C Houston
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 30425 |
|---|---|
| NOME | C Houston |
| PRENOMES | C |
| SOBRENOME | Houston |
| ASSINATURA | HOUSTON C |
| AFILIAÇÕES | Macquarie University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1398-0100 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 37 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 73 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 37 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1981 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 5 |
Political Violence in Turkey, 1975–1980. The State at Stake
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels famously wrote in The Communist Manifesto (1848) that the executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the bourgeoisie.1 For Marx and Engels, the rising new bourgeois class had captured the state. Other political theorists have imagined the state mechanism to be a more neutral force, partial to be sure in protecting the interests of its own cadres, but active in implementing th…
The conscience becomes its own ulama ? The Diyanet and its attempted crafting of conscience in Turkey
Hiding in plain site
Ottoman objects, art traditions, and social practices have long stood at the center of Turkish politics, given that the republic instituted itself through selectively destroying Ottoman institutions. By contrast, the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) promotes a counterpolitics of service to Islam, positioning itself as the sole political force committed to upholding the legacy of Ottoman civilization. Yet not all Muslims are convinced by…
Conscientious Objection or Objecting to the Conscience
In certain domains of contemporary life, political action connected to people's conscience is of central significance. But what is the conscience, and how may it be studied? Much of the anthropological study of conscientious objection has occurred in places where freedom of conscience is codified as a legal possibility. By contrast, this article investigates the social life of the conscience in Turkey, where discourse on freedom of conscience has…
Alternative me? Anthropology and self-alteration
Contemporary life across the globe is awash with enterprises, programs, and practices that purport to foster self-alteration. Developing the self; self-care; transcending the self; self-actualization; expressing the self; empowering it: the myriad of terms testifies to myriad actions of the self on the self, facilitated by activities in a huge number of social domains. Anthropology as a discipline has an intense interest in the way that different…
Musical Intimacy, Model Citizenship, and Sufism in the Life of Niyazi Sayın
Niyazi Sayın is an Istanbul-born ney (reed flute) virtuoso, and the most acclaimed musician of a musical tradition controversially called “Ottoman-Turkish classical music.” Now 94 years old, Sayın has been called insan-i kamil (a perfect human), kutb-ı nayi, (the musical spiritual axis of his age), and hezarfen (master of a thousand arts). What do such titles mean? Building upon the work of Martin Stokes on popular music and its fashioning of int…
Why social scientists still need phenomenology
Pierre Bourdieu famously dismissed phenomenology as offering anything useful to a critical science of society - even as he drew heavily upon its themes in his own work. This paper makes a case for why Bourdieu's judgement should not be the last word on phenomenology. To do so it first reanimates phenomenology's evocative language and concepts to illustrate their continuing centrality to social scientists' ambitions to apprehend human engagement w…
Pandemic in Melbourne
Event-stanbul? Contemporary Istanbul as a Site of Intersecting Urban Events
Are there contingent urban events that are not the inevitable or determined outcome of other happenings or incidents, and yet transform the present city and exert their force and influence into the future? If so, how do we identify and explicate them? This paper describes three urban events in Istanbul that became significant determining acts in the city's modern period, co-constituting both the morphology of the city, the experiences of its inha…
Tribute to Joel Kahn (1946–2017)
It is a sad honour to write a brief and rather personal obituary for the life of Joel Kahn, who died on 1st May 2017 after a year-long struggle with lung cancer. It is an honour because it is a boo
Anthropocratic Republic? Theocracy, secularity and Kemalism in Turkey
Over the past three decades, many once taken for granted assumptions about processes of secularism have been questioned and revised. One unifying feature of these reassessments is recognition of the plurality of social-historical contexts of secularism[s], their contrasting political arrangements, and thus of individuals' radically different regional experiences of them. Given, then, both this variety of 'secular' political systems and the incomp…
Anthropology as critique
Joel S. Kahn (1946-2017), was one of the founding editors of Critique of Anthropology. Throughout his career Joel continually adhered to an anthropology founded on the praxis of critique. Through his fieldwork in South East Asia and his own incursions into Western modernity and modernist thought, Joel was committed to a form of anthropology that challenged strict disciplinary conventions. The papers in this special issue written by his colleagues…
Plotters and Martyrs
