Religion and Global Challenges

In this third instalment of our mini-series on Living with Religious Difference, we talk to Dr Andrew Bush (Cracow University of Economics) about the way in which pious and not so pious Muslims in Iraqi Kurdistan craft everyday lives together. During our conversation, we delve into the everyday as a site of exploring religious difference and consider how poetry becomes a way of engaging with alterity, whether Christian, Muslim, or other. 

Music: ‘Ebasî Kemendî: Gelawej, Refîq Chalak: Diyarm Deyrî ‘Îshqe 

Bio

Andrew Bush completed a PhD in anthropology at Johns Hopkins University in 2014, and then held teaching and research positions at New York University Abu Dhabi until 2019. When the podcast was recorded, he was a Visiting Fellow in Harvard Law's School's Program on Law and Society in the Muslim World, and now as the podcast is released, he is a Research Fellow at the Cracow University of Economics. His work has appeared in American Ethnologist, the Journal of Middle East Women's Studies, and the Wiley-Blackwell Companion to the Anthropology of the Middle East. His book, Between Muslims: Religious Difference in Iraqi Kurdistan was published in 2020 with Stanford University Press.

References 

• Atmaca, Metin (2021). "Negotiating Political Power in the Early Modern Middle East: Kurdish Emirates between the Ottoman Empire and Iranian Dynasties (Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries)." In Cambridge History of the Kurds, ed. Hamit Bozarslan, Cengiz Gunes, and Veli Yadirgi, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Benjamen, Alda ed. (2020). "Narratives of coexistence and pluralism in northern Iraq" Special Issue of the Journal of Contemporary Iraq & the Arab World, no. 14. 
• Bush, Andrew (2020). Between Muslims: Religious Difference in Iraqi Kurdistan, Stanford: Stanford University Press.
• Ghaderi, Farangis, Clémence Scalbert Yücel, and Yasar Hassan Ali, (2021). Women's Voices from Kurdistan: A Selection of Kurdish Poetry, London: Transnational Press.
• Uşşaklı, Kerem Can (2002). "Securitizing Citizenship and Policing Security in Iraqi Kurdistan,’ MERIP 295.

For the second episode of our mini-series on Living with Religious Difference, I talked to Dr Anoush Suni (Northwestern University) about her research on the reverberations of the historic Armenian presence in the lives of contemporary Kurdish communities in eastern Anatolia. Together we explore how the memory of the Armenian past lives on within Kurdish communities, how legacies of state violence materialize in ruins and treasures, and we discuss how Armenian religious sites take on new meaning within Kurdish life worlds.

Music: Balık by Collectif Medz Bazar (with special thanks)

Bio

Anoush Tamar Suni is currently the Keyman Modern Turkish Studies Postdoctoral Fellow at Northwestern University. Previously, she was a Manoogian Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Armenian Studies Program and the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. She earned her PhD in anthropology from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2019. For her doctoral dissertation, entitled “Palimpsests of Violence: Ruination and the Politics of Memory in Anatolia,” she spent over two years (2015-2017) in the region of Van, in southeastern Turkey, conducting ethnographic research. She is currently working on her book project, which investigates questions of memory and the material legacies of state violence in the region of Van with a focus on the historic Armenian and contemporary Kurdish communities. Her research interests include state and intercommunal violence, memory, materiality and landscape, cultural heritage, space and place, and political and historical anthropology in Turkey, Armenia, Kurdistan, and the broader Middle East.

References

• Biner, Zerrin Özlem. 2020. States of Dispossession: Violence and Precarious Coexistence in Southeast Turkey. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
• Darici, Haydar. 2011. “Politics of Privacy: Forced Migration and the Spatial Struggle of the Kurdish Youth.” Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies 13 (4): 457–74.
• Leupold, David. 2020. Embattled Dreamlands: The Politics of Contesting Armenian, Kurdish and Turkish Memory. New York: Routledge.
• Navaro, Yael. 2020. “The Aftermath of Mass Violence: A Negative Methodology.” Annual Review of Anthropology 49 (1): 161–73. 
• Parla, Ayşe, and Ceren Özgül. 2016. “Property, Dispossession, and Citizenship in Turkey; or, The History of the Gezi Uprising Starts in the Surp Hagop Armenian Cemetery.” Public Culture 28 (3 80): 617–53.
• Tambar, Kabir. 2016. “Brotherhood in Dispossession: State Violence and the Ethics of Expectation in Turkey.” Cultural Anthropology 31 (1): 30–55. 
• von Bieberstein, Alice. 2017. “Treasure/Fetish/Gift: Hunting for ‘Armenian Gold’ in Post-Genocide Turkish Kurdistan.” Subjectivity 10 (2): 170–89.

