Sociology and Anthropology

Studies of Islam in Morocco often discern a distinctly national Sufism of domination and submission-a 'Moroccan Islam' of sharifian saints or 'marabouts' (from the French version of the Arabic murabit) granted political and spiritual sovereignty as the Prophet Muhammad's descendants. As Abdellah Hammoudi has argued, a 'cultural schema' of master and disciple relations, or absolute domination and submission, defines the king's relationship to his advisors, saints' authority over devotees, fathers' power over their sons-indeed nearly every (male) asymmetrical relationship in the nation from precolonial times to the postcolonial present. So general an assessment warrants a degree of caution, of course; ethnographic and historical studies are needed to grasp the significance of Muslim practices for particular populations in Morocco, under distinctly modern conditions that make national cultures possible-mass politics and markets, global communications and public spheres. Mohammed Maarouf's study of jinn (spirit) curing rites, which draws directly on Hammoudi's insights, meticulously and convincingly demonstrates that sharifian logics of domination and submission do mark particular ritual practices for a section of the contemporary Moroccan population. Based on intensive observations and interviews with sharifian curers and their clients, and drawing on an extensive knowledge of jinn curing in Morocco more broadly, Maarouf has produced an encyclopedic reference, a compelling theoretical view, and generous foundations for future analyses.

"...[N]ationalist thinkers in interwar Morocco developed an awareness (1) of communication itself as a structural and mobile force for making and unmaking the Moroccan society and its political fortunes, and (2) of communicability, or consciousness of this new force, as a moral quality of modern national subjects. For nationalists in Morocco and elsewhere in the MENA, the interwar expansion of global communications meant that communication and its effects required conscientious social adaptation and political domestication; in short, reformists saw both personal and social awareness of communication as the condition for weaving individual bodies into the social body. No better sign of this nationalist concern is the very ubiquity of the consciousness-raising “call” as grounding logic and strategy of large-scale modernist efforts. The continuity of “the call” in MENA mass politics from the interwar period to the present, whether in print, radio, or social media movements, suggests a continuing awareness of communication and communicability and its effects across disparate social, religious, and political domains (p. 99).

As the studies in this volume attest, tombs and shrines of exemplary Muslims or saints (awliya’, or wali) have long been compelling centers of devotional pilgrimage (ziyara) and thus critical sites for the production and reproduction of Muslim authorities and communal norms. In implicit acknowledgment of their “spiritual magnetism,” episodic reformist movements have criticized such “non-Hajj pilgrimage” sites—and saint veneration more generally—as idolatrous threats to Islam’s fundamental monotheism.1 This chapter analyzes recent Muslim reformist movement challenges to shrine pilgrimage practices by examining the recent spread of highly publicized destruction of popular saints’ shrines. What, if anything, is historically specific to this current tactic? And what can shrine destruction tell us about contemporary Muslim piety and pilgrimage more broadly?

This article addresses the present debate regarding the study of Islam and modernity by highlighting conceptions of mediation, both implicit and explicit, predominant in the contemporary anthropology of Islam. The essay comprises two parts. The first explainss the historical, conceptual significance of mediation to the subfield from its roots in 19th century anthropology and comparative religion through its consolidation on Talal Asad'sconception of Islam as a "discursive tradition" in The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam. Specifically, it proposes that Asad's critical intervention consisted in defining Islam as a tradition of mediation, that is, a tradition of reiterative individual and collective self-making encompassing the distinct media of text, ritual, and institution, compatible with but never determined by the material, mediating conditions of Muslims' particular cultural and historical contexts. The second part of the article, a response to Aaron Rock-Singer's insightful and timely provocation, argues that Asad's genealogical critiques of religion and secularism presented a very different reading of Islam as a tradition of mediation vis-à-vis the material conditions of modernity. Specifically, I suggest that, in reframing global capital and modern states as material instantiations of modern Euro-American secular mediation, Asad now opposed Islam's traditions to their to material contexts. The result, no doubt unintended, was a new and powerful emphasis on Islam's opposition and Muslims' resistances not simply to secular modernism, but to modernity as such, and with it an inability to theorize Islam's historical resonances and complicities with capital and the international state system. Yet this is precisely what scholars need if we are to grasp Islam's capacities for renewal and revival in and beyond the current epoch.

