SANA AZIZ
Assistant Professor, Department of History, Aligarh Muslim University
ABSTRACT
Archiving the ‘Colonized’: Medieval Archival Documents, Family Collections and the Politics of Repositories in Colonial India
This paper examines the issues and concerns of the Muslim community in South Asia in the wake of the collapse of the Mughal Empire and coming of the British rule. I have tried to situate archives-both official colonial archives and alternative Muslim archives- at the intersection of power, polemic, knowledge and conquests. Thinking through the complexities involved in the politics of ‘recording’, I have focused on a variety of ‘absences’ in the official colonial archives regarding the issues of the Muslim community. The Colonial rule in certain regions of South Asia almost erased the Muslim alternative archives: the repositories of the Ulema, the magnificent libraries of the elite and has also done great damage to the surviving monuments from the Islamic era. In addition to these biases, there are certain stark absences in the colonial archives pertaining to the indigenous Islamic knowledge systems, the waqf properties, their institutions of learning and the colonial policies towards them.
The Colonial archival policies facilitated the colonial administration’s intellectual articulation of power and took far-reaching steps to silence a major part of their history by deciding what is to be preserved and what is to be destroyed, especially after the revolt of 1857. Hence, archives were carefully constructed bearing direct interference from state and power. There were some attempts to dislocate vernacular records in order to obfuscate historical events. Such a conscious deportation of cultural artefacts-in this case, archival documents- was nothing but another means of depriving colonized subjects of their intellectual identity and forging a new one for them. Prevalence of such problems had been figurative signifiers of the intellectual obscurantism on the part of the colonial officers documenting these records in order to veil the history of the Muslims in South Asia.
However, in my research I have tried to construct an ‘alternative’ Muslim archives from the surviving family collections to recover the histories of two popular Sufi shrines at Ajmer and Salon in India. These alternative archives not only facilitate in ‘recovering’ the Muslim past in the Indian subcontinent but also highlight the processes of the marginalisation of Indo-Islamic elite and the saga of the destruction of the Muslim elites by the colonial masters. Through these archives we can locate how the British facilitated the process of cultural colonization of Muslim shrines, Muslim archives, and the Waqf properties of the Muslim elites through their archival policies. This was intimately related to the collapsing Muslim power structures and Muslim communities and the emerging political polemic in colonial India. My research also aims to answer some of t he conceptual absences, sequential gaps and broken linkages regarding the Muslim community in the colonial archives in India.
BIO
Dr. Sana Aziz is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History, Aligarh Muslim University, India. She holds a PhD on the topic “Islamic Learning and Colonial State: The Study of Centres of Knowledge in Northern India up to 1914” from the Department of History, University of Delhi. She has published research papers in edited volumes and peer-reviewed journals like Economic and Political Weekly and presented papers at several places including University of Chicago. Her research interests include a wide variety of topics including the intellectual traditions during medieval India, revenue-free land grants and waqf properties in medieval India, pedagogy and writings of Shah Wali Allah and the Colonial policies vis-à-vis the indigenous systems of education in northern India.
AMILA BUTUROVIĆ
Professor, Department of Humanities, York University
ABSTRACT
Mixing and Matching Words and Objects: Written and Material Evidence in the Study of Islamic Occult Knowledge
This paper addresses the question of premodern production of occult knowledge in Ottoman Bosnia by engaging two types of evidence: written and material. Specifically, it focuses on the amulets produced in Ottoman Bosnia and the manuscripts that contain knowledge about the apotropaic powers and usage of such amulets. How does the relation between the two types of sources affect our way of looking at written words and material objects given that each has its own life: one as a book evoking intellectual faculties and the other as a tool inducing emotive and sensory responses? One that is geared towards the literate elite and the other intended for general consumption? One that rests on a thorough and intricate knowledge transferred through a vast network of intellectual, linguistic, and disciplinary channels and the other that is deeply embedded in a specific cultural milieu? Although both start with the belief that communication with the divine exists on wavelengths that may be neither easily understood nor accessed, they serve different purposes and often coexist in historical discord. Given this tension between the word as it tries to express cosmological realities and the object as it puts them to action in everyday life, scholars must come to terms with different trajectories in the production of knowledge as well as in the formation of religious authority.
