Common Knowledge

Perl, Jeffrey M.

2020 Common Knowledge

doi: 10.1215/0961754X-8188820

In this piece, the editor of Common Knowledge offers excerpts from his two-year correspondence with a reader in Hong Kong, who was drawn to arguments made in the journal about maintaining “quietism and resistance in the face of vile behavior.” In the summer and fall of 2019, during the insurrection in Hong Kong, his correspondent shifts rapidly from taking comfort in CK’s defense of quietism to a full embrace of “uncivil disobedience.” She implies that the solidarity the editor expresses with Hong Kong is merely rhetorical, and he responds by writing this article and quoting in it the entire text of the 1984 Joint Declaration of the Chinese and British governments on the question of Hong Kong. The declaration’s guarantees of autonomy and civil rights appear in bold italics. The editor concludes by suggesting that it falls to the United Nations Security Council to enforce the terms of the treaty.

Blok, Anders

2020 Common Knowledge

doi: 10.1215/0961754X-8188832

This guest column asks how Bruno Latour has contributed to any present and future refiguring of relations between the sciences and the humanities. To answer the question, it traces three select and shifting figures of knowledge by means of which Latour himself has been charting his progress—from the anthropologist, charged with unraveling techno-scientific networks, to the moralist, participating in the parliament of nature, to the diplomat, negotiating the moderns’ many modes of existence. Rather than a neat blueprint for carving up the knowledge space, this essay argues, Latour leaves us with “an ethos of knowledges that verges on a chaos of in-disciplines.” The essay concludes, however, that Latour’s “in-disciplinary” thinking is and will likely continue to be an important resource for explorations into the uncertain, “nonmodern” erritories that Latour has so valuably observed.

Jensen, Casper Bruun

2020 Common Knowledge

doi: 10.1215/0961754X-8188844

Early in his career, Bruno Latour’s limited readership consisted mainly of the research community in science and technology studies (STS) that he helped to inaugurate. Today the situation could hardly be more different. Latour is now subject to the “translations”—the processes by which ideas travel—that he has provided such powerful tools for analyzing. He has become a “mutable mobile”—eminently transportable but always changing as he goes—that in different contexts exists as a variety of conceptual characters or figurations. As the Latour network continues to see significant extensions and transformations, it offers an instructive case for understanding the potentials and dynamics of traveling texts and ideas—and of their relation to existing disciplinary formations—as ecologies of knowledge change. This article examines the reception and adaptation of Latour’s ideas in two quite different intellectual contexts: anthropology and literary studies. The proliferation of Latour figurations is shown to be a consequence of interactions between, on the one hand, existing disciplinary constellations of ideas, concerns, and practices, and, on the other hand, his own often ambiguous arguments on topics including theory and method, nonhuman agency and politics, and technical mediation.

Fliche, Benoît

2020 Common Knowledge

doi: 10.1215/0961754X-8188856

Exopraxis—a term for religious practices in places of worship associated with a religion not one’s own—is often associated with heteropraxis, a term for unorthodox religious practices. Heteropraxes, which may be shared by members of more than one religion, can diverge so widely from the orthopraxy and even orthodoxy of a dominant religion that government authorities will make strenuous attempts to suppress them. In Muslim Turkey, a growing proportion of the supporters of Sunni orthodoxy regard the veneration of certain trees, stones, natural springs, and resting places of saintly persons and relics as forms of idolatry (şirk), heresy (bid’at), or superstition (hurāfe). Alevi heteropraxis at such sites of wild piety are often accompanied by Sunni exopraxis. Heteropraxis and exopraxis do not everywhere or completely overlap, argues this introduction to a cluster of articles on exopraxis, but exopraxis is generally tolerant of, if not drawn to, heteropraxis.

Fliche, Benoît;Pénicaud, Manoël

2020 Common Knowledge

doi: 10.1215/0961754X-8188868

Twice a year, the Greek Orthodox Monastery of St. George on the island of Büyükada, off the coast of Istanbul, attracts tens of thousands of Muslim pilgrims who come to make heterogenous and inventive votive offerings. Since these visitors are not Christians, their behavior is a form of exopraxis, which is the subject of the issue of Common Knowledge in which this contribution appears. Due to its scope and dynamism, this shared pilgrimage is perhaps the most important in the contemporary religious landscape of the Middle East, but it is part of a broader ecology that includes many mausoleums of Muslim saints and other Muslim holy places visited by Christians. The rationale and logic of such exopraxes is wild hope (in the Lévi-Straussian sense of wild). Pilgrims from one religious community travel to the sacred place of another not so much for communication or contact with its patron saint—the Muslim pilgrims to Büyükada pray for help to Allah, not to St. George or Jesus—as they travel to be in a place of hope at a time of personal need. This article analyzes how the proliferation of these votive exopraxes indicates both the tenuousness of the distinction between monotheist religions and their need of each other.

