Mark D Calder | University of Aberdeen (original) (raw)
PhD thesis by Mark D Calder
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Articles and chapters by Mark D Calder
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Christians and the Middle East Conflict, Jan 1, 2014
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Talks by Mark D Calder
Recent ethnographic accounts of Christian contexts, especially those of Eastern and “Oriental” tr... more Recent ethnographic accounts of Christian contexts, especially those of Eastern and “Oriental” traditions, call into question Dumont's famous claim that Christian selfhood is "the individual in relation to God". On the contrary, Christians frequently experience themselves firstly as belonging within the ecclesia, or “church”, described in the New Testament as “the Body of Christ” and, drawing on a Hebrew Biblical image, “the Holy Nation”. This paper argues, following theologian John Milbank, that this self-location of Christian lives within the church has been occluded by social anthropologists' assumption of a secular social within which all lives are imagined to reside. This naturalized social, as a context within which the church can be located alongside other (social) phenomena such as the nation or clan, would therefore make it harder to discern alternative ecclesiological narrations and experiences of self. But if the sociological is irrevocably secular, then the ecclesiological is surely inescapably Christian. This reframing of Christian selfhood, however, seems to draw the study of Christian selfhood closer to the study of Muslim and Jewish selfhood, in which the individual in relation to God is less likely to be assumed. How can post-secular anthropology be enhanced by attending to Christian, Muslim and Jewish selfhood within a called, redeemed or chosen people, and how might an ecclesiological anthropology differ from or harmonise with anthropologies which begin with the ‘ummah or Jewish conceptions of the people of Israel?
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Some theorists have focussed on a Palestinian “Christian predicament” in which Christians such as... more Some theorists have focussed on a Palestinian “Christian predicament” in which Christians such as those in Bethlehem are forced to rearticulate their “identities” as a response to regional trends such as “Islamisation”. In this paper I propose that dramatic changes in the local and everyday are the best starting point for considering people’s self-narrations, especially if we wish to interrogate concepts such as “identity”, “secularism”, or “religiosity” which cannot be taken for granted as comparative categories. Specifically, changes in the town’s landscape and demography, changes which are immediately disclosed to the senses, have greatly affected Christians’ ability to form efficacious solidarities, primarily through diminishing their freedom of movement, broadly understood, and rendering slowly-evolved norms of “negotiated neighbourliness” increasingly redundant. With the radical reconfiguration of Bethlehem Christians’ connections to the outside world and to their neighbours, perceived regional or national changes should be considered as narratives or discourses with which to make sense of disorienting new local realities rather than being taken for these new realities per se. With reference to ethnographic fieldwork primarily with Syriac Orthodox Christians in Bethlehem, I will consider how individuals mobilise motifs drawn from a range of established discourses to assert effective solidarities in this changed environment. However, I do not present these discourses as neatly mapping onto Palestinian Christian “identities”. Self-narration explicitly vis-à-vis these changed realities reveals a dialogic, relational process, in which solidarities are being rearticulated, exerting both centripetal and centrifugal forces when it comes to Palestinian national unity, and perhaps disclosing a distinct model of the relationship between people, environment and meaning.
