AbstractIn Denktagebuch (Thought diary, 1950‐73), Hannah Arendt wrote that acts which cannot be forgiven are beyond punishment and hence cannot be reconciled to. In this essay, I draw from Arendt to further theorize and extend the concept of irreconciliation. I draw together ethnographic material, historical material, documents, media reports, and reviews during this era of irreconcilability which includes Black Lives Matter; the memorialization debates on the removal of statues of enslavers; the history of slavery in the United Kingdom; and the 'harmony ideology' experienced by BAME (Black, Asian, and minority ethnic) academics within UK organizations linked to long‐term discrimination. I argue for the concept of irreconciliation as a bulwark against impunity, against a 'window‐dressed', symbolic performance of redress, and to be able to echo Arendt's words that 'this' – any original cause of injustice – 'ought never to have happened'.
AbstractMost post‐conflict reconciliatory exercises make it incumbent upon survivors to forgive, and seek closure as a demonstration of 'moving on'. Various anthropologists have criticized reconciliation and related forms of 'alternative justice' extensively but within the framework of maintaining social bonds and the rule of law. In this introduction, I reflect critically on the interdisciplinary scholarship on reconciliation, apology, and forgiveness, and theorize irreconciliation as a less examined lens of analysis. Rather than being in opposition to 'peace', irreconciliation allows us to interrogate the status quo by refusing to forgive endemic impunities, particularly in the aftermath of staged processes of justice and the absence‐presence of the rule of law. In this special issue of the JRAI, I ethnographically explore irreconciliation's links with law, aesthetics, temporality, resistance, and control to locate its multiple analytical manifestations. Irreconciliation allows an important examination of the rule of law within processes of unresolved genocidal injustices and debates relating to slavery, Black Lives Matter, and institutional responses.
The formation of Bangladesh in 1971 coincided with the death of three million people and rape of two hundred thousand women (according to official and contested figures) by the West Pakistani army and local East Pakistani collaborators. Yet 1971 rarely exists in any public form in Pakistan and there is no "will to architecture" in relation to it. This essay explores the phenomenon of "apparent amnesia" of the past that is 1971 in Pakistan. What implications does consigning 1971 to oblivion have for Pakistan's history? This essay seeks to examine the politics of knowing what not to narrate in relation to the disavowed pasts of 1971 in Pakistan. It draws on long-term ethnographic research on the public memories and nationalist narratives of sexual violence during the Bangladesh war of 1971, along with discussions with various Pakistani scholars and students and engagement with historical sources, government documents, textbooks, blog posts, press articles, and other secondary materials. This gives us an insight into what implications 1971 has for the understandings of apology and forgiveness in relation to the shadowy pasts of Pakistan.
AbstractThe so called western, rational, individual, autonomous, self marked by freedom, potential and choice and deemed essential for modernity has predominantly been juxtaposed with the presumed collective, static, bounded, "identity" of the "non‐west" and its inhabitants. Anthropological scholarship has thus been marked by its focus on the "identity" of its subjects (drawn from a collective and shared with others) instead of a self. Nowhere has this theorisation between the self and the collective been so fraughtly interrogated as in the Anthropology of South Asia. A common place occurrence in academic, policy and everyday discussions, South Asian personhood has been comprehended only through various collective categories like gender, kinship, religion, caste, community following the Dumontian holism that there are no individuals and only caste and hierarchy in India. The discussions of self have also remained understudied in historiography inspite of being intrinsic to the Indian post‐colonial public life. Recently, historians have turned to individual sensibilities and life stories while others have argued that the self is a product of history transformed in a public debate. It is important to reflect on the methodological connotations of using such person‐centred self‐representations – narratives, novels, biographies and memoirs – which are often deemed to be inadequate sources of anthropological and ethnographic value.Theoretically and methodologically these articles on self in South Asia distinctly depart from the existing anthropological and historical literature by bringing together at the same juncture both synchronic and diachronic accounts in conjunction with psychic and social histories. In this volume we are interested in the practices and conceptual tools behind the self than a definition. The focus here is on the ethnographic examination of the self and personal experience, of the minutae of the interactions of daily life, on the dialogical characters of the self in South Asia rather than a "South Asian" self. The idea of the self becomes particularly pertinent within the shifting contexts of economic liberalization, migration, violent conflicts, consumerism, new media and the role of transnationally affiliated groups in challenging/reifying static, orientalised and essentialising accounts of the self.
AbstractThis paper addresses how the wombs of women and the absent skin on the circumcised penises of men become the predominant sites on which racialized and gendered discourses operating during the Bangladesh War are inscribed. This is explored by examining instances of sexual violence by Pakistani soldiers and their local Bengali collaborators. The prevalence of these discourses in colonial documents about the Bengali Muslims underscores the role of history, the politics of identity and in the process, establishes its link with the rapes of Bangladeshi women and men. Through this, the relationship between sexual violence and historical contexts is highlighted. I locate the accounts of male violations by the West Pakistani army within the historical and colonial discourses relating to the construction of the Bengali Muslim and its intertextual, contemporary citational references in photographs and interviews.I draw on Judith Butler's and Marilyn Strathern's work on gendering and performativity to address the citational role of various practices of discourses of gender and race within colonial documents and its application in a newer context of colonization and sexual violence of women and men during wars. The role of photographs and image-making is intrinsic to these practices. The open semiotic of the photographs allows an exploration of the territorial identities within these images and leads to traces of the silence relating to male violations. Through an examination of the silence surrounding male sexual violencevis-à-visthe emphasis on the rape of women in independent Bangladesh, it is argued that these racialized and gendered discourses are intricately associated to the link between sexuality and the state in relation to masculinity.