BIO
Amila Buturović is Professor of Humanities and Religious Studies at York University in Toronto, Canada. Her research interests span the intersections of religion and culture in the context of premodern Islamic societies, with a focus on Bosnia and the Balkans. She is the author of Stone Speaker: Medieval Tombstones, Landscape, and Bosnian Identity in the Poetry of Mak Dizdar (2002), translated into Bosnian/Croatian as Kameni govornik: stećci, prostor i identitet u poeziji Maka Dizdara (2019); co-editor with I. C. Schick of Women in the Ottoman Balkans (2007), translated into Turkish as Osmanlı Döneminde Balkan Kadınlar (2009); guest editor of Descant: Bosnia and Herzegovina, between Loss and Recovery (2012); and author of Carved in Stone, Etched in Memory: Death, Tombstones and Commemoration in Bosnian Islam (2016). She is currently working on a study about health culture tentatively entitled Herbs, Stars, Amulets: Cross-confessional Health and Healing in Ottoman Bosnia.
JILLIAN FULTON-MELANSON
Course Instructor, Department of Anthropology, York University
Co-Chair, Music and Violence Special Interest Group, Society for Ethnomusicology
ABSTRACT
Sampling Maghrebi artistic culture: electronic dance music as sonic archive
This paper explores a sonic archive of Maghrebi artistic culture configured through electronic dance music (EDM) tracks that contain ‘samples’ from a variety of sonic media, such as instruments, old songs, cinematic dialogue, and political speeches. Drawing from my ethnographic fieldwork with Maghrebi artists, this paper highlights the artistic license producers use to implement samples into their varying tracks and illuminates the political and cultural undertones that resonate from various types of samples. In use, samples are often transformed through technology that can, for example, change the pitch of one’s voice or add special effects that shift the form of the sound wave, altering its meaning in the process. Artists also have the agency to repeat or ‘loop’ certain samples for both impact and clarification. This artistic agency retains cultural objects while simultaneously transforming their meaning to meet the wants and needs of youth in the present cultural moment. This paper thus traces the placement of these sonic objects into new media for new audiences and analyzes the emotional responses, ranging from joy to painful mourning to nostalgia, evoked in listeners.
Connecting the individual tracks to larger, hour-long DJ sets—either performed live or uploaded onto audio distribution platforms for at-home listening—this paper also considers the stories and messages embedded in the “EDM podcast.” Such podcasts usually take the form of an informational monologue or dialogue, but they are presented as a musical set curated for EDM culture. It should be emphasized that an EDM podcast contains sonic information that is not always stated in language, but rather through sonic textures, timbres, and rhythms.
This sonic information is also used by artists to generate a community of listeners who have alternative ideas about the state and its power, and the podcast creates spaces for people to meet free from the fear of potential noise complaints and small fines that often grips those hosting such sets in environments that are not digital. Outside of live events, the EDM podcast, made for personal use, allows members of EDM communities, or “scenes,” to carry their sonic archives with them, providing musical accompaniment throughout their daily routines. Maghrebi sonic archives are thus simultaneously silent and sounded in their presence.
While accounting for the cultural and political differences between the Maghrebi nation-states—Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia—as well as the unique identities produced in diasporas, this paper acknowledges the disconnected political movements that each EDM scene identifies with and the tensions such contrasting worldviews can carry for those who float between various scenes. Through an analysis of music produced in the Maghreb and diasporas, this sonic archive embodies what Maghrebi youth feel about their intersectional, national, ethnic, and cultural identities.
BIO
Jillian Fulton-Melanson recently defended her PhD dissertation in Social Anthropology at York University and has training in ethnomusicology, education, and music performance. She is currently a Course Instructor at York University and holds the position of co-chair for the Music and Violence Special Interest Group at the Society for Ethnomusicology. Her dissertation, titled “The Post-tarab Soundscape: Underground Electronic Dance Music Culture and the Arab-Canadian Diaspora,” is an ethnographic account of queer, subaltern, Arab and Maghrebi youth who have participated in the electronic dance music culture of Toronto and Montreal. Her current work is situated in Montreal and Casablanca within a niche community of industrial techno and Noise artists whose music and branding speak to social issues relating to nationalism and violence. Outside of academia, she actively performs at underground electronic music events and collaborates/plays with Arabic folk musicians.
