K Furani
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 19101 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | K Furani |
| NOMBRES | K |
| APELLIDO | Furani |
| FIRMA | FURANI K |
| AFILIACIONES | Tel Aviv University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3764-9594 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 27 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 104 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 27 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2005 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 6 |
What If Anthropology Were a Spiritual Exercise
Taking a cue from Pierre Hadot’s conception of philosophy as “a way of life,” this paper imagines anthropology as a “spiritual” exercise. Freed from the cage of sovereign secular reason, the anthropological intellect may recover its mission to immerse in the other, even in the other of its very reason, and thereby set in motion multiple transformations. Opening up to an “antheistic” space and time wherein human reason welcomes divine possibilitie…
Wound Turbines for Political Dissent in Wadi al-Nisnas
Khalifah and the Modern Sovereign
The Palestinian political condition raises questions of the nation-state and, by extension, the sovereignty paradigm underpinning it. Propelled by these quandaries, this article revisits revelatory language to interrogate the conceptual grammar of modern politics. Mining the land’s religious patrimony, I evoke the Qur’anic notion of khalifah to join recent efforts at illuminating sovereignty’s delirium and deleterious consequences. Largely ignore…
Dialogues
The past five years have witnessed an increased interest in a dialogue between anthropology and theology, evidenced in part by a suite of edited volumes (e.g. Lauterbach & Vähäkangas 2020; Lemons 2018; Tomlinson & Mathews 2018). Analyses informed by this interdisciplinary nexus have demonstrated the utility of theological concepts for anthropological inquiry (e.g. Robbins 2020; Tomlinson 2020; Williams Green 2021). The following series of dialogu…
Leith, a Transnational Tribute
In memoriam of Professor Leith Mullings, my teacher, I raise questions she can no longer answer, although her deeds can speak still. She provides a model of scholarship, mentoring, and activism infused with courage, humility, and nurturance. In her final years and days, she worked with Palestinian anthropologists to form an independent association and forge ties with Black anthropologists. May they remain enduring testaments to a life striving fo…
Introduction
This introductory essay explores the secular constitution of the discipline of anthropology. Anthropology has reflexively interrogated the influence of the colonial, post-colonial, and rhetorical conditions that have shaped its development; however, its growth within the decidedly secular academy has been largely ignored. This inattention has persisted in recent decades even as anthropologists have begun investigating the place of secularism in t…
Ethics and Aesthetics Are One”
After Criticism
A question drives my reading of Mahmoud Darwish’s Mural, chronicling a poet’s quest for his own becoming while facing death: What rhythms of freedom—or what forms of enlightenment—may a person inhabit when facing life’s end? I argue that to this question Mural responds with an ethical striving, guided by a principle Darwish calls “evanescence.” I contingently identify evanescence as an “ethics of oneness” oriented to composite unity, which Darwis…
Why Insaniyyat? A Society for Palestinian Anthropologists
Hubal
Heuristically evoking Hubal, an ancient Arabian god of the moon, the unknown, and divination, this chapter employs idolatry, a central category of critique from monotheistic theology, to explore ways in which anthropology falls prey to disorientations, conflations, and unwarranted concessions in its study of multiplicity. Concerned with a particular form of idolatry whereby the finite is taken for the infinite, entailing confusion about ends wort…
Thoth
Heuristically evoking Thoth, an ancient Egyptian god of wisdom, architecture, crafts, and “science,” this chapter explores the ways anthropologists work to immure their discipline from its banished other, theology. Asking readers to imagine a proverbial “geodesic dome” housing anthropodom—anthropology constructed as a secular science—it discusses five types of “panes” that anthropologists “lay” in constructing their “home.” Derived from anthropol…
Conclusions
Reviewing the ways this book examines anthropology’s fraught and contradictory relationship with theology and the potential the latter offers for revitalizing the former, this chapter extends this book’s exercise of critique. Examining anthropology’s fealty to secular sovereign reason, and by extension the sovereign state, it questions the discipline’s fear of revelation. Should anthropology reintegrate revelation, not only within its catalogue o…
