Search

Susan Sontag, a controversial political activist and philosopher, interrogated ways of seeing photographs, taking photographs and depicting the pain of others. Her system of thoughts teaches how to ask relevant questions before and during any fieldwork where an anthropologist examines configurations of realities and meaning-making processes around visual mediums. She uses them to examine operations of representations without limiting images to either frames or contents. Furthermore, she pushes the definition of frame beyond the limits of the rectangular borders around each photograph or image. Therefore, this chapter explores Tehran, the Iranian capital and visual representations of the Iran-Iraq war (1980–1988) along Susan Sontag to locate and unpack the universe of meanings which is produced by Iranian propaganda machinery and received in various ways by Iranians. The main argument stresses a photograph can represent at best if only its photographer does not try to report or to transfer assumptions about reality but instead allows a photographic composition to emerge from the encounter with others. This chapter follows such encounters through ethnographic stories and fieldworks in Iran and demonstrates what Susan Sontag calls a mystic receptivity between viewers and visual representations turns photographs into the beginning of fieldwork rather than its end.

Indonesia has been an electoral democracy for more than a decade, and yet the political landscape of the world’s third-largest democracy is as complex and enigmatic as ever. Indonesia is simultaneous a country that has achieved a successful transition to democracy and a flawed, illiberal, and predatory democracy.This book provides a portrait of Indonesia’s contradictory democracy through a series of biographical accounts of political entrepreneurs, from the political ‘periphery’ of North Maluku and the ‘political centre’ of East Java respectively. Each biographical account is focused on one contentious area of democracy in Indonesia – elections, corruption, decentralization, and regional representation. The chapters explore the intimate ways in which the political world and the spirit world are entangled. The core argument of the book is that Indonesia’s seemingly peculiar problems with democracy and spirits in fact reflect a set of contradictions within democracy itself.The book will be of interest to academics in the fields of Asian Studies, anthropology and political science and relevant for the study of Indonesian politics and democracy in Asia and beyond.

Varieties of Secularism is an ethnographically rich, theoretically well-informed, and intellectually coherent volume which builds off the work of Talal Asad, Charles Taylor, and others who have engaged the issue of secularism(s) and in socio-political life. The volume seeks to examine theories of secularism/secularity and examine concrete ethnographic cases in order to further the theoretical discussion.Whereas Taylor’s magisterial work draws up the conditions and problems of a belief in God in Western modernity, it leaves unexplored the challenges posed by the spiritual in modernity outside of the North Atlantic rim. This anthology seeks to begin that task. It does so by suggesting that the kind of secularity described by Taylor is only one amongst others. By attending to the shifting relationship between proper religion and ‘bad faiths’; between politically valorised and embarrassing spiritual phenomena; between the new visibilities and silences of magic, ancestors, and religion in democratic politics, this book seeks to outline the particular formations of secularism that have become possible in Asia from China to Indonesia and from Bahrain to Timor-Leste.