Selected Articles & Book Chapters

“A Parody in Berlin: The Trivial, Normal, and the Ordinary of Historical Violence.” Anthropology & Humanism. Vol 28:1 (2023) pp 136-145

The popularity of Timur Vermes's Er ist wieder da (2012), its widespread translation, and the film version (2015) all raised critical hackles in Germany, provoking debate about the perceived risk of normalization associated with satirizing Hitler, or worse, inviting empathy by humanizing him. Hitler escapes his historical demise and awakes in the twenty-first century, where he is misrecognized as an actor and becomes popular on the internet. I read the texts against the grain of its public reception by critics and scholars for whom it offers an obvious critique of Germany's contemporary susceptibility to the allure of charismatic fascism. I argue that it is this obviousness itself that comes under pressure through the two texts: if critics worry that satirizing Hitler even for the sake of such a critique will normalize memory of the Holocaust, it is the ease with which even critics accept the central science fictional device—Hitler's inexplicable return to contemporary Berlin decades after his death—that demands critical attention. Reading a film or a novel's reception anthropologically, in this paper, I make a case for an investigation into what is taken to be obvious and what it is that blocks such an inquiry.

“Language in Flight: Home and Elsewhere,” with Veena Das and Michael Puett, Sophia: International Journal of Philosophy. Vol 62:2 (2023)

How is meaning conceptualized within a language in terms of capacities and potentials of words and sentences? Analyzing words within the sentence as event-makers in Sanskrit and as creating new possibilities and of divining events in Chinese, this paper argues that writing commentaries, making translations, reciting texts and transcribing them, belong to a family of activities that we normally do with language. Thus, movement of every element of language from one place to another whether within a word, a character, a sentence, a text or between two languages is not something added from the outside, it is internal to the experience of language. We ask what bearing might such an insight have on dominant theories of translation and the untranslatable in contemporary theorizing that has been framed primarily in terms of the history of Europe’s understanding of itself.

“Locating the State: Between Region and History,” with Istvan Adorjan and Shalini Randeria, Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 53 (2023)

If anthropology once concerned itself with politics in stateless societies outside the Euroamerica over and against prevailing Euroamerican political theory, today anthropologists see the state at work everywhere. Anthropologists have sought to trouble spatial metaphors of state power that assumed, among other things, its centralization and the unitary character of sovereignty. Locating the state through an attendant question of region, we explore recent literatures on everyday state practices in Central and Eastern Europe and South Asia, to show how different regional histories and configurations of knowledge continue to structure our assumptions about the state and its functions, as well as the grammar of our descriptions. We suggest that the state  could prove to be a useful optic for the study of region, which provides an alternative to an overly rigid local/global dichotomy that continues to shadow our theorizations.

“Reading Context: On the Ethnography of Translation and Commentary” in M. Rosen ed., The Ethnography of Reading at Thirty (Palgrave McMillan, 2023)

The Ethnography of Reading (1993) pointed to the need to study practices of reading and writing as socially embedded activities within their ethnographic context. One question that arises from this sensibility is how to approach the movement of texts and practices from one context to another, in time and in space? How, in other words, do we describe the particularity of “lived textuality” in this context, while remaining attentive to its connections with others—especially in light of the global proliferation by capital and by empire of certain textual practices as if they were universals (Barber 2009)? In this paper, I look to the anthropological archive for examples of practices where texts move through the kinds of reading demanded by commentary and translation practices. Drawing on examples including Cristiana Giordana’s (2014) work on migration and translation in Italy; Roma Chatterji’s (2021) conceptualization of the Ramayana as a narrative universe constituted by the multiplicity of its telling; and Michael Puett’s (2009) work on commentarial strategies in China, I argue that within commentarial traditions and within translation practices, the movement of textuality is already being theorized by practitioners. I offer therefore a view of context not so much as a rigid frame around reading, but rather more like a weaver’s loom that brings a world into being.

The Prosody of Social Ties: Poetry and Ephemerality in ‘Global’ Berlin.” Current Anthropology. Vol. 61:4 (2020): 514-543

This article examines Berlin’s ascendance to the status of a global city and in particular the tethering of this discourse to the city’s attraction for institutions of world literature. Drawing on fieldwork between 2011 and 2017, it offers a new, critical vantage on the multiple trajectories that migrants follow into and through Berlin, as well as how these paths collide. Training ethnographic attention on one important site in which these crossings occur—a literary workshop in a gentrified borough of the former East—reveals long-standing assumptions about the social lives of texts and urban relationships, in which ephemeral forms are understood to be degraded or weak. Mobilizing instead a poetic language of prosody allows us to see how different kinds of circulations are stitched together in the making of everyday life