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Freedom of movement, or more specifically its loss, is a reoccurring motif in both academic repre... more Freedom of movement, or more specifically its loss, is a reoccurring motif in both academic representations of Palestinian social life and in Palestinians’ own testimonies about their lives, leading some to draw parallels between the desiccated landscape of the West Bank and aboriginal reserves in more familiar settler colonial societies. Meanwhile, a related and very radical change in the demographic make-up of some of the quasi-autonomous Palestinian areas, such as Bethlehem, poses questions of inhabitants’ relationships to the land and their neighbours. With reference to ethnographic fieldwork in Bethlehem, engaging especially with Syriac Orthodox Christians, this paper considers how movement has been curtailed, how it persists, and how movement relates to people’s self-narrations, their sense of difference and their solidarities. Part of this is the important place of narratives of indigenousness and migration in Palestinian discourses, as well as the particular experience of disorientation experienced by those who have not been physically displaced but disconnected from people and places once considered part, or potential parts, of their radically and rapidly changed environment. For Syrian Orthodox Christians in Bethlehem, who pray in Aramaic to the Aramaic-speaking Incarnation of God born metres from their homes and church, the opportunities for new self-narrations and tactical solidarities are as great as the rapid and radical changes to their town. Drawing on Michel de Certeau’s opposition of the relational “tactics” exercised by those without the power to establish more-or-less secure places, and the “strategies” of those who do possess this power, it will consider the relationship between established “identity orientations”, normative solidarities articulated in written, institutionalised or otherwise circulating strategic discourses, and people’s day to day engagement with a destabilised world in which people’s identifications and differentiations appropriate inherited motifs in creative ways. Palestinians, perhaps increasingly self-differentiating from one another according to sectarian, political or clan solidarities, nevertheless are sometimes able to narrate differences with centripetal force, and in the process may generate new strategic discourses of national unity out of a reconfigured pluralism.
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Christians across denominations share a great deal of vocabulary for talking about their faith. T... more Christians across denominations share a great deal of vocabulary for talking about their faith. Thus, when the priest in the Syriac Orthodox church in Bethlehem describes the key to defending Syriac Orthodoxy as being ‘to make the Bible part of our lives’, it is easy to assume that his statement contains no distinctively Syriac Orthodox claims to people’s allegiance. When triangulated with concerns about the continued existence of a community which self-consciously preserves ‘the language of our Lord’ in the Holy Land, and with the rich material in and through which Syriac Orthodox Christians mostly experience scripture, this statement should nevertheless cause researchers pause as they seek to locate biblical texts in their representations of Christian communities. Indeed, it is a good starting point for researching the role of the Bible as a Syriac artefact heard, sung and felt in a Syriac liturgy, in the defence of souls through an ancient tradition against perceived threats old and new.
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The biblicism of Christian Zionists has determined to some extent that representations of Palesti... more The biblicism of Christian Zionists has determined to some extent that representations of Palestinian uses of the Bible engage almost exclusively with the question of interpretation. The use of scripture, however, is a part of Palestinian Christian social and communal life in its various traditional and congregational expressions, and interpretation is only one part of this. To focus on interpretation only may be inadequately to represent the place of scripture in Palestinian Christian lives, and in representing etic priorities, may in fact contribute to the minoritisation of Palestinian Christians. Instead, I propose that representations of Palestinian Christianity take account of the material, spatial and bodily domains in and through which the Bible is used, drawing on the concept of textuality. An account of textualities may seek to reconstruct the dialogues implicit in various uses of scripture, and disclose claims to the text that are less determined by the priorities of Western protestants. Such representations may reinforce a Palestinian Contextual Theology which both emerges out of and speaks into Palestinian realities.
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Books by Mark D Calder
This book contains the proceedings of the International conference, “Shifting Identities: Changes... more This book contains the proceedings of the International conference, “Shifting Identities: Changes in the social, political, and religious structures in the Middle East”, which was held in Cyprus in July 2015. The conference brought together around 50 professors, historians, theologians, social scientists and researchers from over 15 countries including Europe, the USA, and the Middle East. Case studies from Palestine, Israel, Lebanon, Iran, and Sweden were presented. Some of these case studies focused on particular community like the Armenians, Syrian orthodox, or Protestants while others studies chose to tackle issues like feminism or Arabism in the Middle East. Several of the articles struggled theologically to find a meaning to what is happening in the aftermath of the so-called Arab Spring showing a way forward. Shifting identities is not a pure theoretical exercise but are related to shifts that were experienced by several of the authors in the course of their biographical journeys.