Eucharist
Heuristically evoking the Christian sacrament of the Eucharist, this chapter undertakes a counterargument to Chapter 1, asserting that anthropology in fact also preserves theology. In proverbial, genealogical, and analogical ways, anthropologists breach the very dome they construct, refracting some “harmful theospheric rays” while reflecting others. Excavating the theistic roots of anthropology’s concepts and practices, most notably its consummat…
Epigraph
Verily, in the creation of the heavens and the earth, and in the difference between night and day, there are indeed signs of wonder for all who are endowed with insight. (Qur’an 2: 190)
Redeeming Anthropology
Anthropologists have invariably engaged in their discipline as a form of redemption, whether to escape from social restriction, nourish their souls, reform their home polities, or vindicate “the natives.” This book explores how in pursuit of a secular science sired by the Enlightenment, adherents to a “faith in mankind” have variably rejected and embraced theology, albeit in concealed and contradictory ways. Mining principally the personal and bi…
Theology Revealing the Hājibs of Anthropology
This chapter proposes ways in which theology could promote a critique of idolatries in modern anthropology. It culls resources by scouring Nietzsche’s arguments against modernity. Nietzsche enables a vision of modern anthropology as symptomatic of God’s death in the West, thus inducing questions about the ways its adoration of idols may inhibit a truer inquiry. The chapter finds examples to this effect in anthropology’s engagement with the nation…
Secular Routes and Theological Drifts in Modern Anthropology
Anthropologists have recently shown an increasing concern with secular formations. This exploratory article inquires into the secular formation of anthropology itself by initiating an examination of its relation to theology, deemed anthropology's disciplinary Other. I argue for recognizing a complex relation, whereby anthropology in some ways forgets theology, in others sustains it, and in still others invites critique by it. Analyzing anthropolo…
Mastering Submission
This article examines how Palestinian poets experience "freedom" when they compose with traditional rhythms in Arabic verse. In analyzing narratives by poets on their introduction to, training in, and mastery of metrical discipline, I argue that these seemingly "technical" practices host an exercise of "freedom" strikingly at odds with dominant liberal modalities, which pit freedom against submission. In contrast with modernizing poets who posit …
Is There a Postsecular
Journal Article Is There a Postsecular? Get access Khaled Furani Khaled Furani * *Khaled Furani, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Tel Aviv University, PO Box 39040, Tel Aviv 69978, Israel. E-mail: [email protected]. I wish to express my gratitude to Yehouda Shanhav, who first prompted my writing of this essay. I received helpful comments from him and from Talal Asad, Joyce Dalsheim, Shlomo Fischer, Helene Furani, and John Milbank. Se…
States of Exception, Ethics and New Beginnings in Middle East Politics
The work of philosopher Giorgio Agamben on 'states of exception' generated discussion across various fields of enquiry about the suspension of juridical norms in liberal democracies. In the wake of Agamben's influential writing, 'state of exception' commonly stands for the manifest might of the governing. However, the governed can also ethically refashion themselves under states of exception of their own. This essay goes beyond a juridical unders…
The Ethnographic Arriving of Palestine
This essay identifies four different modes of ethnographic engagement with Palestine since the nineteenth century: biblical, Oriental, absent, and poststructural. Focusing on the epistemic and political dynamics in which the recent admissibility of Palestine as a legitimate ethnographic subject is embedded, we highlight two conditions. One is the demystification of states and hegemonic groups that control them, and the concomitant legitimacy of g…
Extracanonical Poetry
Said and the Religious Other
Whether observed in Frenchlaïcité, Kemalist Turkey, Kantian political theory, Western Christian theology, or North Indian classical music, the presence of modern secularity has been demonstrably complex (Asad 2003; Bakhle 2008; Blumenberg 1985; Connolly 1999; Navaro-Yashin 2002). My purpose in this essay is to further examine the intricacies of the modern secular, specifically its relation with what it deems 'religious.' My focus will be Edward S…
