Thomas G Kirsch
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 588602 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Thomas G Kirsch |
| PRENOMES | Thomas G |
| SOBRENOME | Kirsch |
| ASSINATURA | KIRSCH T G |
| AFILIAÇÕES | University of Konstanz |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6521-4128 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 30 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 93 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 26 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 7 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2004 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2024 |
| ÍNDICE H | 4 |
Public Anthropology
Von Ethnolog:innen wird heute erwartet, dass sie sich zu aktuellen sozialen Problemen und Debatten positionieren. Dieser Reader bietet erstmals einen Überblick über die vielfältigen Praktiken, Formate und Ansätze, mit denen das Vorhaben der »Public Anthropology« an Instituten der ethnologischen Fächer in Deutschland heute umgesetzt wird. In fünf Sektionen – Öffentlichkeiten, Kollaborationen, Positionierungen, Transformationen und Vermittlung – di…
Securosociality
This article introduces the concept of securosociality by drawing on my research on non-state security in South Africa. By examining ethnographic examples of how actors establish security-related social ties with each other and the role of vernacular understandings of security in forging them, I argue that this concept is a productive lens for analyzing the social lives of security. Among other things, its focus on the dynamic and versatile natur…
Spiritual Infrastructures
In this article, I take inspiration from Marshall Sahlins’ recent plea to study immanentist societies in their own cultural terms so as to rethink infrastructures from a decisively non-secular vantage point. More particularly, I take the case of Pentecostalism to argue that what is required is to go beyond the focus on religious infrastructures, that is, the idea of human-made (secular) infrastructures that serve people’s religious aspirations, s…
Regimes of Ignorance
Non-knowledge should not be simply regarded as the opposite of knowledge, but as complementary to it: each derives its character and meaning from the other and from their interaction. Knowledge does not colonize the space of ignorance in the progressive march of science; rather, knowledge and ignorance are mutually shaped in social and political domains of partial, shifting, and temporal relationships. This volume’s ethnographic analyses provide …
Domestic Demons and the Intimate Uncanny
Verfängliche Ähnlichkeiten innerhalb und außerhalb der Ethnologie
Family Resemblances in Action
The introduction to this special issue argues that in many countries in southern Africa a new phase in the entanglement between the religious and the political has set in. Increasingly, activists in political fields are borrowing from religious registers of discourse and practice, while conversely, activists in the religious domain are adopting discourses and practices originating in the political domain. We suggest that this religiopolitical act…
Managing Unruliness
Based on an ethnographic analysis of volunteer management practices in faith-based organizations in Zambia, this article outlines the dilemmas that these organizations face when deploying volunteers. Due to financial constraints, most of these organizations have to rely on voluntary work from local residents in order to realize their goals. I show that when the volunteers' work is concerned with social problems that are deemed to be controversial…
Securing Security
There is presently no shortage of conceptual models to account for the fact that security have begun to play an increasingly important role in more and more spheres of life. However, most of these explanations rely on a figure of thought in which security is freshly brought to bear on something which has not previously been a target of security. This chapter develops an alternative approach. Drawing on my ethnographic findings from South Africa, …
Commentary
This commentary interprets the performance of state criticism by state employees in an Argentinian judicial outreach office as a practice of boundary drawing between state and society that takes place within the ‘state system’. It argues that this insight adds complexity to Timothy Mitchell’s conceptualization of ‘state effects’ and that it also contributes to a (pluralized) understanding of state justice and the performative construction of ‘the…
Practising Ecumenism Through Boundary Work and Meta-Coding
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork on religion in Zambia, this article engages critically with approaches that suggest that ecumenism necessarily occurs across socio-religious boundaries. I argue that the objective of ecumenism – namely, good-willed co-operation between religious practitioners who are otherwise separated from each other in terms of their institutional affiliations – can also be attained through boundary work and use of the meta-co…
Performing the common good
Using fieldwork data from South Africa's Eastern Cape Province, this article highlights ambiguities of volunteering as idea and practice by exploring discursive strategies used by volunteers in the field of civic crime prevention when the ethical honesty and selflessness of their commitment to volunteering is questioned by others. These ambiguities relate to asymmetries in the relationship between donors and recipients of volunteering, as well as…
