Cityscapes of Violence in Karachi

This book enlists some controversies that understanding, writing about and publishing on violence in Karachi entails. It brings into conversation some prominent academics—including anthropologists and political scientists—journalists, writers and activists. This diverse coalition provokes shifts away from recursive academic and media scripts of the city toward a different “counter-public” of cultural and political commentary, as the contributors critically unpack the constitutive relation of violence to personal experience and also seek to create new understandings that are tentatively shared. The approach to counterpublicking is organized around three overlapping schema. These are: social science and ethnography; epochal or historical transformation; and oral history and personal memoir. Drilling down into Karachi’s city neighborhoods, the chapters examine ways violence is textured locally and citywide into protest drinking, social and religious movements, class and cosmopolitanism, gang wars, the fractured lives of militants, press censorship and the effects on journalists, uncertain continuua between state political and individual madness, and ways the painful shattering of some worlds produces dreams of others. While the individual chapters each provide fresh insights, the collective ethics of rewriting, rethinking or cajoling Karachi’s landscape into other forms is more dynamic and unclear, and one being worked out in public. Chapters are by Nadeem F. Paracha, Laurent Gayer, Zia Ur Rehman, Nida Kirmani, Nichola Khan, Oskar Verkaaik, Arif Hasan, Razeshta Sethna, Asif Farrukhi, Kausar S. Khan, Farzana Shaikh, and Kamran Asdar Ali. Collectively, they comprise a singular and important contribution for all those spirited to understand what went wrong with Karachi.

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Wiesner

With a conscious attempt to contribute to contemporary discussions in mad/trans/queer/monster studies, the monograph approaches complex postmodern theories and contextualizes them from an autoethnographic methodological perspective. As the self-explanatory subtitle reads, the book introduces several topics as revelatory fields for the author’s self-exploration at the moment of an intense epistemological and ontological crisis. Reflexively written, it does not solely focus on a personal experience, as it also aims at bridging the gap between the individual and the collective in times of global uncertainty. There are no solid outcomes defined; nevertheless, the narrative points to a certain—more fluid—way out. Through introducing alternative ways of hermeneutics and meaning-making, the book offers a synthesis of postmodern philosophy and therapy, evolutionary astrology as a symbolic language, embodied inquiry, and Buddhist thought that together represent a critical attempt to challenge the pathologizing discursive practices of modern disciplines during the neoliberal capitalist era.


Author(s):  
Margaretta Jolly

This ground-breaking history of the UK Women’s Liberation Movement explores the individual and collective memories of women at its heart. Spanning at least two generations and four nations, and moving through the tumultuous decades from the 1970s to the present, the narrative is powered by feminist oral history, notably the British Library’s Sisterhood and After: The Women’s Liberation Oral History Project. The book mines these precious archives to bring fresh insight into the lives of activists and the campaigns and ideas they mobilised. It navigates still-contested questions of class, race, violence, and upbringing—as well as the intimacies, sexualities and passions that helped fire women’s liberation—and shows why many feminists still regard notions of ‘equality’ or even ‘equal rights’ as insufficient. It casts new light on iconic campaigns and actions in what is sometimes simplified as feminism’s ‘second wave’, and enlivens a narrative too easily framed by ideological abstraction with candid, insightful, sometimes painful personal accounts of national and less well-known women activists. They describe lives shaped not only by structures of race, class, gender, sexuality and physical ability, but by education, age, love and cultural taste. At the same time, they offer extraordinary insights into feminist lifestyles and domestic pleasures, and the crossovers and conflicts between feminists. The work draws on oral history’s strength as creative method, as seen with its conclusion, where readers are urged to enter the archives of feminist memory and use what they find there to shape their own political futures.


Author(s):  
Alessandro Portelli

This article centers around the case study of Rome's House of Memory and History to understand the politics of memory and public institutions. This case study is about the organization and politics of public memory: the House of Memory and History, established by the city of Rome in 2006, in the framework of an ambitious program of cultural policy. It summarizes the history of the House's conception and founding, describes its activities and the role of oral history in them, and discusses some of the problems it faces. The idea of a House of Memory and History grew in this cultural and political context. This article traces several political events that led to the culmination of the politics of memory and its effect on public institutions. It says that the House of Memory and History can be considered a success. A discussion on a cultural future winds up this article.


Author(s):  
Karel Werner

Among the popular misconceptions which still linger in the minds of many people who are interested in the study of different religious systems, who are personally involved in one of the growing Hindu- or Buddhist-based modern religious movements, or who even do academic research in the field of the history of religions, is the rather simplistic view that Hinduism teaches the existence of a transmigrating individual soul, but that Buddhism denies it. At the same time it is well known that Buddhism, like Hinduism, teaches the rebirth of the individual in successive lives, in combination with the doctrine of moral retribution for his deeds in this or the next life or in subsequent lives according to the laws of karma, whose operation can be summed up rather well by the use of the biblical saying: “as you have sown so you will reap”.


