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MZIS Vortragsreihe: Tarik Sabry (Universität London)

Ethnography As Dream: Time and Cultural Salafism in a small Atlas Mountain Village

16.07.2019

This presentation grapples with a difficult question: how can I, as an ethnographer who is interested in the philosophical notion of ‘cultural time’, detach the obstinate, ghostly trace of the aporetic from my encounter with my Moroccan Middle Atlas interlocutors? What I am refering to here is not a ‘schizogenic’ (Fabian 1983) use of time, [where Others never appear as immediate partners in a cultural exchange], but to the impossibility of thinking through time afresh or from a non-hermeneutic field. Cultural time -- a term I borrow from the Moroccan philosopher Mohammed Abed Al-Jabri, already presupposes a relationship between culture and temporality, and that is certainly not a beginning, but a beginning in thinking that has already begun. This is exactly why I use the idea or description ‘ethnography as dream’. It is a dream since I have no control over my dream: dreams are exactly those uncontrollable/unreadable séances that transgress and trouble all temporal and spatial borders. I show using ethnographic research conducted with people Living in a small Berber village in Morocco how, for the villagers, cultural time is the product of complex ‘intra-actions’ between different times: Roman, Jewish, feudal, French, colonial, Arab, Muslim, Salafist, as well as mediated cultural times of the Other. I show how these cultural times mount each other mnemonically without ruptural cancellations. I also use evidence from fieldwork to show how time comes into and through other times, a constant morphing, into a poly- temporality where to think about time is at any given moment, and always, a mnemonic temporal act.

Tarik Sabry is a reader in Media and Communication Theory at the University of Westminster, where he is also coordinator of the Global Media Research Network. Sabry is author of Cultural Encounters in the Arab World: On Media, the Modern and the Everyday (IB Tauris 2010), Children and Screen Media in Changing Arab Contexts with Nisrine Mansour (Palgrave 2019); editor of Arab Cultural Studies: Mapping the Field (IB Tauris 2012) and co-editor with Layal Ftouni of Arab Subcultures: Transformations in Theory and Practice (2017) and Culture, Time and Publics in the Arab World (IB Tauris 2019) with Joe F. Khalil. He is also co-founder and co-editor of the Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication. Sabry’s research interests lie at intersections between media, cultural studies and philosophy, audiences, popular culture and intellectual Arab history.

Die MZIS Vorträge finden Dienstags um 18 Uhr c. t. im Hörsaal M 014 Universitätshauptgebäude Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1 statt.

In Zusammenarbeit mit der Gesellschaft der Freunde Islamischer Kunst und Kultur und der Deutsch-Türkischen Gesellschaft Bayern e. V.


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