Mikkel Bille

An Anthropology of Luminosity: The Agency of Light

This article addresses the relationship between light, material culture and social experiences. It argues that understanding light as a powerful social agent, in its relationship with people, things, colours, shininess and places, may facilitate an appreciation of the active social role of luminosity in the practice of day-to-day activities. The article surveys an array of past conceptions of light within philosophy, natural science and more recent approaches to light in the fields of anthropology and material culture studies. A number of implications are discussed, and by way of three case studies it is argued that light may be used as a tool for exercising social intimacy and inclusion, of shaping moral spaces and hospitality, and orchestrating movement, while working as a metaphor as well as a material agent in these social negotiations. The social comprehension of light is a means of understanding social positions in ways that may be real or imagined, but are bound up on the social and cultural associations of certain lightscapes.

Flames of transformation: the role of fire in cremation practices

Abstract This paper explores the transformative power of fire, its fundamental ability to change material worlds and affect our experience of its materiality. The paper examines material transformations related to death as a means of illustrating the powerful property of fire as a materially destructive yet socially generative and creative element. While fire has been widely discussed archaeologically as a technological element, and recently coupled with the social and symbolic powers of pyrotechnology, we focus on the sensuous staging of fire in disposal practices. The paper employs two case studies focusing on cremation burial from Bronze Age (c.1300–1100 bc) and modern Denmark in order to demonstrate widely different sensuous engagements with fire and its experiential significance in a cremation context.

Introduction: An Anthropology of Absence

After losing his arm in the battle of Santa Cruz de Tenerife in 1797, Lord Nelson took the pain he felt in his missing limb to be a “direct proof of the existence of the soul” (Ramachandran and Hirstein 1998: 1604). What Lord Nelson had experienced was a phenomenon first identified by the physician Silas Weir Mitchell in the late nineteenth century as “phantom pains”. During the American Civil War, Mitchell treated and studied soldiers with nerve injuries and post-traumatic disorders, who described to him the experience of sensing their amputated limbs (Wade 2003: 518). Since then, phantom pains have been medically defined as the painful sensation of missing limbs, i.e. a sensuous experience of something which is materially absent. However, even before Mitchell’s studies and coining of the term, pain felt in missing limbs and the sense that an amputated limb is still attached to the body had been elements in philosophical treatises. Rene Descartes, for instance, argued that sensations in amputated limbs testify to the unreliability of the senses (Wade 2003: 518-520).

Assembling heritage: investigating the UNESCO proclamation of Bedouin intangible heritage in Jordan

This paper examines the process of incorporating the Bedouin of Petra and Wadi Rum in Jordan on UNESCO’s list of Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity in 2005. The author focuses on the Bedouin tribes around Petra, who were resettled in villages when UNESCO proclaimed the area part of the tangible heritage of humanity in 1985. Heritage is approached as a ‘process of assembling’ that emerges from the interactions of social entities operating on a smaller scale. By focusing on these entities’ various discourses about Bedouin heritage that are included in the reports and applications to UNESCO, it is argued that through the process of proclaiming intangible heritage, cultural categories are formulated so as to fit into contemporary imaginations, longings and settlement policies. Investigating the process of heritage inscription reveals the multiple, and at times contradictory, discourses that undergird the production of particular images of Bedouin culture through heritage institutions that interlock, rather than harmonise, them.

Seeking Providence Through Things: The Word of God Versus Black Cumin

Once again, I am riding with Ibrahim, a settled Bedouin in his mid-twenties, in his car a few kilometres from the village of Beidha towards Siq al-Barid in southern Jordan. This time I cannot stop wondering about the elaborate merchandise hanging from the car’s rear-view mirror (Fig. 10.1). Pointing to the patterned cloth bag hanging in a white string and the handful of amulets with Qur’anic calligraphy, I ask him “What is this for?” Ibrahim answers: “This one is the black cumin bag. It is put in the car as decoration. If you have a beautiful car some people might envy it. The black cumin will take the attraction to it instead of the car. The evil eye will not affect the car, it will affect the black cumin; they will break. As little as the seeds are; they break. The other is ‘There is no God but God, and Muhammad is the Prophet of God’. This is Islam!”