Introduction
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Permutations of Order
Volunteer Economies
Permutations of Order
The Baha'i Faith in Africa
On the difficulties of speaking out against security
This article outlines an approach to security that explains its phenomenal growth by examining a peculiarity of its semantic field. In contrast to notions like 'war' and 'violence', whose antonyms, 'peace' and 'non-violence', have positive connotations and are therefore well suited to discursively opposing 'war' and 'violence', the antonym of 'security' ' namely 'insecurity' ' does not achieve the same effect. I suggest that this peculiarity lead…
Regimes of ignorance
Introduction: Regimes of Ignorance: An Introduction Thomas G. Kirsch and Roy Dilley Chapter 1. Mind the Gap: On the Other Side of Knowing Carlo Caduff Chapter 2. Ignoring Native Ignorance: Epidemiological Enclosures of Not-Knowing Plague in Inner Asia Christos Lynteris Chapter 3. Managing Pleasurable Pursuits: Utopic Horizons and the Arts of Ignoring and 'Not Knowing' among Fine Woodworkers Trevor H. J. Marchand Chapter 4. Ignorant Bodies and the…
The Universal Church of the Kingdom of God in South Africa
published
The Precarious Center
This article addresses a long-standing conundrum in the anthropology of religion concerning the ambiguous status of religious leaders: they are subjects of power in that they are able to exert power over others, yet they are objects of power in that they rely on empowerment through others. Taking African-initiated Pentecostal-charismatic Christianity in Zambia as my example, I argue that church leaders’ strategies to stabilize their authority ha…
Discordance Through Consensus
This article takes the example of religion in Zambia, and more particularly African-initiated Christianity, to explore how people in the Gwembe valley deal with differences in religious outlook and practice. Present-day religious practices in the Gwembe valley are pluralist, dynamic and characterised by blurred boundaries that are re-negotiated according to context and situation. Yet this religious pluralism only rarely leads to open conflicts be…
Pneumatologie und die Konstituierung soziospiritueller Gemeinschaften
Why Yet Another Conference on Freud and Jung
The relationship between Freud and Jung has been a source of tension and rivalry for the past hundred years. The conflicts between the two men have continued into the two fields of psychoanalysis and analytical psychology. The recent publication of The Red Book has supplied us with new insights about Jung’s “confrontation with the unconscious.” It demonstrates how Jung moved from Freudian psychoanalysis to develop his own psychology, which he cal…
Jung and His Relationship to Judaism
Jung’s relationship to Judaism and to Jewish psychology has been a subject of great controversy. In the last two years, four books have been published that have brought to light new primary documents on Jung’s relationship to Judaism, showing a change in his view from the 1930s to one more sympathetic to the mystical traditions within Judaism. This paper discusses the four books—Kabbalistic Visions, The Red Book, Carl Gustav Jung: Avant-Garde Con…
Restaging the Will to Believe
In this article, I examine anthropological conceptions of religious belief by concentrating on the problems that arise in employing them in socioreligious fields characterized by pluralism, a high degree of mobility in changing religious affiliation, and by what Rosalind Shaw and Charles Stewart have called "anti-syncretism" (1994). Instead of discarding the concept for anthropology, however, as some scholars have proposed, I suggest that indigen…
The Universal Church of the Kingdom of God in South Africa
published
Performing the common good
Using fieldwork data from South Africa's Eastern Cape Province, this article highlights ambiguities of volunteering as idea and practice by exploring discursive strategies used by volunteers in the field of civic crime prevention when the ethical honesty and selflessness of their commitment to volunteering is questioned by others. These ambiguities relate to asymmetries in the relationship between donors and recipients of volunteering, as well as…
Practising Ecumenism Through Boundary Work and Meta-Coding
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork on religion in Zambia, this article engages critically with approaches that suggest that ecumenism necessarily occurs across socio-religious boundaries. I argue that the objective of ecumenism – namely, good-willed co-operation between religious practitioners who are otherwise separated from each other in terms of their institutional affiliations – can also be attained through boundary work and use of the meta-co…
Introduction
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Ways of reading as religious power in print globalization
In this article, I address issues of power with regard to religious print media distributed worldwide. I show that mission societies seek to ensure a homogenous interpretation of their publications by making them "obligatory passage points" for socioreligious advancement and standardizing literacy practices. Once successfully established, networks created through religious print media evolve as a twofold process in which the construction of power…