ZULFIKAR HIRJI
Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, York University
ABSTRACT
Reading the grain: Ethnographic journeys in an ‘archive’
Imagine yourself suddenly set down amongst stacks of onion-skin paper inscribed with purplish type, piles of hard-cover cloth and leather bound books, their spines still solid but their pages riddled with worm holes, a group of personal diaries with handwritten lists and notes in pencil, an assortment of crisply printed invitation cards, tinted postcards, sepia and black and white coloured photographs floating loose or pasted into exercise books, a mixture of private letters some written in Swahili, others in English, some using embossed letterhead and others attached with metal paper clips to envelopes affixed with colourful postage stamps that are over-stamped with postmarks, a bundle of expired passports with neatly clipped top and bottom right corners, packets of telegrams bound with brittle elastic bands, a scattering of crumbling manuscripts inked and calligraphed in Arabic script, large-format decorative investiture certificates emblazoned with official stamps, signatures and glossy and brittle red wax seals, faded and yellowed newspaper clippings, pamphlets, leaflets, notices, and ephemera — everything laid out in front of you covered in cough-inducing layers of powdery pyrethrum.
This describes my initial encounter with a private collection of materials that belonged to the late Sheikh Mbarak al-Hinawy (d. 1959), one of the most prominent political figures in Mombasa, the capital of the ten-mile coastal strip of East Africa that was part of the Sultanate of Zanzibar and a British Protectorate from 1895 to 1963. Drawing on the work of Bill Brown (2001) and Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart (2004), among others, this research project describes my multiple ethnographic journeys in the al-Hinawy collection and contend with the materiality of its content as ‘things in their own right’. Along the way, I ask questions about the extent to which the materiality (i.e., materials, form, design, and production) of a collection’s contents can be interrogated as a site of social and political power alongside its written or visual content, and open up conversations about the agency of archival materiality.
BIO
Zulfikar Hirji (DPhil, Oxford) is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at York University, Toronto. His research explores knowledge production, representation and identity, material, visual and sensory cultures, and critical pedagogies, with a focus on Islam and Muslim societies in a range of historical and contemporary contexts, particularly coastal East Africa and the Western Indian Ocean. He has conducted archival, field-based, and community-engaged research in East Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, Europe, and North America. His current research is focused on the ‘Muslim Materialites of coastal East Africa’ and includes the study of a corpus of 18th-19th century illuminated Qur’ans produced in the Lamu Archipelago. His published works include Approaches to the Qur’an in sub-Saharan Africa (2019), Islam: An Illustrated Journey (2018), Between Empires: Sheikh-Sir Mbarak al-Hinawy (1896–1959) (2012), and Diversity and Pluralism in Muslim Contexts (2010).
SALMAN HUSSAIN
Banting Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Anthropology, York University
ABSTRACT
The Politics of Evidence: State Secrecy, Ambiguity and Counterforensic Practice in “Missing Persons” Cases in Pakistan
This paper explores the politics of evidence in the context of “missing persons” cases —suspected Islamic militants, separatists, and their sympathizers, allegedly abducted and detained by state military and intelligence services— in Pakistan. Examining evidence practices of human rights activists and families of the missing persons as “counterforensic” practices, the chapter examines how they assemble a documentary and a visual bricolage (composed of files and photographic evidence) in conditions of state secrecy and in absence of “hard” evidence. My discussion is broadly concerned with documents, photographs, and other types of material things that circulate outside courts and other state repositories and how such materials are retained, transformed, or reconfigured in human rights activism. Many of these documents seem to be part of the state’s records alone, while others are obtained from personal sources as well as personal and state sources. The paper focuses on, what I have called elsewhere, “dossiers of memory” (Hussain 2019). The dossiers assembled by the activists and families of “missing persons” are mobile repositories of various types of fragmentary material evidence collected since the disappearances. Broadly discussing the genealogy of forensics and the role of photography in its emergence, I suggest evidence practices are shaped by their political and historical contexts. The hegemonic forms they take over the long durée give them an aura of legitimacy as well as state authority. Evidence practices are inherently intertwined with how power is exercised, but, also, contested through them. They shape subjects but also provide means for them to resist the conditions imposed on them through these evidentiary forms.
