Matteo Benussi
Biographic Data
| ID | 176638 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Matteo Benussi |
| GIVEN NAMES | Matteo |
| FAMILY NAME | Benussi |
| SIGNATURE | BENUSSI M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Ca' Foscari University of Venice |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9166-036X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 12 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 29 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 12 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2018 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Imperism as political nomos in Russia and beyond
This article proposes the concept of ‘imperism’ as an analytical tool apt to describe political processes in Putin’s Russia and beyond. Imperism denotes an ontological orientation, or nomos (the term derives from theories of religion and politics by Berger and Schmitt), that undergirds a plurality of civic positions, informs policy, and fundamentally casts imperialness as a political entity’s normal, desirable state. Russia’s imperist nomos shall…
Chaotic charisma
This contribution explores the weaknesses, breakdowns, and possibilities of religious infrastructure in the Sinza ward, a multiconfessional residential suburb in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. We focus on instances of infrastructural disruption connected to the grassroots activities of charismatic Christian churches and, to a lesser extent, Islamic piety movements. Through interviews, focus groups, fieldwork, and quantitative data, this study shows how…
Afterword
Two ways of being the Body of Christ
In this article, an anthropologist and a theologian explore an analytical framework for the comparative study of Christian churches, focusing in particular on ritual life among Roman Catholics and Baptist Protestants in Italy. Catholics and Baptists have different ways of articulating what it means to be "the Body of Christ"-that is, the ecclesia. If ecclesiology is a theme well explored by theologians, social scientists have hesitated to pronoun…
Ethical infrastructure
This article explores the ecology of late-modern askesis through the concept of 'ethical infrastructure': the array of goods, locales, technologies, procedures, and sundry pieces of equipment upon which the possibility of ethicists' striving is premised. By looking at the ethnographic case of halal living among Muslim pietists in post-Soviet Tatarstan (Russia), I advance a framework that highlights the 'profane', often unassuming or religiously u…
Emancipating ethics
This article advances a framework aimed at capturing the political life of ethical intensity by putting autonomist theory in resonance with ethnographic material pertaining to quietist Muslim milieus in post-Soviet Russia. The emancipatory and prefigurative potential of collective projects of self-legislation - in this case, 'halal living' - are explored through the notions of ethical form of life and Rule/Law. It will be argued that autonomist t…
Pietaskscapes of halal living
Drawing on ethnographic research in Tatarstan (Russia) and through an engagement with Foucauldian, phenomenological, and ecological social theories, this paper advances the concept of piety taskscape, or “pietaskscape”, to indicate the granular, organically emerging meshwork of settings and locations where Muslim pietists carry out self-fashioning. This concept aspires to grasp the nexus of ethical action, space-making, and experience, in concret…
The golden cage
Through the Weber-inspired metaphor of the ‘golden cage’, this contribution discusses the dual process by which both Islamic heritage and secularity are produced in Russia’s Muslim-majority Tatarstan Republic: on the one hand (‘gold’), Islam is given visibility/legitimacy as an element of Russia’s civilisational makeup; on the other (‘cage’), the region’s Islamic past is shaped by the state while ‘excessive’ manifestations of piety are marginalis…
Public spaces and inner worlds
The emergence of Islamic piety movements in post-Soviet Tatarstan has set afoot two parallel processes: (1) religion has progressively left the narrow sphere to which it was relegated during the Soviet era – old age, the private domain and ethnically connoted rural contexts – through a series of steps including the early appearance of makeshift shops catering to a Muslim clientele, the boom of self-cultivation techniques among the region’s youthf…
Magic