Family Resemblances in Action
The introduction to this special issue argues that in many countries in southern Africa a new phase in the entanglement between the religious and the political has set in. Increasingly, activists in political fields are borrowing from religious registers of discourse and practice, while conversely, activists in the religious domain are adopting discourses and practices originating in the political domain. We suggest that this religiopolitical act…
On the difficulties of speaking out against security
This article outlines an approach to security that explains its phenomenal growth by examining a peculiarity of its semantic field. In contrast to notions like 'war' and 'violence', whose antonyms, 'peace' and 'non-violence', have positive connotations and are therefore well suited to discursively opposing 'war' and 'violence', the antonym of 'security' ' namely 'insecurity' ' does not achieve the same effect. I suggest that this peculiarity lead…
Visions and Evidences
This article examines the role of indigenous concepts of visuality in an attempt by contemporary African Christians in Zambia to stabilize charismatic authority by means of a new prophetic scripture containing drawings of visionary revelations. It is demonstrated here how the chains of referentiality by which church leaders sought to authorize themselves and the scripture involved paradoxes of visuality that eventually led to the demotion of the …
Securosociality
This article introduces the concept of securosociality by drawing on my research on non-state security in South Africa. By examining ethnographic examples of how actors establish security-related social ties with each other and the role of vernacular understandings of security in forging them, I argue that this concept is a productive lens for analyzing the social lives of security. Among other things, its focus on the dynamic and versatile natur…
The Precarious Center
This article addresses a long-standing conundrum in the anthropology of religion concerning the ambiguous status of religious leaders: they are subjects of power in that they are able to exert power over others, yet they are objects of power in that they rely on empowerment through others. Taking African-initiated Pentecostal-charismatic Christianity in Zambia as my example, I argue that church leaders’ strategies to stabilize their authority ha…
An appeal for principled symmetry
This article summarises and elaborates the author's arguments as presented in the round table on 'Perspectives on "Doing Anthropology" in Contemporary South Africa' that was held during the ASnA conference in Cape Town, on December 5, 2006. It is suggested, by way of personal reflection, that some of the ethical, methodological and theoretical challenges of 'doing anthropology' in post-apartheid South Africa can productively be met by a pre-theor…
Restaging the Will to Believe
In this article, I examine anthropological conceptions of religious belief by concentrating on the problems that arise in employing them in socioreligious fields characterized by pluralism, a high degree of mobility in changing religious affiliation, and by what Rosalind Shaw and Charles Stewart have called "anti-syncretism" (1994). Instead of discarding the concept for anthropology, however, as some scholars have proposed, I suggest that indigen…
Visions and Evidences
This article examines the role of indigenous concepts of visuality in an attempt by contemporary African Christians in Zambia to stabilize charismatic authority by means of a new prophetic scripture containing drawings of visionary revelations. It is demonstrated here how the chains of referentiality by which church leaders sought to authorize themselves and the scripture involved paradoxes of visuality that eventually led to the demotion of the …
Ways of reading as religious power in print globalization
In this article, I address issues of power with regard to religious print media distributed worldwide. I show that mission societies seek to ensure a homogenous interpretation of their publications by making them "obligatory passage points" for socioreligious advancement and standardizing literacy practices. Once successfully established, networks created through religious print media evolve as a twofold process in which the construction of power…
An appeal for principled symmetry
This article summarises and elaborates the author's arguments as presented in the round table on 'Perspectives on "Doing Anthropology" in Contemporary South Africa' that was held during the ASnA conference in Cape Town, on December 5, 2006. It is suggested, by way of personal reflection, that some of the ethical, methodological and theoretical challenges of 'doing anthropology' in post-apartheid South Africa can productively be met by a pre-theor…
A problem of presence
Domesticating Vigilantism in Africa
An unprecedented overview of anthropological and political science research on vigilantism in Africa which makes an important and innovative contribution to current discussions on the relationship between violent self-justice andstate and non-state agencies. Self-justice and legal self-help groups have been gaining importance throughout Africa. The question of who is entitled to formulate 'legal principles', enact 'justice', police 'morality' and…
Why Yet Another Conference on Freud and Jung
