David Henig

• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at Utrecht University

One of the foremost intellectuals of his generation, French philosopher of science Michel Serres (1930–2019) broke free from disciplinary dogmas. His reflections on science, culture, technology, art, and religion have proved foundational to scholars across the humanities. The contributors to Porous Becomings bring the inspirational and enigmatic wo...

What motivates gratuitous behaviour? What characterizes its expression? Who benefits from and who is excluded from our favour? In this chapter, we tackle the long-standing anthropological puzzle of how to attend to manifestations of spontaneity, free will to act, and sympathy – that is, manifestations of favour. We argue that acts of favour constit...

This forum brings together four reflections on Remaking Muslim Lives: Everyday Islam in Postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina. I feel immensely fortunate to have had a conversation with such engaged and thoughtful interlocutors as Catherine Wanner, Michael Lambek, Basit Kareem Iqbal, and Joel Robbins. It was gratifying to read their generous comments, whi...

The 'ethical turn' in anthropology has been one of the most vibrant fields in the discipline in the past quarter-century. It has fostered new dialogue between anthropology and philosophy, psychology, and theology and seen a wealth of theoretical innovation and influential ethnographic studies. This book brings together a global team of established...

Taking the realms of business, finance and economic history by storm, polycrisis captures the complexity of an increasingly uncertain world in a state of flux and transition. Proponents of the polycrisis model, such as prominent economic historian and Financial Times contributing editor Adam Tooze, propose polycrisis as a marker of our age, capturi...

Around David Henig's Remaking Muslim Lives: Everyday Islam in Postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina Urbana, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2020, paperback, 210 pages

In this article we advocate taking local vernaculars of informality seriously, arguing that language is a constitutive part of all economic practices, including informal ones, and the models of corruption and informality through which scholars have studied them. We observe that vernaculars of informality operate as a language of affect in both sens...

Over the past two decades, dark and apocalyptic tones have come to dominate many areas of social and cultural theory. This chapter argues that understanding social life calls not only for focus on the darkness of our current times but also for bringing the question of the good to the centre of social science inquiry as a way of studying the working...

Adaptation pathways have been conventionally viewed as an approach for planning and identifying different adaptation options and the ways in which they can be realized. However, there has been scant consideration of the wide diversity of cultural and social processes which shape how adaptation pathways emerge. We argue that a cultural lens sheds li...

The discourse on tolerance has become axiomatic for political and cultural life in the era of (post-)liberal modernity. In the event of any form of violence, the discourse is invoked as a ‘solution’ to ‘intolerance’. But what if we considered the tolerance discourse itself as an axiom of violence? Its discursive labour creates configurations of pow...

The violent disintegration of Yugoslavia and the cultural and economic dispossession caused by the collapse of socialism continue to force Muslims in Bosnia and Herzegovina to reconfigure their religious lives and societal values. David Henig draws on a decade of fieldwork to examine the historical, social, and emotional labor undertaken by people...

Remaking Muslim Lives: Everyday Islam in Postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina examines what it means to live a Muslim life amid the political ruptures, economic deprivation, and transformation of religious institutions in postsocialist, postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina. Popular representations of Muslim communities in Southeastern Europe have long featured sim...

This article explores the concept of West Asia in relationship to recent work in the global history of Islam that points toward the existence of transregional arenas of historic significance that incorporate many of Asia’s Muslim societies. Recent anthropological work has also brought attention to the dynamic nature of the relations and cultural co...

This paper questions claims about the all-pervasive neoliberalization of everyday life that dominate many debates in anthropology and beyond. Situated in deprived rural areas of post-war Bosnia–Herzegovina where socio-economic restructuring has led to a reduction in social redistribution and access to many once-guaranteed state provisions, I explor...

One of the most pervasive features of ‘actually existing socialism’ across Eurasia and the Eastern Bloc was the use of personalised connections in order to get access to goods, services and information. A quarter century after the end of communist rule, there is ample evidence that such ‘economies of favour’ remain firmly embedded in the contempora...

What do ‘beans for the kids’ in Kinshasa, ‘a glass of wine’ in Paris, and ‘little carps’ in Prague have in common? ‘Variations in local cuisine’ may spring to mind, and rightly so. However, they are also ways of referring to informal economic practices – described by many as corruption or bribery – in each of these places. And as with regional vari...

This chapter considers the significance of journeys and the forms of veneration to Muslim sacred sites in contemporary Bosnia-Herzegovina. We specifically focus on the sites that have been elevated in various degrees to the status of “national sites”, and fallen into an embrace with the realm of post-war Muslim identity politics in the past two dec...

This article explores how Muslims in Central Bosnia engage with the violent past through acts of prayer to make history. It traces two idioms expressed in prayers whereby Bosnian Muslims affectively apprehend, remember, and temporalize the past: witness (šahit) and martyr (šehit). These two idioms, I argue, allow Muslims to reanimate recent critica...

