P Werbner
Biographic Data
| ID | 13619 |
|---|---|
| NAME | P Werbner |
| GIVEN NAMES | P |
| FAMILY NAME | Werbner |
| SIGNATURE | WERBNER P |
| AFFILIATIONS | Keele University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2296-9851 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 111 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1156 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 110 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1979 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 20 |
Charisma
This chapter gives a critical review of foundational arguments in sociology by Max Weber, Shmuel Eisenstadt, Edward Shils, and Michel Foucault, and in anthropology by Clifford Geertz. This establishes the theoretical basis for a comparative analysis of Muslim, Jewish, and Christian cases. It examines charisma in religious movements and ritual practices, cult figures, and processes of ethical renewal and self-fashioning. Charismatic leadership is …
Legal mobilisation, legal scepticism and the limits of ‘lawfare’
Against legal scepticism which constructs litigations as negative or useless ‘lawfare’, this article argues for the need to recognise that taking government to court is part of a wider strategy of social mobilisation and campaigns for social justice, as others have also claimed. Legal mobilisation during a public sector strike in Botswana in 2011 was, the paper argues, only one strategic part of a more comprehensive campaign to call on government…
The Cosmopolitan Encounter
Like the discipline itself, many of the most prominent members of the founding circle of modernist anthropology were immigrants, refugees, exiles or secular Jews, the archetypal cosmopolitans, and often all four. Unlike the intrepid anthropological traveller or the world citizen, cosmopolitans are normally associated with cosmopolitan spaces, and with the creation of a transcendent culture beyond the local. Contemporary research on international …
Introduction
Cosmopolitanism describes a ‘citizen of the world’, member in a ‘universal circle of belonging that involves the transcendence of the particular and blindly given ties of kinship and country’. The year 1990 was a watershed one for the new cosmopolitanism scholarship. There were, originally, three discernible strands to this new normative cosmopolitanism. The first strand in the new normative cosmopolitan relates to global governance. The second s…
The Migration Process
This study, which breaks new ground in urban research, is a comprehensive and definitive account of one of the many communities of South Asians to emerge throughout the Western industrial world since the Second World War - the British Pakistanis in Manchester. This book examines the cultural dimensions of immigrant entrepreneurship and the formation of an ethnic enclave community, and explores the structure and theory of urban ritual and its plac…
The state and the paradox of customary law in Africa
What makes customary law paradoxical vis-a-vis the state? This excellent collection contributes to the debate on customary law in sub-Saharan Africa: first, by challenging entrenched canards of pos
A case of inheritance
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 was responsive to public opinion as expressed during a hearing. It was this public debate that argu…
The abstraction of love
Based on the recent hagiography of a Naqshbandi Sufi saint, Zindapir (d. 1999), this paper interrogates the meaning of “love” as the essence of spirituality and ascent on the Sufi path. During the author’s lifetime, like most of the saint’s disciples, he expressed his love of the saint and eulogized him poetically in qasidas often reminiscent of romantic Urdu poetry. After Zindapir’s death, exceptionally among the disciples, he expressed his deep…
A Case of Insult
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 public peace, kinship amity, and decency. Members of a customary court mobilize an elaborate moral l…
Diasporic Muslims
It is possible to identify a dialectical process in the formation of a Muslim diaspora in the United Kingdom as in other western countries. On the one hand, Islam has been incorporative and integrative, providing a legitimate locational identity in an immigrant society. At the same time it has also generated its own contradictions and dilemmas, which have inhibited the integrative process by politicizing and racializing this very same religious i…
Cosmopolitanism
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 anthropology attempts to theorize the complex ways in which cosmopolitans beyond the West juggl…
Anthropology and the new ethical cosmopolitanism
A glaring absence in the growing corpus of work in the anthropology of ethics is any serious engagement with the new anthropology of cosmopolitanism. Englund's essay on poverty in the collection notes the centrality of the 'relational' person in an anthropological study of cosmopolitan ethics. This chapter suggests that anthropologists studying beyond the West must be on the contexts in which cosmopolitanisms develop and flourish. Along with the …
Between Islamic piety, agency and ethical leadership
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-discipline (askesis). Building on Saba Mahmood’s Politics of Piety, the paper draws further on Foucault’…
