Oskar Verkaaik
Biographic Data
| ID | 588724 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Oskar Verkaaik |
| GIVEN NAMES | Oskar |
| FAMILY NAME | Verkaaik |
| SIGNATURE | VERKAAIK O |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Amsterdam |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 216 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2001 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2020 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
The Anticipated Mosque: The Political Affect of a Planned Building
The construction of new, purpose-built mosques in Europe often stirs a number of controversies. This paper looks at one such project: a new mosque building in Almere, a town near Amsterdam. It focuses on two kinds of controversies: discussions between various kinds of mosque committee members about aesthetic preferences and how they relate to members' views about Islam in Europe, and neighborhood protests against the new mosque. Although the latt…
Managing Mosques in the Netherlands: Constitutional versus Culturalist Secularism
This article engages with the emergent ethnographical study of secular practice by focusing on how local bureaucracies manage the Muslim public presence in the Netherlands, particularly the construction of new mosques and the amplifying of the Muslim call to prayer. We argue that what started as the ‘Islam debate’, itself provoked by growing populist articulations of the fear of Islam, has gradually developed into a conflict in the practice of lo…
Violence and Ethnic Identity Politics in Karachi and Hyderabad
From the mid 1980s onwards, urban Sindh has often been in the grip of ethnic violence. The Muhajir Qaumi Movement (now known as the Muttahida Qaumi Movement), established at around the same time, has played a central role in these conflicts. Most analyses interpret the violence as an escalation of already-existing communal differences between various migrant groups in cities like Karachi and Hyderabad. In this paper I argue that violence itself h…
Creativity and controversy in a new anthropology of buildings
Driven by a common critique of human exceptionalism in Western thought, the recent anthropological study of things and materiality has also developed a new perspective on buildings and how they interact with humans. In this review article I discuss four recent anthropological books that deal with architecture. Explicitly or implicitly all of these books move away from the representational paradigm that has dominated the study of architecture for …
Defining Boundaries in al-Andalus: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Islamic Iberia. By Janina M. Safran
In Defining Boundaries in al-Andalus, Janina Safran is interested in the problem of proximity between Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Islamic Iberia. She examines how the Muslim rulers constructed and maintained the political and social boundaries between these groups in a society in which these boundaries were constantly blurred and tested by conversion, intermarriage, and the development of the Arabic language as the lingua franca. As Safran d…
The art of imperfection: Contemporary synagogues in Germany and the Netherlands
This article compares the remarkable revival of Jewish religious architecture in Germany and the Netherlands by focusing on two cases in particular: a newly built synagogue centre in Dresden and a renovated synagogue in a small Dutch town. Both structures contain a carefully styled ornament of imperfection that on the surface looks remarkably similar. Although in both cases the ornament can be interpreted as a symbolic comment on the post-war Jew…
Religious Architecture: Anthropological Perspectives
Religious Architecture. Anthropological Perspectives
Religious Architecture: Anthropological Perspectives develops an anthropological perspective on modern religious architecture, including mosques, churches and synagogues. Borrowing from a range of theoretical perspectives on space-making and material religion, this volume looks at how religious buildings take their place in opposition to the secular surroundings, how they, as evocations of the sublime, help believers to move beyond the boundaries…
Notes on the sublime: Aspects of political violence in urban Pakistan
Years before the so-called ‘War of Terror’ in which Pakistan has played a significant role, representations of terrorism and sacrifice already influenced political conflict in the country, particularly in Karachi and other parts of urban Sindh. This article focuses on the process of representation through which political violence comes to be interpreted in the symbolic terms of culture and religion. Criticizing Orientalist notions that ascribe ce…
Religious Architecture: Anthropological Perspectives
Religious Architecture: Anthropological Perspectives develops an anthropological perspective on modern religious architecture, including mosques, churches and synagogues. Borrowing from a range of theoretical perspectives on space-making and material religion, this volume looks at how religious buildings take their place in opposition to the secular surroundings, how they, as evocations of the sublime, help believers to move beyond the boundaries…
Contesting the State of Exception in the Afghan- Pakistani Marchlands
Designing the ‘anti-mosque: Identity, religion and affect in contemporary European mosque design
