Glenn Bowman | University of Kent, Canterbury (original) (raw)
Papers by Glenn Bowman
Middle East Report, 1990
Silwan and Jerusalem. Scout uniforms were less flamboyant, and where on the previous day the brig... more Silwan and Jerusalem. Scout uniforms were less flamboyant, and where on the previous day the bright insignia of the various sectarian communities had stood out strongly, here all the scouts had covered the badges of their particular units with green, red, black and white ...
Journal of Area Studies, 1993
Late August 1992 was not, by most lights, an auspicious time to convene a seminar of intellectual... more Late August 1992 was not, by most lights, an auspicious time to convene a seminar of intellectuals and scholars from the several republics of what was by then already'Former Yugoslavia'. Open war, which had initially flared up between Slovene forces and the Yugoslav National Army (JNA) in June of 1991, had been raging throughout Croatia for a full year. The Krajina had been wrenched from Croatian control in the late summer and autumn in fierce fighting between the Croatian army and militias and the combined forces of the ...
American Anthropologist, 1991
Social Anthropology, 2013
Post-Ottoman Coexistence: Sharing Space in the Shadow of Conflict, 2016
2001. The Violence in Identity. In Anthropology of Violence and Conflict (eds) Bettina Schmidt & Ingo Schroeder. European Association of Social Anthropologists. London: Routledge. pp. 25-46., 2001
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 2021
Taylor & Francis eBooks, Feb 16, 2010
Editorial Milenio eBooks, 2010
Berghahn Books, Mar 1, 2016
Chapter 3 Identifying versus identifying with'the Other' Reflections on the sit... more Chapter 3 Identifying versus identifying with'the Other' Reflections on the siting of the subject in anthropological discourse Glenn Bowman Edwin Ardener, in an essay entitled'Social Anthropology and the Decline of Modernism'presented before the 1984 ASA conference (Ardener 1985, ...
Social Anthropology, Jan 19, 2007
Berghahn Books, Dec 31, 2022
Middle East Journal, 2008
PALESTINE AND PALESTINIANS: Identity and Religion in Palestine: The Struggle between Islamism and... more PALESTINE AND PALESTINIANS: Identity and Religion in Palestine: The Struggle between Islamism and Secularism in the Occupied Territories, by Loren Lybarger. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007. xxiv + 246 pages. Bibl. to p. 255. Index to p. 265. $39.50. Reviewed by Glenn Bowman There is a tendency in popular discourse to reify Palestinians in various ways, and this tendency has, with a few exceptions, infiltrated academic studies. Whether Palestinians are depicted as victims or as terrorists, the images often presented of them are of "a people" stabilized within a dialectical opposition to the similarly fixed "Israelis." More nuanced readings, which divide those blocs into secularists and "fundamentalists" (whether Islamist or Jewish), nonetheless still produce broad-brush portraits of collectivities aligned around the "Arab-Israeli" conflict. Loren Lybarger's Identity and Religion in Palestine is a welcome exception to this tendency. The book, which Lybarger describes as "a sustained attempt to listen carefully to Palestinians and interpret their choices within a framework informed by historical context, ethnographic observation, and sociological theory" (p. xv), examines the impact on Palestinian individuals and families of two intifadas, the Oslo Accords, the faltering hegemony of the Palestine National Authority, and the humiliations and deprivations generated by Israel's policies of "de-development." Through close analysis of interviews and events, interwoven with analysis of social constraints and determinants, Lybarger shows how what had previously appeared as a collective Palestinian narrative has, since Oslo, unraveled into a multitude of new identity narratives "not easily reducible to the simple dichotomy of Islamist versus secular nationalist" (p. 236). In exposing this fragmentation and analyzing the strategies of liberation variously sited within those fragments, Lybarger shows not only the complexity of politics within the contemporary Palestinian community but also the numerous and divergent pathways future politics might follow. Lybarger taught English in Bayt Jala in the West Bank between 1986 and 1989; in 1999, after training as an anthropologist, she returned to Palestine for a year's fieldwork in two refugee camps (one near Bethlehem and the other in Gaza). This sustained involvement in the region allowed him intimate access to a sampling of individuals representative of a range of political and religious persuasions as well as of different generations and locales of significant experience (the "insider"/ "outsider" distinctions are particularly salient). Lybarger extends the concept of "socio-historical generations" (drawn from Karl Mannheim) to investigate how the rapid and traumatic changes of that period shaped the identities and politics not only of different age groups but also of religious and political cadres: [T]he shared experience of a moment of social destabilization stamped a generation with its particular sense of "fate"... All later experiences of this group would be filtered through the memory of the originating trauma and meanings attached to it (p. …
This special issue of Visual Anthropology is the product of a workshop organized by members of th... more This special issue of Visual Anthropology is the product of a workshop organized by members of the Visual Anthropology Network of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA). In September 2005, eight speakers came to Oxford University. The papers had been selected om more than 40 proposals for papers dealing with a hugely diverse range of theoretical and practical applications of visual anthropology that we had received in response to our call. What follows is a brief outline of the four themes we proposed to our participants, and the questions we considered most important to discuss. Next follows short introductions to the papers themselves, written by the persons responsible for working with the authors to produce the versions that are being published here. THE AGENDA As we enter the 21st century, visual anthropology has increasingly expanded om the emphasis on ethnographic filmmaking that dominated in the latter part of the 20th century, and has taken on a more diverse identity, one encompassing uses of documentation and elicitation and other visual research methods. Photographic and filmic research methods as well as the analysis of visual texts have been important in visual anthropological practices, om the work of Bateson and Mead [1942] through to Collier [1967, 1973] and beyond, as has been repeatedly emphasized [Ruby and Chalfen 1974; Morphy and Banks 1997]. However, until the end of the 20th century, visual methods of research and analysis were largely undiscussed or taken for granted in a subdiscipline dominated by and identified with ethnographic film production (at the levels of both university training and practice). Currently visual anthropology is engaged in a series of transformations, which to a large degree involve making links with other disciplines, testing how it might be more closely integrated with mainstream anthropology and examining its applied potential outside academia.