Tocheva, Detelina

2020 Common Knowledge

doi: 10.1215/0961754X-8188880

An annual celebration called the Day of the Driver, held in the vicinity of a chapel in the central southern part of the Rhodope Mountains of Bulgaria, is a professional as well as Orthodox Christian feast in which Bulgarian Sunni Muslims have participated at least since the fall of the communist regime in 1989. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, this article shows that the protracted workings of the socialist elevation of work identity are expressed in this ritual that has developed under the auspices of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, while at the most conspicuous level, Bulgarian Orthodoxy is strongly associated with anti-Ottoman and anti-Muslim nationalism. The celebration of work in Orthodox ritual life has a long history in the presocialist and earlier periods, but the contemporary interfaith participation is motivated by the desire of the local transportation companies to assert their professional identity in the context of an ongoing economic decline. Although invisible from the outside, exopraxis is nonetheless intrinsic to the event.

Boissevain, Katia

2020 Common Knowledge

doi: 10.1215/0961754X-8188892

Christianity has a long presence in the Maghreb, dating back to Roman imperial times. Eventually it became a mostly Muslim region, but in the late nineteenth century, the Roman Catholic Church embarked on a vast mission of church building, in part to assist the French colonial endeavor. In Tunisia, political independence in 1956 was accompanied by a further reinvigoration of Christianity, and, over the last twenty years, conversion to Christianity (mainly in the form of evangelical and neo-evangelical Protestantism) has been on the rise. Beginning in 2003, workers and students from sub-Saharan Africa have contributed to the growth of both Catholic and Protestant churches in Tunis. This article analyzes the ways in which various Christian groups organize and articulate their religious practice and proselytization in ritual spaces that are sparse and must be shared in contemporary Tunisia.

Pons, Christophe

2020 Common Knowledge

doi: 10.1215/0961754X-8188904

As part of a cluster of articles on religious exopraxis, within a larger symposium on xenophilia, this essay protests against the optimistic casting of exopraxis as a sign of fluidity, porosity, and openness. It argues instead that the pragmatic capacity to navigate alien practices and spaces of devotion can also be predatory. There are cases in which exopraxis amounts to an act of predation on what makes a religion to which one does not belong successful, and there are cases in which it amounts to an act of appropriation, for one’s own purposes, of a sacred place belonging to another religion. This essay details examples found in Cape Verde, whose creole society developed from the admixture of its Portuguese settlers and its formerly enslaved African population. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Cape Verde, like many other countries in the “global South,” emerged as a scene of fierce competition between campaigns of evangelization visited on the country from Europe, the United States, Africa, and Brazil. Most of the evangelists have been Christian, but since 2010, ascetic strains of Islam have also entered the local religious field. These emergent contexts are generating unprecedented forms of predatory exopraxis that this article details and evaluates.

de Tapia, Aude Aylin

2020 Common Knowledge

doi: 10.1215/0961754X-8188916

In the nineteenth-century Ottoman empire, Cappadocia, in the heart of Anatolia, was one of the last regions where Rum Orthodox Christians cohabited with Muslims in rural areas. Among the main aspects of everyday coexistence were the beliefs and ritual practices that, shared by Muslim and Christian individuals, blurred religious belonging as it is traditionally defined. Anthropologists and ethnologists have studied exopraxis broadly, while historians have neglected the topic until recently. In the case of anthropologists, studies have mostly focused on the spatiality of sharing that is characteristic of exopraxis. This article, based largely on testimonies collected in the Oral Tradition Archives of the Center for Asia Minor Studies in Athens, analyzes the temporality of exopraxis and inquires into the different but shared calendars that ordered the ritual life of Muslims and Orthodox Christians in Cappadocia. These testimonies, taken from Orthodox Christians who lived in Turkey prior to the exchange of populations between Turkey and Greece in 1923, help us to understand how the sharing of religious calendars resulted in feelings of belonging to a single collectivity.

Yankelevich, Matvei

2020 Common Knowledge

doi: 10.1215/0961754X-8192738