Although there is by now a substantial body of ethnographic work on contemporary mosques in the West, none of this engages seriously with recently developed insights from material culture and material religion studies. Architectural critics and religious reformists criticise what they perceive as ‘nostalgic’ and ‘Oriental’ designs, whereas others interpret contemporary mosque design in terms of politics of space and religious identity politics. T…
Sexular practice
In Europe today, the most heated identity politics revolve around matters of sexuality and religion. In the context of "integration" debates that occur in different forms in various countries, sexuality has gained a new form of normativity, and new sexual sensitivities have replaced former ones. So far, scholarly discussions deal with these sensitivities in a deconstructivist and critical manner, denaturalizing discourses on culture, identity, an…
Terror and Territory: The Spatial Extent of Sovereignty – By Stuart Elden
The cachet dilemma: Ritual and agency in new Dutch nationalism
In 2006, the Dutch government introduced a naturalization ceremony for foreigners wishing to become Dutch citizens. Local bureaucrats who organize the ceremony initially disapproved of the measure as symbolic of the neonationalist approach to migration. I analyze how their criticism is undermined in the process of designing the ritual, the form of which continues to express a culturalist message of citizenship, despite organizers' explicit critic…
Introduction - Urban Charisma: On Everyday Mythologies in the City
Cities are charismatic entities. Both in and of themselves by virtue of their history and their mythologies, but also as sites where charismatic figures emerge on the basis of their capacity to interpret, manage and master the opacity of the city. The specificity of the urban can neither be understood through the city's functions nor the dynamics of its social networks. The urban is also a way of being in the world and must be understood as a den…
At Home in Karachi: Quasi-domesticity as a Way to Know the City
Cities are difficult to control. The moral panic that is part of much social scientific and military research on cities for more than a century is still manifest today. In Pentagon sources Karachi is mentioned as one of those `feral, failed cities' that are expected to become the sites of future conflicts that will take the form of asymmetric combat within non-nodal, non-hierarchical urban terrains. But the strategies proposed by the US army have…
The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories by Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar
Living Islam: Muslim religious experience in Pakistan's North-West Frontier - By Magnus Marsden
Globalization and Terrorism. The Migration of Dreams and Nightmares – By Jamal R. Nassar
International review of social history: Popular Intellectuals and Social Movements: Framing Protest in Asia, Africa, and Latin America
All forms of popular protest include a specific category of 'popular intellectuals', who reflect on social reality, speak in the name of popular classes and who articulate ideas that inspire collective action. This volume focuses on these individuals from an original angle: it looks at the experiences of popular intellectuals in non-western societies, who operate within social-movement networks that link local, regional, and international arenas,…
Migrants and Militants: Fun and Urban Violence in Pakistan
Reforming Mysticism: Sindhi Separatist Intellectuals in Pakistan
This article examines the revival of Sufism and mysticism by the Sindhi separatist movement in South Pakistan. It explores the emergence of a network of young intellectuals from rural and mostly peasant background, and focuses on two pioneers of Sindhi nationalism and Sufi revivalism: G.M. Syed and Ibrahim Joyo. Influenced by Gandhian as well as Marxist ideas on social reform and national identity, these two leaders transformed the annual urs cel…
Fun and violence. Ethnocide and the effervescence of collective aggression
Les recentes theories anthropologiques de la violence rendent manifeste leur preoccupation dominante pour les processus de differenciation a l'oeuvre dans des societes toujours plus postmodernes, analysant combien les logiques identitaires peuvent engendrer de violence. Une seconde perspective pourtant plus attentive a la production de solidarite sociale engendree au sein de groupes violents s'interroge sur la maniere dont la violence peut au con…
The Captive State: Corruption, Intelligence Agencies, and Ethnicity in Pakistan
Introduction - Urban Charisma: On Everyday Mythologies in the City
Cities are charismatic entities. Both in and of themselves by virtue of their history and their mythologies, but also as sites where charismatic figures emerge on the basis of their capacity to interpret, manage and master the opacity of the city. The specificity of the urban can neither be understood through the city's functions nor the dynamics of its social networks. The urban is also a way of being in the world and must be understood as a den…
The cachet dilemma: Ritual and agency in new Dutch nationalism
