Feeling Bad about Emotional History

This article presents a critical review of The Feeling of History, a recent work by the American anthropologist Charles Hirschkind. In this book, the author treats Andalucismo, a political movement that arose in modern Andalusia early in the twentieth century and was chiefly characterized by an extremely positive view of the Islamic Iberian past (al-Andalus)—a tendency that is certainly unusual in Spain and goes against the prevalent Spanish nationalism. In his book, Hirschkind not only develops an uncritical view of Andalucismo and its intrinsically emotional reading of the past but also legitimizes a rather farfetched conflation of modern Andalusia and al-Andalus. Moreover, he offers an extremely shallow and unnuanced reading of current Spanish scholarship on the Middle Ages, branding it wholesale as an heir to Francoism. He also lends legitimacy to those who call into question the origin of al-Andalus in the Islamic conquest of 711 CE—representatives of an unscholarly approach that has been largely dismissed by academic outlets since the 1970s. Burdened by heavy ideological prejudices and hampered by the author’s limited knowledge of the most recent academic historiographic debates in the field of Iberian medieval studies, the book represents a failed attempt to present the Anglophone readership with a consistent introduction to Andalusian nationalism together with a critical appraisal of the Andalusian nationalist interpretation of the medieval Iberian past.

“The Waters Were Made for Her”: River Mumma beliefs in 19th and 20th century Jamaican ethnographic accounts

During her fieldwork in Jamaica in the 1920s, the American anthropologist Martha Warren Beckwith was told by an interviewee that he had seen a river mumma sitting by a pool near St Ann’s Bay, combing her long hair. The river mumma, a form of duppy or spirit, was said to inhabit ponds, lakes and rivers. Not only was she believed to be guardian of such bodies of water, but she was also accredited with the ability to cause and end droughts, bestow the power to heal and to wreak revenge. In this article I examine the folklore and spiritual beliefs surrounding the river mumma in 19th and 20th Century Jamaica and look at where her origins may lie. There is a particular emphasis on material from the late post-emancipation era as this was a time of an awakening interest in Jamaican folk cultures and a number of influential ethnographic accounts, such as Thomas Bainbury’s Jamaica Superstitions (1894) and Martha Warren Beckwith’s Black Roadways (1929), were published.

Secularizing Effects of Christian Mission: Fifty Years After Elmer Miller’s “The Christian Missionary, Agent of Secularization”

It has been suggested that Christianity is inextricably linked with secularization due to its emphasis on purification and rationalization. But if we believe secularization in Europe is at least partly caused by internal developments within Christianity, may we then assume that secularization emerges wherever Christian missionaries are successful? Has the Christian mission unwittingly instigated secularization in its mission fields? This literature review analyses the argument that American anthropologist Elmer Miller made in the article “The Christian Missionary, Agent of Secularization” (1970) and explores whether his thesis has been confirmed in academic literature during the past fifty years. Miller presents rationalization as the primary driver of secularization and explains how missionaries have played a decisive role in this process. This paper demonstrates that while rationalization has often been mentioned as an effect of the Christian mission in other sources, the process has rarely been linked to secularization in the mission field.

Ārzemju ceļojumu iespaidi latviešu rakstnieku darbos t. s. „Brežņeva laikmetā”: liecības par atļauto un liegto