In 2016 an unexpected and ill-organized coup d’état occurred in Turkey. It failed within 24 hours, in part due to the bravery of thousands of citizens who in opposition to the soldiers and tanks occupied the squares and streets of Istanbul and Ankara. Designated in the political vernacular as the 15 July event, the AKP government has sought to compose its authorized version of the coup attempt through urban ritual and performance, even as it gove…
Humor, Amnesia, and Making Place
Drawing on Caroline Humphrey’s analysis of the personal consequences of ‘decision-events’, in this article we interpret the 2013 protests around Gezi Park in Istanbul as an eventful situation that instigated a break with participants’ previous political sentiments, recomposing them as transformed subjects in the process. We argue that an effective political humor prompted the emergence of a new subject, causing certain features of pre-Gezi politi…
How Globalization Really Happens
Over the past 20 years it has become accepted wisdom that Istanbul has become a ‘global city', transformed in tandem with a raft of neoliberal economic policies. What is the relevant history of this globalization? A muted local knowledge possessed by Istanbul's inhabitants is that the military coup in 1980 was the crucial event in the re‐engineering of the city. Based on extensive interviews with people active in political fractions in the late 1…
Ankara, Tehran, Baghdad
Kemalism has been the guiding and justifying ideology of the Turkish Republic since its institution in 1923. That Kemalism is exclusive to Turkey is a mainstay of Kemalist self-perception. But was (or is) Kemalism as political practice pursued by other regimes in the region? This paper argues that Kemalism should also be understood as a project of urbanism, and that urban interventions into Ankara, Tehran and Baghdad in the 20th century transform…
Thwarted agency and the strange afterlife of Islamism in militant laicism in Turkey
The Iranian Diaspora in Sydney
Recent research has found that discrimination against Islam and Muslims is deeply rooted in Australia. This report explores whether or how recent Iranian migrants have experienced racism, discrimination, or Islamaphobia in Sydney. These questions are explored by focusing on their experiences and issues regarding their making of new lives in Australia. This article suggests that recent Iranian migrants are experiencing far less discrimination than…
Woman, man, and God in modern Islam
Woman, man, and God in modern Islam, by Theodore Friend, Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2012, xv + 378 pp., US$39.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-8028-6673-8 Although it may sound like a theological or reli
Anthropology, autonomy and the art of cultural revolution
Anthropologists (amongst others) have noted how some theorists of the Occident, in order to explicate their analyses of Western modernity, have conceptualized an oppositional category of non-Western, pre-modern or traditional societies, understood to be negatively unified by their lack of particular social capacities (despite other vast dissimilarities between them). One such absent elemental capacity is reflexivity, whose existence or nonexisten…
The Islam of anthropology
Research on ‘Muslim societies’ is a controversial topic in the present, particularly given the US army’s current employment of anthropological experts in war zones under military occupation. In 2006 the UK Foreign Office, too, sought to include anthropologists in its worldwide research project entitled ‘Combating Terrorism by Countering Radicalization’, with grants given outside the normal process of research funding and differently assessed. In …
Remaking Turkey
Lanham, Boulder, New York, Toronto and Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2007, ISBN 978-0-7391-1815-3 and 1816-0, US$80.00 (hb) and US$32.95 (pb), Pp. xxviii+266 Remaking Turkey is a collection of essays
Reproducing and Contesting Social Norms and Forms in Turkey
Additional informationNotes on contributorsChristopher HoustonChristopher Houston is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology, Macquarie University, Sydney
Set Aside from the Pen and Cut Off from the Foot”
Research Article| August 01 2007 "Set Aside from the Pen and Cut Off from the Foot": Imagining the Ottoman Empire and Kurdistan Christopher Houston Christopher Houston Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (2007) 27 (2): 397–411. https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201x-2007-013 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review S…
The Never Ending Dance
Kemalism in Turkey is often presented as an exemplary case of paternalistic and authoritarian modernisation from above, and lauded or condemned for that very reason. Represented in these terms, certain analytic and political binaries are also activated: state versus society; world‐view versus life‐world; universality versus particularity; inauthenticity versus indigeneity; homogeneity versus heterogeneity/resistance. By contrast, in this paper I …
The Brewing of Islamist Modernity
This article argues that the polemics accompanying the valuation of Islamist social movements occur because studies of political Islam are often oriented towards the debate over the relative worth of Western and Islamist routes to modernity and the civilizing process. The method pursued by Weber to delineate the Christian activism of The Protestant Ethic - minus its debilitating Eurocentrism - is suggested as a helpful model for analyzing the com…
Provocations of the built environment
Civilizing Islam, Islamist Civilizing? Turkey's Islamist Movement and the Problem of Ethnic Difference
