Claudia Liebelt
Biographic Data
| ID | 135852 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Claudia Liebelt |
| GIVEN NAMES | Claudia |
| FAMILY NAME | Liebelt |
| SIGNATURE | LIEBELT C |
| AFFILIATIONS | Freie Universität Berlin |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3131-6628 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 26 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 66 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 25 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
The Affective Afterlife of the “Smelly Immigrant” Trope: Contested Scents, “Race,” and Olfactory Contact Zones in Berlin
This paper proposes the notion of “olfactory contact zones” to investigate the role of odors and scents and the affects they give rise to in Berlin's urban publics. Drawing on the notion of the “afterlife” of racialised violence, it shows how tropes of the “smelly immigrant,” anchored in European antisemitism and colonial history, live on despite being considered a thing of the past in an ostensibly “post‐racial” Germany. By analyzing olfactory a…
Beauty
Beauty is an aesthetic value that is tied to embodied practices, affects, and the senses. Whereas philosophers have long discussed beauty as disembodied aesthetics, and scientists have searched for bodily features that are considered universally beautiful, social and cultural anthropologists have emphasised the social and ritual aspects of beauty. They have shown that beauty is defined differently across time and space, often being tied to cultur…
Perfume
Aesthetic citizenship, beauty politics and the state: An Introduction
This introduction situates our approach to the nexus between citizenship, beauty politics and the state, highlighting how embodied aesthetics constitute a central dimension of state-subject relations. We propose 'aesthetic citizenship' to describe embodied aesthetics as a biopolitical field of self-making and a site of disciplining, educating and manufacturing 'proper' citizens through visual and sometimes surgical technologies of surveillance an…
The Religious Which Is Political: Revisiting Pnina Werbner's Imagined Diasporas and Beyond
Dedicated to the memory of Pnina Werbner, this essay revisits Werbner's ethnographic and conceptual work on the relationship between diaspora and religion through a close reading of her book on Imagined Diasporas among Manchester Muslims and her later engagements with the concept of diaspora with respect to religion and the background of her work on African and Filipino labour diasporas in the West. It argues that many of Werbner's insights remai…
Kolonya Renaissance: Disinfection, Healing, and the Role of Eau de Cologne during the early Covid-19 Crisis in Turkey and its Diaspora
This article contributes to the debate on material religion, the body, and the senses by focusing on the uses and reconfigurations of cologne in Turkey and its German diaspora during the COVID-19 pandemic. Eau de Cologne, which emerged in Western Europe during the second plague pandemic, was localized as kolonya in Turkey during the nineteenth century. In the early COVID-19 crisis, it regained its early association with purity and healing in spit…
Pnina Werbner: An Obituary
Pnina Werbner was a British social anthropologist, a brilliant thinker and an engaged intellectual renowned for her prolific contributions to debates on Sufi Islam, multiculturalism and diaspora, as well as urban and legal anthropology. In January 2023, she died unexpectedly during a holiday with her husband, the anthropologist Richard Werbner
Caring for the 'Holy Land': Filipina Domestic Workers in Israel
In Israel, as in numerous countries of the global North, Filipina women have been recruited in large numbers for domestic work, typically as live-in caregivers for the elderly. The case of Israel is unique in that the country has a special significance as the ‘Holy Land’ for the predominantly devout Christian Filipina women and is at the center of an often violent conflict, which affects Filipinos in many ways. In the literature, migrant domestic…
Beauty: What Makes Us Dream, What Haunts Us
In recent years, feminist anthropologists have contributed to an interdisciplinary debate on beauty, which focuses on gendered desires, affectivity, and projects of self‐making amid a global boom in beauty products and services. Drawing on the emergent field of critical beauty studies and ethnographic research on middle‐class femininity in urban Turkey, this article explores the salience and potential of beauty as a feminist keyword in anthropolo…
