Drawing on fieldwork among older Kyrgyz people who become old in the absence of their relatives, ... more Drawing on fieldwork among older Kyrgyz people who become old in the absence of their relatives, this paper explores the afterlife as a horizon of possibility which intersects with the everyday in ways that collapse distinctions between the transcendent and the immanent. The ancestor spirits—who play a central role in many Kyrgyz peoples’ practice of Islam—often settle in peoples’ homes as connections with living others fade. They are seen as bridges to the afterlife—a life many of the older people long for—but they tend to encourage them to stay. I explore these moments as moments of divine presence which place people in the virtue of sabr, patience or perseverance, and argue that while Muslim virtues may be cultivated through active engagement with Islamic ideals and values, they may also be present in more spectral forms: in, for example, a vague sense that one’s existence—however unimportant it may seem—may matter and be virtuous.
In this article, my concern is the sharing of being, thus the existential question of what a per... more In this article, my concern is the sharing of being, thus the existential question of what a person shares with others by virtue of her very ‘thrownness’, the circumstance of finding herself born as human in a particular place, into a particular family, and in a particular moment in history. Questions about what we share with others by virtue of our very being often confront us with a particular urgency in liminal situations where we are confronted with alterity amidst the familiar, when the world becomes porous and mouldable where we thought it was most solid. I explore how such questions become urgent amongst Kyrgyz people of Muslim background who have become evangelical Christians and who struggle to find a place of belonging that is welcoming to them and the values and virtues they see as central to who they are in a context where conversion to Christianity is seen as deeply controversial. Engaging with insights from the phenomenological tradition in philosophy and anthropology, I explore encounters with alterity as central to the efforts of Kyrgyz Christians to find a place of belonging in the world. I argue that we may experience the sharing of being most intensively when alterity draws us in, emplacing us in shared horizons of possibility whose contours are not yet clear.
Impermanence. Exploring Continuous Change Across Cultures, edited by Haidy Geismar, Ton Otto and Cameron David Warner, 2022
Part 1 Living with and against impermanence 2. Heavy curtains and deep sleep within darkness 25 T... more Part 1 Living with and against impermanence 2. Heavy curtains and deep sleep within darkness 25 Tsering Woeser 3. Disinheriting social death: towards an ethnographic theory of impermanence 28 Carole McGranahan 4. Atheist endings: imagining having been in contemporary Kyrgyzstan 47 Maria Louw 5. Encountering impermanence, making change: a case study of attachment and alcoholism in Thailand 65 Julia Cassaniti 6. Holding on and letting go: Tanzanian Indians' responses to impermanence 83
In Kyrgyzstan dreams are of great significance as sources of omens and divine revelations. In the... more In Kyrgyzstan dreams are of great significance as sources of omens and divine revelations. In the practice of dream interpretation a complex relationship between belief in fate and belief in the free will is expressed: Through magical practices which manipulate dream omens people sometimes seek to effect what is about to happen, changing the fate that they, in other situations, claim not to have any control of. It is argued that dream omens embody peoples hopes for, and fears about, how their lives may develop. Through their interpretation of the omens and through the magical acts with which they often handle them, they enter a virtual realm where they and people who are close to them can imagine and orient themselves toward possible future scenarios and test their social resonance. With the interpretation of, and magical manipulation with, omens, a person’s fate becomes a social riddle which concerns not only the directions her life might, or ought to, take, but also the question o...
I stedet for et abstract er her begyndelsen på indledningen:Markante begivenheder i nyere tid sås... more I stedet for et abstract er her begyndelsen på indledningen:Markante begivenheder i nyere tid såsom Rushdie-affæren, den 11. september og karrikaturkrisen har sat islam på den internationale dagsorden. Trods forudsigelser om religionernes mistede betydning og verdens af-fortryllelse synes religion at have fået ny kraft og vitalitet i en moderne global verden. Det er ikke længere alene relevant at forholde sig til globaliseringen af islam, men også til islam som en globaliseringsdynamik. (...)
