Kabir Tambar
Biographic Data
| ID | 92448 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Kabir Tambar |
| GIVEN NAMES | Kabir |
| FAMILY NAME | Tambar |
| SIGNATURE | TAMBAR K |
| AFFILIATIONS | Stanford University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4724-5489 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 15 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 92 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 15 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
On the Refusal to Listen
A History of Clamor: Historical Time and the Late Ottoman Surreal
This essay examines a scene of late Ottoman parliamentary politics characterized by verbal disruption, raucous applause, and strident indignation: in short, clamor. Centered on the brief period in late 1918 following the empire’s exit from World War I but prior to the rise of the Turkish nationalist movement, the essay focuses on a moment shaped by remarkable uncertainty about how to narrate the political present—what aspects of the historical pa…
The Populist Slipper: An Introduction to Supplement 28
A not-so-secret sympathy links anthropology and populism. Nothing suits populism like a misfit, and no discipline is better attuned than anthropology to the kind of misfits and slippages that incite populism. Why did it take so long for anthropologists to broach the subject? And what else might be missing along with this anthropologically shaped hole? In this introduction, we make an argument about populism as a kind of symptom. This is not neces…
The Wager of Popular Address: Practices of Salutation in the Gezi Park Protests
This paper examines how popular protests contest the limits of political intelligibility not only vis-à-vis the state but also within and among the diverse social constituencies engaged in protest. Reflecting on the Gezi Park protests in Turkey during the summer of 2013, I explore how participants often drew on already existing semiotic forms (icons, slogans, flags, etc.) but did so in ways that dislocated them from their familiar historical refe…
The Reckoning of Pluralism: Political Belonging and the Demands of History in Turkey
Professions of Friendship
This essay examines “professions of friendship”: efforts by populations who are targeted as enemies of the state to proclaim their historical fidelity to the state's foundation and preservation. Such declarations often reinscribe a rigid and often violently statist narrative of politics. The essay argues that the retrenchment of this narrative, when reissued in the name of friendship, does not simply close down political options. It seeks to embo…
Minorias
The Uncanny Medium: Semiotic Opacity in the Wake of Genocide
In recent years, Turkey has witnessed the proliferation of new means for representing and mourning the Armenian genocide. This essay examines how the practice of criticizing historical atrocity, central to discourses of human rights, is itself institutionally regimented. Exploring the institutional impetus for critique, the essay offers a theoretical framework for understanding how oppositional groups challenge the parameters that designate the l…
Theologies of the West: A Commentary on Saba Mahmood’s Religious Difference in a Secular Age
Saba Mahmood’s Religious Difference in a Secular Age presents a historical anthropology of secularism, one that works with erudition across a diverse array of materials that include political and r
Brotherhood in Dispossession: State Violence and the Ethics of Expectation in Turkey
The category of minority has been constitutive of the concept of the people in Turkey, distilling those who do not belong to the history and destiny of the nation from those who do. Minority, in this sense, is not simply a demographic classification, nor merely a matter of legal recognition. It carries the weight of a historical judgment, which scaffolds political community by delineating which populations, languages, and religions remain beyond …
Historical Critique and Political Voice after the Ottoman Empire
In a famous 1882 lecture at the Sorbonne, Ernest Renan highlighted a certain obligation to forget, even a necessity for historical error, in the formation of a nation. Renan constructed his argument on the basis of what he perceived to be a straightforward empirical contrast apparent in his day. On the one hand, the countries of Western and Southern Europe, such as France, England, Germany, Spain, and Italy, had successfully—if through different …
Islamic reflexivity and the uncritical subject
This essay examines the politics of reflexive discourse in the contemporary Muslim world, interrogating the social, affective, and material mediation of its expression. I focus on Turkey's Alevi community, for whom the encounter with modern reflexive media has proved deeply ambivalent. If available genres of public reflexive discourse enable Alevi participation in national public debate, such discursive media also sustain a disciplinary impetus, …
Iterations of lament: Anachronism and affect in a Shi'i Islamic revival in Turkey
Many Alevis in Turkey today view their community's traditions of ritual weeping as anachronistic in the modern world. In this article, I situate such sensibilities within a political context in which Turkish state agencies have vigorously regulated norms of public affect. I describe the efforts of one Alevi group to counter such sensibilities by cultivating a susceptibility to affective excitation in line with Shi'i traditions of lamentation. The…
