2023 AAA Sampler by Cornell University Press

The 2023 ANTHROPOLOGY Sampler

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

In this sampler, you will find short excerpts from seven forthcoming books in the field of Anthropology published by Cornell University Press and its imprints. For further information about any of these books visit cornellpress.cornell.edu. If you wish to order any (or all) if these books, enter code 09EXP40 in your shopping cart to save 40 percent off the price of the books and receive free shipping.

Governing the Displaced Race and Ambivalence in Global Capitalism Ali Bhagat

Introduction

GLOBAL DISPLACEMENT AND RACISM

We left Nairobi’s Westlands area for a queer refugee safehouse many miles from the city. The safehouse was hosting an event, and a few of its residents were participating in a film discussing queer migration in Kenya. I do not want to give you, the reader, the impression that this book is about queer refugees explicitly, but I start at a queer refugee safehouse because it sparked my understanding of fantasy as an element of refugee governance. I feel that this often-hidden subset of refugees illustrates both the politics of abandonment vis-à-vis state violence and the potential joys of community. Indeed, it might be useful to think about refugee survival and governance as queer experiences. To follow Natalie Oswin, perhaps queerness can be subjectless—tied to both the politics of love and belonging and the tensions of struggle and violent exclusion as well. Twinning refugee experiences with queer ones allows us to think about the politics of belonging—a key impetus of this book. My first thought after arriving at the safehouse was how utterly far and isolated this place was from central Nairobi. Some months later I asked a representative from a nongovernmental organization (NGO) that runs these safehouses about this, and they told me they wanted to keep these safehouses anonymous and far away to protect residents from the potential of homophobic violence. This is difficult to digest because, in effect, these safehouses keep queer people and queer communities invisible; however, many of the residents I spoke with felt much safer behind the high walls of the safehouse. In reflecting on this contradiction, I invite you to think about how queer refugees (mostly from Uganda) arrive in Nairobi and eventually move to these 1

INTRODUCTION

safehouse communities. Indeed, these spaces exist only because of a heteronormative / homophobic state and society that target queer people; however, we should also reflect on the netted practices of urban refugee governance in general. In both Paris and Nairobi, refugee governance entails the intersection of states, NGOs, international and national organizations, various charities, private citizens, and often corporate actors. For better or for worse, a queer refugee safehouse exists in the time and space of various governance mechanisms and helps us understand refugee governance in general on a range of imperfect, exclusionary, and sometimes survival-enabling policies and practices that are often incongruent with wider liberal framings of refugee rights. I pick up on this throughout the book, but for now I want to emphasize that the material practices of refugee governance are informed by immaterial fantasies that surround the prospect of refugees entering the borders of a nation-state. These fantasies are undoubtedly grounded in imaginaries of race and ethnicity, and I contend that refugees are often framed in the terminology of a crisis because they challenge the racial (and supremacist) visions of a nation-state. For instance, the war on Ukraine has resulted in millions of refugees, but only refugees from the Middle East and Africa are framed as undesirable. The leader of Spain’s Vox Party recently claimed, “Anyone can tell the difference between them [Ukrainian refugees] and the invasion of young military-aged men of Muslim origin who have launched themselves against European borders in an attempt to destabilize and colonize it”1 The fantasy of the refugee subject is disconnected from the humanity and lived realities of those who are forcibly displaced. It was through my visit with the residents of the queer safehouse that this preoccupation with fantasy and the refugee experience arose. My definition of fantasy is twinned to ideological power where states and society enact policies and justify them on the basis of some preconceived notions of morality and nation. The fantasy disappears contradictions and exists on the register of the immaterial while having decidedly material consequences. I dive deeper into this in subsequent chapters, but for now let us return to my day with the safehouse’s residents. As part of the day’s activities, the residents of the safehouse and other guests participated in a series of role-playing games, led by a theater scholar. We played some icebreakers and shared common issues based on collective queer experiences. The usual topics, such as coming out, self-discovery, and sexual experiences, enabled a universal vocabulary. One par ticular moment has stayed with me. I participated in a role-playing game with three residents of the safehouse: Shaziya, Joyce, and Justice. Our task was to create three tableaux prompted by the word hope. The first scene involved a secret affair between two men (Justice and me) in what was narrated as Kam-

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pala, Uganda—the hometown of many of the refugees in the safehouse. While we held hands, Joyce (Justice’s sister in the play) secretly observed the scene unnoticed. In the second scene, the mother character (Shaziya) found out about her son’s sexuality and his same-sex relationship, resulting in him being forced out of his home and out of Uganda. The moment of forced displacement in our discussion and in the tableaux was rushed in the sense that it was not spelled out for me why it was so obvious that the discovery of Justice’s sexuality would result in his mother immediately disowning him. I read this as some expression of lived reality and a comical moment of play. Joyce’s character betrayed Justice, and while the whole scene was intended to be melodramatic and humorous, the deep cuts of this betrayal resonated with those in the audience who had to leave every thing behind because of their gender identity or sexual orientation. The scene ended with Justice exclaiming, “I am a gay now! I can do whatever I want!” I continue to read this assertion as a choice to break free from the heteronormative traditions of his family. Indeed, these words reflect the overarching fantasy of queer liberation, and they might in fact be words Justice never got to say. The statement itself is curious; the indefinite article a in front of gay aligns Justice with some form of global queer other. He accepts that he is one of them, and at the same time, the existence of a universal gay other is also a fantasy—something that exists overseas, far away, and in a distant place and has filtered its way through the pipeline of the internet, films, and various NGOs, but a thing, nonetheless, that feels out of reach. The final scene was rife with contradiction. Justice and his lover (a role Justice volunteered me to play) reunited in America as Justice held a baby (we used a watermelon) to symbolize happiness, hope, and an escape from homophobic Uganda. At the same time, we were also at Shaziya’s funeral, and Joyce decided to forgive Justice for his alleged transgressions. The scene was both a marriage and a funeral encapsulating opposite events that represented an unbridled fantasy for Justice. The play was just that—a place to enact fantasies that seem impossible but, in some ways, reflect on the hopes of relocation. In developing this book, I spoke to queer and straight/cisgender refugees. The deep desire for a life away from both Nairobi and Paris cut across many of their stories. There always seemed to be a proverbial promised land that offered better rights, better livelihoods, and safer surroundings, pointing to the cyclical and never-ending features of displacement where race and class haunt those who are forcibly removed. My experience with the safehouse residents made me think about how fantasies drive the refugee experience. While the role-playing was revelatory of the desires of someone like Justice, who wanted retribution from his homophobic mother, reconnection with his sister, and a family life with a man he loved, what is missing here is why some of these desires are perennially out

INTRODUCTION

of reach. Justice’s desires are oppositional to those of states and an increasingly antimigrant society. If refugees fantasize about relocation, do states fantasize about the potential of refugees? Are refugees destabilizing the nation? Are they a new source of labor? Are some deserving and others not? In considering these questions, I aim to intervene in dominant understandings of refugees as passive recipients of aid divorced from the social realities and lived experiences of work, shelter, and political belonging in contemporary racial capitalism. Capitalism is a tricky word, and I use it to refer to two things. First is the dominant logics of capitalist governance that bolster private interests and profits over human life. By this I mean a systemic tendency to devalue the lives of the poor and marginalized particularly on the grounds of social difference where race becomes the governing logic of displacement management. Second, and related, I am referring to contemporary capitalism at the level of the urban scale where refugees—despite the fact that various governments and societies might not actively consider them workers—are often folded into or excluded from the material spaces of life in the realms of housing and labor market access. Indeed, the dominant images of refugees involve boats on the Mediterranean, encampment, death, and violence. Truly, this is part of the lived experiences of many refugees, but many more live in urban areas and must navigate difficult terrains of housing and labor market access in spaces that are increasingly antimigrant. Therefore, I situate refugee governance and survival in the city and in so doing also hope to shed light on how the poorest, most marginalized, and forgotten people survive in various sites and spaces of relocation. Throughout this book, I am preoccupied by two related threads: fantasy and survival. Therefore, I center this intervention on two key questions: What are the fantasies that make up refugee governance? How do refugees survive upon relocation to major urban centers, if they manage to make it there? For answers, I look at refugee governance on multiple scales—transnational, national, and urban. The urban is where Paris and Nairobi emerge as sites of survival and contestation and where refugee governance is rendered most visible. I follow this line of inquiry because refugees are misfits in the global political economy of migration. Refugees are not workers (though they must work). Refugees are not considered enslaved people (though they definitely face detention and forms of unfree labor). And refugees are considered beneficiaries of human rights and international regulations (and yet, face abject exclusion and violence). Situating refugee governance under capitalism requires us to understand the overall system in which refugees exist and yet also account for the ways in which forcibly displaced people survive at the fringes of this system. With this tension in mind, I am concerned here not only with the material dimensions of exclusion but also

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with the undergirding logics of refugee governance that are untethered from profits, bottom lines, and formal work. Despite this, persistent desires for exclusion, accumulation, austerity, productivity, and self-reliance exist on multiple scales of refugee governance. Refugees often face abject exclusion or some form of economically justified reasoning for inclusion. For example, the Jordan Compact on refugees is frequently described as a pioneering effort of integration where refugees are provided work permits. Its key objective is to enhance refugee self-reliance—an explicit commitment to valorizing refugee labor for the purposes of development. Recent reports have indicated, however, that migrant workers in Jordan face deplorable labor conditions, including forced labor and degrading treatment.2 While the Jordan Compact illustrates a state’s commitment to some form of integration, Viktor Orban’s Hungary has infamously enacted the Stop Soros Law, which threatens anyone assisting refugees with a one-year jail sentence.3 With the arrival of Ukrainian refugees, Orban’s government echoes other Far Right figures in the European Union (EU) who are using Ukrainians to further highlight that nonwhite refugees threaten European values and nationhood. The term refugee is contentious. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) defines a refugee as a person who has fled their country because of a well-founded fear of persecution on the grounds of race, religion, nationality, social grouping, or political stance. In this book, however, I make little distinction among asylum seeker, refugee, and irregular economic migrant. I do this to move away from reifying state categories of status and value. I differentiate from the word immigrant only insofar as refugees (or those who seek asylum) are navigating an often-varied set of systemic barriers. I see the refugee experience, on balance, as occupying intersectional positions of marginality that differentiate this group from others. At the same time, the experiences of immigrants of color, the extant poor, and other marginalized groups should not be minimalized. We are part of the same system of oppression with various incongruencies and potentialities, but by differentiating between the groups I am hoping to provide some granularity to the refugee experience. Global displacement has reached unprecedented levels—the number of people fleeing their homes has doubled in a decade.4 At the same time, the deadly Mediterranean Sea Route contributes to widespread loss of life, continuing the violence of the so-called European refugee crisis in 2015. This has prompted a simultaneous response from the EU to accept some refugees while curbing all sorts of migratory flows from the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa.5 While media attention continues to focus on Europe, the numbers in Africa are staggering, with 2.5 million refugees held in camps in Ethiopia, Kenya, and Chad alone.6 These numbers are no longer shocking as the media coverage of mass death has

INTRODUCTION

desensitized viewers to the spectacle of forced migration and created a passive tolerance toward the displacement of dark-skinned people, particularly at Europe’s shore. So far, global displacement is untethered from the goings-on of capitalist logics and state welfare and has been considered a phenomenon caused by mismanagement, conflict, and social instability in the global South. Refugees are thus treated as if removed from capitalism, but this is simply untrue. In developing this conception of the refugee fantasy that emerges amid neoliberal logics of austerity, I pay attention to the ways in which both the political Left (liberals so to speak) and the political Right (and the rising alt-Right) frame refugees. For instance, the body of Aylan Shenu (Alan Kurdi) made global headlines after he drowned in September 2015. The image of this child alerted the world to the brutalities of forced displacement and contextualized the Syrian refugee crisis. Since then, however, refugee life has become devalued owing to rampant xenophobia and the rise of alt-Right populism not only in Europe but also the world over. Various politicians have called for the closing of borders under the auspices of affordability. In 2016, then French prime minister Manuel Valls said, “[France] cannot accommodate any more refugees . . . that’s not possible.”7 The fantasy operates on the register of the immaterial, but it only arises because of the material circumstances that contextualize refugee governance. For instance, Kenya has managed refugees in its camps and urban spaces for close to three decades; however, with diminished aid funding and the pivot of global attention to Europe, politicians in Kenya have echoed similar sentiments of xenophobia and economistic rejection as their European counterparts. Amnesty International’s deputy director for East Africa, Michell Kagari, has publicly stated that “refugees are caught between a rock and a hard place. Kenyan government officials are telling them they must leave by the end of the month [December 2016] or they will be forced to leave without any assistance.”8 It is not coincidental that fantasies surrounding refugees as destabilizing agents emerge during heightened economic insecurity. In 2022, Kenya pivoted toward a Jordan Compact style of self-reliance. In an about-turn, the government decided to allow refugees to seek employment and issued work permits9—previously unheard of for the majority of refugees in Kenya during the time of my fieldwork in 2018. Regardless of this shift, refugees continue to struggle to validate their documents, find work, and secure housing; in effect, self-reliance is a framework that absolves the state and various institutions of the responsibility for governing migrants. Refugees struggle to survive not only because of the systemic and institutional contexts of economic insecurity but also because of how the refugee becomes an ideological construction. The refugee emerges as a phantom character that needs to be managed for the purposes of economic and cultural stability. This fear strikes

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at the heart of the so-called refugee crisis. The framing of refugees as those in crisis while also presenting a crisis through regional instability is explored in this book as a trope. Using crisis terminology to refer to refugees flattens extant issues of inequality amid rising homelessness, job insecurity, and political division. Indeed, it is capitalism itself that should be understood as crisis prone and unmanageable. As the mayor of Leipzig, Thomas Fabian, puts it, “I don’t like to use the term refugee crisis. We don’t have a refugee crisis. We have a housing crisis.”10 The mayor’s statement points to the key puzzle of this book. Namely, there is global recognition of increased internal and international forced displacement due to conflict, climate change, poverty, and persecution, and yet, despite this unprecedented movement of people, refugees have been undertheorized within the context of global capitalism in either policy or scholarly works. Refugees are rarely recognized as workers, entrepreneurs, home renters, and part of the fabric of everyday life. In trying to understand the everyday lives of refugees amid multiple scales of systemic exclusion, Governing the Displaced places the EU, France, and Paris in conversation with East Africa, Kenya, and Nairobi. The urban scale of analysis features extensively because it is where the everyday politics of survival play out, namely on three axes: shelter, work, and some form of political belonging. These three prongs of access (Ribot and Peluso 2003; Newell 2006) dovetail with systemic inequalities that have been present since gradual welfare retrenchment in Europe in the 1980s, which has only been exacerbated since the Great Recession in 2008. In East Africa, and Kenya specifically, the legacy of structural adjustment has shaped housing and labor access for the extant poor and, thus, has affected refugee life for almost three decades. While the Right seeks to prevent refugees from entering regions and states through border securitization and jingoistic rhetoric, the mainstream perception of liberals such as Justin Trudeau and Angela Merkel is that these types of governments and leaders welcome refugees with open arms. However, most asylum cases in the EU have been rejected—in 2021, only some 34 percent of claims were accepted on the first instance.11 Even when people are accepted, the lack of available welfare in terms of housing and employment leads many refugees to some form of poverty. These policies appear to appease both the political Left and Right—they allow only a few select refugees to enter, and these refugees fall outside the purview of state responsibility. Refugee acceptance thus exists in the realm of appearance, but the materiality of survival is avoided. This is because the refugee represents a par ticular fantasy in capitalism where these groups are passive recipients of aid, apolitical, and extant only in distant geographical locations. They are forgotten and abandoned, but urban social realities of refugee relocation in both Paris and Nairobi challenge these fantasy-driven

INTRODUCTION

conceptions. In recent times, refugees have posed a threat to the nation, hence divergent responses from the political Left and Right. I take inspiration from such dialecticians as Louis Althusser, Stuart Hall, Slavoj Žižek, and Jodi Dean in understanding refugee governance at the level of ideology, which is always inseparable from capitalism. Ideology serves to smooth over inequalities and inherent violence in capitalism by gaining consent from workers. In contending with various processes such as detention, deportation, surveillance, and survival, I place refugee governance in the intertwined politics of race and class. The fantasies of refugee governance are tied to the material and lived conditions of relocation from Kenya’s refugee camps to the streets of Paris. Refugees do not fit into current logics of capital accumulation, and the rhetoric from Prime Minister Valls and Kenyan government officials indicates that refugees are considered unaffordable. At the same time, refugees do relocate and they do survive, and in doing so they exist at the fringes of urban capitalism—a population of greater marginality than the extant poor. The book thus contributes to emerging debates in migration studies (Rajaram 2017; Morris 2021; Bhagat 2022) that are embedded in critical political economy. In so doing, I seek to deepen debates surrounding Marx’s relative surplus population by marrying these conceptions with theories of racial capitalism, abandonment, and social reproduction—the key topic of inquiry in chapter 3. Here, people such as Gargi Bhattacharrya, Susanne Soederberg, Ruthie Gilmore, and Robbie Shilliam point us to a retheorization of capitalism that takes seriously the impacts of social difference and its various exclusions. In terms of its contributions to the “real world,” this book emphasizes that policies surrounding refugee governance are not removed from political and economic circumstances and that the key policies that manage refugee survival are based on fantasies that unite the political Right and Left. In their neutral guise, these policies appear divorced from the historical circumstances that drive urban inequality in major cities of refugee relocation. By placing refugee governance and survival in capitalism, this book provides a wider commentary on social life at the edge. In so doing, I hope to shed light on forms of structural, epistemic, and everyday violence and the ways in which survival is both constrained choice and an infinite number of radical acts performed by those who are forgotten in global capitalism. To answer the two leading questions and summarize the key contentions of this book, I argue that refugees emerge as fantasy subjects in contemporary capitalism. An examination of their lived realities reveals various features of organized abandonment and survival in both exclusion and acceptance. Refugees must thus be understood as a population beyond surplus labor power as theorized by Marx, because their survival is irrelevant to nation-states. Regardless of the fact that refugees represent a population of experimentation, inclu-

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sion, and exclusion, the extant logics of austerity, accumulation, and race thinking structure refugee survival. The refugee fantasy is rooted in ideological ambivalence. It operates for both the political Left and Right, where the former governs through rights and the latter through racism and exclusion.