I stedet for et abstract er her begyndelsen på indledningen: Der er de senere år blevet forsket o... more I stedet for et abstract er her begyndelsen på indledningen: Der er de senere år blevet forsket og skrevet om sufisme fra mange forskellige vinkler og med fokus på en bred række tematikker. For blot at nævne nogle, kunne man fremhæve studier der tager afsæt i den karisma, der emmer fra levende shuyukh (Werbner og Basu 1998; Werbner 2003); de tilbagevendende religiøse festivaller og fejringer ved helgengrave (Curie 2006; Frembgen 2011); forskellige former for zikr (ihukommelse af Gud) og ekstatiske ritualer (Lizzio 2007; Pinto 2010; Irwin 2011); fødevarers potentielt rensende og transformerende egenskaber for dedikerede sufier (Werbner 1998; Matzens 2012; Rytter 2013); sufisme som en integreret del af hverdagsislam (Louw 2007; Raudvere og Stenberg 2007); samt nutidige turuq (veje, ordner) globale udstrækninger og plasticitet (Malik and Hinnels 2006; Geaves, Dressler and Klinkhammer 2009; Stjernholm 2011; Bubandt 2011; Mathiesen 2012). Trods det massive opbud af studier, er der imidle...
What do we, as human beings-religious, non-religious, Muslim and non-Muslimcare about, and how do... more What do we, as human beings-religious, non-religious, Muslim and non-Muslimcare about, and how do experiences of caring and being cared for come to shape the way we lead our lives with and among others? In this special issue, we set out to explore the relations between Muslims and various religious and non-religious others through the concept of 'care'. Doing this, we dwell specifically on what we describe as tensions in care relations and the way they are experienced, thought of, conceptualized and negotiated: 1) tensions between individual aspirations and care for others 2) tensions between care as duty and care as pleasure and ground for human flourishing 3) tensions between practical and emotional dimensions of care 4) tensions between universal and cultural or ideological aspects of care and 5) tensions between state projects of care and religiously motivated care practices.
With a point of departure in fieldwork conducted among Muslims connected with – or inspired by – ... more With a point of departure in fieldwork conducted among Muslims connected with – or inspired by – the Naqshbandiyya Sufi tariqa in Post-Soviet Uzbekistan, this paper focuses on the paradoxes involved in realizing Sufism as virtue ethics. Through a continuous work on the self the Naqshbandis seek to approach God as well as to realize Sufism as this-worldly virtue ethics. What stands out as central in their experience of this process, however, is neither the encounter with the Divine, nor their own ethical perfection. Rather, it is insistent feelings of vulnerability, doubt and imperfection and a sense of being further and further away from the ideals of Sufism the more they seek them or seek to realize them. The paper will focus on these paradoxes – paradoxes which may be general to Sufism as such, or which at least lie as a potential in Sufism as well as other religious traditions which seek to realize transcendent ideals in an imperfect world, but which are accentuated in a context ...
