The mentioning of Foucault often reminds one of the ways of understanding and analyzing the disciplinary technologies and discourses at play in various institutions—be it prisons, hospitals, or asylums—that the modern citizen is subject to. And so, throughout his works, one is also presented with the relationships between...
The precarity of the human condition makes care a vital fabric of social life and acts of care a driving force of our moral engines. Despite how there is so much care work to be done and how often such acts are received with awe and gratefulness, no care work, arguably, is straightforward or without an issue. Every act of care bears with it...
Death is surely a defining feature of the human condition—tying every being together with its universality and constituting the ethical substance of many lives. Beneath such universality, however, lies particular understandings of how a ‘good death’ should be. One could, perhaps, argue that...
Hammer, Juliane. Palestinians Born in Exile: Diaspora and the Search for a Homeland. University of Texas Press, 2005. In this ethnographic book Juliane Hammer, a scholar of Religious Studies with a focus on Islam, writes about the different ways Palestinians born in exile subjectivize their Palestinian identity and how they experience 'return' to homeland. She has... Continue Reading →
Mahmood, S. (2012). Politics of piety: the islamic revival and the feminist subject. Princeton: Princeton University Press. This thought-provoking yet complicated book is a groundbreaking analysis of the complex relationship between religious practices and beliefs of (some) Muslim women and modern secular liberal discourses on feminism and other issues. The ethnography, published in 2004 by... Continue Reading →
Barth, Fredrik. Political Leadership among Swat Pathans. 1st Pbk. Ed. with Corrections ed. London: Athlone, 1965. Print. Monographs on Social Anthropology ; No. 19. This fascinating yet terrifyingly complex ethnography, published in 1959, is about the Pashto-speaking people (Pathans) of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border area called Swat. Fredrik Barth claims the main purpose of his study... Continue Reading →
Thinking Prismatically 