ILUMINURAS ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 18 (44) ◽  
Author(s):  
Guillermo Stefano Rosa Gómez ◽  
Jose Luis Abalos Junior ◽  
Manoel Cláudio Mendes Gonçalves da Rocha

O presente artigo é resultado de um diálogo entre três experiências de produção coletiva de pesquisa etnográfica, que têm em comum os temas juventude, imagem e cidade. Um conjunto de nove etnografias visuais foi realizado a partir de uma parceria entre os pesquisadores associados ao Núcleo de Antropologia Visual (NAVISUAL/PPGAS/UFRGS) e os estudantes da disciplina de Antropologia Visual (2016/1) ministrada ao curso de Ciências Sociais da UFRGS sob a coordenação da antropóloga e professora Cornelia Eckert. As reflexões que aqui apresentamos percorrem um processo de ensino-aprendizagem implicado na experiência dos três autores enquanto estagiários docentes nesta disciplina. A proposta lançada consistiu em um exercício etnográfico a ser desenvolvido ao longo do semestre letivo, tendo como eixo temático as “intervenções artísticas urbanas”, no qual os discentes trabalhariam coletivamente no formato de grupos de trabalho, sob a orientação dos estagiários e pesquisadores do Navisual. Como desdobramento de tais experiências, foi produzida uma expografia compartilhada em parceria com o Departamento de Difusão Cultural (DDC/UFRGS) e o projeto UNIFOTO, que ficou exposta na galeria do Hall da Reitoria da UFRGS entre os meses de agosto e setembro de 2016. Destacamos neste trabalho o diálogo e convergências entre três abordagens que percorrem universos empíricos específicos na cidade de Porto Alegre - as Batalhas de MCs, os itinerários e trajetórias de jovens praticantes de skate, e o evento Feira do Hip Hop - propondo uma abordagem imagética em torno do tema das “intervenções artísticas urbanas”, tendo em vista compreender as formas sensíveis através das quais estes sujeitos experienciam, praticam e transformam o viver urbano.Palavras Chaves: Cidade; Imagem; Juventude; Antropologia Visual; Formas Sensíveis.Youth, Image and city: experiences of ethnographic research with urban youngs in Porto AlegreAbstract  This paper is a result of a dialogue between three experiences of collective ethnographic work which have in common the categories of image, youth and city. A group of nine visual ethnographies was carried departed of a partnership of researchers associated with the “Núcleo de Antropologia Visual (NAVISUAL/PPGAS/UFRGS) and the students of the course of Visual Anthropology assign in Social Science under the coordination of Cornelia Eckert. The reflection that we present here go through a process of learning and teaching, based on the experience of the three autors. The proposal launched consisted in a etnographic exercise to be developped alonge the semester, under the bow of a tematic pivot: "urban artistic intervention".As a result of these experiences, a shared exhibition was produced in partnership with the Department of Cultural Diffusion (DDC / UFRGS) and the UNIFOTO project, which was exhibited in the gallery of the Rectory Hall of UFRGS between August and September 2016. We highlight in this work the dialogue and convergences between three approaches that explore specific empirical universes in the city of Porto Alegre - the MCs Battles, the itineraries and trajectories of young skateboarders, and the Hip Hop Fair - proposing an imaging approach around (Sansot, 1983, Ledrut, 1984; Rocha, 1995) through which these subjects experience, practice and transform urban living.Key words: City. Image. Youth. Visual Anthropology. Sensible Forms.     


2015 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 3-15
Author(s):  
Judith Laister ◽  
Anna Lipphardt

Over the past decades, ‘participation’ has evolved as a key concept in a multitude of practice fields and discursive arenas, ranging from diverse political and economic contexts, through academic research, education and social work, urban planning and design, to arts institutions and artistic projects. While participation originally is a political concept and practice, it has long set out as a ‘travelling concept’ (Bal 2002). This special issue focuses on its travels between three fields of practice: the city, the arts and qualitative empirical research. Each of these practice fields over the past decades has yielded distinct understandings, objectives and methods in respect to participations, yet they also increasingly intersect, overlap and fuse with each other within specific practice contexts. What is more, many of the individual actors engaging in these initiatives on behalf of the city – from temporary projects to long-term collaborations – are not situated in one practice field only. Along with Jana König and Elisabeth Scheffel we understand them as ‘double agents’ (König and Scheffel 2013: 272–3) or even ‘multiple agents’, with simultaneous entanglements and commitments in more than one practice field.


1983 ◽  
Vol 63 (1) ◽  
pp. 34-57 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger Ling

SummaryA British team has been working since 1978 upon a programme of documentation and analysis in the Insula of the Menander at Pompeii, one of the irregular city-blocks situated immediately to the west of the old part of the city in an area which was developed from the early fourth century B.C onwards. Study of the structural techniques, of wall-abutments, and of anomalies in plan can be used in conjunction with the evidence of painted wall-plaster to identify five main phases in the building-history: Phase I (fourth-third centuries B.C), Phase 2 (second and early first centuries B.C), Phase 3 (c. 80-c. 15 B.C), Phase 4 (c. 15 B.C.-C. A.D. 50), Phase 5 (c. A.D. 50-79). These illustrate a complex pattern of changing property-boundaries, but underline the general trend towards increasing commercialization and greater pressure upon living-space in this area of the city. There is also interesting evidence of the economic basis of life in the individual houses during the years immediately before 79.


Xihmai ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (25) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesús Ignacio Panedas Galindo [1]

ResumenHistoria e historias son dos caras de la misma moneda. La primera de ellas describe la narración de hechos. La segunda, explica la individual y personal vivencia de los hechos vividos. Si hablamos de la mujer, ambos se presentan indivisiblemente unidos. Hacemos, junto con el filósofo Julián Marí­as, un camino breve para entender la manera de cómo ser mujer en diferentes momentos históricos.Palabras clave: Mujer, Historia, historias, Julián Marí­as. Abstract History and stories are two sides of the same coin. The first one describes the narration of facts. The second, explains the individual and personal experience of the facts lived. If we talk about woman, both appear indivisibly united. We do, together with the philosopher Julián Marí­as, a brief path to understand the way of being a woman in different historical moments.Keywords: Woman, History, stories, Julián Marí­as. [1] Maestro en Filosofí­a y Doctor en Ciencias para la Familia. Tiene publicaciones en varios paí­ses sobre temas relacionadoscon su formación. Actualmente es Director de Posgradoe investigación de la Universidad La Salle Pachuca.


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