The Islamist critique of the post-1923 regime in Turkey centres around the deconstruction of the Republic's civilizing mission. Here the modernization of the rump of the Ottoman Empire undertaken in the name of the universality of western civilization (with the consequent attributing of backwardness to Islam) is problematized: Islamist discourse converges with other postmodern critiques in proclaiming the exhaustion of modernity as a project of e…
Why social scientists still need phenomenology
Pierre Bourdieu famously dismissed phenomenology as offering anything useful to a critical science of society - even as he drew heavily upon its themes in his own work. This paper makes a case for why Bourdieu's judgement should not be the last word on phenomenology. To do so it first reanimates phenomenology's evocative language and concepts to illustrate their continuing centrality to social scientists' ambitions to apprehend human engagement w…
Recruiting Minority Men Who Have Sex With Men for HIV Research
We describe the efforts of a 4-city campaign to recruit Black and Hispanic men who have sex with men into an established HIV epidemiological study. The campaign used community organizing principles and a social marketing model that focused on personnel, location, product, costs and benefits, and promotion. The campaign was developed at the community, group, and individual levels to both increase trust and reduce barriers. The proportion of Hispan…
Islamic Solutions to the Kurdish Problem
In a recent book detailing the massive war migration in the South-East of Turkey, Kemal Öztürk questions: “Has an Islamic position been made clear on the Kurdish problem, which for the last ten years has assumed the highest place on the national agenda?” and goes on to ask: “In the fifteen reports suggesting solutions to the Kurdish problem is there one representing muslims?” He concludes by saying, “Unfortunately the answer to both questions mus…
Plotters and Martyrs
In 2016 an unexpected and ill-organized coup d’état occurred in Turkey. It failed within 24 hours, in part due to the bravery of thousands of citizens who in opposition to the soldiers and tanks occupied the squares and streets of Istanbul and Ankara. Designated in the political vernacular as the 15 July event, the AKP government has sought to compose its authorized version of the coup attempt through urban ritual and performance, even as it gove…
Set Aside from the Pen and Cut Off from the Foot”
Research Article| August 01 2007 "Set Aside from the Pen and Cut Off from the Foot": Imagining the Ottoman Empire and Kurdistan Christopher Houston Christopher Houston Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (2007) 27 (2): 397–411. https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201x-2007-013 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review S…
Islamism, Castoriadis and Autonomy
In the context of nationalizing, secularizing or Kemalist states, analyses of Islamist movements are often thrown back on notions of traditionalism or atavism. In a related vein, for certain social theorists writing on modernity, the uniqueness of the West is clarified through an imaginative [mis]interpretation of other cultures or civilizations. Too often, however, the apparent gains in Western self-insight reflect an 'inability to constitute on…
Anthropology, autonomy and the art of cultural revolution
Anthropologists (amongst others) have noted how some theorists of the Occident, in order to explicate their analyses of Western modernity, have conceptualized an oppositional category of non-Western, pre-modern or traditional societies, understood to be negatively unified by their lack of particular social capacities (despite other vast dissimilarities between them). One such absent elemental capacity is reflexivity, whose existence or nonexisten…
Legislating Virtue, or Fear and Loathing in Istanbul
Over the past decade or so, a number of secular critics and Muslim activists of the Islamist social movement in Turkey have described the political conflicts dominating Turkish social life in cultural terms, as a struggle between incompatible cultural orders. A rich variety of similes have been used to describe the clash and its protagonists: black and white Turks, Islamist untouchables, Turkey's Negroes, even transgendered secularists (Western s…
Alternative Modernities
Hiding in plain site
Ottoman objects, art traditions, and social practices have long stood at the center of Turkish politics, given that the republic instituted itself through selectively destroying Ottoman institutions. By contrast, the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) promotes a counterpolitics of service to Islam, positioning itself as the sole political force committed to upholding the legacy of Ottoman civilization. Yet not all Muslims are convinced by…
Conscientious Objection or Objecting to the Conscience
In certain domains of contemporary life, political action connected to people's conscience is of central significance. But what is the conscience, and how may it be studied? Much of the anthropological study of conscientious objection has occurred in places where freedom of conscience is codified as a legal possibility. By contrast, this article investigates the social life of the conscience in Turkey, where discourse on freedom of conscience has…
Musical Intimacy, Model Citizenship, and Sufism in the Life of Niyazi Sayın
Niyazi Sayın is an Istanbul-born ney (reed flute) virtuoso, and the most acclaimed musician of a musical tradition controversially called “Ottoman-Turkish classical music.” Now 94 years old, Sayın has been called insan-i kamil (a perfect human), kutb-ı nayi, (the musical spiritual axis of his age), and hezarfen (master of a thousand arts). What do such titles mean? Building upon the work of Martin Stokes on popular music and its fashioning of int…