Setting the Stage Following Robin D. G. Kelley’s foreword in Black Marxism, where “capitalism and racism, in other words did not break from the old order but rather evolved from it to produce a modern world system of ‘racial capitalism’ dependent on slavery, violence, imperialism, and genocide” (Robinson 1983, xiii), I explore refugee governance as a set of violent processes underpinned by the systemic brutalities of always-racialized capitalism. What is now known as the migration crisis is reflective of the racism that has always lurked insidiously behind the liberal veneer of equal opportunity and humanitarianism. Refugees survive in between the political fissures of the alt-Right and a seemingly gentler and accepting liberalism. We do not have to look too far to see these contradictions in play. Lest we forget, Democrats (rightfully) chastised Republicans for draconian antimigrant rhetoric and policies, only to have Vice President Kamala Harris tell Guatemalan migrants, “Do not come. Do not come. The United States will continue to enforce our laws and secure our borders. . . . If you come to our border you will be turned back.”12 The contemporary context of Ukranian refugee acceptance and fast-tracking in Canada along with the closure of the Roxham Road crossing is further illustrative of racial bias in refugee acceptance. In short, Canada’s acceptance of Ukranian refugees (a resoundingly good policy) is occurring at the same time that both Canada and the US (led by alleged champions of refugees Justin Trudeau and Joe Biden) are making it illegal for asylum seekers to cross from either side of Roxham Road—a move that refugee rights’ groups are calling a violation of human rights. Instances of border closing and increased migrant surveillance are happening world over and thus, I contend that refugees are racialized subjects that represent divergent yet contemporaneous fantasies for the political Right and liberal Left, and I develop this through the first key theoretical thrust of this book—refugee governance as fantasy. Refugees are simultaneously portrayed by the media, policymakers, and governments as destabilizing agents referred to metaphorically as disastrous circumstances such as floods and swarms, among thinly veiled racial references of barbarism. On the flip side, refugees are potential sources of labor and present opportunities for states to display benevolence in line with liberal premises of freedom and human rights. Both xenophobia and passive humanitarianism mask

INTRODUCTION

the social realities of shelter and labor insecurity in cities such as Paris and Nairobi. The fantasy is a central ambivalent logic of refugee governance—a Janusfaced regime that justifies the acceptance of some refugees while committing many more to deportation and death. Refugee governance rests on the profitability of refugees in both real and abstract terms. They face disciplinary pressures to become productive members of their societies of relocation, joining those who already struggle to find formal employment. In effect, these sorts of disciplinary pressures only serve to obfuscate the lack of welfare support for the preexisting poor, let alone refugees. To deepen this theorization of the fantasy in relation to survival, I highlight a supporting theoretical concept—disposability. I ground this concept not only in Marx’s relative surplus population but also in Melissa Wright’s (2013 framing of disposable bodies as unwanted, used, and outside the purview of state welfare. Disposability captures the potentiality of labor (and entrepreneurship) where refugees could be a useful stock of low-wage work or consumers in future generations. The potential for refugees to turn themselves into so-called productive citizens is a disciplinary force that parallels the fantasy that surrounds refugees and works to place them outside of welfare responsibility. That is to say, if refugees do not find meaningful work or become entrepreneurs, they are rendered disposable. In turn, refugees are blamed for their inability to survive, and these logics are motivated by the fantasy of the productive refugee despite the lack of available long-term shelter or formal employment in Paris and Nairobi. Race and capital dovetail with refugee survival in variegated ways. To survive, refugees must engage with some aspects of a wider capitalist society. They attempt to work. They need to engage in some form of rental relations. They attempt to start businesses. And they are treated as bodies requiring mass surveillance for the purposes of profit accumulation through various modes of surveillance and border securitization. The refugee is simultaneously a homogenous racial other and a disambiguated category where many other groups receive varied treatment according to preconceived racial attributes. For example, at the height of the Syrian mass displacement, these refugees received the highest rate of acceptance in Europe, whereas refugees from Africa are still framed as opportunistic or irregular economic migrants. Often the country of origin determines the authenticity of the asylum claim; however, the struggle for survival appears at various stages of relocation. The social realities of relocation are most evident on the urban scale as 60 percent of the world’s twenty-six million refugees live in urban areas.13 Despite the increasing presence of refugees in urban environments, scholarly and policy literature continues to emphasize the camp while ignoring emerging issues such as homelessness and cyclical urban displacement. While debates of

Introduction

TRUTH AND INFRASTRUCTURES OF IMPUNITY

This book is about the creation and persistence of impunity for a Cold War genocide (1965–66) and subsequent state violence, direct and indirect, in the name of development and stability in Indonesia. This impunity persists in the realms of law, culture, and common sense, and involves the dehumanization and eradication of (suspected) political opponents and an intricate bureaucracy developed to stigmatize their family members over multiple generations and secure the silence and complicity of others. It involves many forms of violence, complicity, and complacency, and produces subsequent generations that both know and unknow about past state violence. Through these themes, I explore why truth telling and factual revelation have not succeeded in redressing human rights violations. Infrastructures of Impunity critiques a foundational belief that the documentation of history and past state crimes prevents their recurrence. After periods of state violence and authoritarianism, “transitional justice” interventions are often initiated to develop the rule of law and support transitions to democracy. They may include institutions such as truth commissions, tribunals, and policies such as lustration or purges, amnesties, and days of remembrance, designed to support incoming successor states as they address the crimes of previous repressive regimes.1 Transitional justice advocates have produced a wealth of documentation about past cases and yet have had very little success in achieving accountability for state crimes or changing public perceptions of the past. Human rights and justice projects in Indonesia have drawn on survivor testimony, documentation, and truth seeking in a global posttruth era. Meanwhile, those in power use historical narratives that have an 1

INTRODUCTION

enduring affective hold, and this affective resonance disrupts activist history and truth-seeking projects. Thus, the lack of success of these efforts is not a failure of the transitional justice advocates; rather, it is an indication of the power of affective and infrastructural forces that support impunity in the present. An important theme of human rights work is the power of stories about the past, but in the case of Indonesia we see that past propaganda has a long halflife. Finding, using, and making effective the “truth” about the past is a long and circuitous process in which documents and evidence are important but are also subverted by the very institutions and processes that promise to authorize their validity and make them consequential. These are all elements of what I call an infrastructure of impunity. And the truths bend to that infrastructure more than the infrastructure bends to the truths. The key protagonists in this story are those who struggled for justice and against impunity, and those who perform small acts of consistency, creativity, and repetition that subvert the infrastructure. Since the mid-2010s, activists of the millennial generation have engaged the power of affect and micro or experiential truths to reconsider the violent past. In 1966, General Suharto and his New Order regime took power in Indonesia. The New Order made its version of history enduring and affectively powerful into the present. Official Indonesian school histories, films, and policies say that Suharto took power after a supposed coup attempt by suspected members of the PKI, the then-legal Communist Party of Indonesia. These histories mention only in passing the killings of a million or more suspected members or supporters of the PKI, and they omit the New Order’s widespread violations of human rights, repression of political dissent, stigmatization, systematic propaganda, and campaigns of terror, which followed these inaugural killings for more than three decades. The genocide and associated bureaucratic efforts to eradicate the Left were abetted by the United States and other countries during the global Cold War.2 The New Order regime remained in power for over thirty years, creating rich dividends for US corporations through resource extraction, the creation of a class of oligarchs, and a widespread system of corruption. It delivered significant development and modernization to a tactically depoliticized population. The euphoria that marked the end of President Suharto’s authoritarian New Order in 1998 was followed by notable reforms: passage of human rights legislation and the establishment of new institutions and policies that promised to address authoritarian-era violence and corruption. Early efforts led by those with direct experience of New Order repression focused on documenting violations and violence, gathering testimonies, organizing victims, raising awareness,

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“straightening” history, and advocating for human rights tribunals and other legal forms of justice. Although the country has not had an official transitional justice process, and though some say political reform has allowed Indonesians to successfully forget Suharto-era authoritarian violence and move on, Indonesian NGOs since 1998 have launched numerous campaigns against unresolved cases of violence. Technical and political ruses have been used to prevent evidence from entering the court, and there has been little moral outrage in public discourse, where past state (authoritarian) narratives remain affectively and politically powerful. State institutions, especially the police, have failed to protect victims from nonstate groups that extend patterns of extrajudicial violence into the present. The military’s territorial command has remained a feature of everyday life everywhere. Military and political elites and cronies still dominate the political field, and the infrastructure of impunity has continued to shield perpetrators, institutions, practices, and especially cronies and beneficiaries from accountability. In 2014, Joko Widodo, commonly referred to as Jokowi, was elected Indonesia’s first president who did not belong to a prominent political family or a have a military background. Jokowi campaigned on his status as someone unburdened by the past, and on a vision that included addressing past human rights violations.3 He successfully attracted the votes and enthusiasm of youth. Despite decades of human rights documentation, however, Jokowi’s vision and voters’ apparent support for it, even when augmented by public truth telling, did not lead to resolution or accountability. Many responses to state violence, including international human rights advocacy and transitional justice practices, are founded on the premises that exposing violations compels the world to stop them; that acknowledgement and truth telling are healing for survivors; that documentation and truth telling promote justice; that ending impunity with the prosecution of individual criminal perpetrators prevents the recurrence of state violence; and that political transitions, reconciliation, and the public legitimacy of institutions depend on settling the historical accounts. Key to all of these strategies is the importance of investigating, documenting, and making public the truth of state violence. In the literature on transitional justice, scholars and practitioners have advocated for different kinds and forms of knowledge and truth, but their perceived importance, and especially their relationship to law and to the international community, is a vital assumption in many strategies. The urgency and imperative to witness has become a widespread, almost universal response to atrocity. For instance, scholars and literary figures have pointed to the Holocaust’s effort to erase its own witnesses.4 Military dictatorships have

INTRODUCTION

used tactics such as disappearances to terrorize critics and their families and often incorporate the prospect of oblivion into torture.5 The pattern of disappearances have given rise to strong demands for information by family members and human rights workers. Governments have often masked state repression with the rhetoric of national security. The literary scholar and translator Marguerite Feitlowitz analyzes Argentina’s dirty war to demonstrate that language was used in public to obscure intentions, actions, and meanings; to “inspire trust, both at home and abroad”; to “seal . . . complicity”; and to “sow paralyzing terror and confusion.”6 She notes that “even if one doesn’t agree, the language— to some extent—gets internalized.”7 In clandestine contexts, “language became a form of torture.”8 Disappearances, state denials, and doublespeak all create conditions in which revelation of the truth and an end to deniability are seen as imperative in and of themselves. At the same time, state denials often find the power to endure even after the facts have been exposed and corrected. In transitional justice, the power of truth telling relies on the attachment of forensic facts to meaningful terms, and especially to legal norms. This advocacy work holds that there are universal human rights that apply to all individuals, and that the international community has a responsibility to protect them.9 Documented acts can be measured against universal standards and norms that have been violated. The lawyer and legal scholar Ruti Teitel points out that “demands cast in rights language become claims that cannot otherwise be rationalized away in the domestic scheme, such as in terms of war or national security.”10 Revelation of truth has the promise to reverse the official doublespeak and propaganda that justify state violence. Some forms of speaking truth to power, particularly those advanced during the Cold War, rely on local actors smuggling irrefutable evidence of state violence out of the local context to be publicized by international networks, in hopes of ending the secrecy in which state abuse occurs and is thereafter obfuscated. Transnational organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch and networks of local human rights defenders have circulated urgent actions and coordinated letter-writing and media campaigns in the name of individuals whose human rights have been violated, in order to pressure state officials to release them or update family members on their whereabouts. In other cases, such as the long-running effort to counter the Indonesian government’s denials about atrocities committed in occupied East Timor, activists have sought to end military aid and arms sales by the United States to repressive governments. Some of these campaigns have succeeded. Governments do release certain prisoners after public outcry, and arms sales and military aid are occasionally suspended. The idea of truth telling, however, promises much more than these specific outcomes—and perhaps because of these successes.

TRUTH AND INFRASTRUCTURES OF IMPUNITY

In his analysis of how human rights naming and shaming works, Thomas Keenan writes about the presumption of human rights advocates that in the absence of a functioning legal apparatus, representation works as an informal mechanism: the exposure of silenced or hidden violations enforces compliance with shared norms and laws through shaming perpetrators.11 This belief in the power of truth to enforce, and even create, norms shapes the institutions and practice of transitional justice. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, truth commissions were the most prominent institutionalization of truth seeking.12 Advocates of criminal justice tended to see the truth commission as a vehicle for amnesty and a process that would replace the pursuit of legal justice, and that stood almost in opposition to justice.13 For example, South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which operated from 1995 to 2002, was empowered to provide amnesty in exchange for truth. In some cases, state perpetrators have advocated for truth commissions to avoid accountability. Because of this, analysts worried that there was a trade-off between truth and justice.14 Since 2009, this concern is no longer as prominent and has been replaced by ideas of complementarity.15 Scholars have highlighted intersections between truth and justice strategies. For example, legal studies scholar Jamie Rowen argues, the “quasi-judicial nature” of truth commissions are central to their appeal.16 Narratives about the past that are authorized through commissions can undermine past justifications and logics that made individuals tolerant of or complicit with state repression. Such narratives can drive further accountability (that is, criminal processes) or can serve as a form of historical justice.17 In terms of historical justice, following Hannah Arendt’s analysis of Eichmann in Jerusalem, legal scholars have debated the limitations of the trial for generating larger truths about historical violence.18 And yet others see trials as sites for the social construction of knowledge that play an important role in collective memory.19 Ruti Teitel emphasizes the importance of “legal rituals,” including both trials and hearings, to enable the production of histories that “perform critical undoings that respond to prior repression.”20 For some Indonesian activists I spoke with, a judicial process was necessary to authorize information that had been documented or to demand the release of state files believed to contain relevant information that would presumably facilitate such undoings. Despite the promises of transitional justice, scholars and practitioners have critiqued its processes and results. The political theorist Bronwyn Leebaw argues that the “truth” produced in transitional justice institutions is legalistic, depoliticized, polarizing, and unable to appreciate acts of resistance and ambiguous gray zones.21 Zinaida Miller points out the shortcoming that transitional justice, like human rights, focuses on violations of civil and political rights while failing to address social and economic rights or structural violence.22

INTRODUCTION

In addition to the critiques of political theorists, anthropologists have analyzed ethnographically how transitional justice principles and institutions are localized.23 They have challenged assumptions about the nature of the truth captured in these institutions by paying particular attention to issues of gender and gendered violence, the complex political and social dynamics associated with collective memory after violence, issues of public secrecy, and the nature of silence and social forgetting, as well as past contexts of collaboration and betrayal.24 Work with survivors has also challenged assumptions that providing testimony in a transitional institution is therapeutic.25 Taken together, this anthropological work demonstrates that transitional justice interventions are falling far short of the promised results. The anthropologist Alex Hinton has pointed to a “justice facade” that “masks power and the complexities of everyday experience.”26 And yet, the desire for justice through formal transitional rituals persists among various groups in societies that have experienced violence. Despite these institutions designed to produce truth and justice, scholars and advocates have shown that impunity persists. To end impunity, specifically, these advocates demand individual criminal prosecutions for perpetrators of human rights violations and more serious crimes, arguing that prosecutions “deter future abuses, promote the rule of law, restore the confidence of citizens in government, guarantee respect for human rights, and ensure justice for victims of atrocious crimes.”27 The historian of human rights Samuel Moyn notes that ending impunity draws on the intuitive concept that there is a class of infractions for which there must be zero tolerance, and which nation-states have “internationalized as punishable when domestic justice fails.”28 Moyn and other scholars have noted that the current movement to “end impunity” through the International Criminal Court (ICC) prioritizes one definition of justice—individual criminal accountability—and excludes others: most notably, structural, racial, economic, and collective justice.29 Many scholars have pointed out that claims about the utility of international tribunals and ending impunity are rarely articulated or evaluated.30 In addition to marginalizing other visions of justice, the mobilization of international institutions, such as the ICC, designed to combat impunity have “reinforced a structure of global governance premised on exploitation and inequality,” according to the legal theorist Vasuki Nesiah. Nesiah suggests that anti-impunity efforts have provided impunity for the more powerful in some cases or obscured systemic injustices and the repeated failures of international justice processes.31 This critique of the global movement against impunity focuses primarily on cases the ICC has pursued, but the powerful rhetoric of ending impunity circulates

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internationally and informs justice campaigns even in countries that are not signatories to the International Criminal Court. The historian and political scientist Tyrell Haberkorn analyzes prolonged impunity in Thailand, a country that, like Indonesia, has not been a focus of the ICC. She examines how impunity, defined not simply as the lack of justice but as the failure to see something as a crime, is normalized and “takes place in plain sight.” Concludes Haberkorn, “The public nature of impunity makes it pedagogical for both state perpetrators and citizens.”32 Likewise, I explore how victims, family members, and activists in Indonesia persistently demand justice (most often defined in legal terms) despite repeated failures to achieve it, and consider whether these failed attempts at accountability implicitly “teach” seekers of justice about the power of the state and its control over law, and thereby extend impunity into the present. At the same time, I argue that even where impunity is blatant, there is a value in repeatedly naming it as impunity—as a crime and a deviation rather than as a defense of nationalist ideals. International campaigns and institutions tend to construe justice as prosecution for discrete events with clear perpetrators, but this definition does not adequately capture cases of prolonged and widespread impunity that occur in the aftermath of sustained state violence. In Indonesia, for example, the genocide not only occurred over the years of killings but was extended over a half century through new incidents and types of violence abetted by the infrastructure of impunity. Indonesians often talk about a “red thread” that connects many factors into one unit that produces particular effects. It is a common expression that I heard from activists during the authoritarian period to suggest how disparate elements worked together and could be understood with a single narrative, but I heard it in other ordinary contexts as well. Anthropological analysis of “infrastructure” helps us understand and untangle the red threads of social and political life in Indonesia. Brian Larkin describes infrastructures as “built networks that facilitate the flow of goods, people, or ideas and allow for their exchange over space. . . . They comprise the architecture for circulation, literally providing the undergirding of modern societies, and they generate the ambient environment of everyday life.”33 Infrastructures also make promises for the future. They mobilize affect and “the senses of desire, pride, and frustration, feelings which can be deeply political.”34 Like the red thread, an infrastructure is both material and immaterial. Other scholars have described how particular kinds of infrastructure include and exclude individuals, which produces direct as well as indirect violence, abjection, and abandonment.35 The anthropologists Dennis Rodgers and Bruce O’Neill write that infrastructure is “not just a material embodiment of violence

