This essay chronicles a journey through the Caucasus toward the end of the second Russo-Chechen war which resulted in an encounter with a little known work of historical fiction by the Ingush author Idris Bazorkin (1910-1991). In introducing Bazorkin to the Anglophone reader, I examine the intertextual linkages between his fiction and indigenous…[Read more]

Cities of InfraRed is an abstract for my proposed contribution to a book that is being put together by Cornelia Sollfrank, Shuhsa Niederberger and Felix Stalder. The book has the working title of Aesthetics of the Commons, and arises out of the Creating Commons research project at the Zurich University of the Arts.

A version of Cities of…[Read more]

The United Nations cited the 2010 monsoon floods in Pakistan as the largest
humanitarian crisis in living memory. The environmental catastrophe effected
twenty million people and highlighted the complicated relationship between nature
and society. The lives of extremely vulnerable groups such as subsistence farmers
and unskilled labourers were…[Read more]

The chapter focuses on conceptualizing event and situation for ethnographic knowledge production and development of anthropological theory. Therefore, in a first step, I draw attention to the historical and conceptual importance of the anthropological approaches of “situational analysis” and “extended-case method”, developed by Max Gluckma…[Read more]

This article focuses on Jewish women’s experiences of the amen meal ritual. The central intention of this meal is to achieve many recitations of the word “amen” in response to benedictions recited for different sorts of food. The women’s voices and experiences, reflected in in-depth interviews with participants and participant observa…[Read more]

Why are academic and policy discourses on child soldiers relatively silent on sexual violence against boys in armed groups? Drawing from the experiences of boys forcibly conscripted into the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), this Chapter seeks to transcend the gendered language of sexual slavery, concubines, forced pregnancy and rape. Most sexual a…[Read more]

This is a paper that I presented at the 2019 MLA in Chicago. In this paper I situate discussions of the field of Iberian Studies within the context of the crisis of the Humanities and the future of Cultural Studies.

The public sphere is increasingly being depicted as a site of inadequately assessed risk when American undergraduates post blogs, videos, and Facebook updates that become viral, prompting others to mutter ‘don’t they know better than to press send?’ In this article, I offer an analytical frame for such posting that does not re-inscribe US tende…[Read more]

How is the newness of new media constructed? Rejecting technological determinism, linguistic anthropologists understand that newness emerges when previous strategies for coordinating social interactions are challenged by a communicative channel. People experience a communicative channel as new when it enables people to circulate knowledge in new…[Read more]

Media workers have always adopted branding tactics for themselves: creating and managing a certain persona, doing the emotional labour necessary in largely informal and reputation-driven working environments to suggest a persona, performing this identity dutifully in order to make it work. However, branding is not an inevitable practice — it is…[Read more]

Addressing Walt Whitman’s reception in Iran, the present essay focuses on the front cover of a book-length translation of Whitman into Persian to study how Whitman’s image is visually translated for an Iranian audience. Among literary discourses of contemporary Iran, the one that associates poetry with mysticism plays the most significant role in…[Read more]

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Since his first works came to critical attention, Ernest Hemingway has occupied a space in the critical and cultural imagination as a definitively ‘masculine’ writer. His novels and stories focus on male narrators in difficult or extreme situations involving war, violence, and the natural world, and his critical heritage has focused on these ele…[Read more]

The Line of Control arbitrarily bifurcates Neelum valley, Kashmir into Pakistan and India. While the border attempts to constrain and categorize, the daily movements and flows of human and more-than-human bodies via “unofficial” routes and routines generate an understanding of Kashmir that is not dependent on geopolitics. Neelum as sculpted and…[Read more]

We live in an increasingly übercapitalist society. It’s übercapitalist in that a specific version of neoliberalism, characterised by low pay, zero-hours and fixed-term contracts, is growing ever more aggressive; and that the disruptive technology firm Uber offers one of the most high-profile examples of this intensified form of deregulated cap…[Read more]

Little India is a rich historical and ethnographic examination of a fascinating example of linguistic plurality on the island of Mauritius, where more than two-thirds of the population is of Indian ancestry. Patrick Eisenlohr’s groundbreaking study focuses on the formation of diaspora as mediated through the cultural phenomenon of Indian ancestral…[Read more]

This paper is a critical examination of two antithetical theories on the role of authorial intention in the criticism and interpretation of literature: the New Critics’ “intentional fallacy” and E. D. Hirsch’s historicist objectivism. A third way is put forward: a regulative objectivism which emerges as a a result of critical debate.

C. Lloyd Morgan is mostly known for Morgan’s canon (1894), still a popular and frequently quoted principle in comparative psychology and ethology. There has been a fair amount of debate on the canon’s interpretation, function, and value regarding the research on animal minds, usually referring to it as an isolated principle. In this paper we…[Read more]

The link between asimovian universe and Sherlock Holmes