How Globalization Really Happens
Over the past 20 years it has become accepted wisdom that Istanbul has become a ‘global city', transformed in tandem with a raft of neoliberal economic policies. What is the relevant history of this globalization? A muted local knowledge possessed by Istanbul's inhabitants is that the military coup in 1980 was the crucial event in the re‐engineering of the city. Based on extensive interviews with people active in political fractions in the late 1…
Ankara, Tehran, Baghdad
Kemalism has been the guiding and justifying ideology of the Turkish Republic since its institution in 1923. That Kemalism is exclusive to Turkey is a mainstay of Kemalist self-perception. But was (or is) Kemalism as political practice pursued by other regimes in the region? This paper argues that Kemalism should also be understood as a project of urbanism, and that urban interventions into Ankara, Tehran and Baghdad in the 20th century transform…
Thwarted agency and the strange afterlife of Islamism in militant laicism in Turkey
The Iranian Diaspora in Sydney
Recent research has found that discrimination against Islam and Muslims is deeply rooted in Australia. This report explores whether or how recent Iranian migrants have experienced racism, discrimination, or Islamaphobia in Sydney. These questions are explored by focusing on their experiences and issues regarding their making of new lives in Australia. This article suggests that recent Iranian migrants are experiencing far less discrimination than…
History of Richardson’s Merlin in Saskatchewan
Islamic Solutions to the Kurdish Problem
In a recent book detailing the massive war migration in the South-East of Turkey, Kemal Öztürk questions: “Has an Islamic position been made clear on the Kurdish problem, which for the last ten years has assumed the highest place on the national agenda?” and goes on to ask: “In the fifteen reports suggesting solutions to the Kurdish problem is there one representing muslims?” He concludes by saying, “Unfortunately the answer to both questions mus…
Alternative Modernities
Civilizing Islam, Islamist Civilizing? Turkey's Islamist Movement and the Problem of Ethnic Difference
The Islamist critique of the post-1923 regime in Turkey centres around the deconstruction of the Republic's civilizing mission. Here the modernization of the rump of the Ottoman Empire undertaken in the name of the universality of western civilization (with the consequent attributing of backwardness to Islam) is problematized: Islamist discourse converges with other postmodern critiques in proclaiming the exhaustion of modernity as a project of e…
Profane Intuitions
Contemporary analysis of the ‘Kurdish question’ in Turkey has often enough noted the recent explosion of Kurdish refugees and immigrants to the major Turkish cities. Interest in the re‐constitution of Kurdish identity in the metropolis, however, has been less evident. This article seeks to identify some of the main themes that need to be addressed in any such investigation. It begins by arguing that discourse on the ‘Kurdish question’ often frame…
Profane Intuitions
Contemporary analysis of the ‘Kurdish question’ in Turkey has often enough noted the recent explosion of Kurdish refugees and immigrants to the major Turkish cities. Interest in the re-constitution of Kurdish identity in the metropolis, however, has been less evident. This article seeks to identify some of the main themes that need to be addressed in any such investigation. It begins by arguing that discourse on the ‘Kurdish question’ often frame…
The Brewing of Islamist Modernity
This article argues that the polemics accompanying the valuation of Islamist social movements occur because studies of political Islam are often oriented towards the debate over the relative worth of Western and Islamist routes to modernity and the civilizing process. The method pursued by Weber to delineate the Christian activism of The Protestant Ethic - minus its debilitating Eurocentrism - is suggested as a helpful model for analyzing the com…
Legislating Virtue, or Fear and Loathing in Istanbul
Over the past decade or so, a number of secular critics and Muslim activists of the Islamist social movement in Turkey have described the political conflicts dominating Turkish social life in cultural terms, as a struggle between incompatible cultural orders. A rich variety of similes have been used to describe the clash and its protagonists: black and white Turks, Islamist untouchables, Turkey's Negroes, even transgendered secularists (Western s…
Islamism, Castoriadis and Autonomy
In the context of nationalizing, secularizing or Kemalist states, analyses of Islamist movements are often thrown back on notions of traditionalism or atavism. In a related vein, for certain social theorists writing on modernity, the uniqueness of the West is clarified through an imaginative [mis]interpretation of other cultures or civilizations. Too often, however, the apparent gains in Western self-insight reflect an 'inability to constitute on…
Provocations of the built environment
The Never Ending Dance
Kemalism in Turkey is often presented as an exemplary case of paternalistic and authoritarian modernisation from above, and lauded or condemned for that very reason. Represented in these terms, certain analytic and political binaries are also activated: state versus society; world‐view versus life‐world; universality versus particularity; inauthenticity versus indigeneity; homogeneity versus heterogeneity/resistance. By contrast, in this paper I …
