. The question for Lamu youth is: what does piety or respectability look like in contemporary Lamu? It is about deliberations of the proper mediation of this moral value.
Kamala Russell: If any of these questions don’t resonate with you, one of my favorite moments in the book was your explication of the proverb that someone who leaves their mila (tradition) is a slave. This is an interesting positioning of agency with respect to culture and I wonder if you can say more about the consequences of this way of thinking for the way we approach and teach dilemmas of structure and agency, or as linguistic anthropologists, type and token.
Sarah Hillewaert: I really like this question. And, to be honest, I hadn’t really thought of it this way. The way people in Lamu use the proverb really refers to a person’s desire to appropriate other’s practices. “If you forsake your traditions in favor of the appropriation of someone else’s you’re a slave.” So rather than seeing some form of liberation, if you will, in abandoning traditional or cultural practices for the appropriation of other habits, it is perceived as being enslaved to one’s desires in a way. In the book, I link this to the history of slavery in Eastern Africa, and slaves’ positions in Lamu society in the past. Former slaves worked their way up in Swahili societies by appropriating the habits of upper classes, in an attempt to display respectability. But in its current usage, the proverb does speak back at the idea of being “enslaved,” or held back, by traditions, and at the idea of modernization and secularization as being freed from the load of tradition. One of the young women in the book lays this out quite nicely, where she emphasizes that blindly following others’ practices desiring development or modernity is a type of enslavement. But she stresses that this also doesn’t mean blindly upholding local traditions. Rather, it is a careful consideration of which cultural practices are, in their eyes, outdated and which ones are part of their cultural and religious identity as residents of Lamu. And maybe that’s one of the things that I’d like people to take away from this book – what we can learn from paying attention to these seemingly small but incredibly significant negotiations that happen in politically marginalized communities like Lamu. It is not about resistance to outdated practices, nor about a clinging on to distinctive traditional or religious habits out of evident political protest. It is not necessarily about an outward rejection of religious norms nor a conservative preservation of them in the context of religious revival, but rather a working within –an ethnographic illustration of agency within structure that changes the structure, not abruptly, but over time.
Re-reading page 99 of my dissertation, I’m snapped back to the mosque in Milan, Italy that I came to know so well. Where public school children convened to learn about Islam, and a first grader asked if he was no longer a Muslim because he accidentally ate pork. Where, almost every Friday, I sat in the back with my hair covered, surrounded by other women, who expertly moved their bodies to the rhythm of worship. Where I walked, day in and day out in order to enter the offices of Halal Italia.
Page 99 sits towards the end of a chapter about the community running Halal Italia. I’m drinking tea and eating pastries with an Algerian friend who mentions that the group I work with is “not really Muslim”. What my friend was alluding to is that labeling food is powerful and can create legitimate actors and legible worlds. This is especially relevant in Italy for two conceptual reasons that have empirical effects. Italy has a global reputation for “good” food, and Muslims outside of Muslim majority countries play the leading role in determining what is certifiable as halal. Through my entanglement in daily work life, I found that the established culture of made in Italy products was a powerful force in shaping values within the Italian halal industry today.
This notion of value itself is complex. And perhaps it is due to this complexity, and the limits of the ethnographic written form, that I end my dissertation with a passage from Italo Calvino’s (1972) Invisible Cities. In the book, the emperor Kublai Khan tells Marco Polo that he can describe real cities he has never seen, his cities are based on elements in which all cities should possess. However, the Khan is unable to describe any of the cities Polo has encountered. Polo responds, “I have also thought of a model city from which I derive all others… It is a city made only of exceptions, exclusions, incongruities, contradictions… But I cannot force my operation beyond a certain limit: I would arrive at cities too probable to be real” (Calvino 1972:32).
Similarly, I show that the project of the certifier is to operate within a world that is empirically true but is also one of discourse, and like Polo’s cities, their projects are limited by, and shaped within, the food worlds they inhabit.
Calvino, Italo. 1972. Le Citta Invisibili. Turin: Einaudi.
Lauren Crossland-Marr. 2020. Consuming Local, Thinking Global: Building a Halal Industry in a World of Made in Italy. Washington University in St. Louis, Phd.
Alice Yeh: Talk of persecution and extinction often accompanies media coverage of Christians in the Middle East. What intervention does your book contribute to this conversation and what assumptions are you arguing against?
