Pnina Werbner

• PhD University of Manchester
• Professor Emeritus at Keele University

This is the link fo the open access download for the 2014 volume The Polical Aesthetics of Global Protest: The Arab Spring and Beyond. https://ecommons.aku.edu/uk_ismc_series_volumes/3/ Book Abstract From Egypt to India, and from Botswana to London, worker, youth and middle class rebellions have taken on the political and bureaucratic status quo...

Adultery judgments in customary courts in Botswana reflect changing everyday practices and normative understandings both with regard to marriage and broader ideas of gender equality. These changed perceptions parallel a worldwide shift in the legal understanding of adultery from being a crime to a civil offense and then, more recently, a non offens...

Botswana’s customary courts were known in the past for their procedural openness to debate. The presiding judge allowed members of the court, usually in ascending order of seniority, to express their views on the case, before finally reaching a judgement. Most scholars of Tswana society, from Schapera onwards, agree that the chief’s final judgement...

Legal anthropologists have been latecomers in the debate surrounding law and emotion, a movement responding to the notion that the law is ‘imbued with emotion’. As in the US and Europe, in Botswana cases of public insults are emotionally charged, and this is particularly so in witchcraft insult hearings. Akin to hate crimes, these insults threaten...

This article aims to unravel the complex negotiations surrounding property settlements and custody in cases of divorce in customary courts in Botswana today in the light of an earlier legacy of penalising divorce initiators. It argues that women’s attempts to get their husbands to initiate divorce proceedings can entangle women in lengthy negotiati...

Anthropologists have made significant contributions to contemporary debates on cosmopolitanism. In particular, anthropologists have developed notions of rooted, vernacular, working‐class, activist, and situated cosmopolitanisms. Against the slur that cosmopolitans are rootless, with no commitments to place or nation, the new post‐1990s cosmopolitan...

In the face of the huge expansion in the number of women preachers throughout the Muslim world and beyond it, the paper proposes the need to theorise female ethical leadership – the subtle detour that Muslim women have been making to claim rights, including the right to leadership, within Islam, through their extraordinary acts of ascetic self-disc...

In this introductory paper, we contribute to the important debate on 'Everyday Islam' by thinking about ways in which the everyday constitutes a useful analytical category in relation to Islam, not in contrast to studies of Islamic piety and normativity, but as co-constituted with (Islamic) morality. Secondly, drawing on a feminist critique in anth...

This chapter interrogates the validity of Wendy Brown’s apparently self-evident assertion in Regulating Aversion that “Tolerance as a political practice is always conferred by the dominant, it is always a certain expression of domination even as it offers protection or incorporation to the less powerful”. Tolerance, she argues, thus marks what is “...

This commentary outlines an intellectual genealogy of urban friendship stretching from the 1950s to the present, which influenced my own work on friendship. It begins by tracing this developing theory grounded in a basic contrast between close-knit, segregated networks and loose-knit or widely ramifying networks. Such morphological features define...

The article considers the historiography of labour and class studies in sub-Saharan Africa in relation to the contemporary ‘cultural turn’ in sociological studies of class. It identifies three phases: from the 1960s, a highly empiricist Marxist approach which drew on Fanon’s notion of an aristocracy of labour; from the 1980s, a shift to a stress on...

Based on the recent hagiography written by a devoted khalifa of a Naqshbandi Sufi saint, Zindapir, who died in 1999 in Ghamkol Sharif, not far from the city of Kohat in north-west Pakistan, the paper interrogates the meaning of ‘love’ as the essence of spirituality and ascent on the Sufi path. During his lifetime the author, like most of the saint’...

Anticipating later debates on multiculturalism and class ‘fractions’, anthropologists in Britain have recognised that migrants and diasporas bear multiple identities, meaning that their cultures cannot and should not be essentialised as homogeneous. For anthropologists, the importance of studying these groups’ multiple identities lies in the recogn...

Against Ghassan Hage’s theorization of migration “guilt”—the view that migration entails a sense of rupture, animating an unfulfilled desire to recapture a lost, imaginary, subjective wholeness—this article explores the conjunctures of migration and religious pilgrimage in the creation of new, transcendent moral subjectivities away from “home.” Tak...