Beauty and the Norm: Debating Standardization in Bodily Appearance
Aesthetic Citizenship in Istanbul: On manufacturing beauty and negotiating belonging through the body in urban Turkey
This article discusses the relationship between affective body politics and gendered norms of urban belonging in Istanbul, Turkey. As I will show, there are specific bodily imaginations and affective desires that tie a classed and racialized appearance to imaginations of modernity, femininity and urban belonging. In Turkey’s largest city, Istanbul, bodily self-fashioning is about expressing and sometimes producing spatial and social difference an…
Gendering ‘Everyday Islam’: An introduction
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…
Beauty and the Norm: Debating Standardization in Bodily Appearance
Grooming Istanbul
Based on research in Istanbul in 2013–14, the article describes a changing urban geography of beauty, which has multiple repercussions on women’s spatialized notions of femininity, intimate bodily grooming, and aesthetics. Beauty salons in two neighborhoods typically placed on different ends of both the social and the Islamist-secularist axes highlight the similarities and differences of intimate concerns and encounters. Urban beauty salons are w…
Migration, Diaspora, and Religious Pilgrimage in Comparative Perspective: Sacred Geographies and Ethical Landscapes
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 …
Manufacturing Beauty, Grooming Selves: The Creation of Femininities in the Global Economy - An Introduction
Anthropological Perspectives on Care: Work, Kinship, and the Life-Course
The â Mama Maryâ of the White Cityâ s Underside
Jahre Institut für Ethnologie der Universität Leipzig. 6. –7. November 2014, Leipzig
Consuming Pork, Parading the Virgin and Crafting Origami in Tel Aviv: Filipina Care Workers' Aesthetic Formations in Israel
This article investigates the sensual participation of Filipina care workers in Israel, more specifically in the urban space of Tel Aviv. By creating a rich communal life, by parading icons of the Virgin Mary through the streets, and by crafting Origami paper swans that have conquered urban spaces in all sizes, shapes and colours, migrants have fashioned modes of aesthetic and sensual belonging in the city. Their popular aesthetics, I argue, is i…
Caring for the 'Holy Land': Transnational Filipina domestic workers in the Israeli migration regime
In Israel, as in numerous countries of the global North, Filipina women have been recruited in large numbers for domestic work, typically as live-in caregivers for the elderly. The case of Israel is unique in that the country has a special significance as the ‘Holy Land’ for the predominantly devout Christian Filipina women and is at the center of an often violent conflict, which affects Filipinos in many ways. In the literature, migrant domestic…
On Global Happenings in the Name of Jesus, Rubbing Shoulders with ‘VIPs’ and Domestic Work in the ‘Holy Land’: Notes on Celebrity and Blessing in the Filipino Diaspora
In Israel, Filipina migrants employed in domestic work and caring come into contact with global and Filipino so-called ‘VIPs’, especially in the realm of Christianity. As both Catholic and evangelical religious leaders, miracle-workers and elite pilgrims tour the ‘Holy Land’ of Christians worldwide, Filipina domestic workers integrate them into their religious engagements in the diaspora, find them more approachable than ‘at home’ and, against th…
On Gendered Journeys, Spiritual Transformations and Ethical Formations in Diaspora: Filipina Care Workers in Israel
Research on migrant care and domestic workers has focused on their multiple dislocations and exclusions in the diaspora, analysing a highly gendered global economy of care and domestic work. This article investigates the role of ritual performance and spirituality in female care workers' projects of migration and in the emergence of their feminized and racialized subjectivities. On the basis of anthropological research in Israel and the Philippin…
Sacred journeys, diasporic lives: Sociality and the religious imagination among Filipinos in the Middle East
Becoming Pilgrims in the Holy Land: On Filipina Domestic Workers' Struggles and Pilgrimages for a Cause in Israel
Filipino Christian care and domestic workers' migration to Israel is a deeply transformative process of embodied subjectification, imbuing their religious practice with imaginative meanings rather than merely economic. Filipino pilgrimages to holy sites in Israel sacralise the humdrum and sometimes demeaning realities of their work, enabling them to transcend through performance the 'migrant' label assigned to them by contemporary migration regim…