In this first episode of our new series on Living with Religious Difference, our guest is Dr Tilmann Heil who talks about his research with Muslim Senegalese migrants in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Together, we consider how religion may function as a moral infrastructure that allows navigating a world where different communities, beliefs, and convictions meet. Tilmann outlines how his interlocutors position themselves within their new lifeworlds and how religion becomes a key resource for negotiating, taming, and accommodating societal difference..

Music: Sneak by A.A. Alto; Kiss And Tell (breezy bossa nova) by Keshco

Bio

Tilmann Heil is a Postdoctoral Investigator at Maria Sybilla Merian Centre Conviviality-Inequality in Latin America - Mecila - and Principal Investigator at the Global South Studies Center at University of Cologne. In his current ethnographic research with West African and Southern European migrants in Rio de Janeiro, he inquires into how migrant newcomers value and evaluate difference within complex urban assemblages characterized by intersectional hierarchies and deep inequality. In his ethnography Comparing Conviviality. Living with Difference in Casamance and Catalonia (Palgrave, 2020) that derives from earlier work in Senegal and Spain, he has conceptualized conviviality as a process of interaction, negotiation, and translation from which forms of minimal and fragile sociality emerge. Across various spaces bordering the Atlantic, Tilmann has continuously addressed ethical reflections on, and habitual tactics of, everyday struggles with ethnic, religious, and racial plurality.

References

• Heil, Tilmann. 2019. “Muslim - Queer Encounters in Rio De Janeiro: Making Sense of Relative Positionalities.” Ethnography, no. online first: 1-20. doi:10.1177/1466138119859601.
• Diouf, Mamadou. 2000. “The Senegalese Murid Trade Diaspora and the Making of a Vernacular Cosmopolitanism.” Public Culture 12 (3): 679-702.
• Puar, Jasbir K. 2007. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham: Duke University Press.
• Haritaworn, Jin, Adi Kuntsman, and Silvia Posocco, eds. 2014. Queer Necropolitics. London: Routledge.
• Kane, Ousmane O. 2011. The Homeland Is the Arena. Religion, Transnationalism, and the Integration of Senegalese Immigrants in America. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

In this third and last episode of our mini-series on the politics of martyrdom, we talk to historian Dr Chris Moffat (Queen Mary University London) about the manifold afterlives of the early-twentieth-century Indian revolutionary Bhagat Singh. Our conversation explores the political potency of self-sacrifice, interrogates the difficulty to stabilize the meaning of martyrdom, and reflects on the politics of commemoration in contemporary India.

Music: Plaster Combo by Blue Dot Sessions; Punjab Shuffle by The Polish Ambassador

Bio

Chris Moffat is Lecturer in South Asian History at Queen Mary University of London. In 2019 he was Visiting Faculty in the Department of History, Government College University, Lahore, Pakistan. Chris is the author of India’s Revolutionary Inheritance: Politics and the Promise of Bhagat Singh, published with Cambridge University Press in 2019. He is currently writing a book on architecture, politics and the philosophy of history in Pakistan. 

References (in order of mentioning)

• Alex Houen, ‘Sacrificial Militancy and the Wars around Terror’, in Elleke Boehmer and Stephen Morton (eds.), Terror and the Postcolonial (Chichester, 2010), 113-140. 
• Faisal Devji, The Terrorist in Search of Humanity (New York, 2008). 
• Jagmohan Singh and Chaman Lal (eds.), Bhagat Singh aur Unke Saathianke Dastavez (Delhi, 1986). 
• Chaman Lal, The Bhagat Singh Reader (New Delhi, 2019). 
• Christopher Pinney, Photos of the Gods: The Printed Image and Political Struggle in India (London, 2004). 
• Sumathi Ramaswamy, The Goddess and the Nation: Mapping Mother India (Durham, NC, 2010). 
• Kama Maclean, A Revolutionary History of Interwar India (London, 2015). 
• Simona Sawhney, ‘Bhagat Singh: A Politics of Death and Hope’, in Anshu Malhotra and Farina Mir (eds.), Punjab Reconsidered (Delhi, 2012), 377-408. 
• Vyjyanthi Rao, ‘Hindu Modern: Considering Gandhian Aesthetics’, Public Culture 23:2 (2011), 377-394. 