What is moral community, and what role does it play, in a neo-liberal age where concepts of indiv... more What is moral community, and what role does it play, in a neo-liberal age where concepts of individual responsibility are increasingly replacing concepts of the common good? How do people experience their involvement with each other, and which concepts may be used to describe it? Bringing together anthropologists and philosophers and taking a point of departure in a phenomenological perspective emphasizing the human as a responsive being, the project aims to explore these questions, focusing on how moral community is lived and experienced as an existential question, demand and burden. See
http://talent.au.dk/phd/arts/open-calls/phd-call-2018-2/
This introduction is devoted to the task of qualifying what is entailed in the proposed explorati... more This introduction is devoted to the task of qualifying what is entailed in the proposed exploration of ‘moral engines’. This task will be approached as follows. Section One makes the case for why a consideration of ethical drives seems to demand a borderland inquiry that crosses anthropology and philosophy. Section Two situates the question of ethical drives within a brief overview of how ethics and morality have been explored in anthropology and makes the case for why, despite a wealth of current scholarship, this question still needs to be asked. It also identifies certain organizing themes that have emerged in the current theoretical debates in anthropology that are especially pertinent to addressing it. Section Three broadly outlines a framework consisting of three quite different approaches that can be taken in considering what might constitute moral engines. We return to these approaches later in the chapter but briefly introduce them here. One approach, to put it a bit crudely, stresses ‘moral facts’. While opposing reductionist and social deterministic understandings of ‘moral facts’ in order to clear a space for undetermined ethical action, this approach foregrounds some notion of sociocultural dynamics and structures as important catalysts of the ethical drive. A second approach emphasizes ‘moral experience’ and finds in the first-person perspective certain irreducible ethical dynamics. This approach tends to stress the excessiveness of experience, the way that ethical experience can elude attempts to capture it through a society’s normative structures, dynamics or concepts. A third approach argues that an inquiry into the drives or impulses that prompt ethical life needs to be connected to an ontological inquiry into the existential roots of the ethical and into the human condition as such. Relying widely on existential phenomenology and the German tradition of philosophical anthropology, this latter approach insists that the question of moral engines must be posed as a radical anthropological question. The chapters in this volume variously elaborate each of these approaches, sometimes combining more than one. Like any schematic, our tripartite division is necessarily simplified and intended for heuristic purposes. Notably, these approaches are not mutually exclusive. In fact, we will argue that there is an essential complementarity among the three foci and that this complementarity offers a powerful analytic lens through which to explore ethical drives.
Taking an ethnographic point of departure in the relationship between two women in Bishkek, the c... more Taking an ethnographic point of departure in the relationship between two women in Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan – a doctor and a clairvoyant – the article will focus on the ambiguous ways the visible and the invisible intersect in the lives of the Kyrgyz. Esoteric experiences such as ayan, dream omens, sometimes stand out as flashes of insight which bring clarity and guidance, but are equally often unwanted disturbances which haunt people against their will. In order to do justice to this ambiguity I engage the phenomenology of the alien as developed by Bernhard Waldenfels, arguing that esoteric experiences may be seen as an example of what he terms radical alienness which cast doubt on interpretation itself.
Drawing on fieldwork among older Kyrgyz people who become old in the absence of their relatives, ... more Drawing on fieldwork among older Kyrgyz people who become old in the absence of their relatives, this paper explores the afterlife as a horizon of possibility which intersects with the everyday in ways that collapse distinctions between the transcendent and the immanent. The ancestor spirits—who play a central role in many Kyrgyz peoples’ practice of Islam—often settle in peoples’ homes as connections with living others fade. They are seen as bridges to the afterlife—a life many of the older people long for—but they tend to encourage them to stay. I explore these moments as moments of divine presence which place people in the virtue of sabr, patience or perseverance, and argue that while Muslim virtues may be cultivated through active engagement with Islamic ideals and values, they may also be present in more spectral forms: in, for example, a vague sense that one’s existence—however unimportant it may seem—may matter and be virtuous.
In this article, my concern is the sharing of being, thus the existential question of what a per... more In this article, my concern is the sharing of being, thus the existential question of what a person shares with others by virtue of her very ‘thrownness’, the circumstance of finding herself born as human in a particular place, into a particular family, and in a particular moment in history. Questions about what we share with others by virtue of our very being often confront us with a particular urgency in liminal situations where we are confronted with alterity amidst the familiar, when the world becomes porous and mouldable where we thought it was most solid. I explore how such questions become urgent amongst Kyrgyz people of Muslim background who have become evangelical Christians and who struggle to find a place of belonging that is welcoming to them and the values and virtues they see as central to who they are in a context where conversion to Christianity is seen as deeply controversial. Engaging with insights from the phenomenological tradition in philosophy and anthropology, I explore encounters with alterity as central to the efforts of Kyrgyz Christians to find a place of belonging in the world. I argue that we may experience the sharing of being most intensively when alterity draws us in, emplacing us in shared horizons of possibility whose contours are not yet clear.