The Aesthetics of Public Visibility: AleviSemahand the Paradoxes of Pluralism in Turkey
Efforts to theorize pluralism have often explored the challenges posed by the public visibility of ethnic, linguistic, and sectarian differences to modernist imaginaries of a homogeneous national body. In this essay, I examine a context in which public expressions of communal differences re-inscribe the categories of the nation they were meant to contest. The situation reveals what I call a paradox of pluralism
Secular Populism and the Semiotics of the Crowd in Turkey
In much of the Muslim world, secularization has proceeded through the modernizing mechanisms of the region's various states. By contrast, social movements committed to the (re)introduction of religion into public and political life have frequently functioned through appeals to the popular will. Recent political events in Turkey present a dramatic contrast to this historically established antagonism between secularization and populist politics. In…
The Aesthetics of Public Visibility: AleviSemahand the Paradoxes of Pluralism in Turkey
Efforts to theorize pluralism have often explored the challenges posed by the public visibility of ethnic, linguistic, and sectarian differences to modernist imaginaries of a homogeneous national body. In this essay, I examine a context in which public expressions of communal differences re-inscribe the categories of the nation they were meant to contest. The situation reveals what I call a paradox of pluralism
Brotherhood in Dispossession: State Violence and the Ethics of Expectation in Turkey
The category of minority has been constitutive of the concept of the people in Turkey, distilling those who do not belong to the history and destiny of the nation from those who do. Minority, in this sense, is not simply a demographic classification, nor merely a matter of legal recognition. It carries the weight of a historical judgment, which scaffolds political community by delineating which populations, languages, and religions remain beyond …
Secular Populism and the Semiotics of the Crowd in Turkey
In much of the Muslim world, secularization has proceeded through the modernizing mechanisms of the region's various states. By contrast, social movements committed to the (re)introduction of religion into public and political life have frequently functioned through appeals to the popular will. Recent political events in Turkey present a dramatic contrast to this historically established antagonism between secularization and populist politics. In…
The Uncanny Medium: Semiotic Opacity in the Wake of Genocide
In recent years, Turkey has witnessed the proliferation of new means for representing and mourning the Armenian genocide. This essay examines how the practice of criticizing historical atrocity, central to discourses of human rights, is itself institutionally regimented. Exploring the institutional impetus for critique, the essay offers a theoretical framework for understanding how oppositional groups challenge the parameters that designate the l…
Iterations of lament: Anachronism and affect in a Shi'i Islamic revival in Turkey
Many Alevis in Turkey today view their community's traditions of ritual weeping as anachronistic in the modern world. In this article, I situate such sensibilities within a political context in which Turkish state agencies have vigorously regulated norms of public affect. I describe the efforts of one Alevi group to counter such sensibilities by cultivating a susceptibility to affective excitation in line with Shi'i traditions of lamentation. The…
Islamic reflexivity and the uncritical subject
This essay examines the politics of reflexive discourse in the contemporary Muslim world, interrogating the social, affective, and material mediation of its expression. I focus on Turkey's Alevi community, for whom the encounter with modern reflexive media has proved deeply ambivalent. If available genres of public reflexive discourse enable Alevi participation in national public debate, such discursive media also sustain a disciplinary impetus, …
Historical Critique and Political Voice after the Ottoman Empire
In a famous 1882 lecture at the Sorbonne, Ernest Renan highlighted a certain obligation to forget, even a necessity for historical error, in the formation of a nation. Renan constructed his argument on the basis of what he perceived to be a straightforward empirical contrast apparent in his day. On the one hand, the countries of Western and Southern Europe, such as France, England, Germany, Spain, and Italy, had successfully—if through different …
Secular Populism and the Semiotics of the Crowd in Turkey
In much of the Muslim world, secularization has proceeded through the modernizing mechanisms of the region's various states. By contrast, social movements committed to the (re)introduction of religion into public and political life have frequently functioned through appeals to the popular will. Recent political events in Turkey present a dramatic contrast to this historically established antagonism between secularization and populist politics. In…
The Aesthetics of Public Visibility: AleviSemahand the Paradoxes of Pluralism in Turkey
Efforts to theorize pluralism have often explored the challenges posed by the public visibility of ethnic, linguistic, and sectarian differences to modernist imaginaries of a homogeneous national body. In this essay, I examine a context in which public expressions of communal differences re-inscribe the categories of the nation they were meant to contest. The situation reveals what I call a paradox of pluralism