INTRODUCTION

(structural or otherwise), but often its instrumental medium.”36 In the case of Indonesia, the violence of impunity has not simply continued, but has grown. The anthropologist James Ferguson argues that infrastructural violence eludes efforts to specify individual perpetrators because the harms come from largescale systems that incorporate human and nonhuman elements. Infrastructures, Ferguson observes, can also naturalize, make invisible, or make “to seem inevitable” massive inequalities.37 As such, infrastructure is a particularly useful concept for examining how impunity extends, repeats, and grows in Indonesia, beyond the agency (or prosecution) of discrete, identifiable perpetrators. The infrastructure of impunity circulates throughout the entire archipelago through the army’s territorial command, bureaucracy, laws, law enforcement, media, and culture. This infrastructure is built out of a variety of elements: bureaucratic, military, legal, political, educational, social, and affective. Although some of these elements are occasionally dormant and others have been used at different times and in different cases, they can be described as a unified entity whose elements, both singly and in concert, help explain and account for the persistence of impunity. The infrastructure transforms over time. Violations of civil and political rights over multiple generations are transformed into structural violence and economic deprivation. The logic and bureaucratic mechanisms for enacting stigmatization and exclusion remain available to be applied to other groups and individuals, thus shaping how resources and rights flow through society and keeping alive the affective force of propaganda. Bureaucracy is an important element of the infrastructure of impunity. The civilian bureaucracy is shadowed by the army’s territorial command and its ubiquitous posts.38 In addition to depriving citizens of legal rights, stigmatization as enacted through bureaucracy deprives individuals of public services and excludes them from social belonging, and has far-reaching economic and social consequences. The bureaucracy creates a ubiquitous system where one’s rights as a citizen can always be revoked. The logic of association means that an individual’s status can always change and thus must be maintained by constant vigilance, especially by avoiding “contamination” through association with a stigmatized group. Violence that is implemented through bureaucracies is often analyzed in terms of Weberian models that emphasize flawed operations or procedures, or bad agents. In their analysis of the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal, Steven Caton and Bernardo Zacka argue that the Weberian model is insufficient and that the “system” is better understood as one that institutionalizes “arbitrariness.”39 By their logic, accountability processes that rely on written records of procedures or documentation of individual acts that violate clear norms and procedures follow Weberian models and are not well suited to understanding this kind of

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bureaucratic violence. Pervasive and prolonged impunity allows for improvisation and arbitrariness; indeed, this is a key element of the infrastructure and how it extends. For example, local power holders (civilian and military) are able to inflict myriad forms of dehumanization, exclusion, and exploitation on former political prisoners and their families, while in other cases, violence is perpetrated by criminal groups that are both linked to and disavowed by the security apparatus. In their analysis of the Brazilian police forces, sociologist Martha Huggins and her team analyze the creation of a “climate that powerfully structures not only the business of state violence but also social accounting of it.”40 Understanding violence and impunity through an infrastructure that has dynamic, intersecting elements sheds new light on the conditions that enable both the perpetration of violence and the subsequent evasion of accountability for it. The historian Jess Melvin’s work demonstrates the Indonesian Army’s intention in 1965–66 to annihilate leftists, including but not limited to actual and suspected members and supporters of the Communist Party of Indonesia (Partai Komunis Indonesia, or PKI), a then-legal political party. This intention was expressed in the creation of institutions, offices, and declarations ordering the mandatory involvement of civilians in the army’s campaign to exterminate other civilians.41 Melvin describes in careful detail the “mechanics of mass murder,” diagramming the institutions, documents, and policies enacted by the army to orchestrate the killings. The army’s territorial command that shadowed the civilian bureaucracy was critical. The historian John Roosa explains that “by building its own bureaucracy and firmly latching it onto the civilian bureaucracy, the army mangled the lines of jurisdictional authority within the state. The army was free to intervene in the work of all other state officials while remaining outside the control of any other department.” It is important to understand the scale of this apparatus: in addition to army officials who were assigned to civilian posts, approximately a “third of the army’s troops were stationed in [the territorial command structure].” Roosa further notes that “in the army’s logic, the task of ‘managing’ Indonesian society was a necessary corollary of the army’s duty to defend society from external attacks.”42 The territorial command provided a formal structure, but its powers were outside the law. Melvin shows how the existing territorial command was put to a new use to carry out the killing and ensure that all of the other elements of the state complied. Melvin’s work in Aceh is one of the few cases where extensive documentation has been uncovered. Other authors describe a less structured but no less damaging system of winks and nods whereby criminal gangs were engaged by the military and its proxies to commit the killings.43 To both orchestrate the genocide and create impunity for it, a system of institutions, laws, policies, and bureaucracies was created or adapted.

INTRODUCTION

The bureaucracy shaped the daily lives of communities across the archipelago. The mobilization of individuals as intelligence informants or as perpetrators of direct and indirect violence extended the bureaucracy beyond the military posts and the institutions and policies of the state. A climate of impunity structured both the killings and the social and legal accounting of them; the perpetuation of impunity created both a climate and a bureaucracy that repeated and compounded this socially and legally accepted form of dehumanization. The system of detention and discrimination and the ways in which stigmatization spread through families was regulated by official policies that ensured that political prisoners and their relatives would be denied access to basic rights as citizens and consigned to a space of “civil death.”44 In Indonesia, impunity happens blatantly in public, but also in slow motion, over generations. Infrastructure can be spectacular, like modernist construction projects, but also nearly invisible and noticeable only when it breaks.45 Likewise, the infrastructure of impunity has also acquired mundane and ubiquitous forms as individuals have attempted to navigate Indonesia’s bureaucracy and the army’s omnipresent territorial command, which structures everyday life down to the most minute practices and the level of neighborhood governance. The territorial command posts are a key component of this bureaucracy and an omnipresent part of life across the archipelago, always there should one fail to be vigilant. Impunity’s infrastructure has assumed nearly invisible, or all-pervasive, forms as families reinforce stigmatization in the most private and intimate realms. While impunity does occur in plain sight, the infrastructure also includes unseen elements that have extended impunity over time, all but intractably. And in Indonesia, law itself became part of this clandestine infrastructure.46 It appeared to be a route to resolution and justice but has often functioned to extend impunity. The law’s capacity to secure, extend, and perpetuate impunity depends on its superficial appearance as the opposite—a site of transparency and consistency in the service of accountability and justice. For instance, trials for partial and minor elements of large-scale campaigns of violence can provide immunity against future trials in the name of due process. Certain laws and policies have dehumanized particular citizens and subjected them to civil death, while the system of law has continued to function and has created the appearance, and experience, for other citizens that the rule of law functions and that they are law-abiding citizens rather than complicit beneficiaries. Invisible yet ordinary forms of human rights violations, enabled by subtle everyday laws, institutional cultures, and practices that dehumanize and stigmatize individuals or groups, have extended impunity beyond the initial genocide. Even so, the idea of legal solutions remains compelling for human rights advocates in Indonesia,

Beyond Description Anthropologies of Explanation edited by

Paolo Heywood and Matei Candea

Introduction

ETHNOGRAPHIES OF EXPLANATION AND THE EXPLANATION OF ETHNOGRAPHY Matei Candea and Paolo Heywood

What is an explanation? What does it add? What makes it authoritative, clarifying, or misleading? Whom does it serve, and by what means is it produced? These questions lie at the heart of public crises of confidence in expertise and political representation; they echo also within the knowledge practices of disciplines such as anthropology. In a world in which one global political, economic, or indeed epidemiological earthquake after another defies expert predictions of its impossibility, and post hoc accounts can often feel more like rationalizations or special pleading than explanations, competing voices vie for public presence and seek to silence one another in accounting for radical change. At stake in such political, religious, or economic contestations is the particular nature of explanatory speech and its epistemological underpinnings: What visions of truth, if any, underlie such accounts? Who is authorized to provide them, and through which media and technologies? What are the aims, purposes, and ends of explanation and the giving of accounts? Anthropology and the social sciences face such questions too, making contemporary explanatory practice both an empirical and a reflexive challenge. This book brings together anthropologists, philosophers, and historians of social science to take a double look at the problem of explanation. The book combines ethnographic studies of practices of explanation in a range of contemporary political, medical, artistic, religious, and bureaucratic settings with examinations of changing norms and forms of explanation within anthropology itself—one of the social scientific disciplines in which explanation has been most pointedly

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and enduringly in crisis. Alongside chapters detailing the explanatory practices required of asylum seekers at the borders of “Fortress Europe” (Green), those of advocates seeking state funding for mindfulness meditation therapy (Cook), the multiple explanations an artist gives of his own “distorted” paintings (Rapport), those of self-defined nonpolitical readers trying to make sense of their favorite author’s sympathies with fascism (Reed) or of alt-right bloggers sussing out the minds and argumentative techniques of their progressive opponents (Mair), this book also reflects on anthropological attempts to explain specific classes of phenomena such as miracles (Bialecki) and artwork (Rapport), on anthropology’s deployment of and challenge to economic models of behav ior (Staley, Salmon), on its attitude to “problems” (Heywood) and “findings” (Luhrmann), and on the tension between the implicit and the explicit in anthropological description, comparison, and explanation (Candea and Yarrow). The placement of anthropological explanation in the frame in this way is intended as a provocation of sorts. For while, as these chapters show, anthropologists have much to say about expertise, authoritative knowledge, and the mechanics, politics, and ethics of explanation as a thing other people do, the discipline has for some time been rather wary of invoking explanation as a description of its own practice. Anthropology is not alone in this—an anti-explanatory mood has been sweeping a number of social scientific and humanities disciplines. However, anthropology is one of the disciplines in which this mood is perhaps most advanced and all-encompassing. One of its more extreme forms, which we explore in more detail later, is what we will call ethnographic foundationalism—the deferral of all epistemological questions to “the ethnography” (Candea 2018; Heywood 2018). Ethnographic foundationalism is not merely the (falsely naïve) claim that anthropologists should suspend explanation and “just describe”; it is the almost mystical belief in the power of ethnographic description to reach back and resolve anthropology’s own epistemological dilemmas. But ethnographic foundationalism is only an extreme symptom of a more difuse anti-explanatory mood we are diagnosing. There seems to be in contemporary anthropology a pervasive sense that there is a thing called explanation out there and that it is problematic for anthro pologists to try to do it. On closer examination, however, both parts of that statement are obviously incorrect: there isn’t a single thing called explanation out there, and anthropologists do do it all the time. As for the former, as we outline later, even a cursory look at the literature on explanation generated by philosophers of science shows that there are a number of competing theories and no consensus on what it might mean to explain something, let alone what the proper way is to do it. As for the latter, on almost any definition of explanation, if you look closely enough you will find micro- or meso-explanatory moves woven into the texture of most an-

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thropological texts, even those that purport to be purely descriptive or to reject explanation altogether (see Candea and Yarrow, this volume). We thus want to ask about the forms of explanation present in and possible for anthropology, and what their limits and problems actually are. Even though there may be a case for reclaiming explanation, there may still be compelling reasons to reject it in favor of something else. But if so, why? Can we account for what is wrong with explanation, in some or all of its forms? In sum, this book establishes an inside-out relationship between ethnographies of explanation and the problem of how ethnography is to be explained. From one angle, it proposes a comparative account of forms of explanation in the world, in which anthropology and its crisis of explanatory confidence feature as just one case study among others (albeit one that takes a central place in this book and is examined from multiple perspectives). From another angle, this is a book posing reflexive epistemological questions to anthropology, questions that we feel are best asked alongside and on a par with ethnographic accounts of explanation beyond anthropology. This is not to say that we expect the ethnographic account of others’ explanations to resolve the epistemic conundrums relating to anthropology’s own explanatory moves. Rather, the book seeks to explore communications and productive tensions between the reflexive problematic of anthropological explanation and the comparative exploration of other explanations in the world. The final section of this introduction, which discusses the chapters in more detail, draws out some of these contrasts and analogies. In the next two sections, however, we will, first, diagnose the anti-explanatory mood that has swept anthropology and cognate disciplines and, second, take a broader look at the notion of explanation and its internal multiplicities in order to reboot our theoretical and ethnographic sense of what explanation might be.

An Anti- explanatory Mood Our sense of an anti-explanatory mood is partly grounded in the experience of our own training as anthropologists, around a decade apart, in the early years of the twenty-first century. While we each remember being taught about ethnography, description, and critique at various points, we find it hard to recall anyone ever teaching us about explanation, except in one key sense—through a set of worries and warnings about improper attempts to explain. The history of anthropology is often taught as a graveyard of broken explanations and explanatory devices: evolutionism and progress, structuralism and the human mind, Marxism and the laws of history, transactionalism and the maximizing individual, and so on. We remember learning only one thing about explanation as an

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epistemological problem—namely, that it is a rather dubious and probably irrelevant practice for anthropologists. On a closer investigation, there were two broad sources for this general antiexplanatory mood, two explicit and articulated challenges to explanation, which, though historically and epistemologically very diferent, combined to drive home the sense that explanation was a problematic thing to want to do. The first challenge is the one that was recurrently raised against explanation at various points in the twentieth century by proponents of “interpretation.” The contrast has a deep nineteenth-century philosophical and sociological pedigree. Social scientists often hark back to Max Weber’s critique of narrow historical materialism and crudely functionalist sociology and his claim that “the specific task of sociological analysis . . . is the interpretation of action in terms of its subjective meaning” (Weber 1978, 8).1 In anthropology a contrast between explanation and interpretation has tended to be rediscovered at regular intervals. In 1950, E. E. Evans-Pritchard savaged the functionalist paradigm, to which he himself had previously subscribed, arguing that anthropology ought to be a historical interpretive endeavor and not seek to provide explanations of society analogous to those of biology. A similar challenge was famously mounted again a couple of decades later by Cliford Geertz, with his claim that anthropology’s central object, culture, “is not a power, something to which social events, behaviors, institutions, or processes can be causally attributed; it is a context, something within which they can be intelligibly— that is thickly—described” (1973, 14). This seemingly unavoidable recurrence of the contrast between explanation and interpretation reinforced the sense that anthropology had always been and perhaps would always be riven between “two grand epistemological traditions” (Handler 2009, 628; see also Holy 1987): on the one side lay the explanatory ambitions of positivism, with its cortege of scientism, reductionism, and quantification; on the other, the “understanding” ofered by interpretivism, grounded in humanism, hermeneutics, and qualitative thick description. Andrew Abbot (2001; see also Candea 2018) has perceptively analyzed the way in which these paired contrasts operate cyclically in the lives of disciplines as core organizing polarities. For social anthropologists, however, the explanatory side of the contrasts seemed always to be in the past. With a few exceptions (e.g., Bloch 2005), the most recent explicit proponent of positivist explanation who was still recognized as part of the disciplinary canon as we were taught it was Alfred Radclife-Brown (1951), whose pitch for anthropology as a “nomothetic” search for social laws came to stand as the classic exemplar of misplaced scientistic hubris. While this grand struggle between positivism and interpretivism was already rather passé by the time our training began, it had left behind a tendency to associate explanation with what we will argue is only one, very narrow vision of what contemporary epistemologists might mean by this term.

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This provided fertile ground for a far more drastic challenge to explanation, and one that at the time of our training still felt excitingly timely and fresh. This was the radical rejection of any kind of explanation over and above description itself. One of the most forceful proponents of this line of argument was Bruno Latour, whose actor-network theory was fundamentally structured by a profound antipathy for the explanatory ambitions of classic social theories (e.g., Latour 2005). Actor-network theorists were enjoined to “just describe”—to craft forceful accounts that stayed close to the messy contingency of particular assemblages of humans and nonhumans. They were instructed to resist the temptation to reach for the explanatory abstractions that might foreclose the account. This position was informed by Latour’s (1988) critique of explanation as either a possibility or a worthwhile aim for the social sciences. Latour defines explanation, in fact, as exactly a measure of the distance between the context of the object and the context of the account. “Powerful explanations” are “empire-building” and “reductionist,” imagining that we can hold multiple elements of our object of concern in a handy little receptacle like “capitalism” or “neoliberalism.” Even the most basic of explanations, that of cause and efect, is framed as a politics of accusation, an attribution of blame and responsibility, and an error. Latour’s ideal explanation is a “throw away” one, a one-of explanation, applicable only to a par ticular arrangement of elements. An explanation, in other words, that is just a description.2 As Latour unrepentantly puts it, “I’d say that if your description needs an explanation, it’s not a good description, that’s all” (2005, 147).