Impermanence. Exploring Continuous Change Across Cultures, edited by Haidy Geismar, Ton Otto and Cameron David Warner, 2022
Part 1 Living with and against impermanence 2. Heavy curtains and deep sleep within darkness 25 T... more Part 1 Living with and against impermanence 2. Heavy curtains and deep sleep within darkness 25 Tsering Woeser 3. Disinheriting social death: towards an ethnographic theory of impermanence 28 Carole McGranahan 4. Atheist endings: imagining having been in contemporary Kyrgyzstan 47 Maria Louw 5. Encountering impermanence, making change: a case study of attachment and alcoholism in Thailand 65 Julia Cassaniti 6. Holding on and letting go: Tanzanian Indians' responses to impermanence 83
In Kyrgyzstan dreams are of great significance as sources of omens and divine revelations. In the... more In Kyrgyzstan dreams are of great significance as sources of omens and divine revelations. In the practice of dream interpretation a complex relationship between belief in fate and belief in the free will is expressed: Through magical practices which manipulate dream omens people sometimes seek to effect what is about to happen, changing the fate that they, in other situations, claim not to have any control of. It is argued that dream omens embody peoples hopes for, and fears about, how their lives may develop. Through their interpretation of the omens and through the magical acts with which they often handle them, they enter a virtual realm where they and people who are close to them can imagine and orient themselves toward possible future scenarios and test their social resonance. With the interpretation of, and magical manipulation with, omens, a person’s fate becomes a social riddle which concerns not only the directions her life might, or ought to, take, but also the question o...
I stedet for et abstract er her begyndelsen på indledningen:Markante begivenheder i nyere tid sås... more I stedet for et abstract er her begyndelsen på indledningen:Markante begivenheder i nyere tid såsom Rushdie-affæren, den 11. september og karrikaturkrisen har sat islam på den internationale dagsorden. Trods forudsigelser om religionernes mistede betydning og verdens af-fortryllelse synes religion at have fået ny kraft og vitalitet i en moderne global verden. Det er ikke længere alene relevant at forholde sig til globaliseringen af islam, men også til islam som en globaliseringsdynamik. (...)
I stedet for et abstract er her begyndelsen på indledningen: Der er de senere år blevet forsket o... more I stedet for et abstract er her begyndelsen på indledningen: Der er de senere år blevet forsket og skrevet om sufisme fra mange forskellige vinkler og med fokus på en bred række tematikker. For blot at nævne nogle, kunne man fremhæve studier der tager afsæt i den karisma, der emmer fra levende shuyukh (Werbner og Basu 1998; Werbner 2003); de tilbagevendende religiøse festivaller og fejringer ved helgengrave (Curie 2006; Frembgen 2011); forskellige former for zikr (ihukommelse af Gud) og ekstatiske ritualer (Lizzio 2007; Pinto 2010; Irwin 2011); fødevarers potentielt rensende og transformerende egenskaber for dedikerede sufier (Werbner 1998; Matzens 2012; Rytter 2013); sufisme som en integreret del af hverdagsislam (Louw 2007; Raudvere og Stenberg 2007); samt nutidige turuq (veje, ordner) globale udstrækninger og plasticitet (Malik and Hinnels 2006; Geaves, Dressler and Klinkhammer 2009; Stjernholm 2011; Bubandt 2011; Mathiesen 2012). Trods det massive opbud af studier, er der imidle...
What do we, as human beings-religious, non-religious, Muslim and non-Muslimcare about, and how do... more What do we, as human beings-religious, non-religious, Muslim and non-Muslimcare about, and how do experiences of caring and being cared for come to shape the way we lead our lives with and among others? In this special issue, we set out to explore the relations between Muslims and various religious and non-religious others through the concept of 'care'. Doing this, we dwell specifically on what we describe as tensions in care relations and the way they are experienced, thought of, conceptualized and negotiated: 1) tensions between individual aspirations and care for others 2) tensions between care as duty and care as pleasure and ground for human flourishing 3) tensions between practical and emotional dimensions of care 4) tensions between universal and cultural or ideological aspects of care and 5) tensions between state projects of care and religiously motivated care practices.
