This lecture by Charles Hirschkind, Professor of Anthropology at the University of California Berkeley, takes place as part of the Seeing and Not Seeing Seminar.
The seminar explores multiple ways of “seeing and not seeing” actors, events, and movements usually conceptualized as coherent and bounded in social and political analysis. We look at the multiple processes, forces, and representations that occur in and around these phenomena, out of which they are constituted.
We mean by “seeing and not seeing” not that there is “another way of seeing” that we mean to find, but rather that we are committed to simultaneity, to holding multiple kinds and ways of seeing in view - and to seeing what emerges from that holding.
SANS not as a binary - to see or not see. Rather, we mean to hold in view the conventional, understood, bounded actor or force or event “in front of our eyes” - climate change or a repressive police force or a social movement - even as we see around and through it.
Charles Hirschkind’s research interests concern religious practice, media technologies, and emergent forms of political community in the Middle East, North America, and Europe. He gives particular attention to diverse configurations of the human sensorium, and the histories, ethics, and politics they make possible.
Taking contemporary developments within the traditions of Islam as his primary focus, he has explored how various religious practices and institutions have been revised and renewed both by modern norms of social and political life, and by the styles of consumption and culture linked to global mass media practices.
His first book, The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics (Columbia 2006), explores how a popular Islamic media form - the cassette sermon - has profoundly transformed the political geography of the Middle East over the last three decades. His more recent project is a study of the different ways in which Europe’s Islamic past inhabits its present, unsettling contemporary efforts to secure Europe’s Christian civilizational identity.
Taking southern Spain as his focus, he explores the forms of history and memory that mediate and sustain an active relation to Europe’s Islamic heritage, and the impact these forms have on the ethical and political possibilities of finding a place for Islam in Europe today.
We'd like to thank the multiple sponsors of this event, first and foremost the Center for the Humanities, which funds the SANS faculty seminar, and the Center for the Study of Europe. We are also grateful for the sponsorship of the Global Development Policy Center, the School of Theology, CURA, the Department of Anthropology, the Center for Latin American Studies, and Program in Cinema and Media Studies.
23 авг 2024