One of the more radical forms that the anti-explanatory mood has taken in anthropology is that of deferring all epistemological questions to “the ethnography.” Consider one of the few modern anthropological collections devoted specifically to epistemology in the discipline—a theoretically wide-ranging book by Christina Toren and João de Pina-Cabral. Its contributors are presented in the introduction as being in broad agreement about two things: one is antifoundationalism (Toren and Pina-Cabral 2011, 16), and the other is the fact that ethnography is “the primary condition for anthropological knowledge” (15). At the intersection of those two broadly shared anthropological claims lies the position attributed by the editors to contributor Peter Gow: “Anthropology has no need of any epistemology other than ethnography” (6). The thought is, in efect, that epistemological questions separate from ethnography are quite simply “inappropriate for anthropology” (Holbraad 2009, 81). This is what we are calling ethnographic foundationalism (cf. Candea 2018; Heywood 2018). Ethnographic foundationalism is more than a simple injunction to forgo explanation for description, à la Latour. More ambitiously, it seeks to find in

IntRoDUCtIon

ethnographic descriptions the solution to anthropology’s own epistemological problems. Consider the following questions: How should anthropology understand translation (Viveiros de Castro 2004)? How should anthropologists use examples (Krøijer 2015)? How should they generate politico-economic concepts (Corsín Jiménez and Willerslev 2007)? And how can they reinvigorate their notion of truth (Holbraad 2012)? That is not a list of potential problems for an anthropological epistemology to confront. It is, in fact, a list of just a few of the epistemological problems to which various anthropologists have already proposed solutions within the last fifteen years. What these solutions all have in common is that each claims to be derived recursively from the particular ethnographic case the anthropologist happened to be studying. In each case, the solution is for anthropology to adopt some version of what the authors’ informants happened to be doing or thinking. So, for example, and in one of the most elegant examples of this maneuver at work, Martin Holbraad finds in the “inventive definitions” of Cuban oracular divination a conceptual apparatus with which to make sense not only of how truth might continue to play a part in anthropological thinking but also of the “inventive definitions” of Cuban oracular divination. Inventive definitions—which is to say, roughly, successful performative speech acts—are both what Cuban diviners do and how to understand it, as the notion of inventive definition is, itself, argued to be an inventive definition. Whether or not one sees such circularity as a virtue or a vice, it closes of the ethnographic from anything extraneous like “theory” or “explanation”: the object explains itself. This offloading of epistemological questions onto ethnography also chimes with a politics of engagement that sees any division between theory and practice as an academic retreat to an ivory tower that, in the words of an editorial in Anthropology Matters on the subject, should be made “transparent” (Kyriakides, Clarke, and Zhou 2017). Citing David Graeber as an exemplar, Theodoros Kyriakides and the convenors of the Royal Anthropological Institute postgraduate conference on anthropology’s politics of engagement declare that there is no dichotomy between theory and engagement “but rather connections, relations, and multiplicities in the making” (Kyriakides, Clarke, and Zhou 2017). In not dissimilar language but with perhaps more pernicious efect, the British government’s Higher Education Funding Council for England demands that our work, in order to have value, have “an efect on . . . the economy, society, culture . . . beyond academia” (Research England 2020). Theory, and in par ticu lar that kind of metatheoretical exercise that is epistemology, emerges from these perspectives as suspiciously detached and not “impactful.” An antifoundationalist consensus to defer such questions to “the world itself” seems much more palatable. Of course, we are not here arguing against our shared reference to ethnography as a discipline, which as method and material is surely one of the things that

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makes us anthropologists, beyond specific sets of research programs. But sharing a reference to ethnography is not the same as finding in it the answers not only to some but to all of the questions we may pose, including questions of research practice and disciplinary philosophy. And it is certainly not the same as thinking that ethnography and description exhaust the proper tasks of anthropology, and that questions such as “How do we explain?” may be safely set aside or ignored. For to do so is to proscribe (de jure if not always de facto) the sorts of debates and discussions our anthropological forbears had over, for example, the relative worth of deductive or explanatory versus hermeneutic or interpretive models of knowledge and understanding for the discipline. It proscribes them not for the par ticu lar answers they might provide but for the very ambition of seeking an answer from beyond the confines of empirical material. It renders the ambition of a book such as this one—to investigate an ethnographic and an anthropological practice without assuming they amount to the same thing—impossible to pursue. It valorizes description and an erasure, as far as is possible, of any distinction or diference between an anthropological account and its object. More broadly, not only is it the case that we may wish to dispute the specific meanings of foundational concepts, but we may also have diferent ideas as to their proper relationship. It need hardly be pointed out that empiricism does not suit everybody’s politics, and that sometimes the choice between engagement and conceptual invention may be a mutually exclusive one. Neither across anthropology as a discipline nor across ethnographically foundationalist versions of it is any one motivation for such implicit foundationalism dominant. Discussion as to the relative merits of diferent motivations, however, or indeed as to alternatives to them, and to their relationships, is precluded by their common insistence that discussion of a purely epistemological kind is a waste of our time. In other words, while many anthropologists seem to agree on the foundational nature of ethnography in our discipline, the origins of such agreement, its purposes and goals, as well as its consequences and efects, are obscured by that very consensus of method. Our claim is certainly not, then, that it is a problem to believe ethnography as a method unites anthropology as a discipline, nor even is our claim that there is necessarily any problem with any one point of view on what it is that anthropology should be doing. It is that we will be better served in the project of assessing the purposes and underlying metaphysics, the correlations and disjunctures, and the consequences and efects of such justifications by having that discussion openly and explicitly, and without anticipating the answer in our ethnographic findings. So we have chosen to focus this book on a classic yet long-neglected problem in the epistemology of anthropology, one that also has very clear real-world implications, in its anthropological and its ethnographic varieties. We fully expect

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that explanation as it is imagined, valued, practiced, or rejected in specific ethnographic circumstances can teach us something about what an anthropological explanation might look like. But we hope also that this book is an opportunity to consider the nature of anthropological explanation as a problem in its own right.

The Multiplicity of Explanation In seeking to reboot the problematic of explanation, both ethnographically and theoretically, we would be well served by taking a sidelong glance at debates outside the social sciences. Philosophers of science and epistemologists have had profound and long-standing disagreements over what precisely it is to explain, and these debates have generated a number of competing theories and definitions. This section delves into some of these philosophical arguments, definitions, and contrasts, to enrich the often rather one-dimensional discussions of explanation current in anthropology. In so doing, however, this section is emphatically not reaching out to philosophy to authoritatively define what explanation “really is,” or to set the ground rules for this book’s subsequent discussion. The role of this initial engagement with the philosophy of science is in fact precisely the opposite: not to police the boundaries of what can be called explanation but to expand them. For the core aim of this section is to highlight the multiplicity of ways in which explanation can be invoked beyond the sometimes rather limited implicit understandings current in social scientific discussions, thus challenging the tendency to assume that explanation is a unitary, singular, and clearly defined activity. This kind of opening-up is a preliminary to the ethnographic explorations in the chapters that follow. In fact, this section might be thought of as a first ethnographic foray into explanation as it is imagined by one particular subset of contemporary Euro-Americans—namely, philosophers of science. This is not an entirely self-contained discourse, of course. Insofar as these “technical” definitions of explanation are often self-consciously drawing on and formalizing commonsense intuitions and understandings, these various philosophical accounts already give us a glimpse of the variety of ways in which explanation is conceived of in the world beyond philosophy.

Overviews of philosophical theories of explanation tend to start with positivists’ attempts to map out a “deductive-nomothetic” vision of explanation in the early twentieth century. We will come to this later but would like, for reasons

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that will become clear as we proceed, to begin in a slightly more unusual place: philosophical discussions of “abduction.” Abduction—also known as “inference to the best explanation” (Douven 2017; Lipton 2004)—is a term originally introduced by C. S. Peirce (1934). It describes a form of inference that is distinct from both deduction and induction. Deduction moves inexorably from known premises to logical conclusions. By contrast, induction and abduction extrapolate likely conclusions from partial knowledge. Induction is usually characterized as a kind of direct “statistical” extrapolation from the known to the unknown. The paradigmatic case is the induction— famously criticized by David Hume—that the sun will rise tomorrow because it has risen every day in my life so far.3 Abduction, by contrast, is characterized as a form of inference in which a conclusion is reached because it is identified as the best explanation of a state of afairs. An example (Schurz 2008, 207–208) might be inferring the recent passage of an individual on an isolated beach based on the observation of a line of footsteps on said beach. This explanation of the phenomenon (someone has walked across this beach) is only one among many— perhaps infinitely many—possible explanations. For instance, that these footstep-like shapes might have been formed by some coincidental natural process, or by the rolling of a ball with foot-shaped appendages, or, less baroquely, by a large group of people carefully stepping in one another’s footsteps. Among these infinitely many possible explanations for a phenomenon, abduction plumps for what seems the best explanation. Another, more commonplace example of abduction might be the thought that someone can read Latin based on the observation of a number of books in Latin on their bookshelf. What is the best explanation for those books being there? The fact that the owner of the bookshelf owns them and might read them. Of course, the books might have been inherited and the current owner might be incapable of reading them, or the owner might have bought them precisely in order to give the false impression of their competency in Latin. In sum, the notion of abduction points to the fact that, in inferring the unknown from the known, we do not always simply extrapolate, following an inductive rule such as “more of the same.” Rather, in many cases, such inference involves some kind of more complex explanatory consideration. For our purposes in this book, philosophical discussions of abduction are interesting for two reasons. The first is that they make a rather convincing case for the ubiquity of explanation in everyday life. By focusing on the structure of micro-judgments and observations such as the ones just discussed, they show that explanations of various kinds are ineradicably woven into our everyday experience, in a way that undercuts arguments “against” explanation in anthropology or elsewhere. The second reason is that starting from this observation

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about the ubiquity of explanation, philosophers seeking to spell out the structure of abduction—“inference to the best explanation”—are invariably brought face to face with a key problem: contemporary epistemologists have no settled account of what an “explanation” (let alone a “good” or “best” explanation) is. This means that works on abduction (e.g., Lipton 2004) are a great place to look for overviews of the variety of current understandings of explanation in the philosophy of science. It also means that one comes away from them with a refreshing sense that there might indeed be a whole range of diferent ways of explaining. We argued earlier that anthropologists have tended to act as if there were just one thing called explanation and it was best avoided. The take-home point of philosophical discussions of abduction is precisely the reverse: explanation is ubiquitous and it takes a huge variety of forms. The first thing to go, from this perspective, is the engrained binary of explanation versus interpretation that has animated so much social scientific methodological discussion. Philosophers of science frequently use the terms explanation and understanding interchangeably. As Peter Lipton puts it, “The question about explanation can be put this way: what has to be added to knowledge to yield understanding?” (2004, 21). The fundamental contrast to which philosophers of science tend to draw attention is broader than the familiar explanation-interpretation opposition—it is the contrast between describing a phenomenon and adding something further to this description. This extra something is an “understanding” of some sort, and that understanding is what an explanation provides. The contrast between description and “explanatory understanding”—which is central also to the Latourian injunctions to “just describe”—is itself not unproblematic. However, as is often the case, a shift in dualisms has productive efects. Whereas Latourian critiques envision explanation as taking something away from description, curtailing or maiming it in some way, Lipton and others portray explanation as an addition, a “something more.” Collapsing the dualism between explanation and understanding is the preliminary to envisioning a wide diversity of forms of explanatory understanding—what are sometimes rather charmingly described as forms of “explanatory goodness” (Godfrey-Smith 2003, 199).

On one canonical and now much criticized view, the “goodness” of explanation lies in relating phenomena to “laws of nature.” This deductive-nomothetic (D-N) theory of explanation, elaborated in the mid-twentieth century by logical positivists (e.g., Hempel 1965), is the kind of “explanation” that is usually implicitly or explicitly contrasted to interpretation in the anthropological literature. The D-N model claimed that a phenomenon has been satisfactorily explained when it can

The Promise of Piety Islam and the Politics of Moral Order in Pakistan Arsalan Khan

Introduction

ISLAM, HIERARCHY, AND MORAL ORDER

The car stopped on the side of the main road on our way to the grand mosque complex (markaz) of the Tablighi Jamaat. We were heading to the Thursday night (shab-e-jumma) congregation where practitioners of the movement, or Tablighis, spend the night praying, giving sermons and listening to sermons (bayans), and creating connection (jor) with other members of the congregation. In the car was my high school friend Talha, now an active and staunch Tablighi, and three Tablighis from his area mosque whom I knew only superficially. We waited on a fourth to arrive from his house in the adjacent street when suddenly Talha began to move the car forward as he looked intently in his rearview mirror. In Karachi, phone and car snatching are regular occurrences, and we knew something was amiss. A motorcycle with two riders had stopped a car not far behind us, a white Toyota Corolla with black tinted windows. The robbers on the motorcycle had picked the wrong car. The motorcycle suddenly zipped past our car, and a few gunshots were fired. We all took cover. The car zipped past us in chase behind the motorcycle. The robbers lost control of the motorcycle, hurling the riders onto the street. One robber took off on foot into the adjacent neighborhood, while the other, seemingly injured from the fall, tried to pick himself up. The white Corolla pulled up next to him. Three armed men exited the car, grabbed the injured robber, and hurled him into the backseat of the car. They then sped away, leaving the motorcycle in the middle of the street. While this was certainly no ordinary event, seeing armed gunmen in cars with tinted windows is also not exceptionally uncommon in a highly volatile and militarized city like Karachi where, on top of criminal organizations, wealthy 1

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and powerful people often roam with armed guards and political parties have militant wings and a history of armed conflict. “Alhamdulillah,” we all repeated, as we calmed our nerves. “May Allah have mercy,” one compatriot said. We all heaved a sigh of relief. The ride to the Tablighi markaz was quiet, each of us in the car left with our own thoughts, our companions in silent recitation of the Quran. We arrived in time for the maghrib prayers. Then we sat down to listen to sermons given by the pious Elders (buzurg) of the congregation. After the sermons, Mohsin, one of the Tablighis who was in the car with us, came and sat next to me. “Arsalan,” he said, “look at how calm and peaceful it is in this mosque. Everyone is at ease.” I nodded in agreement. “You know why? Because this is Allah’s house (allah ka ghar) and all the people sitting here know that nothing happens without Allah’s will. Not even a twig can be moved from one place to another without Allah’s will. Today someone is around, tomorrow they are gone because that is what Allah has written for us.” Again, I nodded in affirmation. “What happened today,” Mohsin continued, “shows that Allah is not happy with us. Do you know why Allah is not happy with us?” No, I said. “Because we have abandoned our religion (din) and we are chasing after ‘the world’ (dunya). We have given up the Prophet’s way (rasool ka tariqa) and we have adopted the ways of others (doosron ke tariqe). If we want to free ourselves from these troubles, we must return to religion, the one bestowed to our Prophet by Allah. We must cultivate our faith (iman). You must join us on this path and you, too, will see what benefits it brings to your life.” What Mohsin was engaging in was not a dialogue about what happened on our drive to the markaz. Instead, he was using the event as an occasion to frame the problems of crime and violence as a product of Muslims straying from the path of God. Mohsin was doing dawat, a distinct form of face-to-face preaching that is the hallmark of the Tablighi Jamaat. Tablighis can be seen walking through Pakistan’s villages, towns, and cities in groups of ten or twelve dressed in the traditional shalwar-kameez, pant-legs raised above their ankles, with long flowing beards and a white Muslim cap, an image that is immediately discernable to Sunni Muslims as being in the Prophet’s example (sunnat). Dawat literally means “calling” or “inviting,” and it is used interchangeably with the term tabligh, which means to “convey.” The Tablighi invites Muslim addressees to come to the mosque to pray and listen to sermons with the aim of incorporating them into the movement and turning them into Tablighis. Tablighis insist that Muslims have abandoned religion for the world and that this has thrust the world into a state of moral chaos ( fitna), a condition in which moral relationships among Muslims have entirely broken down. All the problems that Muslims face in the world can be traced back to this foundational problem. Ultimately, it is only by drawing fellow Muslims back to Islamic practice and specifically encouraging

IslAm, HIeRARcHy, And moRAl oRdeR

them to take up the calling of dawat that moral relationships can be regenerated in Islamic life and moral order restored. The Tablighi Jamaat emerged in the 1920s in North India and is now one of the largest Islamic movements in the world (Sikand 2002). It has a major presence in many parts of the world, but especially in South Asia and where there are large South Asian populations. Pakistan is one of the four major centers of Tablighi Jamaat activities, with millions of people from Pakistan and around the world attending the annual congregation (ijtima) at Raiwind and hundreds of thousands attending the other annual congregations in various cities across the country. Since the 1980s, the Tablighi Jamaat has grown dramatically in Pakistan. The large mosque complexes (markaz) that have sprung up in all the major cities are a testament to this, the largest of which can host up to fifty thousand worshippers. These complexes serve as key institutional nodes in a network of mosques that, either formally or informally, are affiliated with the movement. The concept of dawat has deep roots in Islamic theology and can be found in the Quran. The Quran states: “Who could be a better person than the one who ‘called’ (da’a) toward God and acted righteously” (41:33), and “There should be a group of people among you who ‘call’ (yad’una) to [do] good, enjoining good and forbidding evil” (3:104). Tablighis interpret these Quranic injunctions to mean that it is the duty of every individual Muslim to preach the virtues of Islam to their fellow Muslims, just as the Prophet did, to keep Muslims focused on Allah and “religion” (din) and protect them from the ploys of the Devil and “the world” (dunya). Tablighi conceptions of dawat, however, are not simply about the spreading of Islamic content. Rather, Tablighis insist that it is the very form or “method of preaching” (tariqa-e-tabligh) that is Islamic because it follows the Prophet’s example (sunnat). The Prophet is an exemplary being (insan al-kamil) whose every deed and action was divinely inspired and carries in it great benefits; thus, these deeds must be meticulously replicated in the lives of Muslims. Because dawat as a method of preaching is inspired by the Prophet’s example, it is uniquely capable of soliciting God’s mercy (rehm) and grace (barkat) and thus affording one “success in both this world and the next” (donon jahan mein kamiyabi). It is only through dawat, they insist, that Islamic virtue can be spread and God’s will communicated. Early Tablighi accounts suggested that the “method” came to the founder of the movement, Muhammad Ilyas, in a dream, implying that it was a direct gift from God, but Ilyas himself never said this. He did note, however, that it was a blessing from God and that “the closeness and the help and blessings [of God] is not to be found in the case of other methods” (cited in Sikand 2002, 131). The efficacy of dawat in soliciting divine intervention is thus seen to depend on it being conducted in precisely the form that it was prescribed and fulfilled by

IntRodUctIon

the Prophet and his Companions. It is by following this precise method of the Prophet that dawat becomes a religious deed or practice (dini amal) that is exclusively efficacious in spreading Islamic virtues, regenerating moral relationships, and creating an Islamic community. The Tablighis’ commitment to their own form of preaching stands out in a country like Pakistan where the state sovereignty is directly linked to Islam, where the state sees its role as one of promoting Islamic values, and where Islamic revivalist activism flourishes in public life. The Objectives Resolution of the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan passed in 1949, only two years after the founding of the nation-state, states: “Whereas sovereignty over the entire universe belongs to Allah Almighty alone and the authority which He has delegated to the State of Pakistan, through its people for being exercised within the limits prescribed by Him is a sacred trust.” Islamist political parties have drawn on this constitutional commitment to move Pakistan in the direction of an Islamic state (Islami riyasat). Islamists have historically claimed that Islam is a total system for life and that this necessitates creating an Islamic state governed by Islamic law (shariat), one that enforces Islamic codes and injunctions and actively creates the space for Muslims to live according to Islamic precepts. In recent years, Islamists have increasingly turned toward creating institutions of “market Islam” (Rudnyckyj 2009) like corporations, welfare trusts, new educational institutions, and NGOs, and have become an active presence in mass media such as radio, television, newspapers, and the internet. The Tablighis’ insistence that only dawat performed and taught in their own congregation can spread Islamic virtue and is, therefore, the basis for creating a genuine Islamic community, challenges the many forces of the Islamic revival that compete for Islamic authority in Pakistan. Tablighis reject the Islamist claim that they are spreading Islamic virtue through participation in the state or in democratic politics. This came up early in my fieldwork. When I first arrived in the field, I had decided that I would try to build in a strong comparative dimension to my research examining both Tablighi piety as well as a range of Islamist political parties, particularly the Jamaat-i-Islami with which I had some prior connections. As I pursued this comparative dimension, I was told repeatedly by Tablighis that I would not come to any understanding of Islam through involvement with Jamaat-i-Islami as they were not “ doing religion” but were instead involved in “politics” (siyasat). Islamists, Tablighis insist, conflate “worldly activities” (dunyavi kam) with “religious practice” (dini amal) and thus are incapable of spreading Islamic virtue, as it can only be spread through practices that are themselves “religious.” Tablighis argue that confusing religion for “politics” has undermined the spread of Islamic virtue and created fissures and fragmentation of the Islamic community.

