Papers by Martin Zillinger
To be published July 31: Introduction: Transforming the Post/Colonial Museum , in: The Post/Colonial Museum, Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften 15:2,11-28, 2022
Much has been said in recent years about the colonial origin and enduring legacy of former ›anthr... more Much has been said in recent years about the colonial origin and enduring legacy of former ›anthropological‹ or imperial museums. Programmatic attempts to decolonize them by opening up (
HAU, 2020
Introduction to the HAU-Colloquium "Iconoclasm, Heritage, Restitution", HAU Volume 10, Number 3. ... more Introduction to the HAU-Colloquium "Iconoclasm, Heritage, Restitution", HAU Volume 10, Number 3. Winter 2020
Hamid's Travelogue, 2021
In their seminal work that helped to re-invent Mediterranean anthropology some 20 years ago, Hord... more In their seminal work that helped to re-invent Mediterranean anthropology some 20 years ago, Horden and Purcell argue that the religious landscape reflects both, the fragmented topography of Mediterranean micro-regions and the means by which the fragmentation is overcome. In order to explore how space and time concern the divine along and across Mediterranean shores, this paper examines how social and spiritual borders are crossed in religious practice and graduated socialities are generated, shaped and negotiated. It argues that connectivities, lateral and vertical, are forged or undone by turning borders into thresholds and vice-versa. Drawing from both, the history of Mediterranean anthropology of religion and ethnographic material from transnational mobile members of trance networks the paper sketches an anthropology of blessing across nested fields of exteriority and alterity, found within and without the social niches of Mediterranean lifeworlds.
Zeitschrift für Ethnologie/Journal of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 145 – 2020, 2., 2020
Rethinking the Mediterranean
From antiquity to today, the Mediterranean has been conceptualised ... more Rethinking the Mediterranean
From antiquity to today, the Mediterranean has been conceptualised as a site of economic and socio-political promise, corruption, and failure. Likewise, anthropological scholarship has conceived the Mediterranean as an area full of tensions and challenges, simultaneously romanticising and continuously deconstructing it. Yet, according to Peregrine Horden, in response to a series of recent proclamations of the Mediterranean’s
“return” (Ben-Yehoyada, Cabot, and Silverstein 2020), it “has never gone away” (Horden, this volume). In light of contemporary migratory movements and multiple aggravating crises, the Mediterranean Sea is no longer described only as a zone of conflicting and competing social formations but as “one of the world’s highest walls” (Pina-Cabral 2013:249), which has increasingly turned a border zone into a site of “carnage” (Albahari 2016). Yet, despite the ongoing devastating economic and political dynamics and the brutal failure of migration policies, the heritage industry and commodification of “Mediterranean identity” are in full swing (Herzfeld 2014). At times it seems as if the Mediterranean envisioned by scholars, artists, and intellectuals from North-Western Europe, whose travelogues and visual documentations have exercised
the imagination of European publics since the nineteenth century (see Kramer 1977), has exceeded the discursive realms. Continuously re-created as social-ecological ‘niches’ by the transnational tourist industry, regional identity politics, and local nostalgia, Mediterranean landscapes lend themselves as economic and social reserves (Hauschild 2008) for individuals and various social formations in late modernity.
Awaiting exciting discovery (Sant Cassia 2000) by tourists, pilgrims, and returning migrants, these reserves, however, continue to be haunted by catastrophes – environmental (earthquakes, floods, and droughts), political (failing states, corruption, and criminal networks), humanitarian (migration, war, and state violence), and medical (invasive species, COVID-19) – that seem to mirror an increasingly fragmented globalisation and testify to their own temporality.
Journal of Social and Cultural Anthropology, 2021
In scholarship on the Mediterranean the topic of ‘mediation’ has always loomed large, not least b... more In scholarship on the Mediterranean the topic of ‘mediation’ has always loomed large, not least because the median space of the sea accounts for much of the dynamics and processes by which connections have been forged but also cut across space and time. We suggested therefore to apprehend ‘the Mediterranean’ not so much as a place, or an entanglement of spaces, but as a way of narrating, conceptualising, and experiencing temporality and locality in the ongoing struggle for spatial and temporal knottings that characterise a specific Mediterranean being in time and space
A Handbook Article on Mediterranean Trance.