Recruiting Minority Men Who Have Sex With Men for HIV Research
We describe the efforts of a 4-city campaign to recruit Black and Hispanic men who have sex with men into an established HIV epidemiological study. The campaign used community organizing principles and a social marketing model that focused on personnel, location, product, costs and benefits, and promotion. The campaign was developed at the community, group, and individual levels to both increase trust and reduce barriers. The proportion of Hispan…
Historical Agency, Nationalism, Architecture
Set Aside from the Pen and Cut Off from the Foot”
Research Article| August 01 2007 "Set Aside from the Pen and Cut Off from the Foot": Imagining the Ottoman Empire and Kurdistan Christopher Houston Christopher Houston Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (2007) 27 (2): 397–411. https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201x-2007-013 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review S…
The Islam of anthropology
Research on ‘Muslim societies’ is a controversial topic in the present, particularly given the US army’s current employment of anthropological experts in war zones under military occupation. In 2006 the UK Foreign Office, too, sought to include anthropologists in its worldwide research project entitled ‘Combating Terrorism by Countering Radicalization’, with grants given outside the normal process of research funding and differently assessed. In …
Remaking Turkey
Lanham, Boulder, New York, Toronto and Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2007, ISBN 978-0-7391-1815-3 and 1816-0, US$80.00 (hb) and US$32.95 (pb), Pp. xxviii+266 Remaking Turkey is a collection of essays
Reproducing and Contesting Social Norms and Forms in Turkey
Additional informationNotes on contributorsChristopher HoustonChristopher Houston is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology, Macquarie University, Sydney
Woman, man, and God in modern Islam
Woman, man, and God in modern Islam, by Theodore Friend, Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2012, xv + 378 pp., US$39.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-8028-6673-8 Although it may sound like a theological or reli
Anthropology, autonomy and the art of cultural revolution
Anthropologists (amongst others) have noted how some theorists of the Occident, in order to explicate their analyses of Western modernity, have conceptualized an oppositional category of non-Western, pre-modern or traditional societies, understood to be negatively unified by their lack of particular social capacities (despite other vast dissimilarities between them). One such absent elemental capacity is reflexivity, whose existence or nonexisten…
Thwarted agency and the strange afterlife of Islamism in militant laicism in Turkey
The Iranian Diaspora in Sydney
Recent research has found that discrimination against Islam and Muslims is deeply rooted in Australia. This report explores whether or how recent Iranian migrants have experienced racism, discrimination, or Islamaphobia in Sydney. These questions are explored by focusing on their experiences and issues regarding their making of new lives in Australia. This article suggests that recent Iranian migrants are experiencing far less discrimination than…
How Globalization Really Happens
Over the past 20 years it has become accepted wisdom that Istanbul has become a ‘global city', transformed in tandem with a raft of neoliberal economic policies. What is the relevant history of this globalization? A muted local knowledge possessed by Istanbul's inhabitants is that the military coup in 1980 was the crucial event in the re‐engineering of the city. Based on extensive interviews with people active in political fractions in the late 1…
Ankara, Tehran, Baghdad
Kemalism has been the guiding and justifying ideology of the Turkish Republic since its institution in 1923. That Kemalism is exclusive to Turkey is a mainstay of Kemalist self-perception. But was (or is) Kemalism as political practice pursued by other regimes in the region? This paper argues that Kemalism should also be understood as a project of urbanism, and that urban interventions into Ankara, Tehran and Baghdad in the 20th century transform…
Humor, Amnesia, and Making Place
Drawing on Caroline Humphrey’s analysis of the personal consequences of ‘decision-events’, in this article we interpret the 2013 protests around Gezi Park in Istanbul as an eventful situation that instigated a break with participants’ previous political sentiments, recomposing them as transformed subjects in the process. We argue that an effective political humor prompted the emergence of a new subject, causing certain features of pre-Gezi politi…
Plotters and Martyrs
In 2016 an unexpected and ill-organized coup d’état occurred in Turkey. It failed within 24 hours, in part due to the bravery of thousands of citizens who in opposition to the soldiers and tanks occupied the squares and streets of Istanbul and Ankara. Designated in the political vernacular as the 15 July event, the AKP government has sought to compose its authorized version of the coup attempt through urban ritual and performance, even as it gove…
Sociology (29 obras) · Political science (24 obras) · Law (22 obras) · Turkey's Politics and Society (22 obras) · Philosophy (18 obras) · Politics (17 obras) · Law (12 obras) · Epistemology (11 obras) · Anthropology (10 obras) · Islamic Studies and History (10 obras)