IslAm, HIeRARcHy, And moRAl oRdeR

The historian Barbara Metcalf (2004), a foremost scholar of the Tablighi Jamaat, has described this position as “quietist,” but the boundaries that Tablighis draw between religion and the world underpin an ethical response to the crises that afflict life in postcolonial Pakistan. The Promise of Piety leverages this tension within the Islamic revival in Pakistan to explore how Tablighis constitute the domain of religion (din) and the distinct form of moral order that they imagine against what they construe as the “moral chaos” of life in Pakistan. Drawing on the Deobandi tradition of Islamic thought, Tablighis understand religion to be a set of practices authorized by the sacred sources, the Quran, Prophetic tradition (sunnat), Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh) and Islamic law (shariat) as it has been developed by Islamic scholars (ulama). They advocate for a return to the pure and original Islam of the Prophet, which they say has been corrupted by innovations (biddat), a position that places them within the broad currents of Islamic reform in South Asia. However, the Tablighis’ insistence that their own form of dawat is modeled on Prophetic example gives a distinct institutional form to their congregation. Tablighis note that the entanglement of Islam with modern institutions of the state and market has failed to produce pious subjects and regenerate moral relationships. This Tablighi stance takes us beyond religion as a matter of doctrinal content to the mediational means for constituting pious subjects and pious relationality and the institutional structure of the domain of religion. Some questions arise: What is at stake ethically, morally, and politically in the way that Tablighis draw the boundary between religion and the world, and how does this construction of religion shape their moral intervention in the world and their vision of moral order? These questions take us into an examination of how dawat as a set of mediational practices through which distinct pious subjects, pious relationality, and ultimately pious authority and sovereignty come to shape Pakistan’s social and political landscape. Dawat is what Birgit Meyer (2011) has called a “sensational form,” a set of organized practices, techniques, and tools for mediating a relationship to transcendental power and therefore creating the conditions for divine presence in the world. This book argues that the ritual forms of dawat constitute a distinct form pious relationality organized around what I call the “ethics of hierarchy,” a hierarchical vision of moral relatedness in which the Tablighi learns to enact Prophetic example by submitting to the authority of pious others. The ritual ideology that frames dawat creates a hierarchical organization of the movement that must be inhabited and embodied in submission to pious authority enacted in both ritualized forms of listening to sermons and everyday acts of citationality that situate pious authorities as a model of life to be emulated in the realization of proximity to God (see Robbins 2001). The ethics of hierarchy, I argue, then becomes the basis for an

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ethical engagement with the problems of kinship conflicts and political fragmentation that Tablighis see as emblematic of the state of moral chaos. The sacred hierarchy constructed in the Tablighi Jamaat and the effort at ethical engagement with the world then come to be seen as an alternative form of sovereign power to the powers of the Islamic state and the corporate institutions of the market. I show how the ethics of hierarchy is a mode of ethical reflexivity that aims to domesticate the powers of modern life and, thus, is understood by Tablighis as the basis for transcending the political fragmentation and violence that shapes life in postcolonial Pakistan. The question of hierarchy is of course an old one in anthropology and one that can trace back to Louis Dumont’s (1980) theorization of the Hindu caste system in his classic Homo Hierarchicus. Dumont famously argued that the “paramount value,” or the primary normative principle of Indian society, is purity, and this sets the terms for the ranking of people and things. Dumont shows that the Hindu caste system organizes castes in terms of their relative purity and that this can be contrasted with the egalitarianism and individualism of the West (Dumont 1986). Critics of Dumont have long noted that Dumont creates an ahistorical image of Indian society locked in tradition as opposed to a historically changing and dynamic West and that, far from reflecting Indian realities, his portrayal of India replicates a distinct Brahmanical worldview (see Das 1997). However, Dumont’s argument that hierarchy cannot be understood purely as a top-down exercise of power but instead must be thought of as a shared value to which people are, relatively speaking, committed as a moral principle remains important. Saba Mahmood’s (2005) argument that feminism’s prescriptive project of liberating women from relations of subordination has hampered the analytic project of understanding forms of agency like that of Islamic pietist women who see pious submission as a form of pious agency rather than simply a capitulation to power and a form of domination (see also Strathern 1988). The normative egalitarianism of our dominant approaches to social and political life has in other words prevented analysts from understanding how hierarchy can be a value in social life (see, however, Ansell 2014; Ferguson 2015; Hickel 2015; Haynes and Hickel 2016; Keeler 2017; Khan 2016, 2018; Piliavsky 2020). The Promise of Piety takes up the question of the moral value placed on hierarchy and the ethical reflexivity this engenders among Pakistani Tablighis. Tablighis see hierarchy as a basis for responsibility and care, not domination and exploitation, and indeed they see their movement in converting a world of domination and exploitation into one based on the responsibility and care that they understand to be intrinsic to Islam and generated in dawat. The book examines how Islamic piety as a form of hierarchical relationality is constituted, legitimated, and naturalized in the practices of dawat and how hierarchy becomes a

IslAm, HIeRARcHy, And moRAl oRdeR

basis for the ethical reflexivity that structures Tablighi approaches to social and political life. It shows how the ethics of hierarchy builds on a distinct ritual and semiotic ideology and becomes an ethical resource that Tablighis see as a basis for addressing the crisis of political fragmentation and violence in Pakistan. The book then opens the question to how people throughout the world constitute hierarchies, how this serves as a basis for ethical action in the world, and how this shapes different conceptions of moral order in modernity.1

Anthropology in the Space of Cultural Intimacy He wore a starched and crisply ironed white kurta and sported a long flowing beard with his mustache shaved, a style that was immediately discernable to anyone in Pakistan as being in the example of the Prophet (sunnat). For years, my friends— our mutual friends—had been telling me that Talha had become a maulvi, a term that means a religious scholar but is also sometimes used derisively by more liberal and secular-oriented people as someone who is excessively religious, closed-minded, and even fanatical. Some said this sympathetically, some with mild amusement, some with a measure of disappointment. Talha and I had met in high school, and we became very close friends over the next few years. He was quiet and contemplative and generally thoughtful about the world. We shared an interest in politics, something that I shared with him more than I did with our other mutual friends. Like the rest of us, Talha indulged in activities that this person standing in front of me who was crafting himself in the image of the Prophet would later describe to me as “way outside the bounds of Islam.” Now, we stood in front of each other on what is sometimes construed as opposite ends of an incommensurable divide between Islam and secularism. But, as we embraced each other in the courtyard of the Makki Masjid, the grand mosque complex in Karachi of the Tablighi Jamaat, the discomfort dissipated, and a sense of intimacy and familiarity resurfaced. “Come, let’s pray, Arsalan, and then we will catch up.” When I returned to Pakistan for fieldwork, my goal was to seek out a Tablighi mosque to which I had absolutely no attachment, preferably in a working-class area. This somehow fit with my idea of what it meant to be in “the field.” From my pre-field experience, I had come to realize that doing research among Tablighi was going to be difficult because they actively opposed being the objects of research and rarely engaged intimately with scholars or journalists. They saw my research as an obstacle to dawat as an Islamic practice. It was clear to me that more than simply being uninterested, my questions to them posed a peculiar

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kind of threat to their faith. During my preliminary fieldwork, I met several Tablighis at the two grand mosque complexes in Karachi, Makki Masjid and Madni Masjid. Of the many Tablighis that I tried to build relationships with, only two agreed to meet with me beyond the mosque. All the others told me I should seek out Tablighis in my own neighborhood and that understanding dawat required “coming to Islam properly.” In meetings that happened in and around the market where they worked, we exchanged pleasantries, and after I explained to them the aims of my research, they would tell me that dawat is not something to be grasped through the mind (zehn) but only something that one can understand through “ doing,” and it is only through participation that I would gain the understanding I was seeking. Then they would narrate the virtues of dawat as they did to anyone seeking guidance about how to live an Islamic life. These encounters would end with them insisting that I create “connection” (jor) with the congregation in my own neighborhood mosque and begin to participate in mosque activities. I will have much more to say about these features of Tablighi ritual ideology and process in the chapters to come. Here I simply want to point to not only how this shaped my ethnographic approach but also what it can help us think about in terms of cultural intimacy between different positions in Islamic or Muslim life in Pakistan. The mosque in my own neighborhood, an upper-middle- to upper-class area, had very few Tablighis, and the area itself does not have the kind of neighborly intimacy that one finds in older parts of the city. I considered moving to an area with a more vibrant Tablighi congregation, but I also knew that moving to an area simply to conduct research would be viewed with suspicion. In the age of the Global War on Terror, a young man with no kinship ties to a neighborhood suddenly arriving to conduct research would surely have aroused suspicion. At the time that I was struggling to find Tablighis who were willing to engage with my research, Talha and I had reconnected, and he expressed an interest in meeting. He came to my apartment on a few occasions, usually close to dusk prayer times (maghrib), and we would go to the mosque and then venture out for juice or tea, and sit in the car and talk, sometimes about dawat and sometimes about our own friends and families. It was obvious that Talha was invested in drawing me to dawat, but he also wanted to rekindle an old friendship. I suspect that he thought my research would ultimately serve to bring me to Islamic practice and that I would find myself less interested in my research and more interested in moving on the path of piety. This created a space between us that allowed me to both ask him substantial questions about the Tablighi congregation and for him to give me dawat in a manner that was in keeping with his ideas about Islam.

IslAm, HIeRARcHy, And moRAl oRdeR

Talha was a close confidant, caregiver, and “son” to a prominent Tablighi Elder (buzurg) who sat on both the city and national councils (shura) and was highly revered and extremely influential throughout the congregation. He went by the title Hazrat, a term of respect that Pakistani Muslims use as an honorific before the names of Prophets, including the Prophet Muhammad. Hazrat was an authorized Sufi sheikh of the Chisti order. He could trace his unbroken spiritual lineage back to the Prophet Muhammad through the founder of the Chisti order. As an authorized sheikh, Hazrat had “followers” (murids) in the thousands who devoted themselves to him through an initiation called bayt, which entails a formalized commitment to follow the sheikh’s every instruction. Hazrat maintained a spiritual house (khanqa) where he received people who needed his guidance. The spiritual house was also a space of special Sufi practices, including various forms of remembrance (zikr) that are not trained in the broader Tablighi Jamaat. Hazrat’s followers were not all Tablighis, but he encouraged them all to be and believed, as other Tablighis do, that dawat was a foundational practice based on which all other practices were built and thus was a necessary condition for all spiritual reform and realization (islah). He insisted that esoteric knowledge (ilm) was no substitute for dawat, and he regularly went on dawat tours to stay on the right path. In this way, Hazrat insisted that dawat superseded all other Islamic activities. Hazrat took a liking to me and told Talha to bring me with him to the khanqa. From then onwards, I was treated as Hazrat’s “guest,” and this is an identity I carried with me into many Tablighi spaces. I will venture to say that Hazrat saw some potential in me as a Tablighi, but he also recognized that Talha wanted me to be part of his world, and this led him to extend an extra level of generosity and kindness toward me. This did not go unnoticed by others in Hazrat’s network. Several Tablighis told me that they did not fully understand why Hazrat had taken such a liking to me, and I could tell that this inspired a level of jealousy in them. In any case, Hazrat’s endorsement of me became pivotal for my research, as people who knew of my relationship with him simply accepted or had to accept my presence. They could not go against Hazrat’s wishes, and many of them assumed that he had a purpose that they could not fully understand. Through Hazrat’s khanqa, I made my way to the Al-Aqsa Mosque, which was close by, and each week Hazrat delivered a sermon there that was attended by hundreds of people. The Al-Aqsa Mosque has one of the largest congregations of Tablighis that I have found anywhere in Karachi, and they all attributed this first to Allah’s grace and then to being under Hazrat’s “shadow.” Hazrat, they said, had singlehandedly created the passion for dawat in this area starting some three decades ago. They frequently recalled how in decades past, Hazrat would

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wander alone from house to house in the scorching sun inviting people to mosque when nobody knew anything about dawat, and the fruits of this labor could now be seen in the fact that the Al-Aqsa neighborhood was a model for other neighborhoods throughout the city and country. I begin on this note of personal intimacy because it speaks directly to the aim of this book to understand how Islamic piety in the Tablighi Jamaat exists in relation to other moral possibilities of being Muslim in Pakistan. Tablighis assumed that we belonged to the shared tradition of Islam and that the differences between us did not pose some incommensurable divide. We had simply been led down distinct paths and distinct ways of understanding the world. For Tablighis, their path was God’s path (Allah ka raasta), while mine was a fallen path that one took when one had become seduced by “the world.” But, it was our shared position as Muslims with divergent historical experiences that created the threshold of similarity and difference that both united and divided us. We were, ultimately, not incommensurable people but rather interchangeable, and it was our interchangeability that could make me an object of the moral transformation of dawat. My interlocutors were not wrong that our lives were, relatively speaking, interchangeable. I spent a good part of my life living in an old middle to uppermiddle class neighborhood in Karachi that was relatively conservative called Nazimabad. Various forms of Islamic piety, including commitment to the Tablighi Jamaat, were ubiquitous and going to the mosque was a daily part of neighborhood life. When I moved to the relatively more affluent part of the city in my teenage years, I found that the daily strictures of Islamic piety were significantly less stringent. But, the pursuit of piety was not absent here either. Over the years, I witnessed countless friends become more and more explicitly pious, increasingly committed to religious practice and indeed to encouraging others to fulfill their religious duties. Many of them ventured, at least for some time, to the Tablighi Jamaat. Some of them ultimately concluded that this pursuit of piety was “too much” and that one should learn to balance religion (din) and the world (dunya). Some became deeply disenchanted and left with significantly less commitment to religious practice than when they arrived. The possibilities of these moral and ethical shifts are a constant feature of life in Pakistan. The fact that I was participating in dawat was a significant source of consternation and fear for many of the closest people in my life, especially my mother, who was deeply worried that I would internalize the normative commitment to piety, particularly its gender norms, and that this could create strains in our relationship. Some friends teased me for growing a beard and joked about how any day now I would be preaching to them. Such fears are built on the recognition that Islamic preaching is a powerful force of transformation in people’s lives and that many people just like me could easily be pulled into the orbit of Islamic

Introduction

ETHNOGRAPHY WITH SCIENCE, DEVELOPMENT, AND BUREAUCRACY

“I’m really excited about this new project,” Matt told me as we walked along a busy road. “Over the past five years, we’ve done a lot of talking about agroforestry, but this is a chance to really put things into action. In Myanmar, it could really make a huge difference too. The forests there have been devasted by logging, and for a lot of people, those forests are their livelihoods.” Matt had spent the past five years working as a soil ecologist at the Institute for Farms and Forests (IFF) in southwest China. He and his colleagues had produced an abundance of scientific research establishing potential social and ecological benefits of biologically diverse agroforestry systems. For Matt, however, there was an important step that he and his colleagues needed to start making: one from understanding the potential benefits of agroforestry to establishing actual agroforestry systems. Matt hoped that his new project, Agroforestry for Myanmar, would be an opportunity to make this step. With a multimillion-dollar grant from an international development donor, Matt’s team would establish a series of experimental agroforestry plots in northern Myanmar. These plots would contain relatively simple agroforestry systems with trees spaced in grids or alleys and agricultural crops planted in between. The plots would begin life as sites for experimental research, but once research was underway, the same plots would also serve as demonstration farms. With training programs at these plots, Matt and his colleagues would try to convince land-users, policymakers, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to adopt and support agroforestry across upland Myanmar. 1

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A year or so later, on a somewhat quieter road near IFF’s leafy suburban campus, Matt’s hope had all but evaporated. “I remember when I used to get to do research,” he told me forlornly. By this point, Agroforestry for Myanmar was mired in endless bureaucratic and institutional headaches: the project donor had retrospectively imposed an inflexible new evaluation framework that was incongruous with IFF colleagues’ expectations for the project, local NGO partners were losing patience after months waiting for IFF headquarters to approve the transfer of project funds, and Matt was busy trying to persuade a key academic partner that it was neither possible nor necessary for IFF to purchase him a new four-wheel-drive vehicle. Amid this never-ending stream of headaches, the agroforestry systems Matt and his colleagues were so excited to plant, to research, and to promote receded into the background. The tension between these two moments—a moment of hope and anticipation that gives way to one of frustration and dismay—is familiar to many of Matt’s colleagues at IFF, as well perhaps to many academic colleagues elsewhere in the world. We are, on the one hand, motivated more than ever to put our research skills to work changing worlds beyond the university while, on the other hand, the institutions that employ and fund us operate in ways that leave everdiminishing time for us to pursue that aspiration. These parallel tendencies are connected. Many of the proliferating bureaucratic evaluation regimes—the so-called audit cultures—that we bemoan in the sciences and humanities are themselves the result of efforts to promote and foster “impactful” research. Indeed, the mantra of maximizing “impact” was at the heart of the new donor monitoring and evaluation framework with which Matt and his colleagues were wrestling. The irony of this contradiction is captured by the commonplace refrain that audit regimes are corrosive of the very things that they are supposed to promote (Kipnis 2008; Power 1997; Shore and Wright 2015; Stein 2018). Certain aspects of the ethnography I present in this book underline this contradiction. As much as examining how bureaucracy and audit undermine the sciences, however, my goal is to explore the positive lessons scientific practices might draw from the logics of bureaucracies and from IFF staff’s frustrations with them. I want to show how thinking with instead of only against bureaucracy might help us confront the task of rebuilding scientific practices for a more just and more livable world.

Thinking with Bureaucracy By thinking with bureaucracy, I mean the application of a classic anthropological method that crafts analytic tactics out of ethnographic encounters. In this

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mode of anthropology, ethnography is not merely something to which we apply theories and concepts; it is also a practice through which we develop them. Some version of this approach to ethnographic theory is shared by anthropologists concerned with all manner of ethnographic objects and intellectual projects. It has given anthropology concepts from “obviation” (Wagner 1986) and “arbitrage” (Miyazaki 2013) to “decolonizing extinction” (Parreñas 2018) and “pluriverse politics” (de la Cadena 2015). In How Forests Think, to take one example, Eduardo Kohn (2013) challenges dominant Euro-American assumptions about what distinguishes humans from other beings by developing an innovative theory of nonhuman thought. For my purposes, Kohn’s theoretical argument is less impor tant than the methods that inspire him to reach it. In this respect, Kohn’s concept of thinking forests emerges fundamentally from encounters with his ethnographic interlocutors—the Runa people of Ecuador’s Upper Amazon. According to Kohn (2013, 94), his claims are “not exactly . . . ethnographic . . . in the sense that [they are] not circumscribed by an ethnographic context.” But, Kohn continues, his claims “gro[w] out of [his] attention to Runa relations with nonhuman beings as these reveal themselves ethnographically.” I would argue that this makes his theoretical claims exactly ethnographic. Ethnography in the sense I am interested in is not about circumscribing one’s claims to a narrow context. It is about building analytic tactics out of encounters with the knowledges, practices, and experiences of our ethnographic interlocutors. For many anthropologists and in many anthropological subfields, the idea of anthropology as a practice of thinking with our ethnographic interlocutors would go without saying. When it comes to certain objects of inquiry, however, anthropologists have been less inclined to adopt this method. This is perhaps especially so with the often-interconnected themes of audit cultures, bureaucracy, and international development. Rather than thinking ethnographically with bureaucratic and development practices, anthropologists have more frequently taken their theoretical inspiration from Foucault or actor-network theory (ANT) (for example, Escobar 1995; Ferguson 1994; Hull 2012; Merry 2016; Mosse 2005; Pels 2000; Rottenburg 2009; Shore and Wright 1999; cf. Yarrow and Venkatesan 2012). To be clear, my goal in departing from this approach is not to defend bureaucracy against unfair attack. Indeed, thinking with bureaucracy does not preclude simultaneously thinking against it. Nor, as importantly, is it to question the reality or significance of the violence, precarity, inequality, and injustice that Foucauldian and ANT-inspired approaches have allowed anthropologists to illuminate.1 In emphasizing a more traditional approach to ethnographic theory, I want merely to suggest that for all that is wrong with bureaucracies—not least the ones that govern our own professional lives—there may nevertheless be creative potential in thinking ethnographically with them.