This paper examines travels outside the Soviet Union by Latvian writers who were recognised by the occupation regime and acclaimed by the public during the Brezhnev era –from the 1960s into the 1980s – as one of the privileges enjoyed by the so-called creative intelligentsia, and how those travels were reflected in their literary and journalistic writings. The writers studied were born between 1910 and 1939 and can be seen as belonging to three different generations. The generational differences have a significant impact on how their experiences were treated in their works. Some of the texts considered in this paper are manifestations of their authors’ authentic creativity, whilst others exhibit obeisance to the status quo of their time and obligatory praise for the regime. But can a line between the two be clearly drawn? What were the goals and possibilities for travel among recognized and materially secure writers? What were they permitted to tell those readers who had no such travel opportunities? How did the notes they published in periodicals differ from the versions that later appeared in books? The methodological basis for this paper is the work of Alexei Yurchak, a Russian-born American anthropologist who provides a unique understanding of the concept of ‘the abroad’ (заграница) in the Soviet Union as demarcating not actual borders or territory but an imagined space, and the insights of the Canadian historian Anne E. Gorsuch about Soviet tourism abroad. Gorsuch has studied how Soviet citizens internalised Soviet norms and supported Soviet goals, but also the attempts by tourists to evade official constraints on their experience in foreign lands and how they sought to devise their own individual itineraries. Journeys abroad elicited conflicting emotions. Writers had to be comparatively affluent to travel, but they often experienced humiliation when confronted with the reality of their meager financial means outside the U.S.S.R. and the fact that they remained in durance even in the free world. Versions of their writings published in the post-Soviet period and later commentaries bear witness to episodes that could not be described in the Brezhnev era as well as self-censorship.

Translanguaging practice: creative mind of a bilingual scholar

Recently, research theorizing bilinguals’ fluid and transcending language practices has flourished. As the strategic use of more than one named language in meaning-making begins to gain validation, educators and researchers have explored the pedagogical implications of such practices in the understanding and education of bilinguals. Aligning with these explorations, this article presents a case study of a bilingual scholar’s meaning-making practice. Relying on a translanguaging lens and a multilingual perspective on creativity, I document how Professor Wang, a Chinese-American anthropologist, utilizes his full communication toolkit to navigate the academic activities of teaching, researching and writing. The findings suggest Wang translanguages to achieve the purpose of culture learning and representation. Particularly, translanguaging creativity emerges as perceived boundaries between named languages are crossed. This study of an experienced bilingual aims to inform our understanding of how to support emergent bilinguals in reaching their full learning potential in our schools.

THE OBSERVER OBSERVED

In his seminal Islam Observed: Religious Developments in Morocco and Indonesia from 1968, the American anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1926-2006) placed the comparative study of Muslim societies on the research agenda. In view of my knowledge on the history of Islam in Indonesia, it stroke me that the political dimension of religion did not take an important place in the book. This is the more remarkable because during Geertz’s fieldwork in Java in 1953-4 manifestations of political Islam regularly popped up, and Geertz did not only notice those, but also recorded them in his book The Religion of Java from 1960. In this paper I will go into the question of why Geertz did not give a more prominent place to political Islam in his analysis of Muslim cultures, and what concepts of both Islam and religion he used.

THE OBSERVER OBSERVED

In his seminal Islam Observed: Religious Developments in Morocco and Indonesia from 1968, the American anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1926-2006) placed the comparative study of Muslim societies on the research agenda. In view of my knowledge on the history of Islam in Indonesia, it stroke me that the political dimension of religion did not take an important place in the book. This is the more remarkable because during Geertz’s fieldwork in Java in 1953-4 manifestations of political Islam regularly popped up, and Geertz did not only notice those, but also recorded them in his book The Religion of Java from 1960. In this paper I will go into the question of why Geertz did not give a more prominent place to political Islam in his analysis of Muslim cultures, and what concepts of both Islam and religion he used.

From Revived Traditions to Modern Practices: The Religious Boom in Post-Secular Vietnam in an Anthropological Perspective

This article gives a review of two books examining the religious situation in “post-secular” Vietnam. The book of American anthropologist Shaun Malarney “Culture, Ritual, and Revolution in Vietnam” (2002) offers a research of the transformations of religious practices and morality caused by the 1945 communist revolution: the author shows the polyphony of understanding of morality and ritual in Vietnamese society. The edited volume “Religion, Place and Modernity: Spatial Articulation in Southeast Asia and East Asia” (Ed. by M. Dickhardt and A. Lauser in 2016) examines, within an “anthropology of space and place,” the emergence of new “secular religions” in Vietnam.