The author explores how members of the Moroccan Sufi brotherhoods of the 'Isawa and H . amadša sh... more The author explores how members of the Moroccan Sufi brotherhoods of the 'Isawa and H . amadša shape their activities and transnational networks through the use of technical media. Trying to think beyond notions of the local, regional and transnational, the article focuses on the mediators and practices by which actors understand the scope of their actions and redefine their agency at different locales through 'scaling'. More particularly, he explores how actors engage in 'downscaling' complex issues into ritual procedures, and in 'upscaling' these procedures by inscribing them into a media chain and a more encompassing network of people, signs and things.
The notion of a " public sphere " has been widely discussed in the anthropology of Islam and, as ... more The notion of a " public sphere " has been widely discussed in the anthropology of Islam and, as elsewhere, criticized for its normative assumptions. Focusing on how actors redefine the scope of their actions in (media) networks of Moroccan trance brotherhoods, in this paper I explore how adepts and skeptics of trance relate to and compete with each other in generating, negotiating, and shunning publicity for their practices and " issues of concern. " In order to take media practices that aim to " make things public " as a point of departure, attention is drawn to " ritual boundary objects " that help to mediate between different viewpoints and enable ritual cooperation across sites. Without such boundary objects, the use of new media and the collapse of carefully distinguished spheres of action are likely to lead to scandals and the violent drawing of boundaries. I argue for a concept of " graduated publics " that makes it possible to rethink Eurocentric imaginaries of unified public or counterpublic spheres and challenges their binary conceptions of public and private realms. The focus on situated mediation practices makes it possible to zoom in on the modalities and materialities of circulation and uptake that expand or delimit publicity for different " issues " in different locales.
Trance Mediums and New Media. Spirit Possession in the Age of Technical Reproduction, 2015
Part of the basic inventory of most concepts of media is that media overcome time and space. In t... more Part of the basic inventory of most concepts of media is that media overcome time and space. In the context of religion, this is true in two ways: first, the ritual shaping of agency is restructured; and second, religion, as mediation, ties the use of technological media back to existing cultural, ritual, and body techniques. Technical media are integrated into established chains of media and media practices. Many scholars note that in this process, media seem to move into the background. Although constitutive of the conveyed experience, they are nevertheless perceived as becoming part of the transcendental, operating beyond mediation, promising unmediated experience of an other world or some kind of divine presence. This paper argues that the technological fantasy and fabric of immediacy is not applicable to all religious media practices and explores rituals of healing in the context of spirit possession among a popular Sufi confraternity in Morocco.
Trance Mediums and New Media. Introduction, 2015
Introduction to the volume "Trance Mediums and New Media", 2015
In Morocco the ‘Isāwa brotherhoods – followers of a local Sufi-saint of the 15th century – are fa... more In Morocco the ‘Isāwa brotherhoods – followers of a local Sufi-saint of the 15th century – are famous for their ecstatic trance-rituals. Mediating divine and demonic powers the adepts increasingly use technical media in order to archive their practices and ritual techniques and to cooperate across space and time at the turn of the 21st century. This paper explores the specific aesthetics of trance, which are produced through the specific media-practices of filming, copying and archiving trance among the ‘Isāwa and their followers.
Anselm Franke (ed.) Animism, 2010
In this article we reexamine notions of relativism and universalism in the history of anthropolog... more In this article we reexamine notions of relativism and universalism in the history of anthropology through a re-appraisal of anthropological research in the Mediterranean. In view of the fact of ongoing, public debates on how to bring about a new world order, we trace the notion of a clash of civilizations in intellectual history and depict early attempts to shed light on cultural techniques of exchange and cohabitation. By examining the material basis of all culture and the body-techniques of visionary experiences, we will argue that creative human beings are apt to develop social and individual strategies for dealing with one's own cultural heritage and with Otherness and its various transformations.
This paper explores media-techniques of conversion among Arabic speaking Christians along the Nil... more This paper explores media-techniques of conversion among Arabic speaking Christians along the Nile. Their practices build up on and intensify long existing religious dynamics of missionization (through migration and re-migration of evangelical Christians) and conversion (from existing religious communities into new, transnational movements) and are formed around narratives of modernisation. In past and present Christian proselytizing has articulated universal aspirations that are to be realized in situ through the differentiation between believers und unbelievers. The demand to make a complete break with the past is emphasized by the use of media (books and more recently the internet) and formats (like a creed) that are seemingly removed from the modifications of time and space. Exploring the various strategies and media-practices of Christian proselytizing along the Nile through time, this paper offers a more detailed analysis of a recent prophetic movement and its territorialisation strategies in the context of the founding of the state of South Sudan.