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In this book, I explore this potential in relation to a planning and evaluation tool called Theory of Change. In basic terms, Theory of Change is a technique for developing a theory of how to bring about desired change in the world. It is often integrated with metrics for measuring the extent to which that change is or is not being achieved as anticipated. Theory of Change originated in development NGOs, but in recent years, it has become prevalent in diverse fields from philanthropy and international aid to universities and academic funding organizations. Australian academics may, for example, be familiar with it as a core component of the “impact framework” used by the federal research agency the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) (CSIRO n.d.). It is likewise a required component of certain funding opportunities offered by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) (NSF 2015, 2022). Depending on who one asks at IFF (as well as which iteration of it you are asking them about), Theory of Change is either a bureaucratic headache keeping scientists like Matt from their research or a tool that can empower those same scientists to achieve the real-world impacts they aspire to make. Theory of Change can, moreover, materialize in a multiplicity of forms. In some instances, it is a colorful hodgepodge of notecards pinned to a board. In others, it is transposed into a neat spreadsheet replete with measurable targets to be met on a strict schedule. What is remarkable to me about Theory of Change, however, is the provocative framework that it provides for reflecting on three dimensions of scientific practice: the horizons that motivate research, the moments at which the future effects of research are anticipated, and how scientists imagine their agency playing out across time. It is, in anthropological terms, a framework for understanding and reimagining the temporalization of action and agency.2 Taking up Theory of Change’s provocation, these dimensions serve as a framework for this book’s analysis and argument. They are, for instance, the basis of my comparison between an IFF communications consultant named Alistair’s plan to build a brand for agroforestry and a junior scientist named Jiaolong’s more modest call for us to communicate our research to wider publics. In the former case, Alistair conceives a Machiavellian strategy for nurturing the eternal expansion of IFF’s power and influence. In the latter, Jiaolong imagines an impact pathway that, like Alistair’s, would entail scientists doing much better at interesting nonacademic audiences in their research. Unlike Alistair, however, her impact pathway anticipates a horizon at which scientists cede control of their work—a moment that anticipates a further horizon where research findings might be put to use in ways scientists neither preconceive nor control. In Alistair’s case, he casts his brand-building strategy as a “Theory of Change.” Jiaolong makes no such connection. Since the start of her gradu ate studies, Jiaolong has been concerned with how scientific research might help people

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generate sustainable incomes from the rubber plantations that she had witnessed spread rapidly across her local landscape. “When I started my PhD,” she told me, “I thought I was doing something that would help rubber farmers like my brother.” This is an aspiration that predates her encounter with Theory of Change, and it is one that she would not herself frame in its terms. I nevertheless approach Jiaolong’s proposal as an implicit Theory of Change. I do this not to suggest that Jiaolong’s proposal is the same as Alistair’s branding strategy or other explicit versions of Theory of Change. Indeed, her proposal is in important respects incompatible with many institutionalized versions of Theory of Change. Rather, framing Jiaolong’s—as well as many of her colleagues’—ideas and practices as an implicit Theory of Change is one way in which I exploit the logic of Theory of Change as my own analytic framework—a framework that can, among other things, help us understand latent alternatives to institutionalized imaginations of impact. Thinking ethnographically with Theory of Change is in this respect distinct from making a case for its embrace within the academy. My argument is that bureaucratic forms like Theory of Change might provide productive problematizations—for example, “What is the horizon that motivates research?”—not that they necessarily offer ideal solutions. In certain respects, thinking with these problematizations can help us articulate what is wrong with Theory of Change as a way of doing science. We can, for instance, follow Theory of Change’s lead by comparing evaluation regime–imposed horizons with the horizons that implicitly motivate IFF scientists. This comparison can help illuminate the limitations of certain conventional research practices, but it can also help us question the very peculiar expectations that Theory of Change–based evaluation regimes generate. In adopting this ambivalent orientation toward bureaucracy, I take inspiration from feminist and decolonial science and technology studies (STS) scholars who have in a variety of ways sought to repurpose ostensibly objectionable scientific concepts and practices to the service of critically analyzing and transforming the sciences (for example, Fanon 1963; Grosz 1999, 2005; Haraway 1991; Harding 1991; Murphy 2021; Roy 2008, 2018; Subramaniam and Willey 2017b).3 Thinking in terms of bureaucracy-inspired problematizations may at times give us pause to ask whether bureaucracy (or at least some transformed version of it) might have a positive role to play in remaking the sciences. At other times, these problematizations will help us conceptualize what is wrong with the audit cultures that govern contemporary science, academia, and international development. Most importantly, thinking with bureaucracy can help us reflect on the aspiration that Matt and Jiaolong share with colleagues at IFF and elsewhere: that of doing science in ways that might help transform the deeply troubled worlds we inhabit.

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Bureaucracy as Interruption Many of the bureaucratic and scientific practices I describe in this book will resonate with experiences beyond one office in southwest China. Indeed, a key goal of this book is to speak to challenges, frustrations, and aspirations that are relatable across disciplinary and national boundaries. Nevertheless, this book, its concepts, and its argument emerge fundamentally out of ethnographic fieldwork at a specific place: the Institute for Farms and Forests’ China office. This is not an ethnography of bureaucracy and Theory of Change in the abstract but one of and with the perspectives of IFF colleagues as they encounter them in their professional lives. IFF is a global agroforestry research for development organization with its headquarters in East Africa. IFF established an office in Songlin—a city in southwest China—almost twenty years ago. Originally a country office responsible for activities within China, by the time of my fieldwork (2014–16), it had expanded to take on a regional role with active projects elsewhere in East, Central, Southeast, and South Asia. Broadly speaking, IFF’s mission is to produce scientific knowledge that will inform and enhance equitable and sustainable rural development—it pursues “research for development.” But the question of what IFF does and why it does it is a large part of what is at stake in the divergent ideas of science and impact that I explore in this book. IFF’s projects at the time of my field research included Eco-Friendly Rubber, a project to develop sustainable and environmentally friendly rubber cultivation practices for southwest China and neighboring Southeast Asia. This project operated in tandem with the Lengshan Multi-Stakeholder Platform, an initiative set up in Lengshan Prefecture, southwest China, as part of a broader global project to facilitate multisector collaboration in tropical agriculture. The Qingshan Agroforestry project held similar aspirations to Matt’s Agroforestry for Myanmar project, only in this instance focused on Qingshan, a small township in southwest China. A broader Asian Fungi project involved numerous subprojects from taxonomic macrofungal surveys to social science research on mushroom harvesting. These projects were led and implemented by an office of around twenty research staff, ten corporate services staff, and forty or so affiliated graduate students. Approximately half of the staff and students are Chinese, with large contingents from elsewhere in Asia as well as from Africa, Europe, and North America. This staff is diverse in terms of their expertise and training as well as in the aspirations and goals they hold for themselves, for IFF, and for environmental research more broadly. This is evident in, among other things, their diverse responses to new institutional mandates to employ Theory of Change as a method for planning and evaluating IFF’s work.

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Like many at IFF, my first encounter with Theory of Change came in the form of an “outcomes thinking” workshop run by a headquarters-based senior scientist named Lesley. I remember sitting through the first morning of her workshop wondering whether what Lesley was telling us about proactively communicating research findings (as opposed to simply sticking them in an academic journal or policy brief and leaving it at that) was not already obvious to everyone in the room. “Isn’t what Lesley is saying more or less what IFF already does?” I asked Matt at lunch. “What is she saying that’s new?” “This is really impor tant,” Matt responded. “What she is describing is a long way from what we’ve been doing, and we really need to start doing what she is teaching us.” Part of my misapprehension, I realize in retrospect, was my incorrect assumption of a natural affinity between the applied agroforestry science that many already practiced at IFF and outcomes- or impact-focused science. I did not yet appreciate the difference between a research practice that anticipates the utility or application of new knowledge in the hands of undefined future users (IFF colleagues’ existing approach to applied science) and a research practice that plans for knowledge to be deployed to predefined ends by predefined users (outcomes thinking). For Matt, moreover, even applied science had been relatively peripheral to his work. In this respect, whereas Jiaolong had always imagined a close connection between her research and transformations in agroforestry practices, for Matt such a direct connection was more novel. Having spent much of his previous five years at IFF taking significant satisfaction (and institutional reward) from the publication of what he called “fundamental research,” Matt appreciated Lesley’s offering as an opportunity to start realizing the potential of his research to generate real-world change. Bob, a more junior colleague—and the only Songlin-based staff member familiar with Theory of Change prior to Lesley’s workshop—gave a slightly different assessment of what was new in Lesley’s workshop. As we climbed the stairs to join colleagues for a morning coffee break, Bob explained to me that “everyone at IFF already has an implicit Theory of Change. We all already work according to a set of assumptions about how one gets from research to change in the world.” A key value to Lesley’s workshop, Bob continued, was that it forced his colleagues to reflect more explicitly on those assumptions. Theory of Change, Bob suggested, is a reflexive process that can help IFF colleagues rethink and revise how they go about their work. This book’s attempt to think with Theory of Change follows through on Bob’s basic idea here—that Theory of Change can help us make explicit and reflect on existing imaginations of the processes that connect research to the worlds beyond the academy. Bob and Matt’s positive attitude toward Lesley’s workshop was not shared by everyone. Ruyue, a postdoc in Matt’s soil biology group, was one of several

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colleagues who attended only the first morning of the two-day event. She later told me, “I’ve heard it all before,” before joking that I would “get used to this sort of workshop soon enough.” What Ruyue had heard before was not Theory of Change specifically but headquarters scientists flying in for a couple of days to share ideas that held minimal relevance to IFF-China’s work. A year— and several encounters with Theory of Change—later, Matt had adopted a similar view. When word got around that Lesley was planning a follow-up workshop, Matt joked with colleagues about what field research they could reschedule to make sure they were out of the office for the workshop. There are impor tant differences in how Matt and Ruyue experience Theory of Change and other externally imposed mandates. These colleagues share, nevertheless, a concept for thinking about such things: for most IFF staff, Theory of Change is just one of the many mafan, or “headaches,” that are part and parcel of professional life. A dictionary translation of the Chinese mafan would be a “trouble” or a “nuisance.” In the office’s common English parlance, the term is often left untranslated, operating as a loanword even among colleagues like Matt who speak very little Chinese. When it is translated, mafan usually becomes “headache,” “pain in the backside,” or some more colorful equivalent.4 This is a label IFF colleagues apply in a range of bureaucratic contexts, flattening distinctions between what we might other wise imagine as quite distinct challenges: drafting a Theory of Change, applying for a visa, completing donor project reports, procuring research permissions, filing expense reports, satisfying Chinese anticorruption procedures, and so on. This notion of headache contains an implicit Theory of Change of its own: a par ticu lar way of imagining the temporality of bureaucratic and scientific action and agency. Rendered as a headache, IFF colleagues experience bureaucratic work (itself a fluid category) as a momentary interruption to meaningful work. Confronted as a headache, the interrupting moment is animated exclusively by the question of how the nuisance in hand can be overcome as quickly and efficiently as possible.5 As IFF colleagues understand it, moreover, the in-themeantime labor of overcoming a headache is something that will have little or no effect on the scientific work that will resume once the headache is out of the way. Headaches do not restrict or transform scientific practice; they merely put it on hold. One thing that is striking about IFF staff’s rendering of bureaucracy as a headache is that it suggests a very different kind of analysis to that offered in social scientific analyses of academic audit cultures or of monitoring and evaluation (M&E) regimes in international development. A central question in studies of university audit regimes has been “what audits and rankings bring into focus

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and what they render invisible or unsayable” (Shore and Wright 2015, 422). Similarly, in the field of international development, David Mosse (2005) analyzes development projects as a “system of representations,” and Richard Rottenburg (2009) describes development project evaluations as a production of “immutable mobiles” for subsequent recombination into representations that serve the hegemonic interests of Western donors. Such focus entails social scientists drawing insight out of the incongruity between what audit and bureaucracy make visible or legible on the one hand and the alternative representations that ethnographers or their research subjects might make of the situation on the other.6 For IFF staff, by contrast, the paucity or opacity of the representations that bureaucratic procedures produce is of little interest. In the context of university audit cultures, understanding bureaucracy as a means of making academic work visible is suggestive of a mode of critique that highlights the failure of audit to provide an adequate medium of representation (Giri 2000). This in turn can imply that our challenge should be to craft regimes that can make academic performance visible on academics’ own terms (Shore and Wright 2015). But what kind of critique and what kind of imperatives for transformation are implied by an understanding of bureaucracy as a mode of interruption? In a straightforward sense, the concept of a headache might suggest that what is wrong with bureaucracy is that it interrupts at all. Indeed, the notion of headache indexes an ideal of scientific work shorn of nuisance distractions such as donor accountability and institutional regulation. Rather than indulge the fantasy of scientific practice free from interruption, however, I consider how central components of scientific practices such as peer review, PhD defenses, and participatory workshops are, no less than bureaucracy, forms of interruption. Unlike headaches, however, these are interruptions in which IFF staff anticipate opportunities for feedback that can positively transform the future direction of a project. Exploring the various ways in which IFF scientists actively seek opportunities for their work to be interrupted by communities within and beyond the sciences, I argue that interruptions are vital to scientific practice—both as it exists now and in the more collaborative and democratic forms of science that we might wish to build. These forms of interruption are moments of willful abeyance of agency (Miyazaki 2004), ones that anticipate our interlocutors shaping our research in unpredictable ways. The critique of academic bureaucracies from this perspective would be that the interruptions these bureaucracies generate fail to provide opportunities for generative abeyance. And if the critique of bureaucracy in the academy were to focus on the inadequacy of the interruptions that bureaucracies generate, our challenge might be to imagine not alternative forms of visibility but alternative modes of interruption.

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Trust and Vulnerability At the time of my research, IFF was officially registered with the Chinese state authorities as an international research organization. This is an arrangement common to the numerous international agricultural research organizations operating in China. More unusually, the office is also legally constituted as a research center within a prestigious public research institute named Songlin Academy of Plant Sciences (SAPS). The same office therefore exists both as an international organization and as a domestic public research institute. This dual identity allows some advantages but can also mean double the bureaucracy. As a colleague named Tao put it, having feet in two institutions means “getting screwed from both sides.” Tao grew up in Songlin before heading overseas to study and work in the fields of rural development and environmental sustainability. Returning home to take up a senior position within IFF’s corporate services team, Tao was attracted to the organization by its mission to build sustainable socio-ecological futures. Like many of her colleagues, however, she was frustrated that so much of her time was devoted to bureaucratic headaches that did nothing but get in the way of that work. Though these headaches came from “both sides,” Tao saw one important difference between Chinese bureaucracy and that of IFF’s global headquarters. Dealing with the latter, she told me, “There is at least the possibility of flexibility.” When she encountered IFF regulations that imposed an unreasonable or impossible burden on the China office’s work, Tao knew she could speak to a colleague at headquarters and try to negotiate an exception. This, she told me over a lunchtime coffee, “could never happen with the Chinese side”: even when following regulations to the letter would make vital scientific activities like field research and academic conferences impossible, Chinese administrators would force IFF to comply. Echoing Matthew Hull’s (2012) ethnography of Pakistani bureaucracy, Tao suggested to me that officials demand strict adherence to (or at least the appearance of adherence to) document-mediated procedures in order to diffuse the possibility of personal responsibility for the activities they authorize. Responsibility, she told me, is feared because of the vulnerability it generates: if a bureaucrat helps bend the rules, they risk later rebuke from their own overseers. Labeling this phenomenon a “refusal to trust,” Tao equates refusing trust with evading vulnerability. Conversely, her analysis implies that to trust might mean to embrace the vulnerability that comes with entanglement in the affairs of another. This is a concept of trust that can help us appreciate instances in which Chinese officials seem to trust IFF colleagues in precisely this manner: when they willingly entangle themselves in IFF’s activities and in doing so make themselves vulnerable to the uncertain outcomes collaboration might bring.

INTRODUCTION David S. Powers and Eric Tagliacozzo

How unified is the Muslim world? In matters of culture and praxis, many answers might be given to this question. Several scholars have attempted to define the umma (global Muslim community) but have come up with diferent indices.1 In seeking answers to this question, we took a broad approach: we invited twenty-two scholars to contribute chapters on Muslim societies that they know well. Together, these contributions suggest that there are, in fact, multiple “ways of being” in the Muslim world. By moving across time and space, as well as between a number of related disciplines, we hope to identify and problematize these “ways of being” in the pages that follow. We also hope to illustrate processes of negotiation—both internal and external—that help determine what it means for a par ticular society to be “Islamic.” These processes, in our view, are dynamic and continually renegotiated by the members of any religion. Making such large-scale identifications of what constitutes a Muslim society is not a simple task. More than one billion Muslims are living on the planet at present.2 They do not perform the exact same practices, nor do they hold the exact same beliefs. But this book is not about Islamic practices or beliefs; rather, it is about Muslim societies. Certainly, Muslims think of themselves as members of a single faith. Almost all Muslims adhere to key doctrines, such as the oneness of God and the finality of Muhammad’s prophecy. This is a near-universal fact. Many Muslims (in theory, but also in practice) perform five basic rituals: the testimony of faith, prayer, almsgiving, fasting, and pilgrimage. Ask almost any Muslim if he or she feels a kinship to other Muslims, a sense of belonging to a shared tradition, regardless of caste, creed, or color, and he or she will invariably respond yes.3 1

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ea an S spi Ca

Black Sea Istanbul Ankara

Izmir Algiers

Rabat

Tunis Tripoli

Mediterranean Sea Alexandria

Damascus

Baghdad

Jerusalem

Cairo

Mecca Black Sea, Timbuktu Dakar

Khartoum

Red Sea Aden

Mogadishu Mombasa ATLANTIC OCEAN

FIGurE I.1.