Becoming Pilgrims in the Holy Land: On Filipina Domestic Workers' Struggles and Pilgrimages for a Cause in Israel
Filipino Christian care and domestic workers' migration to Israel is a deeply transformative process of embodied subjectification, imbuing their religious practice with imaginative meanings rather than merely economic. Filipino pilgrimages to holy sites in Israel sacralise the humdrum and sometimes demeaning realities of their work, enabling them to transcend through performance the 'migrant' label assigned to them by contemporary migration regim…
Consuming Pork, Parading the Virgin and Crafting Origami in Tel Aviv: Filipina Care Workers' Aesthetic Formations in Israel
This article investigates the sensual participation of Filipina care workers in Israel, more specifically in the urban space of Tel Aviv. By creating a rich communal life, by parading icons of the Virgin Mary through the streets, and by crafting Origami paper swans that have conquered urban spaces in all sizes, shapes and colours, migrants have fashioned modes of aesthetic and sensual belonging in the city. Their popular aesthetics, I argue, is i…
Grooming Istanbul
Based on research in Istanbul in 2013–14, the article describes a changing urban geography of beauty, which has multiple repercussions on women’s spatialized notions of femininity, intimate bodily grooming, and aesthetics. Beauty salons in two neighborhoods typically placed on different ends of both the social and the Islamist-secularist axes highlight the similarities and differences of intimate concerns and encounters. Urban beauty salons are w…
Aesthetic Citizenship in Istanbul: On manufacturing beauty and negotiating belonging through the body in urban Turkey
This article discusses the relationship between affective body politics and gendered norms of urban belonging in Istanbul, Turkey. As I will show, there are specific bodily imaginations and affective desires that tie a classed and racialized appearance to imaginations of modernity, femininity and urban belonging. In Turkey’s largest city, Istanbul, bodily self-fashioning is about expressing and sometimes producing spatial and social difference an…
Gendering ‘Everyday Islam’: An introduction
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…
Manufacturing Beauty, Grooming Selves: The Creation of Femininities in the Global Economy - An Introduction
Aesthetic citizenship, beauty politics and the state: An Introduction
This introduction situates our approach to the nexus between citizenship, beauty politics and the state, highlighting how embodied aesthetics constitute a central dimension of state-subject relations. We propose 'aesthetic citizenship' to describe embodied aesthetics as a biopolitical field of self-making and a site of disciplining, educating and manufacturing 'proper' citizens through visual and sometimes surgical technologies of surveillance an…
The Religious Which Is Political: Revisiting Pnina Werbner's Imagined Diasporas and Beyond
Dedicated to the memory of Pnina Werbner, this essay revisits Werbner's ethnographic and conceptual work on the relationship between diaspora and religion through a close reading of her book on Imagined Diasporas among Manchester Muslims and her later engagements with the concept of diaspora with respect to religion and the background of her work on African and Filipino labour diasporas in the West. It argues that many of Werbner's insights remai…
Migration, Diaspora, and Religious Pilgrimage in Comparative Perspective: Sacred Geographies and Ethical Landscapes
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 …
On Global Happenings in the Name of Jesus, Rubbing Shoulders with ‘VIPs’ and Domestic Work in the ‘Holy Land’: Notes on Celebrity and Blessing in the Filipino Diaspora
In Israel, Filipina migrants employed in domestic work and caring come into contact with global and Filipino so-called ‘VIPs’, especially in the realm of Christianity. As both Catholic and evangelical religious leaders, miracle-workers and elite pilgrims tour the ‘Holy Land’ of Christians worldwide, Filipina domestic workers integrate them into their religious engagements in the diaspora, find them more approachable than ‘at home’ and, against th…
On Gendered Journeys, Spiritual Transformations and Ethical Formations in Diaspora: Filipina Care Workers in Israel