Since the onset of the global economic crisis, activists, policy makers, and social scientists have been searching for alternative paradigms through which to re-imagine contemporary modes of thinking and writing about economic orders. These attempts have led to their re-engagement with fundamental anthropological categories of economic analysis, su...

Scholars of post-socialist politics and society have often used ‘favour’ as a by-word for corruption and clientelism. In the Introduction to this volume, the editors argue that favours, and the doing of favours, should be treated as a distinct mode of acting, rather than as a form of ‘masked’ economic exchange or simply an expression of goodwill. F...

Scholars often conflate the act of doing a favour with notions of corruption, nepotism, or bribery. This chapter seeks to demonstrate the need for differentiation between these concepts, their im/moralities, values, and the ethical conduct they entail. It explores the relationship between corruption, bribery, favours, and the Muslim moral imaginati...

This article considers the relevance of an ethnographic approach towards the study of diplomacy. By drawing upon recent interdisciplinary developments we critically reassess the ongoing assumption that in the modern world diplomacy is separated from other domains of human life, and that the only actors authorized and able to conduct diplomacy are t...

doi: 10.1080/09668136.2016.1230405

This chapter seeks to document the complex nature and choreography of Bosnian Muslims' relations with holy sites in the context of debates on sacred landscapes in the Balkans and the Mediterranean. It shows that these sacred sites are not necessarily venerated, worshiped, or shared by Muslims strictly as members of an ethnoreligious group. On the c...

This anthology explores the dynamics of shared religious sites in Turkey, the Balkans, Palestine/Israel, Cyprus and Algeria, indicating where local and national stakeholders manoeuvre between competition and cooperation, coexistence, and conflict. Contributors probe the notion of coexistence and the logic that underlies centuries of “sharing,” expl...

In postsocialist and postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina, popular dervish cults are re-emerging after several decades of (semi)clandestine existence due to official bans and repression imposed by the Yugoslav state socialist governmentality. This article explores how an absence of divine knowledge ensuing from this disruptive history—strongly felt among var...

Comment on Hull, Matthew. 2012. Government of paper: The materiality of bureaucracy in urban Pakistan. Berkeley: University of California Press.

When Tone Bringa published Being Muslim the Bosnian Way in 1995, the book soon became the hallmark of anthropological studies of Islam in Southeast Europe. In the wake of the tragic events in Bosnia-Herzegovina ensuing from the breakdown of Yugoslavia, it provided much needed intimate insights into the complex entanglement of religion, politico-rel...

The contributions in this issue of Social Science Computer Review represent a range of computational approaches to theoretical and disciplinary specializations in anthropology that reflect on and expand the future orientation and practice of the formal and comparative agenda in the context of an increasing emphasis on complexity in anthropology as...

Recording thousands of entries during field research poses a challenge to any field researcher. Contemporary handheld computers offer affordable solutions, which can resolve this challenge. In this paper, we test the iPad tablet computer and FileMaker Go database to conduct garbological research carried out in West Bohemia (Czech Republic). Garbolo...

Bosnian Muslims’ understandings of Islam and relationships with the sacred landscape have undergone significant transformations since the dissolution of socialist Yugoslavia. I explore these transformations as I analyze discourses and debates on what constitutes “correct” Islamic tradition in Bosnia today, when Muslim practice has been exposed to a...

The idea of neighbourhood (komšiluk) has been widely discussed in the anthropology of Bosnia. In the hegemonic academic discourse metaphorical usage prevailed over ethnographic examination. The dominant perspective portrays komšiluk as a social mechanism producing long-lasting differences between ethnoreligious groups that might at times result in...

Waste, in particular the waste produced by conflicts, has become a serious matter of concern in recent scholarship on materiality and society. But what is military post‐conflict waste, and what kind of materiality does it entail? This article retrains an ethnographic focus on post‐conflict materiality away from visible and easily recognized entitie...

This paper introduces and contextualizes Istikhara, Islamic dream incubation practice, as a way to approach the dynamics of Muslims' inner and outer worlds as an interrelated process of embodied well-being. We introduce an anthropologically informed debate on healing dreaming in Islam and Islamic healing dreaming practices. Based on our research, w...

Může v globalizovaném a vzájemně propojeném světě, po postmoderním obratu v sociálních vědách nabídnout antropologie nějakou cestu k porozumění komplexitě lidského života a společnosti? Transnacionální studia poskytují mocný soubor nástrojů k produkci vědění a analýze. Přestože tento přístup přinesl řadu cenných příspěvků a vhledů, provází jej i př...

In a globalised and mutually interconnected world, after the post-modern turn in social sciences, does anthropology offer any way to understand complexity of human life and society? Transnational studies offer a powerful set of explanatory tools for knowledge production and analysis. While this approach has produced a number of valuable contributio...

The convergence of peoples and markets in ‘real-world’ cosmopolitanism is significantly challenged and indeed fractured in emerging apparent differences as to the ontological status of inner worlds. On the one hand, the Western secular, liberal, post-Christian capitalist ideology and world view ‘see’ inner worlds, usually, as reflective but not pri...