Angie Heo: Without doubt, Christians in the Middle East confront horrific incidents of violence – bombings, torchings, abductions, murders – that hit the headlines on a numbingly regular basis. These tragedies understandably lead to anxieties and fears that Christians and Christianity are on the decline in the Arab Muslim world. The irony is that social imaginaries of persecution and extinction are also the very stuff of Christianity in current contexts. Persecution politics rely on aesthetic tropes of martyrdom and suffering. Rhetorics of extinction compel the collective memory of founding origins. During my fieldwork among Egypt’s Copts, I became convinced that marginalization and violence did not so much extinguish minority traditions as they activated and reactivated them toward various political ends.
My book shows how Coptic Orthodoxy serves as a central medium for governing Christian-Muslim relations in Egypt. I found that saints – the Virgin, martyrs, miracle-workers, mystics – invite a form-sensitive analysis of communication between Christians and Muslims. Saints and their imagined representations touch on classic anthropological themes such as personhood and materiality, and they also build on recent debates around religion and/as media. Perhaps most of all, I saw that tracing the semiotic intricacies of divine communication afforded more empirical purchase on the linkages between religious and political mediations. I believe this is especially important when working on saints and shrines – a topic that often appeals to romanticized pasts and other-worlds that circumvent structures of modernity. I hope my book does justice to the ways that cultural expressions of holiness flourish and transform in relation to complex politics of authoritarianism, inequality, revolution, and bloodshed.
Alice Yeh: I want to ask a question about the structure of the book, and its organization into three parts (relics, apparitions, icons). One effect is that, as a narrative, the book describes the increasingly sophisticated semiotic technologies by which saints are made accessible to others. Why did you organize the book this way? Do these techniques build one upon the other or do they develop in tension?
Angie Heo: Thanks for this most thoughtful observation. I am happy to hear it because crafting my book’s organization was a source of weird obsession and pleasure; your recognition that there is a narrative structure in it is so gratifying. When I was planning my book’s flow, I decided to focus on the religious terms of belonging to the Christian community and to the Christian-Muslim nation. My ethnography begins with holy origins (in other words, “life-in-death”): the Coptic Church’s origins in martyrdom, through St. Mark of Alexandria and during New Year’s Eve of the 2011 uprisings. I chose to open with the relics and how they mediate loci of divine passion, sacrifice and resurrection, ultimately, the ritual exchange of violence for justice. My ethnography closes with holy departure (that is, “life-after-death”): the canonization of saints, through holy fools and mystics, and the creation of eternal memory. Here, the icon is my medium of choice, and I trace how icons mediate holy personhood and the temporal dynamics of disappearance.
On the point of the book’s cumulative arc, yes, I do understand that the semiotic technologies that I describe build on each other — relics, apparitions, icons. I am not sure that I would say that they are increasingly sophisticated, but I definitely see them as interconnected modes of reproduction and circulation. Essentially, I wanted to move away from the idea that relics, apparitions and icons are particular types of “things” or image-objects, toward considering them more as distinctive styles of material imagination that are subject to historical transformation. These three genres of imagination involve different sensory ratios (combining the visual, tactile, auditory) with different effects on making the space and time of saints. For all their differences, relics, apparitions and icons are also inter-related media of representing and disseminating presence that work in intimate tandem and blend into one another. I think where you can best see this blending effect is in the transitions between my book’s three parts: between chapters 2 and 3, it is Saint Mark’s relics that operate with the Virgin’s apparitions in a political economy of territorial returns; between chapters 4 and 5, it is a dream-apparition of a Virgin that translates into a miracle icon’s power to reconfigure the public.
Your proposal that relics, apparitions, and icons develop in tension to one another is quite stimulating. While I have devoted my energy to thinking about the continuities between these semiotic technologies, I have done much less work on considering the tensions between them. If I could write a second version of this book, with all the same fieldwork materials but another entire analysis, I would take this question up. It would be a really interesting exercise to see how the relic-form poses a challenge to the icon-form, for example. The arbitrary quality of what analytic direction an author chooses to pursue and not pursue is what makes scholarship feel so infinite and full of possibilities!
Alice Yeh: Can you elaborate on the paradox of “mystical publicity”? Are there non-Christian or non-religious contexts in which it manifests?
It just so happens that I am teaching a bunch of texts this quarter that trace the mystical and ascetic strands of moral personhood in other traditions. There are Sufi mystics hiding away in Hyderabad and Delhi, “Gandhian publicity” with its ascetic management of bodily energy, and of course, the Jewish Kabbalah which appeals to an occult cosmology of knowledge and power. Reading Eastern Orthodox theological writings on the holy icon, I was completely floored by how much ink, century after century, has been spilled on the divine status of images and the fatal risks of idolatry. When I did my fieldwork, I was also taken by the way that monks and nuns looked away from cameras when we were taking group photos, which got me reading up on holy fools and the desert anchorites – on social imaginaries of withdrawal, self-effacement, and death. If you check out my footnotes, you may notice that I also try to link up the Orthodox tradition to ancient Greek ethics of cynicism via Sloterdijk. My last body chapter’s epigraph is also a quote from Goffman’s “On Facework”, a classic piece whose first footnote is a fascinating orientalist reference to Chinese concepts of face and saving face. Not incidentally, it is also an essay that motivated MacIntyre’s charge that foundational nihilism lay behind Goffman’s sociological method.