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General by Mark D Calder
by Gorgias Press, Simon Wolfgang Fuchs, Isabel Toral-Niehoff, Joas Wagemakers, Susan Ashbrook Harvey, David Hernández de la Fuente, Anna Rogozhina, Elena Narinskaya, Johanne Louise Christiansen, Amina Inloes, Marcus Milwright, Najib George Awad (Dr. Phil; Dr. Theol. Habil.), Ryan Schaffner, Laura Hassan, Vladimir Bošković, Mark D Calder, Pietro Longo, Paolo Maggiolini, Keenan Baca-Winters, Saer El-Jaichi, Avraham Elmakias, Orhan Elmaz, Luca Patrizi, Rana Issa, Adam Sabra, Clinton Bennett, Adrian C . Pirtea, Michael R J Bonner, and Paul C. Dilley
Gorgias Press' 2018 Islamic Studies' catalogue sets out a selection of Gorgias' published and for... more Gorgias Press' 2018 Islamic Studies' catalogue sets out a selection of Gorgias' published and forthcoming publications that are related to Islamic and Near Eastern studies, as well as studies carried out for other fields of research that intersect with Islamic studies.
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Drafts by Mark D Calder
This paper considers the diverse situations in which Palestinian Christians experience and narrat... more This paper considers the diverse situations in which Palestinian Christians experience and narrate themselves, attending to commonalities and differences in both. This entails attention to environments broadly understood: the “clusterings” of lives in different places across historic Palestine, each inscribed by stories and meanings that have implications for everyday experience. We will therefore consider in turn Palestinian Christians’ situations in different landscapes, jurisdictions, group relationships (both to one’s own and others), and in relation to powerful circulating narratives, not least those that are distinctively Christian and Palestinian. This is an attempt to sketch a physical and symbolic ecology of Palestinian Christian diversity, their interrelationship with places, materials, others (human and non-human), and countless meanings.
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Papers by Mark D Calder
Journal of Islamic Studies, 2017
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Bethlehem's Syriac Christians, 2017
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Iran and the Caucasus, 2016
At first sight, the Syriac Orthodox community in Bethlehem appears to be well-described as “ethno... more At first sight, the Syriac Orthodox community in Bethlehem appears to be well-described as “ethno-religious”: while many Palestinian siryān emphasise their connection to an ancient Aramean ethnos, this identification also usually entails some relationship to the Syriac Orthodox Church. However, “religion” (ethno or otherwise) is arguably too overburdened a category to tell us much about how being siryāni in Bethlehem compares to being something else. I propose, instead, that thinking of Syrian self-articulation as a kind of ecclesiology, a tradition of incarnating a body (specifically Christ’s), draws attention to the creative, situated and dialogic process of being and becoming siryāni, while problematising categories with which social scientists customarily think about groups. Unlike ethno-religion, ecclesiology captures the fraught pursuit of redeemed sociality, connecting Bethlehem’s destabilized local present to universal and eternal hope. In Bethlehem, what’s more, these dialo...
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Anthropology of the Contemporary Middle East and Central Eurasia, 2018
REVIEW - Gabiam, Nell. The Politics of Suffering: Syria’s Palestinian Refugee Camps. 208 pp. Bloo... more REVIEW - Gabiam, Nell. The Politics of Suffering: Syria’s Palestinian Refugee Camps. 208 pp. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016
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This document is the report for Work Package 7 (WP7) of the EU-funded project Power2Youth (P2Y). ... more This document is the report for Work Package 7 (WP7) of the EU-funded project Power2Youth (P2Y). WP7 provides an overview of the key policy messages for the EU that arise from the research conducted as part of Work Packages 1–6. These key messages are: (1) Young people face multiple forms of marginalization, with the exact nature and combination depending on their social circumstances (including but not exclusively nationality, place of residence, socio-economic class, religion, sect, gender and clan); (2) The problems faced by young people in the South and East Mediterranean (SEM) countries are reminiscent of those faced by young people in the EU; however, they are often faced in more extreme form (e.g., rates of graduate unemployment) and some are quite different (e.g., the extreme levels of political and personal insecurity endured by SEM young people); (3) Although young people are particularly vulnerable to processes of marginalization, these processes are not exclusive to them...