The paper compares my anthropological monograph about a Pakistani Sufi cult founded by a living saint, known as Zindapir, with a translated hagiography written about the same saint by a devoted poet-khalifa. It aims to compare two representational strategies of an historical figure—on the one hand, that of an anthropologist writing for a wider audi...

The article draws on recent fieldwork to explore the intersection between class and Christian faith in the collective worldview of African labour unions in Botswana. Workers across different churches appeal to a Christian God whom they believe supports their struggle for dignity and a living wage. It is this axiomatic faith that underpins the spiri...

No abstract is available for this article.

No abstract is available for this article.

Unlike the classic diasporas of old − the Jews, the Armenians, the Greeks − the territorial origins and boundaries of late modern diasporas may be vast and diverse regions, sometimes even stretching globally. Late modern diasporas are distinctive, the chapter suggests, in being fractal and perspectival rather than multi-layered and 'deep.' Home, ho...

Sufism, the mystical or aesthetic doctrine in Islam, has occupied a very specific place in the Islamic tradition, with its own history, literature and devotional practices. Its development began in the seventh century and spread throughout the Islamic world. The Cambridge Companion to Sufism traces its evolution from the formative period to the pre...

From Egypt to India, and from Botswana to London, worker, youth and middle class rebellions have taken on the political and bureaucratic status quo and the privilege of small, wealthy and often corrupt elites at a time when the majority can no longer earn a decent wage. A remarkable feature of the protests from the Arab Spring onwards has been the...

Cosmopolitan cities have been envisioned as colourful, aesthetically creative places at the centre of trade routes and empires, imaged in their bazaars and cafes, where spices and exotic objects are traded or avante-garde artistic and literary expatriates congregate. In the twenty-first-century world of accelerated migrations, cosmopolitan cities a...

This paper analyses the significance of the Botswana High Court and Court of Appeal judgments of a case in which the Manual Worker Union, a blue-collar public sector union, challenged the Botswana Government to reinstate dismissed workers with all their past benefits. I examine the role of public ethics and morality in Botswana as reflected in key...

How are we to define the cosmopolitan city? In the present essay I trace the emergence of vernacular cosmopolitanism as an urban phenomenon and movement of ideas within and beyond the West. I argue that while ethnic and religious pluralism creates a “descriptive” cosmopolitanism – more than 200 languages are spoken, for example, in many London neig...

The paper contrasts Tswapong puberty ritual, the mothei, conceived of as effecting an ontological change in being and personhood, with the newly invented Kgatla puberty ritual. The latter, it is argued, while reflecting authority and embracing a collective tribal identity, lacks the ordeals of death and rebirth inherent in the mothei ritual. I prop...

Arts and Aesthetics in a Globalizing World investigates arts and aesthetics in their widest senses and experiences, from a variety of perspectives branching from the metaphysical to the political. Moving beyond art as an expression of the inner mind and invention of the individual self, the volume bridges the gap between changing perceptions of con...

This paper contrasts intersectionality, the negative definition of identities, and multiple identities, the situational valorisation of positive identities, to argue for a generational shift in the performance of everyday multiculturalism in Britain. In everyday encounters, actors work to sustain the definition of the situation (Goffman) and with i...

This chapter argues against simplistic notions of ?simultaneity? in contemporary migration and transnational studies, and suggests that the transnational social field cannot be conceptualized as continuous and homogeneous. Instead it is ?ruptured? as migrants create new socialities, networks, and moral careers. This explains why migrants can ?never...

How are transnational aesthetics transformed and appropriated in the diaspora? In theorising the very possibility of a transnational aesthetics, our primary focus goes beyond cognition to aesthetics as ‘sensuous participation’ – the making of beauty, distinction and sensual pleasure as participatory performance, embedded and re-embedded in social w...

Scholarly interest has increasingly focused on the predicament of second-generation counter-diasporic return migration to an ancestral homeland. The present paper portrays two generations of Pakistani middle class women migrants: two mothers, who arrived in Manchester in the 1970s, and their daughters, who both returned to live in Pakistan, one at...