With a point of departure in fieldwork conducted among Muslims connected with – or inspired by – ... more With a point of departure in fieldwork conducted among Muslims connected with – or inspired by – the Naqshbandiyya Sufi tariqa in Post-Soviet Uzbekistan, this paper focuses on the paradoxes involved in realizing Sufism as virtue ethics. Through a continuous work on the self the Naqshbandis seek to approach God as well as to realize Sufism as this-worldly virtue ethics. What stands out as central in their experience of this process, however, is neither the encounter with the Divine, nor their own ethical perfection. Rather, it is insistent feelings of vulnerability, doubt and imperfection and a sense of being further and further away from the ideals of Sufism the more they seek them or seek to realize them. The paper will focus on these paradoxes – paradoxes which may be general to Sufism as such, or which at least lie as a potential in Sufism as well as other religious traditions which seek to realize transcendent ideals in an imperfect world, but which are accentuated in a context ...
What is moral community, and what role does it play, in a neo-liberal age where concepts of indiv... more What is moral community, and what role does it play, in a neo-liberal age where concepts of individual responsibility are increasingly replacing concepts of the common good? How do people experience their involvement with each other, and which concepts may be used to describe it? Bringing together anthropologists and philosophers and taking a point of departure in a phenomenological perspective emphasizing the human as a responsive being, the project aims to explore these questions, focusing on how moral community is lived and experienced as an existential question, demand and burden. See
http://talent.au.dk/phd/arts/open-calls/phd-call-2018-2/
This introduction is devoted to the task of qualifying what is entailed in the proposed explorati... more This introduction is devoted to the task of qualifying what is entailed in the proposed exploration of ‘moral engines’. This task will be approached as follows. Section One makes the case for why a consideration of ethical drives seems to demand a borderland inquiry that crosses anthropology and philosophy. Section Two situates the question of ethical drives within a brief overview of how ethics and morality have been explored in anthropology and makes the case for why, despite a wealth of current scholarship, this question still needs to be asked. It also identifies certain organizing themes that have emerged in the current theoretical debates in anthropology that are especially pertinent to addressing it. Section Three broadly outlines a framework consisting of three quite different approaches that can be taken in considering what might constitute moral engines. We return to these approaches later in the chapter but briefly introduce them here. One approach, to put it a bit crudely, stresses ‘moral facts’. While opposing reductionist and social deterministic understandings of ‘moral facts’ in order to clear a space for undetermined ethical action, this approach foregrounds some notion of sociocultural dynamics and structures as important catalysts of the ethical drive. A second approach emphasizes ‘moral experience’ and finds in the first-person perspective certain irreducible ethical dynamics. This approach tends to stress the excessiveness of experience, the way that ethical experience can elude attempts to capture it through a society’s normative structures, dynamics or concepts. A third approach argues that an inquiry into the drives or impulses that prompt ethical life needs to be connected to an ontological inquiry into the existential roots of the ethical and into the human condition as such. Relying widely on existential phenomenology and the German tradition of philosophical anthropology, this latter approach insists that the question of moral engines must be posed as a radical anthropological question. The chapters in this volume variously elaborate each of these approaches, sometimes combining more than one. Like any schematic, our tripartite division is necessarily simplified and intended for heuristic purposes. Notably, these approaches are not mutually exclusive. In fact, we will argue that there is an essential complementarity among the three foci and that this complementarity offers a powerful analytic lens through which to explore ethical drives.