Zanzibar

INDIAN OCEAN

Muslim Africa and the Middle East. Map courtesy of Bill Nelson.

However, Muslim societies are complex, as Cliford Geertz (1971) shows in his impor tant monograph Islam Observed, published more than fifty years ago. Although many of Geertz’s specific conclusions have been challenged over time, the value of analyzing Muslim societies comparatively has been demonstrated by scholars such as Janet Abu Lughod (1991), Juan Cole (1992), and Nile Green (2020). We have also engaged in comparison in our own scholarship, and we too acknowledge the value of such work (Masud, Messick, and Powers 1996; Powers 2002; Tagliacozzo 2009, 2013; Tagliacozzo and Toorawa 2016). In this book, building on Geertz and inspired by others following in his path, we analyze some of the similarities and diferences across global Muslim communities. In Islamic Ecumene, we study Muslim societies along an arc that stretches from the Western world to China, and from central Asia to sub-Saharan Africa (see figures I.1 and I.2). Our central argument is that “Islam” is in fact the sum

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Caspian Sea

Black Sea Istanbul

Bukhara Baghdad

Kashgar

Lahore

Cairo Karachi Mecca Red Sea

ARABIAN SEA

Dhaka

Canton

Bombay BAY OF BENGAL Sulu Sea

Aceh Mogadishu INDIAN OCEAN

FIGurE I.2.

Jakarta

Java Sea

Muslim Asia. Map courtesy of Bill Nelson.

of choices made by Muslims over time and space. We study those choices by grouping analyses of Muslim societies according to diferent rubrics. We argue that those choices tell us much about what a Muslim ecumene might mean. By using a perspective informed by Geertz—comparative and global—we shine a light on the diversity of Muslim societies and on their histories. The scholars who have contributed to this book represent the disciplines of anthropology, archaeology, architecture, art history, history, literature, and political science. The vision produced by their shared scholarship is nothing if not interdisciplinary, and interdisciplinarity is the beating heart of this book. This book covers not only dar al-Islam or the Muslim world proper but also regions of the world in which Muslims are minority populations. Through the comparative treatment of these loosely connected communities across a range of topics, we are able to develop a better idea of what it means to think of the Muslim umma as a cultural community of common affiliation. The book also moves across temporal rubrics such as medieval, early modern, and modern. By transcending geographic and temporal boundaries, we hope to ofer a longer and broader view of the ties that bind Muslim societies. There are pressing reasons for undertaking such a comparative examination at this moment in history. The need to understand Muslims and their societies has never been more urgent. For the past twenty years, large parts of the Muslim world have been in a state of unrest, both internally, inside individual nation-states, and

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regionally, as in the lands once controlled by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), which straddle a fair section of the heartland of the Middle East. In addition, the Arab Spring has drawn attention to social energies lying below the surface of Muslim societies that were on a low boil, chafing against coercive regimes. If one adds regional variants of disafection and violence (e.g., western China, the southern Philippines, and coastal East Africa), it is readily apparent that a global and comparative understanding of the dynamics of Muslim cultures is overdue. We hope to contribute to this understanding. The Comparative Muslim Societies Program at Cornell, which hosted talks by the contributors to this book over the past two decades, was inaugurated in 2001, a momentous year for Muslims and non-Muslims alike. Note, however, that the program began six months before the 9/11 attacks. The timing is important: the program’s reasons for trying to understand the Muslim world did not emerge in response to 9/11, although the rapid spread of political instability after 9/11 has added urgency to the comparative project. The phenomenon of political instability has made it clearer than ever that a methodology of comparison in our understanding of the Muslim world is crucial. This book seeks to advance that comparative agenda. How can we best understand these societies as part of something larger than the nation-state, the primary organizing unit of almost all human societies in the early twenty-first century? Which disciplines can be utilized to look for common themes across these cultures, and how can these disciplines be deployed as a group to elicit diferences and commonalities? Which themes allow us to see the organizational matrices of common Muslim affiliation in societies scattered across the globe that have their own vernacular languages, folk traditions, and worldviews? How can we identify connections between people who regard themselves as members of a single community when the tools for doing so are so varied and require the interventions of specialists across a wide range of disciplines and approaches to knowledge? How does a book of this magnitude provide us with insights into the Muslim world that a single-authored monograph would not? Fi nally, what can we gain from an attempt to cross centuries and thousands of miles of geographic space in search of an answer to the question, What makes Muslim societies Muslim in the face of myriad diferences?

The chapters in this book were solicited for the coverage that they provide across the span of the Muslim world. This is true both geographically, from Europe to Asia and from the central Asian steppe to sub-Saharan Africa, and temporally. The table of contents specifies the rubrics under which we have divided the chapters. Note, however, that we could have arranged the chapters diferently. By

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design, the configuration we have chosen breaks up time and space so that a reader can see the comparisons on ofer across Muslim communities wherever and whenever they exist. In other words, we want the comparisons to be the center of our story. As noted, this book is not about Islam but about Muslim societies and the ways in which these societies constitute a unity within their overall diversity. This is so even while the distinctiveness of Muslim peoples is clearly sketched out here, both as one travels across the globe and as one moves backward and forward in time. We do not claim to have discovered the inner workings of Muslim societies or what makes them unique as a category of human organization. Rather, we attempt to show that these communities have certain shared features while retaining their individual specificities. By examining ethics, education, the experience of colonial subjugation, and postcolonial liberation, many of these nuances of the common and the par ticular rise to the surface. Manifestations of politics, race, and identity formation concretize these comparisons; so, too, do the vagaries of artistic renderings and the processes of translation across multiple societies. Even the ways in which Muslim communities commemorate and mark their dead both connect and separate them; this also emerges from the process of comparison across societies. We try to view these processes as if from an airplane, from the high vantage point of comparison. Some of the main lessons we have learned in placing these chapters in conversation with each other follow below. Over the span of what historians call the long nineteenth century, the languages and technologies associated with educating the umma and furthering knowledge—a main concern of Muslim communities throughout Islamic history—changed profoundly. These changes are clearly evident in central and south Asia, though they take place wherever one might go in dar al-Islam. It is also clear that the colonial period and its aftermath were vital in orienting and reorienting Muslim societies in numerous ways. Between the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, Muslim communities resisted external nonMuslim regimes, as in Algeria, where Algerians were eventually able to overthrow their Gallic overlords. The dynamism of Muslim societies during the colonial era is also reflected in how Muslims changed certain key practices, such as marriage, as in early twentieth-century British colonial Zanzibar. Coastal East Africa was a complicated zone in which non-Muslim majority populations in Kenya and Tanzania designated coastal Muslims as “foreign” and “other” despite the fact that these Swahili peoples had been Muslim and part of the shared history of these coasts for many centuries. The relationship between colonialists and colons was unsettled by the institution of slavery, which was widely practiced throughout the Muslim world. Islamic notions of sovereignty difered from those of occupying Western powers, as in the

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Sulu Archipelago of the southern Philippines, a seascape Islamized many centuries before the Spanish (and later the Americans) started planting flags in this part of the world. Muslims who lived at great distances from European metropoles could be linked to “great events” that were taking place across the globe. The French Revolution, for example, echoed in Anjouan, a small and otherwise insignificant Indian Ocean island whose story was folded into the narrative of global events. The melding of cultures under colonialism led to significant changes in the way in which members of the umma identified themselves as Muslims. In Ottoman Izmir in the eighteenth century and in Accra (contemporary Ghana) in the nineteenth, identity formation was significantly afected by economic interactions between Muslims and non-Muslims. In the twentieth century, the ramifications of interreligious contact extended as far as Tibet, where the invasion of Communist China in 1950, following the end of the Chinese civil war, had substantial adverse consequences on a centuries-old Muslim community in Lhasa. The same was true of the southern Philippines and Mindanao, where local Muslims resisted indigenous Catholic elites from Manila who usurped American rule when the Philippines became an independent republic after World War II. Some of our authors engage with the concept of “othering.” Just as Westerners use walls as a literary trope to marginalize Muslims (in the past and in the present), the Turkish regime under Erdogan used the built environment (actual physical space) to marginalize Turkey’s Alevi minority. In both cases—one literary, the other physical—a powerful group uses the built environment to categorize and control the “other” in ways that support dominant power. These tropes are also invoked in an efort to repress the forces of resistance. We also look comparatively at the portrayal of Muslims in a range of media—for example, poetic representations of Muslim women in Britain in the age of Romanticism, a mid-twentieth-century film project jointly produced by Russians and Indians that tells the tale of a Muslim traveler, and newspaper coverage of Muslims in Germany and the United States. We also examine art and its ser vice in the formation of the nation. Muslim musicians, for example, have created novel musical genres that incorporate nonMuslim artistic forms, such as the Bengali Hindu bhakti genre, which was developed in West Bengal and what is now Bangladesh. Farther west in the Persian Gulf, tiny oil-rich emirates vie with each other to create hypermodern museums as public spaces in which modern art and ancient artifacts fashioned by Muslim artists are displayed and celebrated as part of the national patrimony. However, what is possessed must also be translated. Muslims have long been adept at translating and then incorporating external ideas. The Ottomans and post-Ottoman Turks were masters of such practices, blending into their societies “foreign” ideas that were considered useful. But the activity of “translation”

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sometimes proves difficult, as reflected in Arab American diasporic literature, which seeks to balance “Old World” culture and the newer cultural demands of American life. Finally, the multivalent forces of comparison are manifest when Muslims find themselves in end-of-life situations in the process of remembering the dead. We see this in medieval Iberia and also in Yemen over a period of four centuries, from Yemen’s “cofee age” to its violent and anarchic present. Decisions about how to mark of and signify the departed show us that Muslim societies are simultaneously local, regional, and global, often in overlapping ways. Muslim cultural practices relating to death are dizzyingly complicated. These practices manifest the same signs of local singularity and complexity found in many other aspects of life in the Muslim global community. Whether in medieval Iberia and the western Mediterranean or in Yemen at the present time, specific ways of saying goodbye to the departed—while simultaneously remembering their lives— echo across Muslim lands. Is there an Islamic ecumene, as suggested by the title of this book? It is beyond doubt that most Muslims feel a sense of recognition in the practices and cultural expressions of their coreligionists, wherever they are located across the globe, and no matter the temporal epoch. In other ways, however, there is clearly a disconnect between the experiences of these societies, many but not all of which underwent painful periods of cultural subjugation by the West.4 Choices about what to translate from the outside world, how to do this, and how much should be adopted distinguish one Muslim society from another in recognizable and less recognizable ways. Some of these diferences developed slowly over long periods of time, with the result that some Muslim societies bear little resemblance to others.5 There is no way to avoid the fact that these societies manifest bonds of similarity that cross cultural boundaries. In this respect, the Muslim ecumene may be little diferent from, for example, Buddhist, Jewish, or Christian religious communities. Societies can be singular and corporate in cadence, while at the same time individual and communal in outlook. This book attests to that duality across time and space and through the assembled lenses of a multiplicity of disciplines. Through the work of historians, anthropologists, political scientists, and art historians, we can identify some of the key features of the Muslim ecumene: a broad sense of community; adherence to the five pillars of Islam; and a set of often (though not always) shared beliefs, both religious and secular. We can also see how these features are reinforced through social norms that cross time and space in the fabrication of the umma. The pages that follow illustrate these processes and the many ways to see both unity and diversity within the global Muslim community.

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NOTES

1. On the caliphate and what it has meant to believers over time, see Kennedy 2016 and Hassan 2017. 2. Almost two-thirds of all Muslims in the world live in Asia, and the number of Muslims living in the Middle East and North Africa (the historical heartland of Islam) is very close to the number of Muslims living in sub-Saharan Africa. The four largest Muslim nation-states in the world are all located outside of the Middle East, with only Egypt breaking into the top five, and then only a distant fifth. Clearly, there is no single model of a Muslim society. 3. The sense of communal identity is reflected in academic literature on the Hajj. During the pilgrimage to Mecca, Muslims repeatedly express their sense of attachment to the umma. See Kane 2015 on the Russian Hajj, Faroqhi 1994 on the Ottoman Hajj, and Can 2020 on the Hajj from central Asia. 4. One may compare the spread of Islam along East Africa’s Swahili coast (see Campbell 2019) and its spread across eastern India to the “Bengal Frontier” (see Eaton 1993). 5. For example, for several centuries Muslim families from the Middle East have enjoyed significant prestige in Indonesia; an Arab lineage opens many doors in Muslim circles. Over the past several decades, however, as social and political unrest have spread through parts of the Middle East, increasing numbers of Indonesian Muslims are asking whether that prestige is justified. This is especially the case when such prestige is combined with derision of Indonesian Muslims as “Muslims in name only.” In some circles, Southeast Asian Muslims have begun to see less continuity with their Middle Eastern coreligionists and have pointed this out in increasingly open and aggressive ways. Many Indonesians contrast their success with democratic elections in the past twenty years with the political repression prevalent in much of the Muslim Middle East. On these issues, see Hefner 2000 and Hefner and Bagir 2021. REFERENCES

Abu Lughod, Janet. 1991. Before European Hegemony: The World System AD 1250–1350. New York: Oxford University Press. Campbell, Gwyn. 2019. Africa and the Indian Ocean World from Early Times to Circa 1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Can, Lale. 2020. Spiritual Subjects: Central Asian Pilgrims and Ottoman Hajj at the End of Empire. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. Cole, Juan, ed. 1992. Comparing Muslim Societies: Knowledge and the State in a World Civilization. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Eaton, Richard. 1993. The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier. Berkeley: University of California Press. Faroqhi, Suraiya. 1994. Pilgrims and Sultans: The Hajj under the Ottomans. London: I.B. Tauris. Geertz, Cliford. 1971. Islam Observed: Religious Development in Morocco and Indonesia. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Green, Nile. 2020. Global Islam: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press. Hassan, Mona. 2017. Longing for the Lost Caliphate: A Transregional History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hefner, Robert. 2000. Civil Islam: Muslims and Democratization in Indonesia. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hefner, Robert, and Zainal Abidin Bagir, eds. 2021. Indonesian Pluralities: Islam, Democracy, Citizenship. Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press.

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Kane, Eileen. 2015. Russian Hajj: Empire and the Pilgrimage to Mecca. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Kennedy, Hugh. 2016. Caliphate: The History of an Idea. New York: Basic Books. Masud, M. Khalid, Brinkley Messick, and David S. Powers, eds. 1996. Islamic Legal Interpretation: Muftis and Their Fatwas. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Powers, David S. 2002. Law, Society and Culture in the Maghrib, 1300–1500. New York: Cambridge University Press. Tagliacozzo, Eric, ed. 2009. Southeast Asia and the Middle East: Islam, Movement, and the Longue Durée. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. ——. 2013. The Longest Journey: Southeast Asians and the Pilgrimage to Mecca. New York: Oxford University Press. Tagliacozzo, Eric, and Shawkat Toorawa, eds. 2016. Hajj: Pilgrimage in Islam. New York: Cambridge University Press.

The Natural Border Bounding Migrant Farmwork in the Black Mediterranean Timothy Raeymaekers

INTRODUCTION

More than a concrete sign or place, the frontier is a feeling that creeps over me. It is a feeling of emptiness and abandonment, but also of imminent rupture, a stillness that is ready to explode at any moment. After making a right turn at the height of Candela, I enter a crossroads, which connects to the highway between Bari and Naples, in the heart of Italy’s Meridione, or South. While the night sets in, the road gently bends toward the right, and a hilly landscape opens, covered with vast wheat fields. Far away mountain ridges reveal the shadows of a small village, an abandoned farmhouse, a lonely ruin standing still on the rough terrain. Then, suddenly, I smell the stench of burnt plastic. A minute later, I see small campfires on the side of the road, sex workers looking to warm themselves in the night. Another bend to the right, and I am surrounded by tomato fields. In the fading light, I discern the silhouettes of workers ripping the fruits from the soil, while I see tractors driving hectically back and forth to the large trailer trucks waiting to carry the produce away. As the sun sets, the dark sky makes way for the glow of smoldering wheat stubbles farmers leave to burn after the harvest. This book summarizes five years of ethnographic inquiry in a turbulent territory of agrarian extraction. It discusses the way this territory is actively made from mobile infrastructures like temporary labor camps and informal migrant settlements, which mobilize, channel, and segregate the human and natural resources that enable the expansion of capitalist operations across space. At the

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same time, the book also highlights how such infrastructures remain a terrain of active struggle and contestation as they form the backbone of profound socioecological transformations that characterize the history of Mediterranean supply chain capitalism since the last century and a half. By highlighting the tension between the mobility and immobility, abandonment, and surveillance of migrant agricultural laborers in this deeply bordered space, I intend to highlight the paradox of extractive operations that actively transform the earth and human bodies into productive commodities but simultaneously destroy the very foundations of the life that sustains them—the main point being that, while these operations are often noted for their ability to include (non)citizens in the projects of high modernist development, they may also perform the function of structural exclusion, particularly of informal workers and racialized subjects who are deemed unworthy of modern “civil” integration. While erecting the edifices of modern urbanity and industrialization on one end, capitalist development—particularly in the domain of agrarian production—also actively continues to feed its own counterimage, a “backward” and “uncivilized” outside space that is both actively marginalized and adversely incorporated into the ideal of formal, modern industrial progress. The focal point of my inquiry is the South of Italy, more specifically the boundary between Puglia and Basilicata. This region has become an important site for industrial tomato production: a fruit that, like Mediterranean agriculture as a whole, progressively relies on the extraction of precarious migrant labor in the context of global retail supply chains. Taking these two factors, of “cheap labor” and “cheap commodities,” as a starting point, I will explore what the deeper territorial processes are behind the production of this ostensibly “made in Italy” commodity of the industrial tomato: how political boundaries are drawn around the land and the resources needed to bring it to fruition, what technologies of exclusion and inclusion enable extractive operations to take place in this agrarian frontier, and which political mechanisms structure the allocation, use, and commodification of resources across space. Through these guiding questions I try to analyze how territories and the resources they are believed to contain are actively constructed through contested notions of identity and space. And I insist on the deep material-social entanglements that underlie and guide these processes of capitalist expansion and contraction through spatially complex dynamics of abandonment and valorization, expulsion, and incorporation. In the following three sections, I will quickly introduce the main motivation for writing this book, before discussing my two main focuses of natural racialization and bordering infrastructures.