Rather than discourse this article argues that the challenge facing anti-racist scholars is to grasp the visceral, atavistic nature of the differential social imaginaries and deep-seated psychological fears of difference and sameness that constitute contemporary racisms and their historical mutations. Is it the case, as Said argued, that essentiali...

South Asia's diaspora is among the world's largest and most widespread, and it is growing exponentially. It is estimated that over 25 million persons of Indian descent live abroad; and many millions more have roots in other countries of the subcontinent, in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. There are 3 million South Asians in the UK and approxima...

Among overseas Pakistanis, the Pakistani diaspora in Britain was the first emergent diasporic community and the largest formed since World War II, following the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. Other major concentrations of Pakistanis exist in the United States of America, Canada and Norway, and smaller Pakistani communities can also be fou...

Meer and Modood have written an admirably lucid exposition of the political-philosophical case in defence of multiculturalism. Their critical evaluation of interculturalism, a latecomer to the Anglo-American scholarly discourse on relations among cultures in modern states, is convincing: interculturalism is not really a political theory but refers...

This article begins by suggesting three ways of approaching transnational migrant "culture" that evade the charge of essentialism. It then explores comparatively a range of ethnographic examples of immigrant cultural celebrations, starting with an analysis of homemaking and translocated migrant domestic rituals, from seasonal holidays to weddings,...

One of the challenges faced by scholars who write on cosmopolitanism as a philosophy and ethos of world peace, tolerance, intercultural communication and human rights, is that such visionary ideals invariably encounter deep-seated scepticism. Critical social science is grounded, on the whole, in the realpolitik of economic inequalities and individu...

The paradox that sexual intimacy is neither intimate nor private but instead the subject of intense public deliberation, is rightly associated with the work of Michel Foucault. Standards of normalcy and deviancy, of the permitted and prohibited, can never, Foucault proposes, be the choice of individuals, but are subjected to normalising discourses...

Pnina Werbner is Reader in Social Anthropology at Keele University in the UK. She is the author of The Migration Process: Capital, Gifts and Offerings among British Pakistanis (Berg, 1990) and of the forthcoming Imagined Diasporas among Manchester Muslims: The Public Performance of Pakistani Transnational Identity Politics (New School of American R...

In the Introduction to the hagiography of the reform Naqshbandi Sufi saint, Zindapir, the ‘Living Saint’, who died in his lodge near Kohat, Pakistan, in 1999, poet and devoted khalifa (vicegerent) of Zindapir Rab Nawaz writes:Contemporary Muslim students (talib) who study in religious schools, the vast portion of their life passes in studying forma...

Public exposés of hidden spaces where diasporic Muslims allegedly enunciate extreme anti-Western rhetoric or plot sedition highlight an ironic shift from a time, analyzed in my earlier work, when the Pakistani diasporic public sphere in Britain was invisible and local while nevertheless being regarded as relatively benign: a space of expressive rhe...

This issue highlights recent ethnographic work that discloses migrant women's creative engagements with the people and landscapes in the places they migrate to. We challenge a dominant view that construes women international migrants from Asia as docile bodies shaped and constrained by their transnational (re)productive labours. And we reject simpl...

Interrogating critiques of the 'African labour aristocracy' thesis, the article proposes that public service industrial-class manual workers in Botswana form, if not a labour 'aristocracy' in the sense first defined by Saul and Arrighi, then a marginal worker 'elite'. They are privileged in having a regular salary above minimum pay, augmented by pe...

Unlike other religious movements, Sufi orders rarely preach ideologies of either nationalism or religious nationalism. Sufi annual pilgrimages and festivals are open and inclusive: they cut across provincial and even national borders. They gather followers traversing vast distances across the entire country to the order's centre. This feature of mo...

Can there be an engaged public anthropology of global Islamic terror? Arguably, anthropology was not meant to be a study of clandestine networks or unreachable social groups secretly plotting sudden cataclysmic international crises. These days, anthropologists study societies in motion and, increasingly, the impact of a global media and global econ...