In the broadest sense, I suppose I am making a claim here about the nature of the religious / non-religious distinction within the work of concepts. One could argue that mystical thought and practice has been a crucial resource for deconstruction and poststructuralism; I am thinking of Derrida’s disavowal of metaphysics and de Certeau’s ontological commitment to traces here. Continental philosophy and American sociology also inherited, at least in part, a canon of core terms that have defined the status of the human, and the divine/ human limit, in religious traditions. Secular humanism may be presumed in mass industries of celebrity and in the consumption of imagined persons. However, the moral perils of mass popularity, such as “losing one’s self” or “turning corrupt”, also deeply resonate with the millennia-old mystical impulse to retreat and just disappear from the crowds.
Alice Yeh: One especially interesting observation is that institutionalized Christian-Muslim sectarianism is more the consequence of a shared rather than oppositional religious imaginary. For example, you write about how Muslim eyewitnesses are crucial to authenticating a Marian apparition. How are these eyewitnesses located in the construct of “the simple people”? How do “the simple people”shape cross-confessional practices of witnessing?
Angie Heo: One of my book’s main arguments is that sectarian division is intrinsic to imaginings of Christian-Muslim nationhood. My claim here is really directed to long-championed formulas of “nation above religion” that are based on an ideological opposition between national unity and sectarian difference. To break past the opposition, I begin with questions of communication, or “commonness”, to expose the formal continuities between national and sectarian imaginaries. This is where I see semiotic approaches and resources in linguistic anthropology to be very helpful. In each of my chapters, I explore the question of communicative form, or what is presumed to be shared and not shared between Christians and Muslims. When I analyzed relics and apparitions, I focused on the communicative terms of a sacred territory, whether it is imagined as a divinely blessed Holy Egypt (national) or as a church in competition with a mosque (sectarian). When I analyzed apparitions and icons, I examined the communicative terms of a moral public, and the ways in which a collective subject comprised of both Christians and Muslims (national) create structures of communal identity and secrecy (sectarian).
Anybody who has spent significant time with Copts will have likely heard the adjective “simple” (basīṭ, basīṭa) or the phrase “the simple people” (al-busaṭāʾ). In Egypt, “simple” can be a subtle geographic reference to Upper Egypt, and in the Arab world at large, “simple” can also connote the urban working classes (here, I must credit Abdellah Hammoudi for pointing this out to me). During my fieldwork in both rural villages and industrial neighborhoods, I discovered that the term “the simple people” also expressed some kind of moral credibility among Copts: “Those villagers are too simple, they wouldn’t even know how to torch a church!” (chapter 6); “The Muslims who reported seeing the Virgin are simple people, unlike those who denied her who are motivated by their self-interest.” (chapter 3).
Judgments like these are curiously ambivalent. They revealed how the quality of simpleness signified both the power to transcend sectarian identity and the guilelessness to ward off allegations of violence. I became utterly fascinated by invocations of “the simple people”, especially since saints are also frequently praised for being simple. If simplicity is a virtue, then I had to study the image of “the simple people” – the trustworthy public and its credible opinion – as a key protagonist in the story of making saints.
Alice Yeh: What specific challenges or conveniences did the turn to identifying relics, apparitions, and icons as genres of mediation pose for your fieldwork? What advice would you offer to students with related interests?
Angie Heo: I have a zillion answers running through my head, and I think it’s because I am imagining many different audiences reading this. To students interested in materiality studies, I am committing to one brief piece of advice, for what it’s worth. Resist taking the object for granted. This seems like an elementary point, but I am always surprised by how often some “thing” is presumed to be a relic merely because it is a body-part of a holy figure or because it is a fragment of a lost past. I approach relics, apparitions, and icons as genres of mediation, and not as already-given types of objects, because I see my most interesting work emerging from a curiosity in how persons and things are recognized as such in the first instance. Like it did with numerous thinkers from Marx to Munn, this somewhat dissatisfied curiosity drove my constant doubt in my inclinations to naturalize images into “things.” And I am grateful for what the curiosity and doubt together allowed me to question and see anew.
CaMP Anthropology 