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Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
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Christians and the Middle East Conflict, Jan 1, 2014
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Recent ethnographic accounts of Christian contexts, especially those of Eastern and “Oriental” tr... more Recent ethnographic accounts of Christian contexts, especially those of Eastern and “Oriental” traditions, call into question Dumont's famous claim that Christian selfhood is "the individual in relation to God". On the contrary, Christians frequently experience themselves firstly as belonging within the ecclesia, or “church”, described in the New Testament as “the Body of Christ” and, drawing on a Hebrew Biblical image, “the Holy Nation”. This paper argues, following theologian John Milbank, that this self-location of Christian lives within the church has been occluded by social anthropologists' assumption of a secular social within which all lives are imagined to reside. This naturalized social, as a context within which the church can be located alongside other (social) phenomena such as the nation or clan, would therefore make it harder to discern alternative ecclesiological narrations and experiences of self. But if the sociological is irrevocably secular, then the ecclesiological is surely inescapably Christian. This reframing of Christian selfhood, however, seems to draw the study of Christian selfhood closer to the study of Muslim and Jewish selfhood, in which the individual in relation to God is less likely to be assumed. How can post-secular anthropology be enhanced by attending to Christian, Muslim and Jewish selfhood within a called, redeemed or chosen people, and how might an ecclesiological anthropology differ from or harmonise with anthropologies which begin with the ‘ummah or Jewish conceptions of the people of Israel?
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Some theorists have focussed on a Palestinian “Christian predicament” in which Christians such as... more Some theorists have focussed on a Palestinian “Christian predicament” in which Christians such as those in Bethlehem are forced to rearticulate their “identities” as a response to regional trends such as “Islamisation”. In this paper I propose that dramatic changes in the local and everyday are the best starting point for considering people’s self-narrations, especially if we wish to interrogate concepts such as “identity”, “secularism”, or “religiosity” which cannot be taken for granted as comparative categories. Specifically, changes in the town’s landscape and demography, changes which are immediately disclosed to the senses, have greatly affected Christians’ ability to form efficacious solidarities, primarily through diminishing their freedom of movement, broadly understood, and rendering slowly-evolved norms of “negotiated neighbourliness” increasingly redundant. With the radical reconfiguration of Bethlehem Christians’ connections to the outside world and to their neighbours, perceived regional or national changes should be considered as narratives or discourses with which to make sense of disorienting new local realities rather than being taken for these new realities per se. With reference to ethnographic fieldwork primarily with Syriac Orthodox Christians in Bethlehem, I will consider how individuals mobilise motifs drawn from a range of established discourses to assert effective solidarities in this changed environment. However, I do not present these discourses as neatly mapping onto Palestinian Christian “identities”. Self-narration explicitly vis-à-vis these changed realities reveals a dialogic, relational process, in which solidarities are being rearticulated, exerting both centripetal and centrifugal forces when it comes to Palestinian national unity, and perhaps disclosing a distinct model of the relationship between people, environment and meaning.