In recent years, selective colleges and universities have made diversifying their student bodies a top priority, yet the class diversity on these campuses has barely shifted. While most research on class disparities in college admissions focuses on student explanations, this study seeks to understand how campus admissions approaches to recruitment may also contribute to why so few lower-income, first-generation, and/or working-class students (LIFGWC students) attend selective colleges. To address this question, we conducted interviews with seven admissions officers from selective campuses with both relatively strong and weak records of LIFGWC students recruitment. Institutions with stronger records of recruiting LIFGWC students actively sought out new initiatives to make their college more accessible for LIFGWC students, and these actions were motivated by a shared focus on improving larger societal inequality. Although campuses with weaker records also expanded their recruitment st...

The transformation of Argentina's state-owned oil company into a transnational joint-stock corporation and a series of worker-owned subcontracting microenterprises in northwestern Patagonia provides an example of an actually existing neoliberal project. In this article, I illustrate how this project was as much a process of sustaining affective relationality as it was a process of fostering calculative rationality. The privatization process generated corporate subjects attached through familial associations of property, company, and family. Kinship sentiment was also the crucial force that incorporated former state oil workers into the inequitable circuits of the global petroleum industry. I argue that this neoliberal process was effective inasmuch as it worked affectively. [neoliberal, kinship, property, affect, corporations, structural adjustment, petroleum, Argentina]

This article analyzes the meanings and practices of corporate personhood through ethnographic examination of the changing relationship between the Shell oil company and residents of the neighborhood surrounding the company's refineries in Argentina. The article scrutinizes the Shell public relations staff's work to remake the company into a good corporate citizen and caring neighbor with a benevolent public “face.” It argues that Shell's shift from corporate philanthropy to corporate social responsibility (CSR) reconfigured the “legal fiction” of corporate personhood and the historical relations of patronage and paternalism. This reconfiguration was achieved through the regendering of the public face of the company.

While most people live far from the sites of oil production, oil politics involves us all. Resources for Reform explores how people's lives intersect with the increasingly globalized and concentrated oil industry through a close look at Argentina's experiment with privatizing its national oil company in the name of neoliberal reform.

Examining Argentina's conversion from a state-controlled to a private oil market, Elana Shever reveals interconnections between large-scale transformations in society and small-scale shifts in everyday practice, intimate relationships, and identity. This engaging ethnography offers a window into the experiences of middle-class oil workers and their families, impoverished residents of shanty settlements bordering refineries, and affluent employees of transnational corporations as they struggle with rapid changes in the global economy, their country, and their lives. It reverberates far beyond the Argentine oil fields and offers a fresh approach to the critical study of neoliberalism, kinship, citizenship, and corporations.

The anthropology of transnational and multinational corporations (hereafter T&MCs) intertwines anthropological concerns with capitalism, personhood, institutions, development, and globalization to critically examine one of the most powerful phenomena in the world. Although there is a long history of anthropological inquiry into problems in which T&MCs play important parts, it was only at the turn of the twenty-first century that T&MCs themselves emerged as the central object of inquiry in a substantial body of anthropological research.The resulting scholarship demonstrates that the transnational corporation is not merely a dominant economic institution, an elaborate bureaucratic structure that separates ownership from control, and a “fiction” of the European legal tradition inflicted on the rest of the world; it is a total social fact that shapes and is shaped by the world around it. Anthropologists have shown how T&MCs affect large-scale political–economic processes and human subjectivities across the globe.They have also revealed how T&MCs are themselves affected by social systems and cultural forces they do not control. As anthropology has shifted from primarily studying corporations from the perspective of their office buildings and factory floors to increasingly examining how corporations operate across spatial borders and institutional boundaries, it has changed how we understand what a corporation is. The growing body of scholarship investigating the quotidian lives of particular T&MCs reveals them to be culturally constructed, unstable, and context-specific political–economic and social organizations that need to be continually regenerated even as their power endures.