In 2006, the Dutch government introduced a naturalization ceremony for foreigners wishing to become Dutch citizens. Local bureaucrats who organize the ceremony initially disapproved of the measure as symbolic of the neonationalist approach to migration. I analyze how their criticism is undermined in the process of designing the ritual, the form of which continues to express a culturalist message of citizenship, despite organizers' explicit critic…
Designing the ‘anti-mosque: Identity, religion and affect in contemporary European mosque design
Although there is by now a substantial body of ethnographic work on contemporary mosques in the West, none of this engages seriously with recently developed insights from material culture and material religion studies. Architectural critics and religious reformists criticise what they perceive as ‘nostalgic’ and ‘Oriental’ designs, whereas others interpret contemporary mosque design in terms of politics of space and religious identity politics. T…
Fun and violence. Ethnocide and the effervescence of collective aggression
Les recentes theories anthropologiques de la violence rendent manifeste leur preoccupation dominante pour les processus de differenciation a l'oeuvre dans des societes toujours plus postmodernes, analysant combien les logiques identitaires peuvent engendrer de violence. Une seconde perspective pourtant plus attentive a la production de solidarite sociale engendree au sein de groupes violents s'interroge sur la maniere dont la violence peut au con…
At Home in Karachi: Quasi-domesticity as a Way to Know the City
Cities are difficult to control. The moral panic that is part of much social scientific and military research on cities for more than a century is still manifest today. In Pentagon sources Karachi is mentioned as one of those `feral, failed cities' that are expected to become the sites of future conflicts that will take the form of asymmetric combat within non-nodal, non-hierarchical urban terrains. But the strategies proposed by the US army have…
Sexular practice
In Europe today, the most heated identity politics revolve around matters of sexuality and religion. In the context of "integration" debates that occur in different forms in various countries, sexuality has gained a new form of normativity, and new sexual sensitivities have replaced former ones. So far, scholarly discussions deal with these sensitivities in a deconstructivist and critical manner, denaturalizing discourses on culture, identity, an…
Reforming Mysticism: Sindhi Separatist Intellectuals in Pakistan
This article examines the revival of Sufism and mysticism by the Sindhi separatist movement in South Pakistan. It explores the emergence of a network of young intellectuals from rural and mostly peasant background, and focuses on two pioneers of Sindhi nationalism and Sufi revivalism: G.M. Syed and Ibrahim Joyo. Influenced by Gandhian as well as Marxist ideas on social reform and national identity, these two leaders transformed the annual urs cel…
Religious Architecture: Anthropological Perspectives
Religious Architecture: Anthropological Perspectives develops an anthropological perspective on modern religious architecture, including mosques, churches and synagogues. Borrowing from a range of theoretical perspectives on space-making and material religion, this volume looks at how religious buildings take their place in opposition to the secular surroundings, how they, as evocations of the sublime, help believers to move beyond the boundaries…
The art of imperfection: Contemporary synagogues in Germany and the Netherlands
This article compares the remarkable revival of Jewish religious architecture in Germany and the Netherlands by focusing on two cases in particular: a newly built synagogue centre in Dresden and a renovated synagogue in a small Dutch town. Both structures contain a carefully styled ornament of imperfection that on the surface looks remarkably similar. Although in both cases the ornament can be interpreted as a symbolic comment on the post-war Jew…
Managing Mosques in the Netherlands: Constitutional versus Culturalist Secularism
This article engages with the emergent ethnographical study of secular practice by focusing on how local bureaucracies manage the Muslim public presence in the Netherlands, particularly the construction of new mosques and the amplifying of the Muslim call to prayer. We argue that what started as the ‘Islam debate’, itself provoked by growing populist articulations of the fear of Islam, has gradually developed into a conflict in the practice of lo…
Violence and Ethnic Identity Politics in Karachi and Hyderabad
From the mid 1980s onwards, urban Sindh has often been in the grip of ethnic violence. The Muhajir Qaumi Movement (now known as the Muttahida Qaumi Movement), established at around the same time, has played a central role in these conflicts. Most analyses interpret the violence as an escalation of already-existing communal differences between various migrant groups in cities like Karachi and Hyderabad. In this paper I argue that violence itself h…
Creativity and controversy in a new anthropology of buildings
Driven by a common critique of human exceptionalism in Western thought, the recent anthropological study of things and materiality has also developed a new perspective on buildings and how they interact with humans. In this review article I discuss four recent anthropological books that deal with architecture. Explicitly or implicitly all of these books move away from the representational paradigm that has dominated the study of architecture for …