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Freedom of movement, or more specifically its loss, is a reoccurring motif in both academic repre... more Freedom of movement, or more specifically its loss, is a reoccurring motif in both academic representations of Palestinian social life and in Palestinians’ own testimonies about their lives, leading some to draw parallels between the desiccated landscape of the West Bank and aboriginal reserves in more familiar settler colonial societies. Meanwhile, a related and very radical change in the demographic make-up of some of the quasi-autonomous Palestinian areas, such as Bethlehem, poses questions of inhabitants’ relationships to the land and their neighbours. With reference to ethnographic fieldwork in Bethlehem, engaging especially with Syriac Orthodox Christians, this paper considers how movement has been curtailed, how it persists, and how movement relates to people’s self-narrations, their sense of difference and their solidarities. Part of this is the important place of narratives of indigenousness and migration in Palestinian discourses, as well as the particular experience of disorientation experienced by those who have not been physically displaced but disconnected from people and places once considered part, or potential parts, of their radically and rapidly changed environment. For Syrian Orthodox Christians in Bethlehem, who pray in Aramaic to the Aramaic-speaking Incarnation of God born metres from their homes and church, the opportunities for new self-narrations and tactical solidarities are as great as the rapid and radical changes to their town. Drawing on Michel de Certeau’s opposition of the relational “tactics” exercised by those without the power to establish more-or-less secure places, and the “strategies” of those who do possess this power, it will consider the relationship between established “identity orientations”, normative solidarities articulated in written, institutionalised or otherwise circulating strategic discourses, and people’s day to day engagement with a destabilised world in which people’s identifications and differentiations appropriate inherited motifs in creative ways. Palestinians, perhaps increasingly self-differentiating from one another according to sectarian, political or clan solidarities, nevertheless are sometimes able to narrate differences with centripetal force, and in the process may generate new strategic discourses of national unity out of a reconfigured pluralism.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Christians across denominations share a great deal of vocabulary for talking about their faith. T... more Christians across denominations share a great deal of vocabulary for talking about their faith. Thus, when the priest in the Syriac Orthodox church in Bethlehem describes the key to defending Syriac Orthodoxy as being ‘to make the Bible part of our lives’, it is easy to assume that his statement contains no distinctively Syriac Orthodox claims to people’s allegiance. When triangulated with concerns about the continued existence of a community which self-consciously preserves ‘the language of our Lord’ in the Holy Land, and with the rich material in and through which Syriac Orthodox Christians mostly experience scripture, this statement should nevertheless cause researchers pause as they seek to locate biblical texts in their representations of Christian communities. Indeed, it is a good starting point for researching the role of the Bible as a Syriac artefact heard, sung and felt in a Syriac liturgy, in the defence of souls through an ancient tradition against perceived threats old and new.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
The biblicism of Christian Zionists has determined to some extent that representations of Palesti... more The biblicism of Christian Zionists has determined to some extent that representations of Palestinian uses of the Bible engage almost exclusively with the question of interpretation. The use of scripture, however, is a part of Palestinian Christian social and communal life in its various traditional and congregational expressions, and interpretation is only one part of this. To focus on interpretation only may be inadequately to represent the place of scripture in Palestinian Christian lives, and in representing etic priorities, may in fact contribute to the minoritisation of Palestinian Christians. Instead, I propose that representations of Palestinian Christianity take account of the material, spatial and bodily domains in and through which the Bible is used, drawing on the concept of textuality. An account of textualities may seek to reconstruct the dialogues implicit in various uses of scripture, and disclose claims to the text that are less determined by the priorities of Western protestants. Such representations may reinforce a Palestinian Contextual Theology which both emerges out of and speaks into Palestinian realities.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