Iterations of lament: Anachronism and affect in a Shi'i Islamic revival in Turkey
Many Alevis in Turkey today view their community's traditions of ritual weeping as anachronistic in the modern world. In this article, I situate such sensibilities within a political context in which Turkish state agencies have vigorously regulated norms of public affect. I describe the efforts of one Alevi group to counter such sensibilities by cultivating a susceptibility to affective excitation in line with Shi'i traditions of lamentation. The…
Islamic reflexivity and the uncritical subject
This essay examines the politics of reflexive discourse in the contemporary Muslim world, interrogating the social, affective, and material mediation of its expression. I focus on Turkey's Alevi community, for whom the encounter with modern reflexive media has proved deeply ambivalent. If available genres of public reflexive discourse enable Alevi participation in national public debate, such discursive media also sustain a disciplinary impetus, …
Historical Critique and Political Voice after the Ottoman Empire
In a famous 1882 lecture at the Sorbonne, Ernest Renan highlighted a certain obligation to forget, even a necessity for historical error, in the formation of a nation. Renan constructed his argument on the basis of what he perceived to be a straightforward empirical contrast apparent in his day. On the one hand, the countries of Western and Southern Europe, such as France, England, Germany, Spain, and Italy, had successfully—if through different …
Brotherhood in Dispossession: State Violence and the Ethics of Expectation in Turkey
The category of minority has been constitutive of the concept of the people in Turkey, distilling those who do not belong to the history and destiny of the nation from those who do. Minority, in this sense, is not simply a demographic classification, nor merely a matter of legal recognition. It carries the weight of a historical judgment, which scaffolds political community by delineating which populations, languages, and religions remain beyond …
Theologies of the West: A Commentary on Saba Mahmood’s Religious Difference in a Secular Age
Saba Mahmood’s Religious Difference in a Secular Age presents a historical anthropology of secularism, one that works with erudition across a diverse array of materials that include political and r
The Uncanny Medium: Semiotic Opacity in the Wake of Genocide
In recent years, Turkey has witnessed the proliferation of new means for representing and mourning the Armenian genocide. This essay examines how the practice of criticizing historical atrocity, central to discourses of human rights, is itself institutionally regimented. Exploring the institutional impetus for critique, the essay offers a theoretical framework for understanding how oppositional groups challenge the parameters that designate the l…
Professions of Friendship
This essay examines “professions of friendship”: efforts by populations who are targeted as enemies of the state to proclaim their historical fidelity to the state's foundation and preservation. Such declarations often reinscribe a rigid and often violently statist narrative of politics. The essay argues that the retrenchment of this narrative, when reissued in the name of friendship, does not simply close down political options. It seeks to embo…
Minorias
The Reckoning of Pluralism: Political Belonging and the Demands of History in Turkey
On the Refusal to Listen
A History of Clamor: Historical Time and the Late Ottoman Surreal
This essay examines a scene of late Ottoman parliamentary politics characterized by verbal disruption, raucous applause, and strident indignation: in short, clamor. Centered on the brief period in late 1918 following the empire’s exit from World War I but prior to the rise of the Turkish nationalist movement, the essay focuses on a moment shaped by remarkable uncertainty about how to narrate the political present—what aspects of the historical pa…
The Populist Slipper: An Introduction to Supplement 28
A not-so-secret sympathy links anthropology and populism. Nothing suits populism like a misfit, and no discipline is better attuned than anthropology to the kind of misfits and slippages that incite populism. Why did it take so long for anthropologists to broach the subject? And what else might be missing along with this anthropologically shaped hole? In this introduction, we make an argument about populism as a kind of symptom. This is not neces…
The Wager of Popular Address: Practices of Salutation in the Gezi Park Protests
This paper examines how popular protests contest the limits of political intelligibility not only vis-à-vis the state but also within and among the diverse social constituencies engaged in protest. Reflecting on the Gezi Park protests in Turkey during the summer of 2013, I explore how participants often drew on already existing semiotic forms (icons, slogans, flags, etc.) but did so in ways that dislocated them from their familiar historical refe…
Political science (10 works) · Politics (10 works) · Turkey's Politics and Society (10 works) · Law (9 works) · Sociology (9 works) · Philosophy (8 works) · Law (7 works) · Islamic Studies and History (6 works) · Philosophy (6 works) · Anthropology (4 works)