Taking an ethnographic point of departure in the relationship between two women in Bishkek, the c... more Taking an ethnographic point of departure in the relationship between two women in Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan – a doctor and a clairvoyant – the article will focus on the ambiguous ways the visible and the invisible intersect in the lives of the Kyrgyz. Esoteric experiences such as ayan, dream omens, sometimes stand out as flashes of insight which bring clarity and guidance, but are equally often unwanted disturbances which haunt people against their will. In order to do justice to this ambiguity I engage the phenomenology of the alien as developed by Bernhard Waldenfels, arguing that esoteric experiences may be seen as an example of what he terms radical alienness which cast doubt on interpretation itself.
In the past fifteen years, there has been a virtual explosion of anthropological literature argui... more In the past fifteen years, there has been a virtual explosion of anthropological literature arguing that morality should be considered central to human practice. Out of this explosion new and invigorating conversations have emerged between anthropologists and philosophers. Moral Engines: Exploring the Ethical Drives in Human Life includes essays from some of the foremost voices in the anthropology of morality, offering unique interdisciplinary conversations between anthropologists and philosophers about the moral engines of ethical life, addressing the question: What propels humans to act in light of ethical ideals?
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http://talent.au.dk/phd/arts/open-calls/phd-call-2018-2/
to be asked. It also identifies certain organizing themes that have emerged in the current theoretical debates in anthropology that are especially pertinent to addressing it.
Section Three broadly outlines a framework consisting of three quite different approaches that can be taken in considering what might constitute moral engines. We return to these approaches later in the chapter but briefly introduce them here. One approach, to put it a bit crudely, stresses ‘moral facts’. While opposing reductionist and social deterministic understandings of ‘moral facts’ in order to clear a space for undetermined ethical action, this approach foregrounds some notion of sociocultural dynamics and structures as important catalysts of the ethical drive. A second approach emphasizes ‘moral experience’ and finds in the first-person perspective certain irreducible ethical dynamics. This approach tends to stress the excessiveness of experience, the way that ethical experience can elude attempts to capture it through a society’s normative structures, dynamics or concepts. A third approach
argues that an inquiry into the drives or impulses that prompt ethical life
needs to be connected to an ontological inquiry into the existential roots of the ethical and into the human condition as such. Relying widely on existential phenomenology and the German tradition of philosophical anthropology, this latter approach insists that the question of moral engines must be posed as a radical anthropological question. The chapters in this volume variously elaborate each of these approaches, sometimes combining more than one. Like any schematic, our tripartite division is necessarily simplified and intended for heuristic purposes. Notably, these approaches are not mutually exclusive. In fact, we will argue that there is an essential complementarity among the three foci and that this complementarity offers a powerful analytic lens through
which to explore ethical drives.
http://talent.au.dk/phd/arts/open-calls/phd-call-2018-2/
to be asked. It also identifies certain organizing themes that have emerged in the current theoretical debates in anthropology that are especially pertinent to addressing it.
Section Three broadly outlines a framework consisting of three quite different approaches that can be taken in considering what might constitute moral engines. We return to these approaches later in the chapter but briefly introduce them here. One approach, to put it a bit crudely, stresses ‘moral facts’. While opposing reductionist and social deterministic understandings of ‘moral facts’ in order to clear a space for undetermined ethical action, this approach foregrounds some notion of sociocultural dynamics and structures as important catalysts of the ethical drive. A second approach emphasizes ‘moral experience’ and finds in the first-person perspective certain irreducible ethical dynamics. This approach tends to stress the excessiveness of experience, the way that ethical experience can elude attempts to capture it through a society’s normative structures, dynamics or concepts. A third approach
argues that an inquiry into the drives or impulses that prompt ethical life
needs to be connected to an ontological inquiry into the existential roots of the ethical and into the human condition as such. Relying widely on existential phenomenology and the German tradition of philosophical anthropology, this latter approach insists that the question of moral engines must be posed as a radical anthropological question. The chapters in this volume variously elaborate each of these approaches, sometimes combining more than one. Like any schematic, our tripartite division is necessarily simplified and intended for heuristic purposes. Notably, these approaches are not mutually exclusive. In fact, we will argue that there is an essential complementarity among the three foci and that this complementarity offers a powerful analytic lens through
which to explore ethical drives.