Gods huis in de steigers

In this book three anthropologists explore contemporary religious architecture and they develop an original vision on the religious landscape in the Netherlands and Europe. Mosques, synagogues and churches do not only facilitate and symbolize religion, the intimate relationship we have with these buildings touches the essence of what religion is today - in both a positive and a negative sense

Three Styles in the Study of Violence

This is a postprint (accepted manuscript) version of the article published in Reviews in Anthropology 37:1-19. The final version of the article can be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00938150701829525 (login required to access content). The version made available in Digital Common was supplied by the author.Accepted Manuscripttru

Managing Mosques in the Netherlands : Constitutional versus Culturalist Secularism

This article engages with the emergent ethnographical study of secular practice by focusing on how local bureaucracies manage the Muslim public presence in the Netherlands, particularly the construction of new mosques and the amplifying of the Muslim call to prayer. We argue that what started as the ‘Islam debate’, itself provoked by growing populist articulations of the fear of Islam, has gradually developed into a conflict in the practice of local governance about the meaning of secularism. Whereas the public and political debate about mosque issues is often dominated by what we call a ‘culturalist’ or ‘nativist’ form of secularism, in practice bureaucrats are often led by a ‘constitutional secularism’ that protects the constitutional rights of Dutch Muslims. Thus, in its ractical application, constitutional secularism is one way of tackling Islamophobia and protecting the rights of religious minorities in general. Moving beyond the genealogical study and the deconstructivist critique of secularism by such authors as Talal Asad and Wendy Brown, we show that the ethnographic study of actual secular practice remains crucially important to avoiding monolithic text-based understandings of the secular as inherently dominating the religious

Gods huis in de steigers

In this book three anthropologists explore contemporary religious architecture and they develop an original vision on the religious landscape in the Netherlands and Europe. Mosques, synagogues and churches do not only facilitate and symbolize religion, the intimate relationship we have with these buildings touches the essence of what religion is today - in both a positive and a negative sense

Notes on the sublime: Aspects of political violence in urban Pakistan

Years before the so-called ‘War of Terror’ in which Pakistan has played a significant role, representations of terrorism and sacrifice already influenced political conflict in the country, particularly in Karachi and other parts of urban Sindh. This article focuses on the process of representation through which political violence comes to be interpreted in the symbolic terms of culture and religion. Criticizing Orientalist notions that ascribe certain violent mentalities and practices to religious or ethnic groups in an essentialist manner, I argue that (self-)representations of sublime violence are nonetheless important to analyze for their an escalating effect on the political conflict. By examining the ways in which religious and ethnicized traditions of solidarity, justice and sacrifice have framed the representation of political violence in Sindh, I explore the interplay between the media, intelligence agencies of various state authorities, as well as political parties and their militants, focusing on their mutual interest in producing a visual culture of heroic violence and martyrdom

Identity representation and conflict prevention in community mosques of Malang Raya, East Java, Indonesia

The phenomena of identity representations in mosques are strongly related to certain socio-political dynamics. Multiple strategies may be employed to represent the specific aims of the patrons. One aim is to prevent the possibility of conflicts in the community mosques in Malang Raya, East Java. Socio-political issues among Islamic groups in the region include the struggle for mosques’ authority by a certain group deemed “hard-liners”. To explore the variety of communities’ responses to this issue through their mosque architecture, fieldwork research was conducted through documentation and semi-structured interview. One of the findings was various strategies of identity construction were helpful to the mosque community. These ranged from expressing group identity through explicit and implicit elements, to suppressing group identity by eliminating, negotiating, and even camouflaging significant elements of mosques. The different strategies are related to each mosque’s resilience to the external and internal dynamics. In spite of the different ways to represent identity, there is a mutual concern to prevent conflicts and to create a more peaceful religious environment