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The Image sans Orientalism: Local Histories of Photography in the Middle East
The Image sans Orientalism: Local Histories of Photography in the Middle East
The Image sans Orientalism: Local Histories of Photography in the Middle East
The Image sans Orientalism: Local Histories of Photography in the Middle East
The Image sans Orientalism: Local Histories of Photography in the Middle East
Lucie RyzovaIntroduction to special double issue of Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 8 (2015)
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This essay looks at a little studied genre of photographic albums—'peer albums'— created by young Egyptian men and women through the middle decades of the twentieth century. These strongly gendered albums are characterized by the visual exclusion of social seniors, and were typically kept hidden from them. As photographic objects embedded in particular social relationships and contexts, these albums speak of how a classed and gendered self emerged in early-to mid-twentieth-century Egypt through a range of practices, of which photography-making (and album-making) was part. But photography also had its own agency in engendering new practices. The social efficacy of vernacular photographs was predicated on a combination of photographic indexical-ity and performativity. Through the making of such albums, young modernity-claiming Egyptians were asserting, performing and negotiating the parameters of their middle-class urbanity, their emerging positions as modern gendered subjects and as adolescents. Together with the range of peer activities in which they were embedded, these albums represented zones of autonomy free from patriarchal control, but still nested within larger patriarchal structures. Ultimately these albums show how particular historical subjects come to be through engagements with objects; and how patriarchy and individualism construct each other. Keywords photographic albums – snapshot photography – cross-dressing – Kodak – efendi – Egypt * I thank Walter Armbust, Wessam Soliman and the anonymous reviewers for their generosity. The images are taken from my private collection.
This article focuses on two sets of images sparked by the assassination of the Iranian ruler Nasir al-Din Shah in 1896—photographs of his murderer Mirza Riza Kirmani as a prisoner and photographs of his execution—as a significant episode in the history of photography in Iran. These images are more than mere illustrations of a historical event. Rather, they mark an important semantic shift both politically and photo-historically. These photographs thus allow us to interrogate how photographs visualized power relations in late Qajar Iran, and also how their deployment evolved in the rapidly changing social and political field. The photographs of Mirza Riza Kirmani should also be understood in the context of legal and penal reforms of the period, as they make visible the changing perceptions of the criminal as a particular historical subject.
This article examines the emergence and spread of the ‘sportsman’ genre of Ottoman photography in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Istanbul. The ‘sportsman photograph’ depicted young men posing shirtless or wearing tight-fitting athletic attire flexing their muscles and exhibiting their bodies. These images were embedded in a wider set of athletic and leisure activities and constitutive of novel social and photographic practices alike. By tracing the deployment of ‘sportsman’ photographs in sports clubs and the press, I argue that they cemented homosocial bonds, normalized and popularized new notions of masculinity, confessionalized the male body, and reconfigured the ways in which Ottoman Muslims, Christians, and Jews performed and conveyed their commitment to middle-class notions of masculinity and the self.
Indo-European Linguistics
Anatolian Default Accentuation and its Diachronic Consequences2015 •
This paper adduces evidence for and attempts to phonologically motivate a pattern of descriptive "retraction" of surface word accent in the Anatolian languages. It is proposed that the innovative accentual peak (ICTUS) in the relevant forms is due to Anatolian Default Accentuation, which applies when no constituent morpheme in a prosodic word is lexically- specified as accented and assigns ICTUS to its leftmost syllable. Diachronic prosodic change is shown to result from the interaction of various morphophonological developments and the stable operation of this default accentual principle, whose effects in Hittite, Palaic, and Luwian require its reconstruction for Proto-Anatolian. Furthermore, the Anatolian evidence is argued to support Kiparsky and Halle’s (1977) reconstruction of the same default principle for Proto- Indo-European on the basis of Vedic and Balto-Slavic evidence.