The introduction to a handbook of media ethnography
in: Bettina Severin-Barboutie (ed), Stadt in Bewegung. Wanderungsprozesse in pluridisziplinärer P... more in: Bettina Severin-Barboutie (ed), Stadt in Bewegung. Wanderungsprozesse in pluridisziplinärer Perspektive. Francia. Forschungen zur Westeuropäischen Geshichte 2014/41, p. 489-501
Migration lässt sich nicht auf Flucht und Migranten nicht auf Asylanten reduzieren lassen. Ein Pr... more Migration lässt sich nicht auf Flucht und Migranten nicht auf Asylanten reduzieren lassen. Ein Problem für die Migrierenden ist nicht zuletzt, dass sie durch das Grenzregime Europas wortwörtlich in ein Boot gezwängt werden und die unterschiedlichen Migrationshintergründe und Dynamiken keine differenzierten Antworten auf Seiten der Aufnahmegesellschaften und ihrer Migrationspolitik finden. Das gegenwärtige Problem besteht weniger in der Tatsache, dass Menschen aus den Gesellschaften Nordafrikas und des Mittleren Ostens nach Europa kommen wollen, um hier zu leben, zu arbeiten und Schutz zu suchen. Die tödlichen Probleme der Migration entstehen erst, wenn die zunehmende Verflechtung euro-mediterraner Lebenswelten geleugnet und die Bewegung der Menschen nicht gestaltet und dadurch kontrolliert wird.
Between 1900 and 1912, Durkheim, Mauss and other contributors of the L'Année Sociologique develop... more Between 1900 and 1912, Durkheim, Mauss and other contributors of the L'Année Sociologique developed the most ambitious philosophical project of modern anthropology: a comparative and worldwide social history of philosophical categories. This article briefly summarises three phases of the 'Category Project' and gives a preliminary characterisation of its Hegelian ambitions. Further, it points out the common denominator in the diverse success stories of the Category Project, namely the reference to the human body as the site of collective consciousness. In a second step, the article traces the intricate genesis and afterlife of the most important category of bodily efficacy and epistemological insight provided by Durkheim and Mauss: the elaboration of 'effervescence' and its manifestation of 'totality'.
Die fremde Welt des Sozialen. Reading (with) Durkheim
Mauss' paper "Conceptions qui ont précédé la notion de matière" in German translation (by Johanne... more Mauss' paper "Conceptions qui ont précédé la notion de matière" in German translation (by Johannes Schick) and with commentaries by Erhard Schüttpelz, Martin Zillinger, Mario Schmidt and Johannes Schick.
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Papers by Martin Zillinger
From antiquity to today, the Mediterranean has been conceptualised as a site of economic and socio-political promise, corruption, and failure. Likewise, anthropological scholarship has conceived the Mediterranean as an area full of tensions and challenges, simultaneously romanticising and continuously deconstructing it. Yet, according to Peregrine Horden, in response to a series of recent proclamations of the Mediterranean’s
“return” (Ben-Yehoyada, Cabot, and Silverstein 2020), it “has never gone away” (Horden, this volume). In light of contemporary migratory movements and multiple aggravating crises, the Mediterranean Sea is no longer described only as a zone of conflicting and competing social formations but as “one of the world’s highest walls” (Pina-Cabral 2013:249), which has increasingly turned a border zone into a site of “carnage” (Albahari 2016). Yet, despite the ongoing devastating economic and political dynamics and the brutal failure of migration policies, the heritage industry and commodification of “Mediterranean identity” are in full swing (Herzfeld 2014). At times it seems as if the Mediterranean envisioned by scholars, artists, and intellectuals from North-Western Europe, whose travelogues and visual documentations have exercised
the imagination of European publics since the nineteenth century (see Kramer 1977), has exceeded the discursive realms. Continuously re-created as social-ecological ‘niches’ by the transnational tourist industry, regional identity politics, and local nostalgia, Mediterranean landscapes lend themselves as economic and social reserves (Hauschild 2008) for individuals and various social formations in late modernity.
Awaiting exciting discovery (Sant Cassia 2000) by tourists, pilgrims, and returning migrants, these reserves, however, continue to be haunted by catastrophes – environmental (earthquakes, floods, and droughts), political (failing states, corruption, and criminal networks), humanitarian (migration, war, and state violence), and medical (invasive species, COVID-19) – that seem to mirror an increasingly fragmented globalisation and testify to their own temporality.
https://soziopolis.de/erinnern/jubilaeen/artikel/durkheim-lesen/#_ftn13