Citation

Werbner P. Curr. Anthropol. 2010; 51(2): 193-221.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2010, University of Chicago Press)

DOI

10.1086/651041

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Can there be an engaged public anthropology of global Islamic terror? Arguably, anthropology was not meant to be a study of clandestine networks or unreachable social groups secretly plotting sudden cataclysmic international crises. These days, anthropologists study societies in motion and, increasingly, the impact of a global media and global economic events on local communities. In order to comprehend these, our conceptual tools have had to be stretched beyond their original limits in the study of small-scale societies. Yet our ethnographic mediations still start from the bottom-from the small places where we do our ordinary, quotidian research. This includes, as in my own work, the study of religious mobilization and social movements, radical religious rhetoric, and ontologies of religious nationalism as they are inflected and moved by mediated global crises. Importantly, also, anthropologists have studied and continue to study violence: in the face of civil war or the fallout from global and state terror, they have contributed evocatively to an understanding of the sufferings and force of memory of ordinary citizens, the victims of such crises, and the activism of human rights NGOs. But September 11 defied the scale of such events. In this paper I consider the possibilities for a genuinely anthropological analysis of Islamic militancy in the West following the suicide bombings of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. As anthropologists we may try, I argue, to rely on journalistic accounts to supplement our knowledge of small places. After all, journalism too creates its own ethnographic mediations from the collocation of many small places. But are journalistic accounts of war zones or clandestine terror reliable? The paper explores some of these issues for anthropology.© 2010 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research.

Language: en