Gendering ‘Everyday Islam’
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 anthropology that is intricately linked to the discussion of the everyday in the wider Mediterranean, we…
Commentary
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 gender roles, friendship cultures and peer-group loyalties. Against the view that urban friendship i…
Divorce as Process, Botswana Style
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 negotiations and ultimately frustrate the aim of achieving a divorce. Repeated court hearings can last for ye…
The abstraction of love
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’s disciples, expressed his love of the saint, and eulogised him poetically in qasidas often reminisc…
Trading Worlds
This much-awaited book is a monumental achievement of fieldwork in out-of-the-way places, across dangerous frontiers, over an extended period of time. Marsden takes us on a journey that enables us to experience alongside him the constant sense of precariousness, of living between dangerous pasts and uncertain futures, which is the day-to-day experience of his Afghan trader friends. In this densely described, argued and analysed account of cross-b…
Rethinking class and culture in Africa
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 culture, agency and identity, following E. P. Thompson; the final move has focused on the African m…
Barefoot in Britain - yet again
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 recognition that none of the social unities evoked - of identity, diaspora, community, nation, tradition -…
Between Tristes Tropiques and Cultural Creativity
Migration, Diaspora, and Religious Pilgrimage in Comparative Perspective
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." Taking four case studies-Christian Filipino migrants working in Israel, Muslim Pakistani immigrants to …
Political prayer and the dignity of labour
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 spiritual interpretation of worker vocation and worker solidarity. Moreover, in Botswana, unlike in some …
Between Ethnography and Hagiography
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 audience of expert social scientists and Islamic scholars and, on the other hand, an indigenous devotee …
Essentialising Essentialism, Essentialising Silence
Debating Cultural Hybridity
The aim of this volume is to shed some light on the essentially hybrid nature, the complexity and the flexibility of "culture" and identity, their potential openness as well as their closures. Starting from the reality that postmodern personal identities are multicultural identities, it tries to define the limits of cultural hybridity. Why is it so difficult to negotiate differences across cultures? In what ways does racism strike at the foundati…
Vernacular Cosmopolitanism
Veiled Interventions in Pure Space
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 associated with the politics of embodiment surrounding veiling and honour killings comparatively, in…
Stamping the Earth with the Name of Allah
Islamophobia
1 The Serious Crime and Organised Crime and Police Bill was originally brought to Parliament by the then Home Secretary David Blunkett on 24 November 2004 (http://www.parliament.the-stationery-office.co.uk/) 2 'Islamophobia', and other similar terms such as xenophobia, the fear of strangers, are often favoured over the term 'racism' in European discourse. The first known use was by an American journalist in 1991 (Runnymede Trust 1997). 3 I use fu…
Introduction
The prizing open of a familiar concept inaugurates new directions for research. It also leads to a proliferation of definitions and typologies as, over time, the concept comes to be reworked from different disciplinary vantage points and re-interpolated into widely divergent ethnographic accounts or aesthetic texts. This complex, often dialectical process of thinking through a concept anew is not simply linear; it loops back on itself in creative…
The Translocation of Culture
In his work on a Welsh border village, Ronald Frankenberg showed how cultural performances, from football to carnival, conferred agency on local actors and framed local conflicts. The present article extends these themes. It responds to invocations of 'community cohesion' by politicians and policy makers, decrying the failure of communal leadership following riots by young South Asians in northern British towns. Against their critique of self-seg…
Theorising Complex Diasporas
This paper examines the creation of alternative diasporic public spheres in Britain by South Asian settlers: one produced through the entertainment industry—commercial film and other media—that satirises the parochialism and conservatism of the South Asian immigrant generation and highlights cultural hybridity and cosmopolitanism, intergenerational conflict, family politics, inter‐ethnic or ‐racial marriages, and excesses of consumption. The othe…
The limits of cultural hybridity
There are many parallels between hybridity theory, especially as it has been developed in the work of Bhabha, and theories of liminality in anthropology, particularly in the work of Turner and Douglas. These share a stress on sited performance and the specific positioning of actors. However, the stress in hybridity theory on the colonial encounter as the source of reflexivity and double consciousness does not engage, I argue, with the fact that c…
