On Twitter I am @jboy.
— E. H. Carr, What is History? (New York: Vintage, 1961), p. 132.
— Alexander Demandt, Metaphern für Geschichte (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1978), p. 176.
— Federico Campagna, “Night of the Living Geeks”
My latest at The Immanent Frame.
Hard Times in New York Town. WBAI, 1962.
Deutsche Welle reports on an initiative to rename streets named after some sordid individuals from Germany’s largely forgotten colonial past.
[Cross-posting my latest piece on The Immanent Frame.]
Reflecting on the fallout of the events in Egypt for the theory of religion, Carl Raschke recently wrote they would “cut significantly into the commercial relevance of today’s generations of Islamic and religous [sic] studies scholars.” In face of a political movement sweeping the Middle East that is—as Slavoj Žižek insists—based upon appeals to universal, secular values, the category of religion, Raschke’s reasoning goes, will no longer have much explanatory power. As a result, religious studies will lose much of the market appeal it was able to capitalize on in the post–9/11 world anxious about politicized religious movements and “fundamentalism.” In the terms of positivist social science, religion will be less likely to be included in our models as an independent variable as we try to make sense of political and cultural dynamics in the Middle East and North Africa in the future. (See also Muriam Haleh Davis’s critical remarks on the “new internationalism.”)
Raschke certainly is correct that orientalism and “good multi-culturalist genuflexion” have been dealt strong blows. He is also correct that this affects much scholarship on the role of Islam in our world. However, not all contemporary scholars of Islam and religion have an orientalist or shallow multiculturalist outlook. Not all scholars of religion argue that certain populations or civilizations, on account of their religious beliefs, are simply different and therefore unable to be represented in a universalist political project.
For the last two decades, the category of religion—as well as its presumed opposite, the secular—has been subject to questioning by scholars of religion. This questioning attitude comes to the fore in the celebrated works of Charles Hirschkind and Saba Mahmood, two U.S.-based anthropologists who have done extensive fieldwork in Egypt and who have both recently commented on the events in Egypt. They owe an intellectual debt to Talal Asad, an anthropologist who also has fieldwork experience in Egypt as well as neighboring Sudan. I want to briefly hint at how Asad’s thought can help us make sense of religion in the context of the revolution in Egypt. Partially I do this on the basis of what he has written, and partially on the basis of his brief remarks at a recent forum on Tunisia and Egypt held at Brecht Forum in New York City.
$ history | awk '{print $2}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head
(inspired by)
69 xelatex
62 cd
58 open
40 biber
38 vi
36 ls
28 bzr
23 sudo
19 ping
10 tar
