Editorial Foreword
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Articles in this Issue
Materials of Absence and Presence
H. Glenn Penny
Material Connections: German Schools, Things, and Soft Power in Argentina and Chile from the 1880s through the Interwar Period
Incorporating Nature
Filipe Calvão
The Company Oracle: Corporate Security and Diviner-Detectives in Angola’s Diamond Mines
David Bond
Oil in the Caribbean: Refineries, Mangroves, and the Negative Ecologies of Crude Oil
Sovereignty and the Mythic
Bart Klem, Sidharthan Maunaguru
Insurgent Rule as Sovereign Mimicry and Mutation: Governance, Kingship, and Violence in Civil Wars
Alev Çinar, Hakki Taş
Politics of Nationhood and the Displacement of the Founding Moment: Contending Histories of the Turkish Nation
Persons, Things, Person-Things
Mischa Suter
Debt and Its Attachments: Collateral as an Object of Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Liberalism
Ceyda Karamursel
Transplanted Slavery, Contested Freedom, and Vernacularization of Rights in the Reform Era Ottoman Empire
Review Essay
Matt Tomlinson, Christian Difference. A Review Essay
Author Biographies
David Bond teaches on the environment at Bennington College. Trained as an anthropologist, Bond studies oil spills and their imprint on environmental science and governance. His work shows how toxic disruptions can fix vital relations with new forms of knowledge and care. Bond received his Ph.D. from the New School for Social Research and is currently the Associate Director of the Center for the Advancement of Public Action at Bennington College.
Filipe Calvão is a socio-cultural anthropologist and Assistant Professor at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Switzerland. In his published work, Calvão examines the social and cultural relations binding mining communities and corporations, the materiality of minerals, and the problem of ‘unfree labor.’ He is finishing a book manuscript based on his research on extractive economies in postcolonial Angola, in which he examines the life of mining communities engrained in a secretive system of social, legal, and power relations, from the sourcing of gemstones to the quotidian surveillance of workers.
Alev Çınar is Professor of Political Science at Bilkent University, Turkey. She received her M.A. in Sociology from Bogazici University and her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Pennsylvania. She completed two postdoctoral fellowships at the International Center for Advanced Studies, New York University, and the Five College Women’s Studies Research Center, University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She is the author of Modernity, Islam and Secularism in Turkey: Bodies Places and Time (University of Minnesota Press, 2005); co-editor (with Thomas Bender) of Urban Imaginaries: Locating the Modern City (University of Minnesota Press, 2007), and (with Srirupa Roy and Maha Yahya) of Visualizing Secularism and Religion: Egypt, Lebanon, Turkey, India (University of Michigan Press, 2012). Her articles have appeared in journals such as the Comparative Studies in Society and History, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Theory, Culture and Society, and Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. Çınar has taught at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst as a Ford Associate and at Bryn Mawr College as a Fulbright Visiting Specialist. She has received various awards and grants from different institutions including Fulbright, Ford Foundation, Social Science Research Council, Mellon Foundation, United States Institute of Peace, and Institute for Advanced Study (membership). She received a Distinguished Teacher Award from Bilkent University in 2008.
Ceyda Karamursel is a lecturer at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. She completed her Ph.D. in history at the University of Pennsylvania, where she also held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Middle East Center. Her research focuses on the practice of slavery in the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish republic in the second half of the nineteenth and early decades of the twentieth centuries and has been supported by the Social Science Research Council and the Charlotte W. Newcombe Foundation, among others. She is currently working on a book manuscript that continues to explore Ottoman slaves’ and slaveholders’ perceptions of freedom, justice, equality, and in an indirect way, citizenship.
