Urban Charisma
City-dwellers, like urban anthropologists, struggle to make sense of a complex and ever shifting urban landscape. Throughout the world, they are faced with the same lack of intelligibility, the same experience of opacity, sensuous attraction and lurking dangers in the less traversed parts of the city. Within cities, it is always the poorest and most dense parts that acquire a quasi-mythical status as sources of crime, amorality and danger but also of hidden forces, enormous strength and heroic courage. The township, the favela, the mohalla have always been regarded as onerous problems resisting governance but it was always a resistance defying legibility - without a name, without a cause and without organisation. More…
Featuring:
Ahmed Afzal, Visiting Assistant Professor, Colgate University, “Rumors, Tales, Gossip and the Pakistan-American Association of Greater Houston: Specters of Power and Contemporary Ethnic Organizations in the United States”
Bernard Bate, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Yale University, “Walking Utopia: Spacetime and the City in Indian Political Practice”
Ayse Çaglar, Head of Sociology and Social Anthropology, Central European University, Budapest, “Hometown Associations, Rescaling of State Spatiality and Migrant Grassroots Transnationalism”
Jan Willem Duyvendak, Professor and Head of Department, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Amsterdam, “Participatory Logic in a Mediated Age. Neighbourhood Governance in the Netherlands after the Multicultural Drama”
James Ferguson, Chair and Professor of Anthropology, Stanford University, “Formalities of Poverty: Thinking about Urban Unemployment and Social Assistance in Neoliberal South Africa”
Thomas Hansen, Professor of Anthropology, Yale University, “The Hustler and the Anthropologist. Introductory Notes on Infra-Power and Legibility in the City”
Wilson Chacko Jacob, Cornell University, “Between Strongman and Thug: Diagnosing the Futuwwa in Interwar Cairo”
Steffen Jensen, Assistant Professor of Geography and International Development Studies, Roskilde University, “Back Street Blues: Imaginaries and Practices of Street Gangs in Cape Town”
Dhooleka Raj, Associate Chair of South Asian Studies Council and Lecturer in Anthropology, “The neo-Hindu Hustler and the Department of the Environment”
Abdoumaliq Simone, Assistant Director, International Affairs Program, New School University, New York, “Choreographing Emergency Democracy: on the ‘Governing Composite’ of a Douala Market”
Helen Siu, Professor of Anthropology, Yale University, “Grounding Displacement II: The Infra-Power of Middle Class Hong Kong in the New Millennium”
Thijl Sunier, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Amsterdam, “Muslim Women take Issue: Islam and the Public Sphere in Western Europe”
Justus L. Uitermark, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Amsterdam, “Performing Authority in the ‘Multicultural Drama’ - Building Bridges after the Assassination of Theo van Gogh”
Oskar Verkaaik, Associate Professor, Research Centre for Religion and Society, University of Amsterdam, “Charisma and Taboo: Introductory Notes on Non-Bureaucratic Forms of Urban Authority”
Eric Worby, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Yale University, “The Play of Race in a Field of Urban Desire: Soccer and Spontaneity in Post-Apartheid Johannesburg”
conference schedule & audio |
Discussants:
Arjun Appadurai, Provost and John Dewey Professor in the Social Sciences, New School University
Véronique Benëi, Singh Visiting Lecturer in South Asian Studies and Anthropology, Yale University
Carol Breckenridge, Associate Professor of History, New School University
Faisal Devji, Assistant Professor of Humanities, New School University
Ajay Gandhi, Ph.D. Student in Anthropology, Yale University
Naveeda Khan, Postdoctoral Fellow in Anthropology, Johns Hopkins University
Srirupa Roy, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Massachuetts at Amherst and Rustgi Family Fund Visiting Professor, South Asian Studies and Department of Political Science, Yale University
Saba Mahmood, Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Berkeley
Patricia Marquez, Director, Instituto de Estudios Superiores de Administracion (IESA), Caracas, Venezuela
Arvind Rajagopal, Associate Professor of Humanities, New School University