Anthropological Sensibility and Secular Numbness
Rhythms of the secular
In this article, I ethnographically trace how Arab, mainly Palestinian, poets have modernized their literary tradition during the last seven decades. Shortly after the 1948 Israeli occupation of Palestine, the reign of the classical Arabic ode collapsed, and the modern forms of free verse and, later, the prose poem became dominant. Aiming to contribute to the ethnography of modernity, I examine how poets have adopted and abandoned poetic forms by…
Redeeming Anthropology
Anthropologists have invariably engaged in their discipline as a form of redemption, whether to escape from social restriction, nourish their souls, reform their home polities, or vindicate “the natives.” This book explores how in pursuit of a secular science sired by the Enlightenment, adherents to a “faith in mankind” have variably rejected and embraced theology, albeit in concealed and contradictory ways. Mining principally the personal and bi…
The Ethnographic Arriving of Palestine
This essay identifies four different modes of ethnographic engagement with Palestine since the nineteenth century: biblical, Oriental, absent, and poststructural. Focusing on the epistemic and political dynamics in which the recent admissibility of Palestine as a legitimate ethnographic subject is embedded, we highlight two conditions. One is the demystification of states and hegemonic groups that control them, and the concomitant legitimacy of g…
Introduction
This introductory essay explores the secular constitution of the discipline of anthropology. Anthropology has reflexively interrogated the influence of the colonial, post-colonial, and rhetorical conditions that have shaped its development; however, its growth within the decidedly secular academy has been largely ignored. This inattention has persisted in recent decades even as anthropologists have begun investigating the place of secularism in t…
Is There a Postsecular
Journal Article Is There a Postsecular? Get access Khaled Furani Khaled Furani * *Khaled Furani, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Tel Aviv University, PO Box 39040, Tel Aviv 69978, Israel. E-mail: [email protected]. I wish to express my gratitude to Yehouda Shanhav, who first prompted my writing of this essay. I received helpful comments from him and from Talal Asad, Joyce Dalsheim, Shlomo Fischer, Helene Furani, and John Milbank. Se…
Rhythms of the secular
In this article, I ethnographically trace how Arab, mainly Palestinian, poets have modernized their literary tradition during the last seven decades. Shortly after the 1948 Israeli occupation of Palestine, the reign of the classical Arabic ode collapsed, and the modern forms of free verse and, later, the prose poem became dominant. Aiming to contribute to the ethnography of modernity, I examine how poets have adopted and abandoned poetic forms by…
Middle Eastern Lives in America
Middle Eastern Lives in America. Amir Marvasti and Karyn D. McKinney. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. 171 pp
Dialogues
The past five years have witnessed an increased interest in a dialogue between anthropology and theology, evidenced in part by a suite of edited volumes (e.g. Lauterbach & Vähäkangas 2020; Lemons 2018; Tomlinson & Mathews 2018). Analyses informed by this interdisciplinary nexus have demonstrated the utility of theological concepts for anthropological inquiry (e.g. Robbins 2020; Tomlinson 2020; Williams Green 2021). The following series of dialogu…
Mastering Submission
This article examines how Palestinian poets experience "freedom" when they compose with traditional rhythms in Arabic verse. In analyzing narratives by poets on their introduction to, training in, and mastery of metrical discipline, I argue that these seemingly "technical" practices host an exercise of "freedom" strikingly at odds with dominant liberal modalities, which pit freedom against submission. In contrast with modernizing poets who posit …
Why Insaniyyat? A Society for Palestinian Anthropologists
Said and the Religious Other
Whether observed in Frenchlaïcité, Kemalist Turkey, Kantian political theory, Western Christian theology, or North Indian classical music, the presence of modern secularity has been demonstrably complex (Asad 2003; Bakhle 2008; Blumenberg 1985; Connolly 1999; Navaro-Yashin 2002). My purpose in this essay is to further examine the intricacies of the modern secular, specifically its relation with what it deems 'religious.' My focus will be Edward S…
Middle Eastern Lives in America
Middle Eastern Lives in America. Amir Marvasti and Karyn D. McKinney. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. 171 pp
Sirens of Denial