Middle East Report, 1990
Silwan and Jerusalem. Scout uniforms were less flamboyant, and where on the previous day the brig... more Silwan and Jerusalem. Scout uniforms were less flamboyant, and where on the previous day the bright insignia of the various sectarian communities had stood out strongly, here all the scouts had covered the badges of their particular units with green, red, black and white ...
Journal of Area Studies, 1993
Late August 1992 was not, by most lights, an auspicious time to convene a seminar of intellectual... more Late August 1992 was not, by most lights, an auspicious time to convene a seminar of intellectuals and scholars from the several republics of what was by then already'Former Yugoslavia'. Open war, which had initially flared up between Slovene forces and the Yugoslav National Army (JNA) in June of 1991, had been raging throughout Croatia for a full year. The Krajina had been wrenched from Croatian control in the late summer and autumn in fierce fighting between the Croatian army and militias and the combined forces of the ...
American Anthropologist, 1991
Social Anthropology, 2013
Post-Ottoman Coexistence: Sharing Space in the Shadow of Conflict, 2016
2001. The Violence in Identity. In Anthropology of Violence and Conflict (eds) Bettina Schmidt & Ingo Schroeder. European Association of Social Anthropologists. London: Routledge. pp. 25-46., 2001
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 2021
Taylor & Francis eBooks, Feb 16, 2010
Editorial Milenio eBooks, 2010
Berghahn Books, Mar 1, 2016
Chapter 3 Identifying versus identifying with'the Other' Reflections on the sit... more Chapter 3 Identifying versus identifying with'the Other' Reflections on the siting of the subject in anthropological discourse Glenn Bowman Edwin Ardener, in an essay entitled'Social Anthropology and the Decline of Modernism'presented before the 1984 ASA conference (Ardener 1985, ...
Social Anthropology, Jan 19, 2007
Berghahn Books, Dec 31, 2022
Middle East Journal, 2008
PALESTINE AND PALESTINIANS: Identity and Religion in Palestine: The Struggle between Islamism and... more PALESTINE AND PALESTINIANS: Identity and Religion in Palestine: The Struggle between Islamism and Secularism in the Occupied Territories, by Loren Lybarger. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007. xxiv + 246 pages. Bibl. to p. 255. Index to p. 265. $39.50. Reviewed by Glenn Bowman There is a tendency in popular discourse to reify Palestinians in various ways, and this tendency has, with a few exceptions, infiltrated academic studies. Whether Palestinians are depicted as victims or as terrorists, the images often presented of them are of "a people" stabilized within a dialectical opposition to the similarly fixed "Israelis." More nuanced readings, which divide those blocs into secularists and "fundamentalists" (whether Islamist or Jewish), nonetheless still produce broad-brush portraits of collectivities aligned around the "Arab-Israeli" conflict. Loren Lybarger's Identity and Religion in Palestine is a welcome exception to this tendency. The book, which Lybarger describes as "a sustained attempt to listen carefully to Palestinians and interpret their choices within a framework informed by historical context, ethnographic observation, and sociological theory" (p. xv), examines the impact on Palestinian individuals and families of two intifadas, the Oslo Accords, the faltering hegemony of the Palestine National Authority, and the humiliations and deprivations generated by Israel's policies of "de-development." Through close analysis of interviews and events, interwoven with analysis of social constraints and determinants, Lybarger shows how what had previously appeared as a collective Palestinian narrative has, since Oslo, unraveled into a multitude of new identity narratives "not easily reducible to the simple dichotomy of Islamist versus secular nationalist" (p. 236). In exposing this fragmentation and analyzing the strategies of liberation variously sited within those fragments, Lybarger shows not only the complexity of politics within the contemporary Palestinian community but also the numerous and divergent pathways future politics might follow. Lybarger taught English in Bayt Jala in the West Bank between 1986 and 1989; in 1999, after training as an anthropologist, she returned to Palestine for a year's fieldwork in two refugee camps (one near Bethlehem and the other in Gaza). This sustained involvement in the region allowed him intimate access to a sampling of individuals representative of a range of political and religious persuasions as well as of different generations and locales of significant experience (the "insider"/ "outsider" distinctions are particularly salient). Lybarger extends the concept of "socio-historical generations" (drawn from Karl Mannheim) to investigate how the rapid and traumatic changes of that period shaped the identities and politics not only of different age groups but also of religious and political cadres: [T]he shared experience of a moment of social destabilization stamped a generation with its particular sense of "fate"... All later experiences of this group would be filtered through the memory of the originating trauma and meanings attached to it (p. …