Bart Klem holds a Ph.D. in Political Geography (University of Zurich) and is a Lecturer in Development Studies at the University of Melbourne. His research focuses on the interconnections between politics, development, and violent conflict in South and Southeast Asia. His work has appeared in the Journal of Asian Studies, Political Geography, and Development and Change. He co-edited (with Bert Suykens) a forthcoming special issue for Modern Asian Studies (52, 2, 2018), titled “The Politics of Order and Disturbance: Public Authority, Sovereignty and Violent Contestation in South Asia.”
Sidharthan Maunaguru received his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University and is Assistant Professor at the South Asian Studies Programme, National University of Singapore. He is currently completing a book on transnational marriages that explores the ways in which Sri Lankan Tamil communities, who are dispersed by war, recreate their sense of community by attempting to rebuild personal and familial networks through the institution of marriage. His subsequent research examines Hindu religion and politics by looking at Hindu temples, philanthropy, power, and mobility of Tamils of Sri Lanka. His articles have appeared in Contribution to Indian Sociology, and Religion and Society.
Michael Meng is Associate Professor of History at Clemson University. He is the author of Shattered Spaces: Encountering Jewish Ruins in Postwar Germany and Poland (Harvard, 2011) and co-editor (with Erica Lehrer) of Jewish Space in Contemporary Poland (Indiana, 2015). He has published articles in Central European History, Contemporary European History, New German Critique, German History, and The Journal of Modern History. He is currently writing a book on death, history, and salvation in European thought, as well as a book on the history of authoritarianism in modern American history.
H. Glenn Penny is Professor of Modern European History at the University of Iowa. Much of his work is focused on relations between Germans and non-Europeans over the last two centuries. He is the author of Objects of Culture: Ethnology and Ethnographic Museums in Imperial Germany (University of North Carolina Press, 2002), and Kindred by Choice: Germans and American Indians since 1880 (University of North Carolina Press, 2013). He is also co-editor (with Matti Bunzl) of Worldly Provincialism: German Anthropology in the Age of Empire (University of Michigan Press, 2003), and (with Laura Graham) Performing Indigeneity: Global Histories and Contemporary Experiences (University of Nebraska Press, 2014). He is currently engaged in an in-depth study of German interactions with Guatemala and with completing a book manuscript, “German History Unbound, 1760s–1960s,” for Cambridge University Press.
Mischa Suter is a lecturer at the Department of History at the University of Basel. His dissertation, “Rechtstrieb: Schulden und Vollstreckung im liberalen Kapitalismus 1800–1900,” came out in 2016. Currently he studies money and economic rationality by examining the discourse of usury in high modernity. Another of his projects is concerned with the history of ethnopsychology in the epoch of decolonization. His broader research interests include the history of capitalism, class and classification struggles, the decolonization of the senses, history, and social theory.
Hakkı Taş is a Philipp Schwartz Fellow at the Institute for Intercultural and International Studies, University of Bremen. Holding a Ph.D. in Political Science from Bilkent University, Taş worked as an Assistant Professor at Ipek University. He has been a visiting researcher at Yale University, American University in Cairo, and Swedish Defence University. Taş’s research interests include democratization, civil-military relations, identity politics, and power and resistance, with a special focus on Turkey and Egypt. His articles have appeared in journals including PS: Political Science and Politics, Third World Quarterly, Social Compass, and Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations.
Matt Tomlinson is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the Australian National University in Canberra. Since 1996 he has conducted research on Pacific Islands Christianity, with much of his fieldwork based in Fiji. From 2012 to 2016, he held an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship for research on indigenous Christian theologies for which he conducted new research in Samoa, American Samoa, and New Zealand. He is the author of Ritual Textuality: Pattern and Motion in Performance (Oxford, 2014) and In God’s Image: The Metaculture of Fijian Christianity (California, 2009), as well as the coeditor of several volumes including The Monologic Imagination (with Julian Millie, Oxford, 2017), New Mana: Transformations of a Classic Concept in Pacific Languages and Cultures (with Ty P. Kāwika Tengan, ANU, 2016), and Christian Politics in Oceania (with Debra McDougall, Berghahn, 2012).