The Anticipated Mosque: The Political Affect of a Planned Building
The construction of new, purpose-built mosques in Europe often stirs a number of controversies. This paper looks at one such project: a new mosque building in Almere, a town near Amsterdam. It focuses on two kinds of controversies: discussions between various kinds of mosque committee members about aesthetic preferences and how they relate to members' views about Islam in Europe, and neighborhood protests against the new mosque. Although the latt…
Notes on the sublime: Aspects of political violence in urban Pakistan
Years before the so-called ‘War of Terror’ in which Pakistan has played a significant role, representations of terrorism and sacrifice already influenced political conflict in the country, particularly in Karachi and other parts of urban Sindh. This article focuses on the process of representation through which political violence comes to be interpreted in the symbolic terms of culture and religion. Criticizing Orientalist notions that ascribe ce…
The Captive State: Corruption, Intelligence Agencies, and Ethnicity in Pakistan
Fun and violence. Ethnocide and the effervescence of collective aggression
Les recentes theories anthropologiques de la violence rendent manifeste leur preoccupation dominante pour les processus de differenciation a l'oeuvre dans des societes toujours plus postmodernes, analysant combien les logiques identitaires peuvent engendrer de violence. Une seconde perspective pourtant plus attentive a la production de solidarite sociale engendree au sein de groupes violents s'interroge sur la maniere dont la violence peut au con…
Migrants and Militants: Fun and Urban Violence in Pakistan
Reforming Mysticism: Sindhi Separatist Intellectuals in Pakistan
This article examines the revival of Sufism and mysticism by the Sindhi separatist movement in South Pakistan. It explores the emergence of a network of young intellectuals from rural and mostly peasant background, and focuses on two pioneers of Sindhi nationalism and Sufi revivalism: G.M. Syed and Ibrahim Joyo. Influenced by Gandhian as well as Marxist ideas on social reform and national identity, these two leaders transformed the annual urs cel…
International review of social history: Popular Intellectuals and Social Movements: Framing Protest in Asia, Africa, and Latin America
All forms of popular protest include a specific category of 'popular intellectuals', who reflect on social reality, speak in the name of popular classes and who articulate ideas that inspire collective action. This volume focuses on these individuals from an original angle: it looks at the experiences of popular intellectuals in non-western societies, who operate within social-movement networks that link local, regional, and international arenas,…
Globalization and Terrorism. The Migration of Dreams and Nightmares – By Jamal R. Nassar
Introduction - Urban Charisma: On Everyday Mythologies in the City
Cities are charismatic entities. Both in and of themselves by virtue of their history and their mythologies, but also as sites where charismatic figures emerge on the basis of their capacity to interpret, manage and master the opacity of the city. The specificity of the urban can neither be understood through the city's functions nor the dynamics of its social networks. The urban is also a way of being in the world and must be understood as a den…
At Home in Karachi: Quasi-domesticity as a Way to Know the City
Cities are difficult to control. The moral panic that is part of much social scientific and military research on cities for more than a century is still manifest today. In Pentagon sources Karachi is mentioned as one of those `feral, failed cities' that are expected to become the sites of future conflicts that will take the form of asymmetric combat within non-nodal, non-hierarchical urban terrains. But the strategies proposed by the US army have…
The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories by Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar
Living Islam: Muslim religious experience in Pakistan's North-West Frontier - By Magnus Marsden
Terror and Territory: The Spatial Extent of Sovereignty – By Stuart Elden
The cachet dilemma: Ritual and agency in new Dutch nationalism
In 2006, the Dutch government introduced a naturalization ceremony for foreigners wishing to become Dutch citizens. Local bureaucrats who organize the ceremony initially disapproved of the measure as symbolic of the neonationalist approach to migration. I analyze how their criticism is undermined in the process of designing the ritual, the form of which continues to express a culturalist message of citizenship, despite organizers' explicit critic…
Sexular practice
In Europe today, the most heated identity politics revolve around matters of sexuality and religion. In the context of "integration" debates that occur in different forms in various countries, sexuality has gained a new form of normativity, and new sexual sensitivities have replaced former ones. So far, scholarly discussions deal with these sensitivities in a deconstructivist and critical manner, denaturalizing discourses on culture, identity, an…
Contesting the State of Exception in the Afghan- Pakistani Marchlands
Designing the ‘anti-mosque: Identity, religion and affect in contemporary European mosque design