Everyday multiculturalism
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 it a surface of civility and mutual respect which are nevertheless morally compelling. Everyday relat…
Divided Loyalties, Empowered Citizenship? Muslims in Britain
Fear of Muslims, Islamophobia, is embedded in stereotypical assumptions and pronouncements regarding selected customs and, above all, the inherently fanatical, violent and irrational tendencies of Muslim leaders and their followers. The further point of such discourses is the claim that these alien qualities and attributes have come to be implanted in the Western body itself, no longer simply confined to its 'bloody boundaries', to cite Huntingto…
Metaphors of Spatiality and Networks in the Plural City
This paper considers a particular debate in the scholarly literature on ethnicity in the United States 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 the hypothesis is both redundant and misguided. In denying this critique, this paper draws on Lefebvre's theori…
Understanding Vernacular Cosmopolitanism
Folk devils and racist imaginaries in a global prism
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 essentialized, contrastive racist constructions of Islam and Judaism persist over many centuries or is it poss…
The Migration Process
This study, which breaks new ground in urban research, is a comprehensive and definitive account of one of the many communities of South Asians to emerge throughout the Western industrial world since the Second World War - the British Pakistanis in Manchester. This book examines the cultural dimensions of immigrant entrepreneurship and the formation of an ethnic enclave community, and explores the structure and theory of urban ritual and its plac…
Bootstrap capitalism and the culture industries
A perennial debate in Europe and the United States has been about the causes of apparent black under-representation in self-employment, an implicit racialization in scholarly discourse which arguably parallels prevalent common-sense notions about cultural pathology. The present article challenges conventional definitions of African American entrepreneurship by examining in detail the role of black entrepreneurs in the hip hop industry. The organi…
Diasporic Encounters, Sacred Journeys
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 simplistic contemporary formulations of transnational migration that posit a singular, homogeneous ‘trans…
Fun Spaces
The Aesthetics of Diaspora
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 worlds of literary art or celebration forged in diaspora. Going beyond current debates in the anthrop…
The Virgin and the Clown Ritual Elaboration in Pakistani Migrants' Weddings
The Predicament of Diaspora and Millennial Islam
This article considers the production of an Islamic utopian or millennial discourse by British South Asian Muslims in the diasporic public sphere and its possible impact on the younger generation of Muslims growing up in the UK. Associated with such a discourse, the article considers the vulnerability of diasporas – the process whereby global events can precipitate radical diasporic estrangement, leading to self-estrangement. Such estrangement is…
Minority Families in Britain
What Colour 'Success'? Distorting Value in Studies of Ethnic Entrepreneurship
The study of ethnic entrepreneurship has tended to take as unproblematic what we mean by 'success' and 'failure'. Hence, some groups are defined as success stories. Recently, for example, in Britain, South Asian immigrants were said to be a 'success': they had a 'Jewish future'. The perennial debate both in Europe and in the United States is why Black people have been a 'failure' as entrepreneurs. This is even debated by Black people themselves. …
The making of Muslim dissent
The rise of a British Islamic radicalism stressing a heterodox combination of civil rights rhetoric and Islamic values is considered as a form of "magical" religious dissent, rooted in the predicaments of migration and the peculiar structural features of South Asian Sufi orders as regional cults. Drawing on Dumont's work, I extend recent discussions of the sited production of authoritative Islamic knowledge by exploring the dialectical interactio…
Economic Rationality and Hierarchical Gift Economies
This article analyses the tendency of Pakistani immigrants in Britain to transform commodities into gifts, and the rationality of their economic behaviour. Central to the argument is the view that South Asian gift economies may be typified as 'hlerarchical gift economies' and that this is reflected in specific consumption patterns. The argument extends recent discussions of unilateral gifting in South Asia and elsewhere, and focuses on the system…
Avoiding the ghetto
(1979). Avoiding the ghetto: Pakistani migrants and settlement shifts in Manchester. New Community: Vol. 7, No. 3, pp. 376-389
From rags to riches
(1980). From rags to riches: Manchester Pakistanis in the textile trade. New Community: Vol. 8, No. 1-2, pp. 84-95
Minority Families in Britain
Short reviews