Can we speak of the existence of an `African diaspora' over and above the many discrete national diaspora groups in Britain? The present paper explores the conviviality and reach of black African elite networks in London across ethnic boundaries, their mastery of a shared language of governance and their capacity as actors and activists operating i...

Scholarship on the African diaspora has documented the legal hurdles African migrants face in acquiring residence and begun to record the religious efflorescence of African Independent churches. Missing, however, is attention to the complex moral assumptions informing African diasporic sociality and claims to citizenship, whether through churches o...

This paper argues that the refusal of the Muslim Council of Britain to attend Holocaust Memorial Day highlights a key dimension of memory as political myth: namely, the sense that time is cyclical. Prior external and internal enemies (in their current manifestations) are apocalyptically destined to threaten the integrity of the nation once more. He...

The 200 Richest Asians Magazines 2000, 2002, 2003 construct the success of British South Asian multi-millionaires in images that foreground their masculine traits and characteristics. And yet, this paper argues, such individual success stories are merely the tip of an “entrepreneurial iceberg”. They mask the existence of clusters of immigrant enter...

In this article, I propose, against earlier missionary and anthropological narratives that construct Tswana girls’ initiation as abjectifying, subjectifying, and violent, that the Tswapong girls’ puberty ritual, the mothei, endows novices with seriti, a quality that implies an active sense of autonomy, dignity, respect, and self-respect. I argue th...

Tracing the careers of three Batswana women leaders, two of them trade unionists and one a public servant who became, first, a politician and then an international civil servant, the article explores ideas of ethical leadership in Botswana and argues that leadership is to be understood as essentially dialogical, linked to notions of dignity and res...

Public exposés of hidden spaces where diasporic Muslims allegedly enunciate extreme anti‐Western rhetoric or plot sedition, highlight an ironic shift from a time, analysed in my earlier work, when the Pakistani diasporic public sphere in Britain was invisible and local while nevertheless being regarded as relatively benign: a space of expressive rh...

in: Margaret Wetherell and Chandra Talpade Mohanty (eds) The Sage Handbook of Identities. London: Sage, pp. 231-257.

Arguing Sainthood: Modernity, Psychoanalysis, and Islam. Katherine Pratt Ewing. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997. xiv. 312 pp., figures, glossary, notes, references, index.

Television, Ethnicity and Cultural Change. MARIE GILLESPIE. New York: Routledge, 1995. xi + 238 pp., figures, appendix, bibliography, Index.

Against the critique of self-segregating isolationism, the article traces the historical process of Pakistani migration and settlement in Britain, to argue that the dislocations and relocations of transnational migration generate two paradoxes of culture. The first is that in order to sink root in a new country, transnational migrants in the modern...

The rise of Islamic fundamentalism in Europe seems to be tangibly signalled by an increase in women and young girls wearing the Muslim veil, the hijab. In France, this has led to the legal banning of all headscarves and other religious symbols in state schools in the name of French secularism. The article considers the ambiguities and ambivalences...

The current interest in new diasporas and globalisation processes raises the question of what a transnational subjectivity might be like? What does it mean to be, in some sense or other, at home in the world? The present article responds to debates on cosmopolitans and transnationals, hybridity and globalisation through a consideration of the trans...

Introduction The present chapter considers a particular debate in the scholarly literature on ethnicity in the US regarding ethnic entrepreneurship which has come to be known as the 'ethnic enclave economy hypothesis'. According to this hypothesis, ethnic enterprises and their workers benefit from clustering. The current consensus seems to be that...

To compare Sufi regional cults across different places separated by thousands of miles of sea and land, and by radically different cultural milieus, is in many ways to seek the global in the local rather than the local in the global. Either way, charting difference and similarity in Sufism as an embodied tradition requires attention beyond mystical...

The paradox that sexual intimacy is neither intimate nor private but instead the subject of intense public deliberation, is rightly associated with the work of Michel Foucault. Standards of normalcy and deviancy, of the permitted and prohibited, can never, Foucault proposes, be the choice of individuals, but are subjected to normalising discourses...