Although there is by now a substantial body of ethnographic work on contemporary mosques in the West, none of this engages seriously with recently developed insights from material culture and material religion studies. Architectural critics and religious reformists criticise what they perceive as ‘nostalgic’ and ‘Oriental’ designs, whereas others interpret contemporary mosque design in terms of politics of space and religious identity politics. T…
Religious Architecture: Anthropological Perspectives
Religious Architecture. Anthropological Perspectives
Religious Architecture: Anthropological Perspectives develops an anthropological perspective on modern religious architecture, including mosques, churches and synagogues. Borrowing from a range of theoretical perspectives on space-making and material religion, this volume looks at how religious buildings take their place in opposition to the secular surroundings, how they, as evocations of the sublime, help believers to move beyond the boundaries…
Notes on the sublime: Aspects of political violence in urban Pakistan
Years before the so-called ‘War of Terror’ in which Pakistan has played a significant role, representations of terrorism and sacrifice already influenced political conflict in the country, particularly in Karachi and other parts of urban Sindh. This article focuses on the process of representation through which political violence comes to be interpreted in the symbolic terms of culture and religion. Criticizing Orientalist notions that ascribe ce…
Religious Architecture: Anthropological Perspectives
Religious Architecture: Anthropological Perspectives develops an anthropological perspective on modern religious architecture, including mosques, churches and synagogues. Borrowing from a range of theoretical perspectives on space-making and material religion, this volume looks at how religious buildings take their place in opposition to the secular surroundings, how they, as evocations of the sublime, help believers to move beyond the boundaries…
Defining Boundaries in al-Andalus: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Islamic Iberia. By Janina M. Safran
In Defining Boundaries in al-Andalus, Janina Safran is interested in the problem of proximity between Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Islamic Iberia. She examines how the Muslim rulers constructed and maintained the political and social boundaries between these groups in a society in which these boundaries were constantly blurred and tested by conversion, intermarriage, and the development of the Arabic language as the lingua franca. As Safran d…
The art of imperfection: Contemporary synagogues in Germany and the Netherlands
This article compares the remarkable revival of Jewish religious architecture in Germany and the Netherlands by focusing on two cases in particular: a newly built synagogue centre in Dresden and a renovated synagogue in a small Dutch town. Both structures contain a carefully styled ornament of imperfection that on the surface looks remarkably similar. Although in both cases the ornament can be interpreted as a symbolic comment on the post-war Jew…
Managing Mosques in the Netherlands: Constitutional versus Culturalist Secularism
This article engages with the emergent ethnographical study of secular practice by focusing on how local bureaucracies manage the Muslim public presence in the Netherlands, particularly the construction of new mosques and the amplifying of the Muslim call to prayer. We argue that what started as the ‘Islam debate’, itself provoked by growing populist articulations of the fear of Islam, has gradually developed into a conflict in the practice of lo…
Violence and Ethnic Identity Politics in Karachi and Hyderabad
From the mid 1980s onwards, urban Sindh has often been in the grip of ethnic violence. The Muhajir Qaumi Movement (now known as the Muttahida Qaumi Movement), established at around the same time, has played a central role in these conflicts. Most analyses interpret the violence as an escalation of already-existing communal differences between various migrant groups in cities like Karachi and Hyderabad. In this paper I argue that violence itself h…
Creativity and controversy in a new anthropology of buildings
Driven by a common critique of human exceptionalism in Western thought, the recent anthropological study of things and materiality has also developed a new perspective on buildings and how they interact with humans. In this review article I discuss four recent anthropological books that deal with architecture. Explicitly or implicitly all of these books move away from the representational paradigm that has dominated the study of architecture for …
The Anticipated Mosque: The Political Affect of a Planned Building
The construction of new, purpose-built mosques in Europe often stirs a number of controversies. This paper looks at one such project: a new mosque building in Almere, a town near Amsterdam. It focuses on two kinds of controversies: discussions between various kinds of mosque committee members about aesthetic preferences and how they relate to members' views about Islam in Europe, and neighborhood protests against the new mosque. Although the latt…
Sociology (18 works) · Law (17 works) · Political science (17 works) · History (14 works) · Law (13 works) · Philosophy (12 works) · Politics (11 works) · Philosophy (9 works) · Aesthetics (8 works) · Anthropology (8 works)