• About Jonathan Mair

    Cultures of Belief — post-print version of article

    by  • 10 April, 2013 • anthropology, belief, Inner Mongolia, religion • 0 Comments

    As promised, here’s a post-print version of my Cultures of Belief article, which was published in Anthropological Theory. cultures-of-belief-post-print The text is identical to the journal version, but the formatting is different — this is the version I’m allowed to distribute according to the publishing agreement. If you have access to the journal, for...

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    Cultures of Belief – New paper out in Anthropological Theory

    by  • 10 April, 2013 • anthropology, belief, Mongolian Buddhism, religion • 0 Comments

    Anthropological Theory

    I’ve just had a new paper out in Anthropological Theory — this is behind a paywall, I’ll make a post-print version available through this website soon for those who don’t have access to the journal through an academic library. The paper is titled ‘Cultures of ignorance’. In a nutshell, the argument is that academic...

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    Literacy, religious renaissance and the ‘morality system’

    by  • 4 April, 2013 • anthropology, anthropology of ethics, religion • 0 Comments

    Safari ya roho akhera, ‘the journey of the soul into the afterlife’, was published in 1999 by Said Amour Al-Habsy in Oman — image from Becker’s 2009 paper.

    This is a cross-post from ethics.CRASSH. Felicitas Becker on Islamic reformism and Sufi traditionalism in Tanzania I’ve just read two fascinating papers by Felicitas Becker on moral conflict in East Africa. Both papers describe the relationship between Islamist reformers and Sufi-influenced traditionalists in rural Tanzania. Broadly speaking, the Islamists are young, have international connections (though these...

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    New blog: ethics.CRASSH

    by  • 28 March, 2013 • anthropology • 0 Comments

    ethics blog

    I’ve launched a new website as part of my current project at CRASSH. It’s called ethics.CRASSH and at the moment it’s covering the Speaking Ethically Across Borders Project, which has been running as a reading group this year. Several of the participants have already posted commentaries on the texts we’ve been reading. If things...

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    Stuart Hall on rootless cosmopolitanism

    by  • 31 January, 2013 • anthropology, anthropology of ethics, ethics across borders • 0 Comments

    Stuart Hall

    Here’s an interesting interview with Stuart Hall, in which he speaks about cosmopolitanism and rootedness — relevant to the previous post: http://www.sms.cam.ac.uk/media/1119965 Pnina Werbner interviewing — I’ve transcribed the most relevant bit below. 23.30 PW: Can you be a cosmopolitan if you don’t have to commitments to a place or people or maybe even...

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    Rooted Cosmopolitanism

    by  • 31 January, 2013 • anthropology, anthropology of ethics, ethics across borders • 0 Comments

    Waterhouse-Diogenes

    Tuesday saw the first of a series of reading groups that I’m organizing at CRASSH on the subject of ethical conversations across borders. There will be four sessions this term, each dealing with a different theme, taking in readings from anthropology, sociology, philosophy and history. The first session, on rooted cosmopolitanisms, was based on...

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    “Neoliberal is henceforth dead to me”

    by  • 14 December, 2012 • anthropology • 0 Comments

    Thanks to Theo Kyriakides (@Theo_Kyriakides), who was present at the GDAT debate on neoliberalism for alerting me to a post by Kathleen Fitzpatrick of Pomona College. She writes, I have come to despise the term “neoliberal,” to the extent that I’d really like to see it stricken from academic vocabularies everywhere. It’s less that...

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