Introduction: Sainthood in Fragile States

Sainthood is more than an abstract, ideal model of defining the order of charismatic figures. This chapter argues that the field of sainthood is productively conceived through the interplay between structural and existential states. It explains the applications and investments in ideas of sainthood in order to offer a broad and dynamic understanding of the oscillations between polemics and apologetics, ignorance and indifference, and oppositional and parallel movements, creating sanctity and sainthood. The authors conceive of sainthood as bound to a saint in Christian tradition, pertaining to ascriptions and a bestowing of sanctity in veneration of imagery and objects, as well as Islamic, Jewish and secular figures. The chapter presents sainthood as a poly semantic term with porous boundaries, spanning from the ecstatic, a shaman, Christian saints and Islamic ‘friends of God’ to national heroes. Keywords:Christian; Islamic revival; Jewish figures; sainthood; saints

'Always like never before': Learning from the lumitopia of Tivoli Gardens

Abstract Drawing on a detailed analysis of the historical and current development of lighting in Copenhagen’s Tivoli Gardens, this article addresses how this site of extraordinarily diverse illumination exemplifies a carefully orchestrated balance between (1) muted and more vivid forms of lighting, (2) curation of historical styles and promotion of contemporary innovations in illumination and (3) artistic luminaires and those more aligned with popular tastes. Through these themes, we argue that the current strategies towards urban lighting that predominantly promote energy conservation, security, commercial imperatives and place-branding may be supplemented by place-specific design strategies that implement multiplicity, connect past and present, and accommodate diverse desires, dreams and realities. These attributes contribute to the ongoing emergence of what we call a ‘lumitopia’, a space in which an intensified attention to illumination is integral to the particularity of a place or landscape. In the case of Tivoli, this offers a lens to manage nocturnal space so that it becomes more aesthetically complex, inclusive and convivial.

Ecstatic things: The Power of Light in Shaping Bedouin Homes

Abstract This article addresses the orchestration of domestic lighting as an object of anthropological study. It takes Bedouin domestic architecture in southern Jordan as a starting point in an analysis of how light is used as means of safeguarding spaces as part of hospitality practices central to Bedouin culture. By arguing that things are “ecstatic” in the sense that they transcend their own tangibility, the article shows how objects, such as tinted windows, impose themselves on other objects to shape the particular visual presence of the world that informants opt for. Such a presence of the world is analyzed through the notion of “atmosphere” as a contemporaneity of subjective emotions, cultural ideals, and material phenomena. Thus, while boundaries between interior and exterior may be upheld by tangible material strategies, such as walls, these boundaries may also simultaneously be permeated by the ecstasy of material things, which aim to safeguard other aspects of life through less tangible strategies.

The Samer, the Saint and the Shaman: Ordering Bedouin Heritage in Jordan

The chapter shows how cultural practices and religious figures from the Bedouin past are not just cherished traditions but are framed and contested in contemporary negotiations at various levels of Jordanian society and extending to global narratives of spirituality and heritage. It explores the tensions, gaps and dissonance between the articulations of heritage, shamanism, sainthood and forging of pious subjects. The chapter explains how parallel versions of various renowned characters from the past are employed in contemporary Jordanian heritage discourse. The Samer , the shaman and the saint all figure in complex ways in this heritage discourse. By exploring the apparent gaps between these versions, the chapter argues that a precarious, even uncanny, relationship exists between shamanism and sainthood, which is continuously ordered through oscillations between the minimizing and maximizing the gaps. Keywords:Bedouin heritage; Jordan; saint; Samer ; shaman; shamanism

Politics of Worship in the Contemporary Middle East

Acknowledgments List of Figures Introduction: Sainthood in fragile states - Andreas Bandak and Mikkel Bille Part I - Sustained Sainthood Contesting Fragile Saintly Traditions: Miraculous healing among Twelver Shi`is in contemporary Syria - Edith Szanto Saints, Media and Minority Cultures: On Coptic cults of Egyptian revolution from Alexandria to Maspero - Angie Heo Part II: Contested Representations Enigmas of a Pakistani Warrior Saint: Interrogating media conspiracies in an Age of Terror - Pnina Werbner The Samer, the Saint and the Shaman: Ordering Bedouin heritage in Jordan - Mikkel Bille Part III: Indeterminate Sainthood Our Lady of Soufanieh: On knowledge, ignorance and indifference among the Christians of Damascus - Andreas Bandak Ecstatic Sainthood and austere Sunni Islam: A majzub in northern Pakistan - Juergen Frembgen Part IV: Secular Sainthood Imbued with Agency: Contesting notions of the extraordinaryness of Turkan Saylan - Daniella Kuzmanovic The Secular Saint: Iconography and ideology in the cult of Bashir Jumayil - Sune Haugbolle