BIO
Salman Hussain is a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow in Anthropology Department, York University. He completed his PhD in Cultural Anthropology at The Graduate Center, City University of New York; he has held Dissertation Writing and Visiting Research Fellowships in Law and Anthropology Department, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology; and has taught at University of Massachusetts, Amherst. His research interests include decolonization, human rights and social movements, law and political violence, and gender and sexuality studies. Currently, he is engaged in two research projects. The first one examines human rights activism against ‘disappearances’ in Pakistan and explores how state sovereignty is reformulated at the intersection of the politics of terror and the politics of dissent. This project draws from ethnographic research he has conducted (from 2012-2019) with the families of the ‘missing persons’ and human rights activists in the country. The second project examines the intersection between law, body and sexual biopolitics in postcolonial South Asia; Hussain follows the khwajasarras’ campaign for human rights in the Pakistani legal, public and media spheres and examines how a new language of gender and sexual rights has emerged to contest inequality and marginalization in South Asia. His research has been published in POLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, Postcolonial Studies, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, and Antropologica.
ANTONIUS C. G. M. ROBBEN
Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, Utrecht University
ABSTRACT
Archival Agency and the Materiality of Destroyed Evidence in Wartime Rotterdam
Archives are generally understood as depositories of documents and records that provide researcherswith evidence of historical events. Incomplete records pose a common challenge to researchers that is exacerbated by the absence of material traces to the past. I faced these problems when I tried to understand the fate of Rotterdam’s bombing victims during the Second World War. The port city was bombed by the German Luftwaffe in May 1940, forcing the Netherlands to surrender, after which British and American bombers attacked German military positions for the remainder of the war. Around 850 people died, and 25,000 homes and 11,000 buildings were destroyed by the German bombardment on May 14, 1940. The days after the bombardment in the still burning city were so hectic that the casualties were poorly documented by the city administration, while the German authorities forbid Dutch newspapers to report about the dead. Within days, the German authorities ordered the removal of the ruins and rubble. Rotterdam was to be rebuild and serve as the Third Reich’s main Atlantic harbor after its final victory in Europe. Hundreds of bombing victims were hastily interred in mass graves but many human remains were dumped together with the rubble in rivers and canals to create traffic lanes for the future city.
I examined the death and postmortem treatment of Rotterdam’s bombing victims in two roundabout ways that combined records from Rotterdam’s city archive with external materials. In the absence of records about the large May 1940 bombardment, I analyzed the damage inflicted by an American bombardment in March 1943. Police records, news reports, and postwar testimonies were used to reconstruct the deaths through an analysis of the interaction of victims and artifacts. The deaths were caused as much by the direct impact of bombs as by collapsing houses and air raid shelters. Next, the dual metonymic relation between the dead and Rotterdam’s ruins was studied. In the censored wartime news reports, the ruins stood metonymically for the dead. This contiguity between corpses and ruins existed also on the material level as inorganic rubble and organic human remains amalgamated into anthropomineral debris. Ruins and corpses, and rubble and remains, indexed the German and Allied bombardments through their material agencies and mutual interaction.
This indirect analysis was able to recover the fate of Rotterdam’s bombing victims because of the archival agency and the materiality of the dead: historical records have agency because of their semantic affordances, the dead because of their material indeterminacy. The semantic affordances created different versions of past events through their objectification in polysemous texts. Human remains, in turn, encapsulated agency through the interaction of the materiality of the corpses and the subjectivity of the deceased. An analysis of the semantic and material metonyms of victims and their destroyed built environment yielded further evidence that was unavailable through archival sources. This study reveals the dialectical relation of archival records and historical events because of their semantic and material agencies.