This article analyses Clifford Geertz’s shift from a social scientist who participated during the Cold War in policy-serving research on modernization in Indonesia to an anthropologist who focused on meaning and treated culture as an ensemble of texts to be read over the shoulder of the native. This shift becomes most evident in the different ways in which Geertz represented the social and political organization of the economy in Java and Bali in two of his major works. The results of these studies, though based on the same fieldwork data, are conflicting due to diverging theories and their epistemic design.
Bijdragen tot de taal-, land- en volkenkunde / Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences of Southeast Asia, vol. 171, no. 2-3, pp. 312-345
Development Alternatives in Timor-Leste: Recasting Modes of Local Engagement2015 •
Despite investing significant resources, the practice of development has struggled to secure positive, long-term outcomes for the people of Timor-Leste. More than a decade on from formal independence, much of the nation’s population remains deeply impoverished and many human development challenges persist. This article attempts to answer two questions: First, why has development in Timor-Leste been unable to deliver more observable benefits and outcomes for the population at large? And second, how might development be reconfigured to be more effective? Drawing from statistical information, interviews, and case study material, this article argues that part of the ‘problem’ lies with development orthodoxy and its incapacity to recognize and adapt to settings where customary systems of local authority, practice, and belief remain important to social cohesion. Indeed, much may be gained by recasting the way development theory and practice views and interprets such practices, moving away from the idea of a series of cultural obstacles to acknowledging them as deeply embedded systems of meaning which continue to guide various aspects of East Timorese life.
Intellectual History of the Islamicate World, 5/1 (2017), 127-99
Powers of One: The Mathematicalization of the Occult Sciences in the High Persianate TraditionOccultism remains the largest blind spot in the historiography of Islamicate philosophy-science, a casualty of persistent scholarly positivism, even whiggish triumphalism. Such occultophobia notwithstanding, the present article conducts a survey of the Islamicate encyclopedic tradition from the 4th-11th/10th-17th centuries, with emphasis on Persian classifications of the sciences (sg. taṣnīf al-ʿulūm), to demonstrate the ascent to philosophically mainstream status of various occult sciences (ʿulūm ġarība) throughout the post-Mongol Persianate world. Most significantly, in Persian encyclopedias, but not in Arabic, and beginning with Faḫr al-Dīn Rāzī, certain occult sciences (astrology, lettrism and geomancy) were gradually but definitively shifted from the natural to the mathematical sciences as a means of reasserting their scientific legitimacy in the face of four centuries of anti-occultist polemic, from Ibn Sīnā to Ibn Ḫaldūn; they were simultaneously reclassified as the sciences of walāya, moreover, which alone explains the massive increase in patronage of professional occultists at the Safavid, Mughal and Ottoman courts in the runup to the Islamic millennium (1592 CE). I argue that the mathematicalization, neopythagoreanization and sanctification of occultism in Ilkhanid-Timurid-Aqquyunlu Iran is the immediate intellectual and sociopolitical context for both the celebrated mathematization of astronomy by the members of the Samarkand Observatory in the 9th/15th century and the resurgence of neoplatonic-neopythagorean philosophy in Safavid Iran in the 10th/16th and 11th/17th, whereby Ibn Sīnā himself was transformed into a neopythagorean-occultist—processes which have heretofore been studied in atomistic isolation.
Based on extensive qualitative research, this paper focuses on lament ceremonies Eritrean asylum seekers in Israel performed in public parks in 2008–2014.1 Specifically, we expose social and political structures of this diaspora, including mechanisms of survival in a context of harsh living conditions, a fragile legal status and a hostile environment. Following Werbner's analysis of diasporas as chaordic entities, having no single representation and fostering multiple identities, we show how chaordicness underlies this diaspora's ability to survive and thrive in Israel, and to embrace the unique Eritrean trans-local nationalism. We highlight how these public religious rituals were transformed into contested sites of identity formation following Israeli struggles against them. Finally, we shed light on the role that such ceremonies play in shaping transnational identities, as well as how disenfranchised communities of asylum seekers aim for visibility and recognition in the public sphere.
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