Research Article| August 01 2007 Sirens of Denial: Notes on the 2006 War between Israel and Hizbullah Khaled Furani Khaled Furani Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google boundary 2 (2007) 34 (3): 109–119. https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-2007-017 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Khaled Furani; Sirens of Denial: Notes on the 2006 War between Israel and Hizbullah. b…
Anthropological Sensibility and Secular Numbness
Rhythms of the secular
In this article, I ethnographically trace how Arab, mainly Palestinian, poets have modernized their literary tradition during the last seven decades. Shortly after the 1948 Israeli occupation of Palestine, the reign of the classical Arabic ode collapsed, and the modern forms of free verse and, later, the prose poem became dominant. Aiming to contribute to the ethnography of modernity, I examine how poets have adopted and abandoned poetic forms by…
Extracanonical Poetry
Said and the Religious Other
Whether observed in Frenchlaïcité, Kemalist Turkey, Kantian political theory, Western Christian theology, or North Indian classical music, the presence of modern secularity has been demonstrably complex (Asad 2003; Bakhle 2008; Blumenberg 1985; Connolly 1999; Navaro-Yashin 2002). My purpose in this essay is to further examine the intricacies of the modern secular, specifically its relation with what it deems 'religious.' My focus will be Edward S…
The Ethnographic Arriving of Palestine
This essay identifies four different modes of ethnographic engagement with Palestine since the nineteenth century: biblical, Oriental, absent, and poststructural. Focusing on the epistemic and political dynamics in which the recent admissibility of Palestine as a legitimate ethnographic subject is embedded, we highlight two conditions. One is the demystification of states and hegemonic groups that control them, and the concomitant legitimacy of g…
States of Exception, Ethics and New Beginnings in Middle East Politics
The work of philosopher Giorgio Agamben on 'states of exception' generated discussion across various fields of enquiry about the suspension of juridical norms in liberal democracies. In the wake of Agamben's influential writing, 'state of exception' commonly stands for the manifest might of the governing. However, the governed can also ethically refashion themselves under states of exception of their own. This essay goes beyond a juridical unders…
Is There a Postsecular
Journal Article Is There a Postsecular? Get access Khaled Furani Khaled Furani * *Khaled Furani, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Tel Aviv University, PO Box 39040, Tel Aviv 69978, Israel. E-mail: [email protected]. I wish to express my gratitude to Yehouda Shanhav, who first prompted my writing of this essay. I received helpful comments from him and from Talal Asad, Joyce Dalsheim, Shlomo Fischer, Helene Furani, and John Milbank. Se…
Theology Revealing the Hājibs of Anthropology
This chapter proposes ways in which theology could promote a critique of idolatries in modern anthropology. It culls resources by scouring Nietzsche’s arguments against modernity. Nietzsche enables a vision of modern anthropology as symptomatic of God’s death in the West, thus inducing questions about the ways its adoration of idols may inhibit a truer inquiry. The chapter finds examples to this effect in anthropology’s engagement with the nation…
Secular Routes and Theological Drifts in Modern Anthropology
Anthropologists have recently shown an increasing concern with secular formations. This exploratory article inquires into the secular formation of anthropology itself by initiating an examination of its relation to theology, deemed anthropology's disciplinary Other. I argue for recognizing a complex relation, whereby anthropology in some ways forgets theology, in others sustains it, and in still others invites critique by it. Analyzing anthropolo…
Mastering Submission
This article examines how Palestinian poets experience "freedom" when they compose with traditional rhythms in Arabic verse. In analyzing narratives by poets on their introduction to, training in, and mastery of metrical discipline, I argue that these seemingly "technical" practices host an exercise of "freedom" strikingly at odds with dominant liberal modalities, which pit freedom against submission. In contrast with modernizing poets who posit …
Hubal
Heuristically evoking Hubal, an ancient Arabian god of the moon, the unknown, and divination, this chapter employs idolatry, a central category of critique from monotheistic theology, to explore ways in which anthropology falls prey to disorientations, conflations, and unwarranted concessions in its study of multiplicity. Concerned with a particular form of idolatry whereby the finite is taken for the infinite, entailing confusion about ends wort…