BIO
Antonius Robben is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Utrecht University, the Netherlands, and past President of the Netherlands Society of Anthropology. He received a Ph.D. (1986) from the University of California, Berkeley, and has been a research fellow at the Michigan Society of Fellows, Ann Arbor, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, New York, and the David Rockefeller Center at Harvard University. Antonius Robben conducted ethnographic fieldwork among fishermen in northeast Brazil during the 1970s and early 1980s, and then moved to Argentina for decades of research on the country’s political violence, enforced disappearances, and sociocultural traumas. Deeply affected by the Iraq War, he started the Iraq Research Project (2006-2010) to add an anthropological understanding to a public debate dominated by historians and political scientists. At present, he is studying the wartime destruction and postwar reconstruction of the port city of Rotterdam in the Netherlands. He is the author of three monographs: Sons of the Sea Goddess: Economic Practice and Discursive Conflict in Brazil (1989), Political Violence and Trauma in Argentina (2005), and Argentina Betrayed: Memory, Mourning, and Accountability (2018).
SHAHLA TALEBI
Assistant Professor, School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies, Arizona State University
ABSTRACT
Tracing fading traces, bringing in the senses
As the Iranian state erases the “evidences” of the massacre of the summer of 1988, as the parents of the executed keep dying one after another, taking their memories and stories with them to their graves, the surviving family members hold on to any trace of the lives and deaths of their loved ones. They record their stories, make videos of their visits to the cemetery, …collect “evidence” to tell the “truth” about those deadly times. But what does it mean to claim truth when the state has its grip on all the documents considered as evidence in the court of law? What does it mean to know, when knowledge, as we so often come to assume, depends on “facts”, which if not obscured and guarded away from the public, are so easily distorted, manipulated, or even fabricated, especially in the age of advance technologies and social media? What does it mean to think of historical knowledge when the traces of atrocities are so often whitewashed, leaving survivors with the burden of their wounds and memories? In invoking anthropology of trace, Valentina Napolitano (2015) invites us “to explore “the mattering of things” … “new ways of conjecturing and operationalizing ethnographic ‘details’ and to broaden our debate on an anthropology beyond the subject, in the light of mattering of histories (2015, 47). What kind of anthropology of trace may capture this kind of “truth telling”, or invoke these silenced histories? What materiality, what form of mattering of history, may help us regenerate those senses entrapped in the dungeons of hegemonic truth claims? In this workshop, I invite you to contemplate these questions with me.
BIO
Shahla Talebi is Associate Professor of Religious Studies, School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies, Arizona State University. A native of Iran, she lived through the 1979 Revolution and the Iran-Iraq War and left Iran in 1994 for the United States where she now resides. She received her undergraduate degree in social-cultural anthropology from University of California at Berkeley and her master’s and doctorate, also in social cultural anthropology, from Columbia University. Talebi’s research interests include questions of self sacrifice and martyrdom, violence, memory, trauma, death, burial, funerary rituals, commemoration and memorialization or their banning, religion, revolution, and nation-state in contemporary Iran. Talebi’s manuscript entitled “Ghosts of Revolution: Rekindled Memories of Imprisonment in Iran” is forthcoming by Stanford University Press. Recent articles include: “From the Light of the Eye to the Eye of the Power” and “Who is Behind the Name? A Story of Voilence, Loss, and Melancholic Survival in Post-Revolutionary Iran.” She discusses the differences and similarities of political prisoners in Iran before and after the disputed presidential election for “The Week in Green.”
RICHARD VOKES
Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Western Australia
ABSTRACT
(Re)sounding Archives: Some Further Reflections on the Idi Amin Photographic Collection
In recent years, the field of visual anthropology has paid increasing attention to the ways in which photographs may be ‘re-sounded’, which is to say, brought into relation with voice, narrative, and other elements of sonic experience. This presentation, which is very much a work in progress, examines the possibilities, and implications, of such a move for our understanding of the Idi Amin photographic archive – a collection of around 70,000 photographic negatives which were recently discovered at the Uganda Broadcasting Corporation in Kampala. Since 2018, UWA, in partnership with the University of Michigan, have been leading a project to digitise this archive. In this presentation, I want to begin thinking about what affordances this collection of images have to be re-sounded, and in what ways, and to start to explore how these ‘experimental ethnographic interventions’ may even further the goal of doing justice for the approximately 300,000 Ugandans who lost their lives at the hands of the Amin regime.