Research on migrant care and domestic workers has focused on their multiple dislocations and exclusions in the diaspora, analysing a highly gendered global economy of care and domestic work. This article investigates the role of ritual performance and spirituality in female care workers' projects of migration and in the emergence of their feminized and racialized subjectivities. On the basis of anthropological research in Israel and the Philippin…
Touristinnen, nicht Arbeiterinnen!« Philippinische Pflegekräfte in Israel auf Pilgerfahrt im ›Heiligen Land‹
Sacred journeys, diasporic lives: Sociality and the religious imagination among Filipinos in the Middle East
Becoming Pilgrims in the Holy Land: On Filipina Domestic Workers' Struggles and Pilgrimages for a Cause in Israel
Filipino Christian care and domestic workers' migration to Israel is a deeply transformative process of embodied subjectification, imbuing their religious practice with imaginative meanings rather than merely economic. Filipino pilgrimages to holy sites in Israel sacralise the humdrum and sometimes demeaning realities of their work, enabling them to transcend through performance the 'migrant' label assigned to them by contemporary migration regim…
Caring for the 'Holy Land': Transnational Filipina domestic workers in the Israeli migration regime
In Israel, as in numerous countries of the global North, Filipina women have been recruited in large numbers for domestic work, typically as live-in caregivers for the elderly. The case of Israel is unique in that the country has a special significance as the ‘Holy Land’ for the predominantly devout Christian Filipina women and is at the center of an often violent conflict, which affects Filipinos in many ways. In the literature, migrant domestic…
On Global Happenings in the Name of Jesus, Rubbing Shoulders with ‘VIPs’ and Domestic Work in the ‘Holy Land’: Notes on Celebrity and Blessing in the Filipino Diaspora
In Israel, Filipina migrants employed in domestic work and caring come into contact with global and Filipino so-called ‘VIPs’, especially in the realm of Christianity. As both Catholic and evangelical religious leaders, miracle-workers and elite pilgrims tour the ‘Holy Land’ of Christians worldwide, Filipina domestic workers integrate them into their religious engagements in the diaspora, find them more approachable than ‘at home’ and, against th…
On Gendered Journeys, Spiritual Transformations and Ethical Formations in Diaspora: Filipina Care Workers in Israel
Research on migrant care and domestic workers has focused on their multiple dislocations and exclusions in the diaspora, analysing a highly gendered global economy of care and domestic work. This article investigates the role of ritual performance and spirituality in female care workers' projects of migration and in the emergence of their feminized and racialized subjectivities. On the basis of anthropological research in Israel and the Philippin…
Consuming Pork, Parading the Virgin and Crafting Origami in Tel Aviv: Filipina Care Workers' Aesthetic Formations in Israel
This article investigates the sensual participation of Filipina care workers in Israel, more specifically in the urban space of Tel Aviv. By creating a rich communal life, by parading icons of the Virgin Mary through the streets, and by crafting Origami paper swans that have conquered urban spaces in all sizes, shapes and colours, migrants have fashioned modes of aesthetic and sensual belonging in the city. Their popular aesthetics, I argue, is i…
The â Mama Maryâ of the White Cityâ s Underside
Jahre Institut für Ethnologie der Universität Leipzig. 6. –7. November 2014, Leipzig
Anthropological Perspectives on Care: Work, Kinship, and the Life-Course
Grooming Istanbul
Based on research in Istanbul in 2013–14, the article describes a changing urban geography of beauty, which has multiple repercussions on women’s spatialized notions of femininity, intimate bodily grooming, and aesthetics. Beauty salons in two neighborhoods typically placed on different ends of both the social and the Islamist-secularist axes highlight the similarities and differences of intimate concerns and encounters. Urban beauty salons are w…
Migration, Diaspora, and Religious Pilgrimage in Comparative Perspective: Sacred Geographies and Ethical Landscapes
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 …
Manufacturing Beauty, Grooming Selves: The Creation of Femininities in the Global Economy - An Introduction
Gendering ‘Everyday Islam’: An introduction
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…