The relationship between Freud and Jung has been a source of tension and rivalry for the past hundred years. The conflicts between the two men have continued into the two fields of psychoanalysis and analytical psychology. The recent publication of The Red Book has supplied us with new insights about Jung’s “confrontation with the unconscious.” It demonstrates how Jung moved from Freudian psychoanalysis to develop his own psychology, which he cal…
Jung and His Relationship to Judaism
Jung’s relationship to Judaism and to Jewish psychology has been a subject of great controversy. In the last two years, four books have been published that have brought to light new primary documents on Jung’s relationship to Judaism, showing a change in his view from the 1930s to one more sympathetic to the mystical traditions within Judaism. This paper discusses the four books—Kabbalistic Visions, The Red Book, Carl Gustav Jung: Avant-Garde Con…
Book and Film Reviews
published
Social Security in Religious Networks
Pneumatologie und die Konstituierung soziospiritueller Gemeinschaften
The Precarious Center
This article addresses a long-standing conundrum in the anthropology of religion concerning the ambiguous status of religious leaders: they are subjects of power in that they are able to exert power over others, yet they are objects of power in that they rely on empowerment through others. Taking African-initiated Pentecostal-charismatic Christianity in Zambia as my example, I argue that church leaders’ strategies to stabilize their authority ha…
Discordance Through Consensus
This article takes the example of religion in Zambia, and more particularly African-initiated Christianity, to explore how people in the Gwembe valley deal with differences in religious outlook and practice. Present-day religious practices in the Gwembe valley are pluralist, dynamic and characterised by blurred boundaries that are re-negotiated according to context and situation. Yet this religious pluralism only rarely leads to open conflicts be…
Regimes of ignorance
Introduction: Regimes of Ignorance: An Introduction Thomas G. Kirsch and Roy Dilley Chapter 1. Mind the Gap: On the Other Side of Knowing Carlo Caduff Chapter 2. Ignoring Native Ignorance: Epidemiological Enclosures of Not-Knowing Plague in Inner Asia Christos Lynteris Chapter 3. Managing Pleasurable Pursuits: Utopic Horizons and the Arts of Ignoring and 'Not Knowing' among Fine Woodworkers Trevor H. J. Marchand Chapter 4. Ignorant Bodies and the…
The Universal Church of the Kingdom of God in South Africa
published
Permutations of Order
Volunteer Economies
Permutations of Order
The Baha'i Faith in Africa
On the difficulties of speaking out against security
This article outlines an approach to security that explains its phenomenal growth by examining a peculiarity of its semantic field. In contrast to notions like 'war' and 'violence', whose antonyms, 'peace' and 'non-violence', have positive connotations and are therefore well suited to discursively opposing 'war' and 'violence', the antonym of 'security' ' namely 'insecurity' ' does not achieve the same effect. I suggest that this peculiarity lead…
Performing the common good
Using fieldwork data from South Africa's Eastern Cape Province, this article highlights ambiguities of volunteering as idea and practice by exploring discursive strategies used by volunteers in the field of civic crime prevention when the ethical honesty and selflessness of their commitment to volunteering is questioned by others. These ambiguities relate to asymmetries in the relationship between donors and recipients of volunteering, as well as…
Introduction
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Commentary
This commentary interprets the performance of state criticism by state employees in an Argentinian judicial outreach office as a practice of boundary drawing between state and society that takes place within the ‘state system’. It argues that this insight adds complexity to Timothy Mitchell’s conceptualization of ‘state effects’ and that it also contributes to a (pluralized) understanding of state justice and the performative construction of ‘the…
Practising Ecumenism Through Boundary Work and Meta-Coding
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork on religion in Zambia, this article engages critically with approaches that suggest that ecumenism necessarily occurs across socio-religious boundaries. I argue that the objective of ecumenism – namely, good-willed co-operation between religious practitioners who are otherwise separated from each other in terms of their institutional affiliations – can also be attained through boundary work and use of the meta-co…
Securing Security
There is presently no shortage of conceptual models to account for the fact that security have begun to play an increasingly important role in more and more spheres of life. However, most of these explanations rely on a figure of thought in which security is freshly brought to bear on something which has not previously been a target of security. This chapter develops an alternative approach. Drawing on my ethnographic findings from South Africa, …
Sociology (20 obras) · Political science (15 obras) · Law (14 obras) · Philosophy (13 obras) · Religion, Society, and Development (12 obras) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (11 obras) · Epistemology (8 obras) · Law (8 obras) · African history and culture analysis (7 obras) · Anthropology (7 obras)