This special issue of Visual Anthropology is the product of a workshop organized by members of th... more This special issue of Visual Anthropology is the product of a workshop organized by members of the Visual Anthropology Network of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA). In September 2005, eight speakers came to Oxford University. The papers had been selected om more than 40 proposals for papers dealing with a hugely diverse range of theoretical and practical applications of visual anthropology that we had received in response to our call. What follows is a brief outline of the four themes we proposed to our participants, and the questions we considered most important to discuss. Next follows short introductions to the papers themselves, written by the persons responsible for working with the authors to produce the versions that are being published here. THE AGENDA As we enter the 21st century, visual anthropology has increasingly expanded om the emphasis on ethnographic filmmaking that dominated in the latter part of the 20th century, and has taken on a more diverse identity, one encompassing uses of documentation and elicitation and other visual research methods. Photographic and filmic research methods as well as the analysis of visual texts have been important in visual anthropological practices, om the work of Bateson and Mead [1942] through to Collier [1967, 1973] and beyond, as has been repeatedly emphasized [Ruby and Chalfen 1974; Morphy and Banks 1997]. However, until the end of the 20th century, visual methods of research and analysis were largely undiscussed or taken for granted in a subdiscipline dominated by and identified with ethnographic film production (at the levels of both university training and practice). Currently visual anthropology is engaged in a series of transformations, which to a large degree involve making links with other disciplines, testing how it might be more closely integrated with mainstream anthropology and examining its applied potential outside academia.
Since I began in the early 1980s to research Muslim-Christian cohabitation of religious sites, I ... more Since I began in the early 1980s to research Muslim-Christian cohabitation of religious sites, I have been convinced of the political importance of making practices of intercommunal 'sharing' ethnographically visible. Thirty five years of that work, spread across the Eastern Mediterranean (Israel/Palestine, Yugoslavia and its successor states, and both sides of the Cyprus divide), have not only revealed contemporary and historical choreographies of cohabitation but also their disintegration and the forces which bring it about. While I was carrying out this research, an accelerating resurgence of ethnic, religious and nationalistic politics was taking place not only throughout the areas I was studying but also in the global arena. This 'identitarian' politics, its philosophical grounding and its shaping of academic and popular thought and practice is the focus of the first half of this paper; in the second part I look theoretically and empirically into examples of sharing and its refusal so as to show not only how cohabitation with alterity works but as well to make visible the processes which sabotage it. In the past eighteen months several events have taken place that foreground the importance of the material addressed in this article. The referendum on the U.K.'s membership in the European Union, called in order to protect David Cameron's prime ministership om the right wing of the Tory party, gave rise to a heated debate about the place of 'foreigners' in Great Britain, culminating in a contentious decision to avoid the immigration of others regardless of what such avoidance might cost. Across the Atlantic the vitriolic rhetoric of Donald Trump and his fellow travellers, again focussing on the need to protect an ill-defined 'us' om a threatening 'them', gave the presidency of the most powerful state in the world to a man promising to exclude Muslims, expel immigrants and build walls against territorial neighbours. In France, Holland, Hungary and elsewhere in Europe a populist nationalism has burgeoned threatening to erode, if not eradicate, the progressive gains that the West, and with it much of the world, has enjoyed since the end of the Second World War. Constructing Others One of the more troubling aspects of these events is that the 'other' against which people turn is not simply that of a territorial outside deemed antagonistic but is as well made up of people and communities living in contiguity with those who've come to see them as threatening and unwelcome. Trump's proposed deportation orders refer to 'illicit' residents who, in many cases, have been born and raised to adulthood in the USA, while in the UK, as in France, Holland and elsewhere in contemporary Europe, people who have been long integrated into those countries and their local communities are targeted by politicians and governmental agencies that question, and oen delegitimate, their rights to be there. Undeniably there are people who repeat and ampli the antagonistic messages accompanying and promoting these events. Some of these have always been around, nursing their antipathies in silence or manifesting them under the cover of darkness but, as the recent surges of racialist and sectarian attacks have shown, the normalisation of discourses of intolerance and hatred gives legitimacy to their rage and encourages them to emerge om the shadows calling on others to take up their crusade. As those discourses proliferate, and are subtly or not so subtly legitimated by governmental, academic and media dissemination, calls to neighbour hatred come to seem increasingly commonsensical and anything but marginal. Outbreaks of intolerance and hatred are not simple expressions of primordial antagonisms despite what Robert Kaplan has suggested with reference to the wars in Yugoslavia (Kaplan 1993). In the case of most if not all of the countries mentioned above, contemporary nationalisms are recent constructions produced by discursively amalgamating a number of