Malcolm Cross, URBANIZATION AND URBAN GROWTH IN THE CARIBBEAN, Cambridge University Press, 1979, xx + 174 pp., £10.50 (h.b.) £3.95 (p.b.). David G. Pearson, RACE, CLASS AND POLITICAL ACTIVISM: A STUDY OF WEST INDIANS IN BRITAIN, Famborough, Gower, 1981, 207 pp., £11.50. Arthur Helweg, SIKHS IN ENGLAND: THE DEVELOPMENT OF A MIGRANT COMMUNITY, Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1979, 156 pp., £5.75. Roger L. Nichols, THE AMERICAN INDIAN: PAST AND PRES…
Manchester Pakistanis
(1981). Manchester Pakistanis: Life styles, ritual and the making of social distinctions. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies: Vol. 9, No. 2, pp. 216-229
The organization of giving and ethnic elites
1985). The organization of giving and ethnic elites: Voluntary associations amongst Manchester Pakistanis. Ethnic and Racial Studies: Vol. 8, No. 3, pp. 368-388
The Virgin and the Clown Ritual Elaboration in Pakistani Migrants' Weddings
An International Diaspora in Global Perspective South Asian Communities Overseas, 26-28 March, Oxford
Barefoot in Britain
The King and the Clown in South Indian Myth and Poetry
"Sealing" the Koran
This article is concerned with the extension of moral space, and the transformation of newly formed relations into moral relations. The two processes implied in this transformation may be conceived of analytically as the "naturalization" of ritual in a novel setting, and the "ritualization" of labour migrants' local relations. The article examines one particular ritual widely practiced by Pakistani immigrants in Britain and spells out its symboli…
The Ranking of Brotherhoods
Economic Rationality and Hierarchical Gift Economies
This article analyses the tendency of Pakistani immigrants in Britain to transform commodities into gifts, and the rationality of their economic behaviour. Central to the argument is the view that South Asian gift economies may be typified as 'hlerarchical gift economies' and that this is reflected in specific consumption patterns. The argument extends recent discussions of unilateral gifting in South Asia and elsewhere, and focuses on the system…
Shattered bridges
Public events articulate moods, emotions, and hopes as well as setting practical agendas. The present article argues that even as it disguises hidden truths, an event's facade constitutes a currently ‘real’ public truth. The construction of communal myths and sacred histories catches up these moods and builds historical facts around them. Based on research among Muslims in Manchester, the article shows that at any one time, multiple realities exi…
Books
Richard Williams, Hierarchical Structures and Social Value: The Creation of Black and Irish Identities in the United States, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, 190 pp., £25.00 h.b. Joseph T. O'Connell, Milton Israel and Willard G. Oxtoby (eds), Sikh History and Religion in the Twentieth Century, South Asian Studies Papers No 3, Toronto: University of Toronto Centre for South Asian Studies, 1988, 496 pp., n.p., p.b. Peter D. Pumfrey and …
Black and Ethnic Leaderships in Britain
Processes of Community Formation
In a review of my recent book, The Migration Process (AA 93:1014-1015, 1991), Kathleen Hall consistently misreads my evidence: for example, she attributes to me wrongly the argument that second-generation Pakistanis forge long-term friendships and business associations with English school peers. In fact, they form such relationships with one another, thereby extending and elaborating intra-ethnic networks. Pakistanis in Manchester do not
Economy and Culture in Pakistan
Economy and Culture in Pakistan
Family and low income housing in Karachi, Frits Selier security and value - squatter dwelling in Karachi, Jan van der Linden the impact of migration on Pakistan's economy and society, Omar Noman marriage and power - tradition and transition in an urban Punjabi community, Michael Fischer Pakistani women in a changing society, Hamza Alavi competing doctors, unequal patients - stratified medicine in Lahore, Wenonah Lyon nationhood and the nationalit…
The Sikh Diaspora
Books
Camilla Palmer, Discrimination at Work: The Law on Sex and Race Discrimination, 2nd edition London: Legal Action Group, 1992, 353 pp., n.p., p.b. Malcolm Cross (Ed.), Ethnic minorities and industrial change in Europe and North America Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, 341 pp, £35.00 cloth Richard Skellington with Paulette Morris, ’Race’ in Britain Today London: Sage Publications, 1992,168 pp., £9.99 p.b. May Opiz, Katharina Oguntoye an…
Economy and Culture in Pakistan
Critique or caricature? A response to Wilcken and Gell
Stamping the Earth with the Name of Allah
The making of Muslim dissent
The rise of a British Islamic radicalism stressing a heterodox combination of civil rights rhetoric and Islamic values is considered as a form of "magical" religious dissent, rooted in the predicaments of migration and the peculiar structural features of South Asian Sufi orders as regional cults. Drawing on Dumont's work, I extend recent discussions of the sited production of authoritative Islamic knowledge by exploring the dialectical interactio…
Sociology (95 works) · Political science (74 works) · Law (64 works) · Gender Studies (52 works) · Anthropology (43 works) · Philosophy (40 works) · History (36 works) · Law (36 works) · Politics (36 works) · Diaspora, migration, transnational identity (32 works)