BIO
Richard Vokes is Associate Professor in Anthropology at UWA. His research focuses primarily on Uganda, where he has been conducting ethnographic fieldwork since 2000.
He has published extensively, including on the history of photography, media and social change. His books include: Ghosts of Kanungu (2009); Routes and Traces: Anthropology,
Photography and the Archive (with Marcus Banks, 2010); Photography in Africa (2012); Media and Development (2018) and; The Unseen Archive of Idi Amin (with Derek Peterson, 2021).
DAPHNE WINLAND
Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology York University
ABSTRACT
“A Light unto the Nations”: Archival disruptions in the Israeli nation-building narratives
Among the many disputes that have emerged since the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 are those that concern the myths upon which the state was founded. The veracity of archival evidence marshaled in support of the national narrative though came to a head in the early 1980s when a group of Jewish Israeli scholars referred to as the ‘new historians’ working with declassified state archives, uncovered major discrepancies between the official story and the archival records. The controversy drew attention to the hegemonic force of Israel’s national origin story. The state responded swiftly, reclassifying documentation, imposing restrictions and prohibitions on archival access, and arbitrarily removing and transferring the archives to military control. Palestinian archival data and film footage raided from Lebanon in the Israeli incursion in 1982 further revealed the efforts of the state to protect Israel’s founding narrative.
Recently, the Israeli government issued a public statement calling upon citizens to “return” archival materials and documents of national security to the state archive so that it may fulfil its responsibility as the “guardian of memory” (Ha’aretz, A18, July 5, 2019). This announcement gave me pause as I was recently bequeathed a collection of documents, photos, honours and medals, personal mementos and other paraphernalia from a close relative, a high level Israeli diplomat in the years following independence in 1948. Not only did this cache of materials inspire my curiosity about family history but also questions about the scholarly merits of this archive of sorts, ethical decisions about if, how and with whom to share its content, as well as anxieties over how to evaluate, sort, curate and eventually navigate the political yet also personal implications of these choices.
One of the multiple access points I am pursuing for the purposes of this workshop is the insights to be gained from this collection into the relationship between state efforts to realize the early Zionist vision of the State of Israel as a “light unto the nations” through its diplomatic forays to Africa in the 1950s and 60s, particularly with newly formed states emerging from French colonial rule. While scholarly literature reveals, for example, the geopolitical and foreign policy dimensions of this process and/or the explicit ironies of a settler colonial state endeavouring to link its history to that of post-colonial states, the materials I am presenting here contain no clearly-defined evidentiary textual basis to confirm or bolster the conclusions reached by scholars. Rather they provoke questions about the performance of national imaginaries by Israeli consular officials who projected an image of a ‘civilized’ and mature nation-state modeled on western European diplomatic protocols. Medals, honours and awards, letters of commendation, official (and candid) photos capturing and chronicling moments of nation- to-nation camaraderie and fellowship were key to the state’s efforts to gain legitimacy abroad.
How do the multiple affordances of materials that do not fulfil the core attributes of archives challenge assumptions and disciplinary or bureaucratic conventions concerning the epistemic value of materials for scholarly inquiry. Furthermore, how do the aesthetics, forms and materiality of documentary practices enable or challenge particular subject formations, new and ongoing expressions of agency and affect.
BIO
Daphne Winland is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at York University. Her research and publications reflect specializations in nationalism and diaspora, the politics of transnational memory and representation in post-independence Croatia. Among her publications are “‘We Are Now a Nation’: Croats between ‘Home’ and ‘Homeland’, book chapters and journal articles (e.g. American Ethnologist, Ethnopolitics, Memory Studies, Diaspora). Current research projects include ethnographic research on the intensification of social and political conservatism in Croatian transnational relations and, (b) the political genealogies of archives and their relationship to the performance of national imaginaries and nation-building in Israel/Palestine.