This book contains the proceedings of the International conference, “Shifting Identities: Changes... more This book contains the proceedings of the International conference, “Shifting Identities: Changes in the social, political, and religious structures in the Middle East”, which was held in Cyprus in July 2015. The conference brought together around 50 professors, historians, theologians, social scientists and researchers from over 15 countries including Europe, the USA, and the Middle East. Case studies from Palestine, Israel, Lebanon, Iran, and Sweden were presented. Some of these case studies focused on particular community like the Armenians, Syrian orthodox, or Protestants while others studies chose to tackle issues like feminism or Arabism in the Middle East. Several of the articles struggled theologically to find a meaning to what is happening in the aftermath of the so-called Arab Spring showing a way forward. Shifting identities is not a pure theoretical exercise but are related to shifts that were experienced by several of the authors in the course of their biographical journeys.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
by Gorgias Press, Simon Wolfgang Fuchs, Isabel Toral-Niehoff, Joas Wagemakers, Susan Ashbrook Harvey, David Hernández de la Fuente, Anna Rogozhina, Elena Narinskaya, Johanne Louise Christiansen, Amina Inloes, Marcus Milwright, Najib George Awad (Dr. Phil; Dr. Theol. Habil.), Ryan Schaffner, Laura Hassan, Vladimir Bošković, Mark D Calder, Pietro Longo, Paolo Maggiolini, Keenan Baca-Winters, Saer El-Jaichi, Avraham Elmakias, Orhan Elmaz, Luca Patrizi, Rana Issa, Adam Sabra, Clinton Bennett, Adrian C . Pirtea, Michael R J Bonner, and Paul C. Dilley
Gorgias Press' 2018 Islamic Studies' catalogue sets out a selection of Gorgias' published and for... more Gorgias Press' 2018 Islamic Studies' catalogue sets out a selection of Gorgias' published and forthcoming publications that are related to Islamic and Near Eastern studies, as well as studies carried out for other fields of research that intersect with Islamic studies.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
This paper considers the diverse situations in which Palestinian Christians experience and narrat... more This paper considers the diverse situations in which Palestinian Christians experience and narrate themselves, attending to commonalities and differences in both. This entails attention to environments broadly understood: the “clusterings” of lives in different places across historic Palestine, each inscribed by stories and meanings that have implications for everyday experience. We will therefore consider in turn Palestinian Christians’ situations in different landscapes, jurisdictions, group relationships (both to one’s own and others), and in relation to powerful circulating narratives, not least those that are distinctively Christian and Palestinian. This is an attempt to sketch a physical and symbolic ecology of Palestinian Christian diversity, their interrelationship with places, materials, others (human and non-human), and countless meanings.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Journal of Islamic Studies, 2017
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Bethlehem's Syriac Christians, 2017
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Iran and the Caucasus, 2016
At first sight, the Syriac Orthodox community in Bethlehem appears to be well-described as “ethno... more At first sight, the Syriac Orthodox community in Bethlehem appears to be well-described as “ethno-religious”: while many Palestinian siryān emphasise their connection to an ancient Aramean ethnos, this identification also usually entails some relationship to the Syriac Orthodox Church. However, “religion” (ethno or otherwise) is arguably too overburdened a category to tell us much about how being siryāni in Bethlehem compares to being something else. I propose, instead, that thinking of Syrian self-articulation as a kind of ecclesiology, a tradition of incarnating a body (specifically Christ’s), draws attention to the creative, situated and dialogic process of being and becoming siryāni, while problematising categories with which social scientists customarily think about groups. Unlike ethno-religion, ecclesiology captures the fraught pursuit of redeemed sociality, connecting Bethlehem’s destabilized local present to universal and eternal hope. In Bethlehem, what’s more, these dialo...
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Anthropology of the Contemporary Middle East and Central Eurasia, 2018
REVIEW - Gabiam, Nell. The Politics of Suffering: Syria’s Palestinian Refugee Camps. 208 pp. Bloo... more REVIEW - Gabiam, Nell. The Politics of Suffering: Syria’s Palestinian Refugee Camps. 208 pp. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
This document is the report for Work Package 7 (WP7) of the EU-funded project Power2Youth (P2Y). ... more This document is the report for Work Package 7 (WP7) of the EU-funded project Power2Youth (P2Y). WP7 provides an overview of the key policy messages for the EU that arise from the research conducted as part of Work Packages 1–6. These key messages are: (1) Young people face multiple forms of marginalization, with the exact nature and combination depending on their social circumstances (including but not exclusively nationality, place of residence, socio-economic class, religion, sect, gender and clan); (2) The problems faced by young people in the South and East Mediterranean (SEM) countries are reminiscent of those faced by young people in the EU; however, they are often faced in more extreme form (e.g., rates of graduate unemployment) and some are quite different (e.g., the extreme levels of political and personal insecurity endured by SEM young people); (3) Although young people are particularly vulnerable to processes of marginalization, these processes are not exclusive to them...
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