Beauty and the Norm: Debating Standardization in Bodily Appearance
Beauty and the Norm: Debating Standardization in Bodily Appearance
Aesthetic Citizenship in Istanbul: On manufacturing beauty and negotiating belonging through the body in urban Turkey
This article discusses the relationship between affective body politics and gendered norms of urban belonging in Istanbul, Turkey. As I will show, there are specific bodily imaginations and affective desires that tie a classed and racialized appearance to imaginations of modernity, femininity and urban belonging. In Turkey’s largest city, Istanbul, bodily self-fashioning is about expressing and sometimes producing spatial and social difference an…
Caring for the 'Holy Land': Filipina Domestic Workers in Israel
In Israel, as in numerous countries of the global North, Filipina women have been recruited in large numbers for domestic work, typically as live-in caregivers for the elderly. The case of Israel is unique in that the country has a special significance as the ‘Holy Land’ for the predominantly devout Christian Filipina women and is at the center of an often violent conflict, which affects Filipinos in many ways. In the literature, migrant domestic…
Beauty: What Makes Us Dream, What Haunts Us
In recent years, feminist anthropologists have contributed to an interdisciplinary debate on beauty, which focuses on gendered desires, affectivity, and projects of self‐making amid a global boom in beauty products and services. Drawing on the emergent field of critical beauty studies and ethnographic research on middle‐class femininity in urban Turkey, this article explores the salience and potential of beauty as a feminist keyword in anthropolo…
Kolonya Renaissance: Disinfection, Healing, and the Role of Eau de Cologne during the early Covid-19 Crisis in Turkey and its Diaspora
This article contributes to the debate on material religion, the body, and the senses by focusing on the uses and reconfigurations of cologne in Turkey and its German diaspora during the COVID-19 pandemic. Eau de Cologne, which emerged in Western Europe during the second plague pandemic, was localized as kolonya in Turkey during the nineteenth century. In the early COVID-19 crisis, it regained its early association with purity and healing in spit…
Pnina Werbner: An Obituary
Pnina Werbner was a British social anthropologist, a brilliant thinker and an engaged intellectual renowned for her prolific contributions to debates on Sufi Islam, multiculturalism and diaspora, as well as urban and legal anthropology. In January 2023, she died unexpectedly during a holiday with her husband, the anthropologist Richard Werbner
Aesthetic citizenship, beauty politics and the state: An Introduction
This introduction situates our approach to the nexus between citizenship, beauty politics and the state, highlighting how embodied aesthetics constitute a central dimension of state-subject relations. We propose 'aesthetic citizenship' to describe embodied aesthetics as a biopolitical field of self-making and a site of disciplining, educating and manufacturing 'proper' citizens through visual and sometimes surgical technologies of surveillance an…
The Religious Which Is Political: Revisiting Pnina Werbner's Imagined Diasporas and Beyond
Dedicated to the memory of Pnina Werbner, this essay revisits Werbner's ethnographic and conceptual work on the relationship between diaspora and religion through a close reading of her book on Imagined Diasporas among Manchester Muslims and her later engagements with the concept of diaspora with respect to religion and the background of her work on African and Filipino labour diasporas in the West. It argues that many of Werbner's insights remai…
Perfume
The Affective Afterlife of the “Smelly Immigrant” Trope: Contested Scents, “Race,” and Olfactory Contact Zones in Berlin
This paper proposes the notion of “olfactory contact zones” to investigate the role of odors and scents and the affects they give rise to in Berlin's urban publics. Drawing on the notion of the “afterlife” of racialised violence, it shows how tropes of the “smelly immigrant,” anchored in European antisemitism and colonial history, live on despite being considered a thing of the past in an ostensibly “post‐racial” Germany. By analyzing olfactory a…
Sociology (18 works) · Gender Studies (13 works) · Aesthetics (11 works) · Art (11 works) · Political science (11 works) · Law (10 works) · Beauty (7 works) · Diaspora (7 works) · Diaspora, migration, transnational identity (7 works) · Anthropology (6 works)