Attempts to define and describe magic must reckon with this concept’s slipperiness, as magic is often understood against what supposedly it is not: typically, ‘proper’ religion and ‘rational’ science, even though both religion and science are objects just as elusive. Despite its ambiguous status and the prejudices attached to it, or maybe precisely for these reasons, magic has long enthralled scholars in the human sciences, and anthropology in pa…
Ethnic Muslims and the ‘Halal Movement’ in Tatarstan
The ‘halal movement’ is an orientation predominantly mobilised by urban youth and by the emerging urban middle class in Tatarstan. It articulates a cosmopolitan, universal Islamic discourse, explicitly separates ethnicity and Muslimness, and stages religion as an ethical issue, tied neither to a nation nor to a theological doctrine
Sovereign” Islam and Tatar “Aqīdah”
“Traditional Islam” has emerged in the post-Soviet Republic of Tatarstan (Russian Federation) as a powerful if contentious discursive trope. In this paper, I look at traditional Islam and its conceptual twin, “non-traditional Islam”, as normative governmental tools aimed at defining acceptable or unwelcome form of religious commitment in an environment in which the rapid success of Sunni piety trends after socialism’s end has exacerbated the anxi…
Sovereign” Islam and Tatar “Aqīdah”
“Traditional Islam” has emerged in the post-Soviet Republic of Tatarstan (Russian Federation) as a powerful if contentious discursive trope. In this paper, I look at traditional Islam and its conceptual twin, “non-traditional Islam”, as normative governmental tools aimed at defining acceptable or unwelcome form of religious commitment in an environment in which the rapid success of Sunni piety trends after socialism’s end has exacerbated the anxi…
Public spaces and inner worlds
The emergence of Islamic piety movements in post-Soviet Tatarstan has set afoot two parallel processes: (1) religion has progressively left the narrow sphere to which it was relegated during the Soviet era – old age, the private domain and ethnically connoted rural contexts – through a series of steps including the early appearance of makeshift shops catering to a Muslim clientele, the boom of self-cultivation techniques among the region’s youthf…
Ethical infrastructure
This article explores the ecology of late-modern askesis through the concept of 'ethical infrastructure': the array of goods, locales, technologies, procedures, and sundry pieces of equipment upon which the possibility of ethicists' striving is premised. By looking at the ethnographic case of halal living among Muslim pietists in post-Soviet Tatarstan (Russia), I advance a framework that highlights the 'profane', often unassuming or religiously u…
Emancipating ethics
This article advances a framework aimed at capturing the political life of ethical intensity by putting autonomist theory in resonance with ethnographic material pertaining to quietist Muslim milieus in post-Soviet Russia. The emancipatory and prefigurative potential of collective projects of self-legislation - in this case, 'halal living' - are explored through the notions of ethical form of life and Rule/Law. It will be argued that autonomist t…
Afterword
Two ways of being the Body of Christ
In this article, an anthropologist and a theologian explore an analytical framework for the comparative study of Christian churches, focusing in particular on ritual life among Roman Catholics and Baptist Protestants in Italy. Catholics and Baptists have different ways of articulating what it means to be "the Body of Christ"-that is, the ecclesia. If ecclesiology is a theme well explored by theologians, social scientists have hesitated to pronoun…
The golden cage
Through the Weber-inspired metaphor of the ‘golden cage’, this contribution discusses the dual process by which both Islamic heritage and secularity are produced in Russia’s Muslim-majority Tatarstan Republic: on the one hand (‘gold’), Islam is given visibility/legitimacy as an element of Russia’s civilisational makeup; on the other (‘cage’), the region’s Islamic past is shaped by the state while ‘excessive’ manifestations of piety are marginalis…
Ethnic Muslims and the ‘Halal Movement’ in Tatarstan
The ‘halal movement’ is an orientation predominantly mobilised by urban youth and by the emerging urban middle class in Tatarstan. It articulates a cosmopolitan, universal Islamic discourse, explicitly separates ethnicity and Muslimness, and stages religion as an ethical issue, tied neither to a nation nor to a theological doctrine
Sovereign” Islam and Tatar “Aqīdah”
“Traditional Islam” has emerged in the post-Soviet Republic of Tatarstan (Russian Federation) as a powerful if contentious discursive trope. In this paper, I look at traditional Islam and its conceptual twin, “non-traditional Islam”, as normative governmental tools aimed at defining acceptable or unwelcome form of religious commitment in an environment in which the rapid success of Sunni piety trends after socialism’s end has exacerbated the anxi…
