Ali-Reza Bhojani and Morgan Clarke take us behind the scenes of their collaborative work as a textualist and anthropologist studying religious authority.
Category: Behind the Scenes
If you are curious about the special labor that goes into producing each new issue of CSSH, or about the unseen deployments of theory and method that go into our individual essays, this feature will provide a regularly updated tour of our extended work space.
Certainty, doubt, and ethnographic knowledge production
Agnieszka Pasieka follows up with former fieldwork consultants (far-right activists in Italy), prompting reflection on the limits of ethnographic knowledge production.
From Thrift to Austerity
Catherine Alexander shares the initial fieldwork breakthroughs and subsequent scholarly pursuits that led to the nuanced understanding of thrift she presents in her CSSH essay, “The Simple Bare Necessities: Scales and Paradoxes of Thrift on a London Public Housing Estate.”
Better late than never – and winding up better
Barbara Metcalf describes the frustrations and breakthroughs over nearly forty years that brought her to the conclusions in her 2022 CSSH article, “A Sovereign and Virtuous Body: The Competent Muslim Woman’s Guide to Health in Thanawi’s Bihishtī Zēwar(1905).”
Killing Heroes – How Martyrdom and Revenge Complicate the Relationship between History and Memory
On the 101st anniversary of Soghomon Tehlirian’s trial for the assassination of Talat Pasha, Alp Yenen calls for a post-heroic rethinking of history and memory to overcome the “martyr-avenger complex.”
“Feeling Under Pressure”: Realities of Sex, Love, and Dating in Urban China
Jean-Baptiste Pettier describes the central role of parents in the choosing of life partners in urban China, a surprising finding that altered his research trajectory.
Uncomparable, incomparable things
Courtney Bender’s recent CSSH article, Mrs. Rockefeller’s Exquisite Corpse (63-4), reads like a detective story, with new mysteries on every page: an intriguing discovery in the archive, a forgotten painting by a famous artist within, an unsigned message in a foreign script on the cover. Here, the author discusses the analytic tool that helped her piece together and interpret…
An Ilex Counterpoint
Christine Folch compares the trajectories of yerba mate and yaupon, stimulants she explores in her 2009 and 2021 CSSH essays, to understand why yaupon never took off.
Death and Burial: The Affinity of Journalism and Ethnography
In this companion essay to his recent CSSH article, “Burying “Zik of Africa”: The Politics of Death and Cultural Crisis,” Wale Adebanwi discusses the insights revealed by returning as an anthropologist to events first explored as a journalist.
“Battle of Agencies” Released
Ali Sipahi describes how the Gezi Park protests of 2013 transformed his thinking about the 1985 massacres of Armenians in Harput, Turkey, analyzed in his recent CSSH essay, “Deception and Violence in the Ottoman Empire: The People’s Theory of Crowd Behavior during the Hamidian Massacres of 1895.”