The second episode of our series on the politics of martyrdom hosts Dr Maria Rashid, author of Dying to Serve: Militarism, Affect, and the Politics of Sacrifice in the Pakistan Army (Stanford UP, 2020). Together we discuss the role that affects and emotions play in making martyrdom a key theme for Pakistani militarism, the way in which gender impacts ideas about sacrifice, and how religion and nationalism intersect in the construction of martyrdom.

Music: Sunday Lights by Blue Dot Sessions; Entonces by A. A. Aalto

Bio

Dr. Maria Rashid has been working in the human rights and development sector for over 22 years now. A psychologist by training, she has been associated with various non-governmental groups in Pakistan including heading a national women and child rights organization for 14 years.  She acquired her doctorate in Politics and International Studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London in 2018. Her book, Dying to Serve: Militarism, Affect and the Politics of Sacrifice in the Pakistan Army was published in 2020 by Stanford University Press and received an honourable mention for the IPS-International Political Sociology Book Award, 2021. She continues to be involved in trainings and research on violence against women, gender, masculinities and militarism and serves on the board of a number of groups and collaboratives both nationally and in South Asia. 

Further readings

• Acton, C. (2007). Grief in War time: Private Pain, Public Discourse. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
• Holst-Warhaft, G. (2000). The Cue for Passion: Grief and Its Political Uses. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Goldstein, J. (2003). War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 
• Navaro-Yashin, Y.  (2012). The Make-Believe Space: Affective Geographies in a Postwar Polity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
• Verdery, Katherine (1999). The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Post Socialist Change. New York: Columbia University Press.

The first in a series of episodes on the politics of martyrdom in which we consider how religious and spiritual ideas about self-sacrifice animate contemporary social movements, political ideas, and moral imaginaries. In this episode, social anthropologist Dr Victoria Fomina (University of Toronto) discusses the rise of new martyr cults in the Christian Orthodox world, and how these articulate with a rise of nationalist politics, an admiration of militarist values, and the appeal of moral conservatism. 

Bio

Dr Victoria Fomina is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto. She received her doctorate in sociology and social anthropology from Central European University. Her research interests include anthropology of religion and nationalism, moral conservatism, postsocialist economic transformation, and grassroots political activism. She has carried out research in Russia and Cyprus, investigating the role the practices of commemoration and new martyr cults play in the recent surge of nationalist mobilization in the two countries. Her book project, Land of Heroes and Martyrs: Public Commemoration, Moral Conservatism, and the Making of Russia’s New Military-Patriotic Culture, examines the transformation of Russian nationalism since the 1990s through the lens of the contested cult of soldier Evgenii Rodionov beheaded in Chechen captivity in 1996. Drawing on interviews with clerics, lay parishioners, artists, and nationalist activists engaged in promotion of this new martyr cult, the book traces the development of the new, memory-centered conservative public sphere and reveals the moral imagination driving the patriotic revival in Russia.

Music: Lobo Lobo by Blue Dot Sessions; Russian Dance by Yair Yona

Further Readings

• Atran, Scott. "ISIS is a Revolution." Aeon Essays, recuperado el 8 (2015). https://aeon.co/essays/why-isis-has-the-potential-to-be-a-world-altering-revolution
• Christensen, Karin Hyldal. The Making of the New Martyrs of Russia: Soviet Repression in Orthodox Memory. Routledge, 2017.
• Christou, Miranda. "A Double Imagination: Memory and Education in Cyprus." Journal of Modern Greek Studies 24, no. 2 (2006): 285-306.
• Efthymiou, Stratis Andreas. Nationalism, Militarism and Masculinity in Post-Conflict Cyprus. Springer, 2019.
• Fomina, Victoria. “Between Heroism and Sainthood: New Martyr Evgenii Rodionov as a Moral Model in Contemporary Russia.” History and Anthropology 29, no. 1 (2018): 101-120.  
• Oushakine, Serguei Alex. The Patriotism of Despair: Nation, War, and Loss in Russia. Cornell University Press, 2011.

Welcome to “Religion and Global Challenges”, a podcast of the Cambridge Interfaith Programme that is brought to you from of the Faculty of Divinity at the University of Cambridge. In this podcast, we explore the many ways in which religious narratives and ideas, practices and experiences inform some of the most crucial challenges facing our world today. You can look forward to monthly sessions where we will invite guest speakers to discuss topics ranging from religion and climate change to how people navigate religious difference in their everyday lives.

For more information follow us on Twitter (@CamInterfaith), visit our website or send us an email at [email protected]

Music credit: Tripoli by Blue Dot Sessions