Magic
Attempts to define and describe magic must reckon with this concept’s slipperiness, as magic is often understood against what supposedly it is not: typically, ‘proper’ religion and ‘rational’ science, even though both religion and science are objects just as elusive. Despite its ambiguous status and the prejudices attached to it, or maybe precisely for these reasons, magic has long enthralled scholars in the human sciences, and anthropology in pa…
Public spaces and inner worlds
The emergence of Islamic piety movements in post-Soviet Tatarstan has set afoot two parallel processes: (1) religion has progressively left the narrow sphere to which it was relegated during the Soviet era – old age, the private domain and ethnically connoted rural contexts – through a series of steps including the early appearance of makeshift shops catering to a Muslim clientele, the boom of self-cultivation techniques among the region’s youthf…
Pietaskscapes of halal living
Drawing on ethnographic research in Tatarstan (Russia) and through an engagement with Foucauldian, phenomenological, and ecological social theories, this paper advances the concept of piety taskscape, or “pietaskscape”, to indicate the granular, organically emerging meshwork of settings and locations where Muslim pietists carry out self-fashioning. This concept aspires to grasp the nexus of ethical action, space-making, and experience, in concret…
The golden cage
Through the Weber-inspired metaphor of the ‘golden cage’, this contribution discusses the dual process by which both Islamic heritage and secularity are produced in Russia’s Muslim-majority Tatarstan Republic: on the one hand (‘gold’), Islam is given visibility/legitimacy as an element of Russia’s civilisational makeup; on the other (‘cage’), the region’s Islamic past is shaped by the state while ‘excessive’ manifestations of piety are marginalis…
Ethical infrastructure
This article explores the ecology of late-modern askesis through the concept of 'ethical infrastructure': the array of goods, locales, technologies, procedures, and sundry pieces of equipment upon which the possibility of ethicists' striving is premised. By looking at the ethnographic case of halal living among Muslim pietists in post-Soviet Tatarstan (Russia), I advance a framework that highlights the 'profane', often unassuming or religiously u…
Emancipating ethics
This article advances a framework aimed at capturing the political life of ethical intensity by putting autonomist theory in resonance with ethnographic material pertaining to quietist Muslim milieus in post-Soviet Russia. The emancipatory and prefigurative potential of collective projects of self-legislation - in this case, 'halal living' - are explored through the notions of ethical form of life and Rule/Law. It will be argued that autonomist t…
Two ways of being the Body of Christ
In this article, an anthropologist and a theologian explore an analytical framework for the comparative study of Christian churches, focusing in particular on ritual life among Roman Catholics and Baptist Protestants in Italy. Catholics and Baptists have different ways of articulating what it means to be "the Body of Christ"-that is, the ecclesia. If ecclesiology is a theme well explored by theologians, social scientists have hesitated to pronoun…
Imperism as political nomos in Russia and beyond
This article proposes the concept of ‘imperism’ as an analytical tool apt to describe political processes in Putin’s Russia and beyond. Imperism denotes an ontological orientation, or nomos (the term derives from theories of religion and politics by Berger and Schmitt), that undergirds a plurality of civic positions, informs policy, and fundamentally casts imperialness as a political entity’s normal, desirable state. Russia’s imperist nomos shall…
Chaotic charisma
This contribution explores the weaknesses, breakdowns, and possibilities of religious infrastructure in the Sinza ward, a multiconfessional residential suburb in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. We focus on instances of infrastructural disruption connected to the grassroots activities of charismatic Christian churches and, to a lesser extent, Islamic piety movements. Through interviews, focus groups, fieldwork, and quantitative data, this study shows how…
Afterword
Sociology (11 works) · Philosophy (10 works) · Law (8 works) · Political science (8 works) · Philosophy (7 works) · Epistemology (6 works) · Islam (6 works) · Law (6 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (5 works) · Aesthetics (4 works)