Oskar Verkaaik

Introduction — Urban Charisma On Everyday Mythologies in the City

Cities are charismatic entities. Both in and of themselves by virtue of their history and their mythologies, but also as sites where charismatic figures emerge on the basis of their capacity to interpret, manage and master the opacity of the city. The specificity of the urban can neither be understood through the citys functions nor the dynamics of its social networks. The urban is also a way of being in the world and must be understood as a dense and complex cultural repertoire of imagination, fear and desire. We propose to understand the urban and its charismatic potential through three registers: the sensory regimes of the city; the specific forms of urban knowledge and intelligibility; and the specific forms of power, connectivity and possibility which we call urban infra-power.

Managing Mosques in the Netherlands

This article engages with the emergent ethnographical study of secular practice by focusing on how local bureaucracies manage the Muslim public presence in the Netherlands, particularly the construction of new mosques and the amplifying of the Muslim call to prayer. We argue that what started as the ‘Islam debate’, itself provoked by growing populist articulations of the fear of Islam, has gradually developed into a conflict in the practice of local governance about the meaning of secularism. Whereas the public and political debate about mosque issues is often dominated by what we call a ‘culturalist’ or ‘nativist’ form of secularism, in practice bureaucrats are often led by a ‘constitutional secularism’ that protects the constitutional rights of Dutch Muslims. Thus, in its practical application, constitutional secularism is one way of tackling Islamophobia and protecting the rights of religious minorities in general. Moving beyond the genealogical study and the deconstructivist critique of secularism by such authors as Talal Asad and Wendy Brown, we show that the ethnographic study of actual secular practice remains crucially important to avoiding monolithic text-based understandings of the secular as inherently dominating the religious.

Notes on the sublime: Aspects of political violence in urban Pakistan

Years before the so-called ‘War of Terror’ in which Pakistan has played a significant role, representations of terrorism and sacrifice already influenced political conflict in the country, particularly in Karachi and other parts of urban Sindh. This article focuses on the process of representation through which political violence comes to be interpreted in the symbolic terms of culture and religion. Criticizing Orientalist notions that ascribe certain violent mentalities and practices to religious or ethnic groups in an essentialist manner, I argue that (self-)representations of sublime violence are nonetheless important to analyze for their an escalating effect on the political conflict. By examining the ways in which religious and ethnicized traditions of solidarity, justice and sacrifice have framed the representation of political violence in Sindh, I explore the interplay between the media, intelligence agencies of various state authorities, as well as political parties and their militants, focusing on their mutual interest in producing a visual culture of heroic violence and martyrdom.

Religious architecture: anthropological perspectives

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Managing Mosques in the Netherlands : Constitutional versus Culturalist Secularism

This chapter engages with the emergent ethnographic study of secular practice by focusing on how local bureaucracies manage Muslim public presence in the Netherlands, particularly the construction of new mosques and the amplifying of the Muslim call to prayer. Whereas the public debate about mosque issues is often dominated by what we call a ‘culturalist’ or ‘nativist’ form of secularism, in practice bureaucrats are often led by a ‘constitutional secularism’ that protects the constitutional rights of Dutch Muslims. Constitutional secularism is one way of tackling Islamophobia and protecting the rights of religious minorities in general. Moving beyond the critique of secularism, we show that the ethnographic study of actual secular practice remains crucially important to avoid monolithic text-based understandings of the secular.

Creativity and controversy in a new anthropology of buildings

Driven by a common critique of human exceptionalism in Western thought, the recent anthropological study of things and materiality has also developed a new perspective on buildings and how they interact with humans. In this review article I discuss four recent anthropological books that deal with architecture. Explicitly or implicitly all of these books move away from the representational paradigm that has dominated the study of architecture for decades. They seek new ways to conceptualize the relation between materiality and symbol, creation and cognition, space and meaning. However, they differ with respect to the role buildings play in politics and social controversies. Whereas politics seems largely absent in the more theoretically inclined studies, the more ethnographically based books show that it is perfectly possible, and even desirable, to combine a phenomenological approach with an interest in political-symbolic processes.

The art of imperfection: contemporary synagogues in Germany and the Netherlands

This article compares the remarkable revival of Jewish religious architecture in Germany and the Netherlands by focusing on two cases in particular: a newly built synagogue centre in Dresden and a renovated synagogue in a small Dutch town. Both structures contain a carefully styled ornament of imperfection that on the surface looks remarkably similar. Although in both cases the ornament can be interpreted as a symbolic comment on the post-war Jewish presence in Europe, their symbolic meaning and depth differ profoundly. In Dresden, this element primarily has a political meaning meant for the German public, to which the predominantly Russian-Jewish community is largely indifferent. In the Netherlands, the stylistic creation of imperfection is a more complex, multilayered architectural sign that speaks of aspirations of tradition, continuity, and a particular religious way of being in the world. Building upon these ethnographic reflections, as well as on Richard Sennetts work on architecture and the human body, I interpret these architectural practices as an example of a particular kind of contemporary religiosity which seeks to engage actively with fragmented and unsettled reality, both historically and existentially. This is presented as an alternative to dominant theories of contemporary religion that interpret modern religiosity in terms of authenticity, the sacralization of the self, and the desire for wholeness.

Violence and Ethnic Identity Politics in Karachi and Hyderabad

ABSTRACT From the mid 1980s onwards, urban Sindh has often been in the grip of ethnic violence. The Muhajir Qaumi Movement (now known as the Muttahida Qaumi Movement), established at around the same time, has played a central role in these conflicts. Most analyses interpret the violence as an escalation of already-existing communal differences between various migrant groups in cities like Karachi and Hyderabad. In this paper I argue that violence itself has often been constitutive of ethnic identity and ethnic mobilisation. Tracing the background of the language of ethnicity in Pakistani politics since Independence, I analyse how ethnic identity politics and violence have often gone hand in hand, beginning with the student activism of the late 1970s and developing into full-scale ethnic conflict during the 1980s and 1990s. This enables us to move away from primordial and communal interpretations of ethnic identity towards an analysis of ethnic identity in terms of political mobilisation.