This post builds on the research article “Physical Training, Ethical Discipline, and Creative Violence: Zones of Self-Mastery in the Hindu Nationalist Movement,” which was published in the February 2010 issue of the Society’s peer-reviewed journal, Cultural Anthropology.
Editorial Overview
In the February 2010 issue of Cultural Anthropology, Arafaat A. Valiani examines projects of self-mastery within neighborhood physical training programs associated with the Hindi Nationalist Movement. He argues that these physical regimes of training produce subjects that are simultaneously ethically oriented and creatively violent. This analysis is then applied to anti-Muslim pogroms in postcolonial Gujarat. In contrast to previous scholarship on these events, Valiani argues that the pogroms cannot be understood as the simple product of people blindly following the directives of the pro-Hindu BJP party, but must rather be analyzed with reference to the more extended project in which moral selves are cultivated through physical regimes of training and improvization.
Editorial Footnotes
Cultural Anthropology has published a number of essays on the topic of violence. These include: Nils Bubandt's "From the Enemy's Point of View: Violence, Empathy, and the Ethnography of Fakes" (2009); Peter Benson's "El Campo: Faciality and Structural Violence in Farm Labor Camps" (2008); Lori Allen's "Getting By the Occupation: How Violence Became Normal During the Second Palestinian Intifada" (2008); Charles Briggs' "Mediating Infanticide: Theorizing Relations between Narrative and Violence" (2007); and Rosalind Shaw's "Displacing Violence: Making Pentecostal Memory in Postwar Sierra Leone" (2007).
Cultural Anthropology has also published a number of essays on religion. These include: Jesse Weaver Shipley's "Comedians, Pastors, and the Miraculous Agency of Charisma in Ghana" (2009); Dierdre de la Cruz's "Coincidence and Consequence: Marianism and the Mass Media in the Global Philippines" (2009); Omri Elisha's "Moral Ambitions of Grace: The Paradox of Compassion and Accountability in Evangelical Faith-Based Activism" (2008); Webb Keane's "Sincerity, 'Modernity,' and the Protestants" (2002); Saba Mahmood's "Feminist Theory, Embodiment, and the Docile Agent: Some Reflections on the Egyptian Islamic Revival" (2001); and Charles Hirschkind's "Civic Virtue and Religious Reason: An Islamic Counterpublic" (2001).
Recent and Forthcoming Works by the Author
Valiani, Arafaat A. Militant Publics: Physical Training, Guerilla-styled Protest, and 'Civic' Action in Gujarat, India (tentative title, book manuscript)
Valiani, Arafaat A. "Violence." In Darity Jr., William A., ed. The International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, Volume 8. 2008: 622-625.
Valiani, Arafaat A. Contribution solicited by the Social Science Research Council pertaining to the terrorist attacks which took place in Mumbai, India in 2008. In "Off the Cuff: Mumbai Revisited," in Social Sciences Resource Council. The Immanent Frame: Secularism, religion and the public sphere. 2009.
Related Readings
Asad, Talal. Genealogies of Religion: Descipline, and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1993.
Hansen, Thomas Blom. The Saffron Wave: Democracy and Hindu Nationalism in Modern India. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999.
Mahmood, Saba. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005.
Mueggler, Erik. "The Age of Wild Ghosts: Memory, violence, and place in Southwest China." Anthropologica 45.1(2003): 450-453.
Questions for Classroom Discussion
1. What does it mean to do the type of ethnography that Valiani did for this article? How does Valiani describe the ethical and methodological dilemmas he faced? And, how would you if placed in a comparable situation?
2. How does Valiani balance the issues of authority and agency? Are these opposing terms? What is the relationship between them? How do the characters Valiani presents in this essay exercise their agency, and how is this similar or dissimilar from conventional accounts of agency?
3. What does Valiani's account of the National Volunteer organization tell us about the relationship between violence and political subjectivity? How does Valiani analyze the embodied, discursive, and affective dispositions which enable certain technologies of violence? What type of information does it reveal?