Thoth
Heuristically evoking Thoth, an ancient Egyptian god of wisdom, architecture, crafts, and “science,” this chapter explores the ways anthropologists work to immure their discipline from its banished other, theology. Asking readers to imagine a proverbial “geodesic dome” housing anthropodom—anthropology constructed as a secular science—it discusses five types of “panes” that anthropologists “lay” in constructing their “home.” Derived from anthropol…
Conclusions
Reviewing the ways this book examines anthropology’s fraught and contradictory relationship with theology and the potential the latter offers for revitalizing the former, this chapter extends this book’s exercise of critique. Examining anthropology’s fealty to secular sovereign reason, and by extension the sovereign state, it questions the discipline’s fear of revelation. Should anthropology reintegrate revelation, not only within its catalogue o…
Eucharist
Heuristically evoking the Christian sacrament of the Eucharist, this chapter undertakes a counterargument to Chapter 1, asserting that anthropology in fact also preserves theology. In proverbial, genealogical, and analogical ways, anthropologists breach the very dome they construct, refracting some “harmful theospheric rays” while reflecting others. Excavating the theistic roots of anthropology’s concepts and practices, most notably its consummat…
Epigraph
Verily, in the creation of the heavens and the earth, and in the difference between night and day, there are indeed signs of wonder for all who are endowed with insight. (Qur’an 2: 190)
Redeeming Anthropology
Anthropologists have invariably engaged in their discipline as a form of redemption, whether to escape from social restriction, nourish their souls, reform their home polities, or vindicate “the natives.” This book explores how in pursuit of a secular science sired by the Enlightenment, adherents to a “faith in mankind” have variably rejected and embraced theology, albeit in concealed and contradictory ways. Mining principally the personal and bi…
Ethics and Aesthetics Are One”
After Criticism
A question drives my reading of Mahmoud Darwish’s Mural, chronicling a poet’s quest for his own becoming while facing death: What rhythms of freedom—or what forms of enlightenment—may a person inhabit when facing life’s end? I argue that to this question Mural responds with an ethical striving, guided by a principle Darwish calls “evanescence.” I contingently identify evanescence as an “ethics of oneness” oriented to composite unity, which Darwis…
Why Insaniyyat? A Society for Palestinian Anthropologists
Leith, a Transnational Tribute
In memoriam of Professor Leith Mullings, my teacher, I raise questions she can no longer answer, although her deeds can speak still. She provides a model of scholarship, mentoring, and activism infused with courage, humility, and nurturance. In her final years and days, she worked with Palestinian anthropologists to form an independent association and forge ties with Black anthropologists. May they remain enduring testaments to a life striving fo…
Introduction
This introductory essay explores the secular constitution of the discipline of anthropology. Anthropology has reflexively interrogated the influence of the colonial, post-colonial, and rhetorical conditions that have shaped its development; however, its growth within the decidedly secular academy has been largely ignored. This inattention has persisted in recent decades even as anthropologists have begun investigating the place of secularism in t…
Khalifah and the Modern Sovereign
The Palestinian political condition raises questions of the nation-state and, by extension, the sovereignty paradigm underpinning it. Propelled by these quandaries, this article revisits revelatory language to interrogate the conceptual grammar of modern politics. Mining the land’s religious patrimony, I evoke the Qur’anic notion of khalifah to join recent efforts at illuminating sovereignty’s delirium and deleterious consequences. Largely ignore…
Dialogues
The past five years have witnessed an increased interest in a dialogue between anthropology and theology, evidenced in part by a suite of edited volumes (e.g. Lauterbach & Vähäkangas 2020; Lemons 2018; Tomlinson & Mathews 2018). Analyses informed by this interdisciplinary nexus have demonstrated the utility of theological concepts for anthropological inquiry (e.g. Robbins 2020; Tomlinson 2020; Williams Green 2021). The following series of dialogu…
Sociology (16 obras) · Philosophy (15 obras) · Law (13 obras) · Political science (13 obras) · Epistemology (9 obras) · Theology (9 obras) · History (8 obras) · History (8 obras) · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies (8 obras) · Politics (8 obras)