The nation, it is increasingly recognized, needs to be performed and materialized. The representation of national conflicts and contested pasts by governments and communities through various aesthetic artefacts and practices seeks to evoke and regulate multiple senses and feelings. But is a straightforwardly productive affect –feeling– always manifested? In this introduction, I reflect critically on some of the anthropological scholarship on nation, aesthetics, and senses and seek to offer new terms of analysis and styles of interpretation. Overall, I seek to problematize the often too easily invoked relationship between performative material embodiment and the nation. It is at the (often fractured) intersection of these multiple levels and through an ethnographic engagement with the acts of production, consumption, and social participation in the aesthetic representation of these national pasts that I locate the analytical focus of the anthropology of nation, aesthetics, and feelings in this special issue of theJournal of the Royal Anthropological Institute.RésuméIl est à présent généralement admis que la nation a besoin de se manifester et de se matérialiser. La représentation des conflits nationaux et des passés litigieux par les gouvernements et les populations, par le biais de différents artefacts et pratiques esthétiques, a pour but d'évoquer et de réguler des sens et des sentiments multiples. Mais y a‐t‐il toujours une manifestation d'un affect simplement productif, d'unsentiment ? Dans cette introduction, l'auteure examine d'un œil critique une partie de la littérature anthropologique sur la nation, l'esthétique et les sens et tente de proposer de nouveaux termes d'analyse et modes d'interprétation. Globalement, elle cherche à formuler le problème de la relation, souvent trop facilement invoquée, entre incarnation matérielle performative et nation. C'est à l'intersection (souvent disloquée) de ces multiples niveaux, par une approche ethnographique des actes de production, de consommation et de participation sociale à la représentation esthétique de ces passés nationaux, qu'elle place le point focal de l'analyse anthropologique de la nation, de l'esthétique et des sentiments, dans ce numéro spécial duJournal of the Royal Anthropological Institute.
This paper seeks to explore the affective aesthetics that are generated through the perceptions of 'genocidal' horrors in relation to accounts of sexual violence during wars, and to engagements with war memorials and museums commemorating such atrocities. In particular it focuses on the trope 'never again', which aptly captures the search for juridical and moral justice linked to events of conflict and violence in the twentieth and twenty‐first centuries. The cosmopolitan moral and aesthetic orientations by means of which such tropes come to represent the horrors of the Bangladesh War of 1971 are analysed via an examination of the Bangladesh Liberation War Museum. Through a study of exhibits and visitors to this 'memorial museum', the paper considers how 'genocidal' cosmopolitanism, involving connections and identification with global 'genocidal' tropes, alters the processes of ownership and appropriation of emotions towards, the sense of belonging to, and claims on the nation.RésuméL'auteure explore ici l'esthétique affective générée par les perceptions des horreurs « génocidaires » en relation avec les récits de violences sexuelles en temps de guerre et avec les engagements vis‐à‐vis des mémoriaux et musées commémorant ces atrocités. Elle se concentre en particulier sur le leitmotiv « plus jamais », qui résume judicieusement la recherche de morale et de justice en lien avec les événements conflictuels et violents des XXe et XXIe siècles. Les orientations morales et esthétiques cosmopolites suivant lesquelles ces leitmotive en viennent à représenter les horreurs de la guerre du Bangladesh de 1971 sont analysées par le biais d'un examen du Bangladesh Liberation War Museum. Par une étude des pièces exposées et des visiteurs de ce « musée de la mémoire », l'auteure examine la façon dont le cosmopolitisme « génocidaire », avec ses liens et son identification aux leitmotive « génocidaires » mondiaux, influe sur les processus d'appropriation et de possession des émotions envers la nation, sur le sens d'appartenance à celle‐ci et sur les attentes vis‐à‐vis d'elle.
There has been much academic work outlining the complex links between women and the nation. Women provide legitimacy to the political projects of the nation in particular social and historical contexts. This article focuses on the gendered symbolization of the nation through the rhetoric of the 'motherland' and the manipulation of this rhetoric in the context of national struggle in Bangladesh. I show the ways in which the visual representation of this 'motherland' as fertile countryside, and its idealization primarily through rural landscapes has enabled a crystallization of essentialist gender roles for women. This article is particularly interested in how these images had to be reconciled with the subjectivities of women raped during the Bangladesh Liberation War ( Muktijuddho) and the role of the aestheticizing sensibilities of Bangladesh's middle class in that process.
Memorialization of valor and losses through war memorials unquestioningly presume that material objects stand for and embody memory. In exploring this relationship, this article focuses on the evocation of mourning and melancholia in the annual commemorations at the site of two war memorials dedicated to the Martyred Intellectuals of the Bangladesh War of 1971. Following a discussion of the increased ethnographic reconceptualization of culture in spatialized ways, the article examines the role of the built environment in simulating an emotional experience for its visitors. The article argues that the different evocations of mourning and melancholia at these memorials are a reflection of the middle-class aesthetics and the political trajectory of Bangladesh since the 1971 war and in the present. This highlights the links among memorialization, the current socio-political condition, differing practices and responses of the visitors, and the historicity of the urban spaces in which the memorials are situated.
