Theorizing Sunniyat as a Mode of Being: An Asadian Perspective from South Africa

Reflecting on thoughts by Talal Asad, this paper suggests an approach to theorizing Sunniyat – the approach to Islam taken by those commonly called “Barelvis” – in South Africa by focusing on sensibilities and dispositions. It specifically examines the kinds of sensibilities that are cultivated by adherents in their relationship to the Prophet as well as in their practice of everyday ethics. The aim is to shed light on the embodied nature of these sensibilities and not just their discursive context. In Asad’s work, both dimensions are important, but discourse is a prelude to embodiment, with the latter constituting one’s mode of being in the world. In thinking about Sunniyat in this way, the works of Abdulkader Tayob and Seraj Hendricks provide important precedents for navigating both discursiveness and embodiment in a South African Muslim context.

Coffeehouses (Re)Appropriated: Counterpublics and Cultural Resistance in Tabriz, Iran

Over the last decade, traditional coffeehouses have attracted increasing interest in the city of Tabriz, Iran, in the context of consistent state monitoring and restriction of public life—particularly so among non-Persian ethnolinguistic populations. Relying on a combination of ethnographic methods (observations, interviews, and visual documentation), this article explores the everyday life of two coffeehouses in Tabriz through a theoretical lens of third place, counterpublics, and everyday ethics of resistance. Coffeehouses are currently retaining functions as third places; cross-generational venues for preserving cultural, artistic, and linguistic identity as well as institutions of social defiance, resting on elaborate ethical codes and tacit social agreements. Through mechanisms of everyday ethics and cultural practices re-connecting to local history, cultural creativity, and language, insiders are distinguished from outsiders, serving to build trust, security, and solidarity in the context of Iranian state monitoring and restricted social space.

Documenting Death: Maternal Mortality and the Ethics of Care in Tanzania

Documenting Death is a gripping ethnographic account of the deaths of pregnant women in a hospital in a low-resource setting in Tanzania. Through an exploration of everyday ethics and care practices on a local maternity ward, anthropologist Adrienne E. Strong untangles the reasons Tanzania has achieved so little sustainable success in reducing maternal mortality rates, despite global development support. Growing administrative pressures to document good care serve to preclude good care in practice while placing frontline healthcare workers in moral and ethical peril. Maternal health emergencies expose the precarity of hospital social relations and accountability systems, which, together, continue to lead to the deaths of pregnant women.