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#RuInS Initially, my decision to work in Basilicata appeared as a classical no-brainer. My wife’s parents grew up in a small town at the foot of the Apennine Mountains on the Puglia-Basilicata border. For the last fifteen years, I spent most of my summers there, meeting my wife’s friends and hanging around the parental house in the old part of town with my daughter, with the neighbors, and with the emigrati (emigrants) who cyclically returned to the village to meet each other and the kin they had left behind. Together with my friend Marco, a photographer and architect, we used to wake up in the early morning hours to drive through the vast plains of the Alto Bradano area—a wide rectangle between Venosa, Lavello, Genzano, and Palazzo San Gervasio—to spontaneously explore the area of the riforma agraria (agricultural reform): boroughs and hamlets that once figured in the orbit of a vast land reform during the 1950s and 1960s. In a process that is frequently depicted as a development failure from the perspective of state reformers and agro-capitalist enterprises, the riforma agraria, which implied the expropriation and redistribution of around 600,000 to 800,000 hectares (about 1.5 to 2 million acres, or 2,300 to 3,000 square miles) of agricultural land, nevertheless generated a series of important transformations, though mostly indirectly: between 1950 and 1960s, the Meridione’s agricultural workforce dropped from 3.7 to 1.6 million; most peasants ended up working either in the industries in Northern Italy or emigrated abroad (Percoco 2018). Those who had access to the land reform’s credit and infrastructures ended up setting up their own firms, which subsequently entered the global market competition. Each of the houses of the agro-towns spawned by the reform included a living space, a small stable for cattle, and a storage room for wheat and utensils. Other borghi (hamlets) consisted of a more complex urban organization: in Taccone, for instance, rows of terraced houses, a central square, a church, shops, and facilities for public services were constructed to gather inhabitants in a familiar setting. Subsequently afflicted by massive emigration, the municipality in later years offered free access to whoever would promise to transform one of these abandoned houses into a permanent residence. In the mid-2010s, the hamlet vacated for good, except for one of its warehouses, which kept functioning as a storage space for a local farmer. While the ruins of the agricultural reform appear as lonely skeletons in the landscape, they also stand witness to a contentious Italian history of peasant revolts and state repression, of persistent socioeconomic inequalities and capital accumulation that runs like a red thread through the Meridione’s post–World War II history. Next to this familiar Italian history, however, I was struck to find

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the traces of a not-so-distant past. In the area of Spinazzola, just across the Puglia border, for instance, boots, cutlery, and utensils lay around in the derelict buildings of an abandoned village as signs of a hasty eviction. On one of our journeys, we discovered an abandoned settlement that still contained the corpses of animals lying around the abandoned watering holes. Other hamlets were deliberately transformed: buildings covered with cardboard and plastic sheeting, used as storage rooms for mattresses and utensils, repurposed as open kitchens or dormitories. Some were permanently inhabited. On one cold winter night, we bumped into a Sudanese man hiding in the niche of what was once a wood oven of a singular house at Mulini Matinelle, close to Palazzo San Gervasio. The next weeks we stopped over to bring him sugar and canned food, until one day he was gone with the freezing wind. Struck by these absent presences, I started to be more systematic in my travels through Basilicata as my attention gradually shifted toward the northeast, in the area around Palazzo San Gervasio. Here, the cultural heritage of the agricultural reform had gradually taken on a different aspect since the mid-1980s. Abandoned borghi were being reoccupied and repurposed by migrant agricultural workers who, when called in by local agri-food firms, came to be employed as “seasonal” laborers. As I quickly found out, though, “seasonal” was a euphemistic term for those workers who, despite their employment in agri-food jobs the entire year, were actively banned from accessing the most elementary public services of nutrition, health, and accommodation. Like the Sudanese man in Mulini Matinelle, these people did not count very much in the official historiography of the Italian land reform; on the contrary, during the next year and a half I spent in Basilicata I witnessed how they were actively reduced to a condition of those with no rights, subject to extortion and exploitation. Black African migrant workers—most of them of West African (Burkina Faso) origins—who make up the majority of the so-called seasonal laborers in Basilicata, continued to camp out in these makeshift ghettos: located amid the fields, built with whatever ready-to-hand materials (branches, sticks, straw, plastic sheeting, canvas, irrigation pipes) they could find, the crude shelters that partly coincided with the agricultural reform hamlets were a demonstration of the fact that agricultural workers had to use their own creativity and networks to fend for themselves in the absence of formal state support. As I was soon to find out, the regional administration’s logistical approach to the “problem” of migrant labor, which consisted of the active destruction of migrant habitats combined with the haphazard construction of transitory reception centers or labor camps, contrasted sharply with the largely informal ways in which this agricultural workforce interacted with the rural economy and society. As I was trying to make sense of the way rural capitalism in northern Basilicata accompanied a politics of inclusion and exclusion, yet another important layer

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added itself to these already complex dynamics. While authors like Anna Tsing, Dona Haraway, and Jason Moore rightly point at the detrimental socioecological consequences of the type of plantation agriculture I witnessed in Basilicata, I felt that something was missing from this debate. The missing link, in my view, concerned the flattening narrative about the relation between “man” and “nature.” In its fundamentally color-blind conception of ecological extinction (Du Bois [1903] 2007; see also Davis et al. 2019), the narrative that tended to dominate public debate in Italy—but also globally—about plantation agriculture and its relation to the Anthropocene appeared to bolster, rather than resolve, the binary categories that had produced the foundations of rural capitalism in this context in the first place. On the other side of the Atlantic, this had not escaped the attention of critical race thinkers like Laura Pulido, who rightly criticized Anthropocene scholars for limiting the disparities produced by capitalist supply chains to the chasm between rich and poor, or “developed” and “developing” countries. Looking more closely, she notices, the problems we are facing today should also be viewed as an outcome of race-related practices, since the meta-processes that have contributed to the Anthropocene, such as industrialization, urbanization, and capitalism, are essentially the products of a racial politics of differentiation (Pulido 2017, 529).1 Building on a small but interesting Italian post-Marxist and antiracist literature—particularly in correspondence with the emerging concept of the Black Mediterranean—I grew gradually aware of the deeper history of Black struggle and the ways racial oppression shapes and is shaped by agri-food capitalism in the Italian context, but also of the deliberate marginalization of the differentiated life that inhabits contemporary agri-food supply chains but is both deliberately destroyed and restructured through such struggles and their wider political ramifications (McKittrick 2013; see also Black Mediterranean Collective 2021; Gilroy 2021; Hawthorne 2021a). This work has been key for me in developing a more diasporic perspective on the time-space of capitalism. More specifically, it has helped me to understand how the infrastructures of labor segregation that characterize contemporary agri-food chains across the Mediterranean reflect the racialization that has underpinned its birth and growth in this context. It has helped me to place the dynamics of racial differentiation within a longer history of internal and external colonialism (see also Chambers 2008). As I will review in detail in chapter 2, the consolidation of the geo-body of the Italian nation-state was not only significantly intertwined with a process of internal racialization—in the course of which citizens of the South acquired an inferior status as “less civilized” and “not yet” fully recognized citizens of the nascent modern nation-state—but this precarious national-racial identity also shaped Italy’s relation with Africa, particularly the Italian colonies

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of Eritrea and Somalia, which unfolded alongside the process of national unification (Hawthorne 2021a). So, the aim of this book is also to place the history of contemporary Italian agribusiness into a more layered, geographically informed analysis of the Mediterranean as a cradle of modern capitalism, and of the Italian nation-state as one characterized by a constant tension around who is categorized as a legitimate citizen and who is not.

Immersive Geographies This book is not a stand-alone effort. My methodological starting point includes previous, detailed anthropological studies by, among others, Benoit Hazard and Hans Lucht, who narrate the attempts, particularly of West African migrants on the Italian peninsula, to reestablish connections between the desires and constraints of rural lifeworlds that have been significantly destabilized because of proceeding globalization and ecological destruction (Lucht 2012, xii; Hazard 2004). These studies accompany a longer interest, particularly in French African studies of the Burkinabè immigration to Europe, by among others Blion, Bagré, Zongo, Bredeloup, and Schmidt di Friedberg, on which this study gratefully builds (for a discussion see Bredeloup and Zongo 2005). The analytical lens of these authors is similar to mine as they describe how African migrants are taking daily jobs as construction workers, harvesters, and day laborers in the urban informal economy. Moving my lens from the urban periphery to the rural centers of industrialized agriculture, I look specifically for the traces that African migrants leave in the rural landscape, analyzing the signs of their segregation and exclusion, but also of their impermanent settlement in this agrarian frontier. The methodological innovations I bring to the fore in this context involve a more explicit sociomaterial outlook and multiscalar analysis of the phenomenon of agrarian change in this rhizomatic and interconnected landscape. Before moving to the discussion of this methodology, I need to say a few words about doing research in explicitly violent settings. Even if this subject is only marginally addressed in geography as an issue of methodological concern,2 the fact that I am dealing in this study with an explicitly violent phenomenon of illegalized labor intermediation requires separate attention. My engagement with capitalist labor exploitation in the context of the Mediterranean agri-food frontier—which involves explicitly violent modes of labor coercion, eviction, and destruction—has pushed me to further reflect on what it means to live with and make sense of uncertain and constantly changing conditions in the context of capitalist supply chains. Building on my previous experience (Raeymaekers 2014), I have decided to adopt what Teo Ballvé

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(2020) calls an investigative ethnographic stance. Admitting the different ontological starting points of ethnography and investigative journalism, his methodological outlook serves to move beyond the ethnographers’ illusion with distant and lonely reflexivity, while grasping the ways certain practices are generated and given meaning as events in a given context. Contrary to overtly militant approaches to research, Ballvé associates himself with a research method that places the micropolitics of difference in the foreground to understand the subtleties and complexities of power relations in a postcolonial context (see also Gledhill 2000). In a field like this, it is mandatory to pay attention to daily life and lived experience. Ethnography indeed offers a unique method to immerse oneself into such experiences, critically reflect on one’s positionality, and make space for interpretive iterations. During my study, I combined a total of sixty recorded interviews with public administrators in Puglia and Basilicata at various levels of town and regional administrations, from population registries to town council members and regional migration offices, with labor union representatives and antiracist activists, along with an uncounted number of unrecorded interviews with policy experts, journalists, and academics active in the domain of labor migration. Next to these interviews, I could rely on a detailed analysis of public records, specifically of newspaper articles and court cases about labor intermediation, in the region of Basilicata, thanks to my access to the database of the Associazione Michele Mancino in Palazzo San Gervasio. The association holds a vast archive of newspaper and court case clippings about migration, which it has been accumulating and storing since its inception in 1996. Furthermore, it has been an active participant in various contestations of human rights and labor rights violations. My connection with this association permitted me to secure further access to precious information in this regard: besides furnishing personal contacts, it allowed me to get hold of detailed reports and accounts of the history of labor migration in the Alto Bradano area of Basilicata, which gradually became the focal point of my inquiry. My research in Puglia, on the other hand, relies on shorter research I did on the site of the Casa Sankara–Azienda Fortore, a former agricultural reform institution turned migrant reception center in 2014, close to San Severo (province of Foggia). Thanks to my connection to the project’s main protagonists, whose story I tell in chapter 5, I could secure access to key political figures who supported the initiative. During my intermittent research visits to Casa Sankara (four in total) I carried out dozens of unrecorded interviews with migrant workers inhabiting the site, along with repeated, and partially recorded, interviews with the initiators of the project. These interviews accompanied a further snowball sampling of acquaintances and allies of the project’s initiators, whom I also interviewed formally for this project.

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Next to these formal inquiries, however, I felt I needed to spend more time to also foreground the lived experiences of the workers this book takes to heart. Beyond my short visits to the ghettos of Foggia (Grand Ghetto) and Cerignola (Tre Titoli, or Ghana House), where I interviewed inhabitants and activists from Radio Ghetto, CGIL, Caritas, and Emergency, I decided to focus my ethnographic inquiry on the Alto Bradano area, where, apart from the work of Domenico (Mimmo) Perrotta, there has been no systematic study of African labor migration. I spent a total of seven months in the ghettos and agrotowns of this area, hanging out regularly with African workers and with local youth. Methodologically, I build here on what Biao Xiang (2013) calls a “multiscalar” ethnographic method. Rather than an immersion exclusively in one social network or ethnic group, this method allows for more question-driven research, which explicitly follows through on multiple connections and leads. Multiscalar ethnography, as Xiang explains, is concerned with how social phenomena are constituted through actions at different scales. It follows the lead of multi-sited ethnography by tracing a series of empirically driven “tracking strategies” that follow commodities, people, or policies across interconnected geographic scales. At the same time, it seeks to understand how the constantly changing coordination of social networks across geographic scales actively transforms spaces. In my case, this method allowed me to note the increasing ethnic separation as well as the differentiated levels of social embeddedness of agricultural labor in the given context (for a discussion see Perrotta and Raeymaekers 2022). And it offered a way to conceptualize the active boundary work that mediating figures, like caporali, fulfill while they contribute to changing norms and political subjectivities (compare Lindquist, Xiang, and Yeoh 2012; Lin et al. 2017). Yet while such immersive methods do have the potential to reveal the quotidian dimension of extractive operations and the cultural and political meaning they acquire, they reveal only one part of the longer histories of racial oppression, colonization, and discrimination that today’s experience of monocropping agriculture are embedded in. For these histories, I could only rely on existing literature. Chapter 1 tries to give an overview of that literature while bringing to the fore the missing links in what I call the color-blind perception that characterizes much of the Anthropocene literature. Finally, I need to emphasize that my personal inquiry has been at times a lonely exercise, but mostly, and fortunately, a constant collective reflection and conversation with others. People who have accompanied me on my tracks during the seven months I spent physically in Basilicata and Puglia between 2015 and 2019 during different agricultural seasons included my wife, a social psychologist; Marco, a photographer and architect; the theater director Pietro Floridia; and several students and colleagues.

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One student, Marc-Antoine Frébutte, dedicated a master’s study to an adjacent area, which resulted in a monograph (Frébutte 2021). A colleague with roots in Burkina Faso, Muriel Côte, stayed with me in the field for several weeks. With colleagues Ilaria Ippolito and Mimmo Perrotta, I also curated a couple of publications. These research collaborations did not emerge coincidentally but are also a way to demonstrate—contra the ideal of recording, lonely in the field, life as it is—that ethnography is and should always be a collective exercise, which involves joint reflections, strategies of inquiry, and adaptations to a constantly moving terrain. It is evident that investigating violent economies, like the one I present here, also generates a more immediate problem of access—to people, sites, and information. The high stakes involved in my inquiries made the spaces I visited often polarized and politically charged. At a more rudimentary level, often people I talked to were extremely reluctant to share information. This reluctance concerned many stakeholders: from the day workers who were tired of intrusive media attention, to bureaucrats who were unhappy with outside interference, to NGO representatives who regarded research as ideologically laden. As Ballvé (2020) highlights, “The close-up study of economies of violence inevitably implies scholars’ intrusion into high-stakes spaces that are dangerous, hyperpolarized, politically charged, socially opaque, and fraught with ethical dilemmas.” Such intrusion inevitably results in moments when one must acknowledge one’s proper limits. Despite my long experience in a protracted war zone like the east of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, I noticed many times during my fieldwork that I was not able to “cut it”—a feeling that sometimes left me desperately in doubt about the added value of ethnographic research in general (see also Billo and Hiemstra 2013; Coddington 2017). One episode made these limits blatantly clear to me. While I was talking with a group of legal advisers in the ghetto of Ghana House in 2016, a young man in a pickup truck speeded perilously by, nearly running over my feet. “He’s the son of the local boss,” one of the legal advisers told me. “He just wants to show us who is in charge here.” A moment later, a decrepit car screeched to a halt at the local bar in front of us. A tall man got out and went into the bar. We heard some noise inside. Not more than five minutes later, he stormed out again and speeded away in his car. Forty-five minutes later, an ambulance arrived. The driver said there had been a fight, and that someone had been wounded. Nobody seemed to care, not even the driver, who—after we indicated the bar in front of us— slowly parked his ambulance there, then helped carry out a heavily bleeding man moments later. Gathered around the trunk of another car a short distance away, a group of workers who were filling out forms with their Italian capo watched the scene with indifference.

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While these events unfolded, a group of workers had joined us from their tents to get some legal advice. One told a member of the team that he had been expelled from a migrant reception center in Parma four months earlier. He said he had since been sleeping rough on the streets, first in Naples and then here, hoping to find some work. Another Ghanaian man said he arrived in Italy in 2011 from Libya. He didn’t want to leave there, he said, because he had always worked there, was happy to earn his money, and had his own apartment. While we were commenting on Mediterranean geopolitics, another, considerably younger, boy joined us. He said, “You know why we don’t learn Italian here? Because the only words they tell us are ‘fuck,’ ‘fuck you,’ and ‘faster’!”3 We all laughed. But at the same time, this short visit also revealed an intricate pattern of violence, which— as I wrote—was not easy to grasp, neither from a psychological nor from a political perspective. Twenty minutes later, while we were taking some pictures of a truck scale (a scale to weigh the content of truck trailers), a man walked toward Marco and me from a neighboring gate, asking us insistently what we were doing there. I protested, saying we were on a public road and he had no right to meddle in our business. Minutes later, a car stopped between us on the gravel pathway. The driver and the man at the gate told us again we should leave. Something snapped in me. Infuriated, I told them they should get lost. The driver called to Marco and told him that “your friend better calm down,” showing him what looked very much like a pistol in his lap. Dragged away by Marco, I got into our car, and we drove off. I was still infuriated but—after Marco told me what he saw—happy to be safe from harm. This episode brings together many of the acute challenges one faces when doing research in contested resource frontiers. Part of this challenge has to do with the difficulty of identifying who exactly is wielding power in such unstable environments—an opaqueness that, I will argue, is functional to the type of boundary I am describing here. But another part of my uneasiness, I felt, also had to do with the fact that I was doing ethnographic research “at home.” To address these multiple challenges, I decided to adopt two complementary methods: triangulation and multi-sitedness. Concretely, triangulation involves a way of assuring the validity of research by using different kinds of data as well as methods of data collection. Mandatory for the nonmilitant researcher in such a context is to remain transparent about the fact that interviews will be held with as many stakeholders as possible. In my case public interviews involved humanitarian organizations, NGOs, local associations, local and regional administrators, labor union representatives, day workers, police, and activists. While this method may still raise suspicion—as I will indicate, humanitarian agencies remained surprisingly closed to any form of sharing information—it also opens doors that more militant research in this context would be unable to access. Besides interviewees