Honor killings: Arsalan Khan interviewed by Le Monde

Honor Killings: Arsalan Khan interviewed by Le Monde

Arsalan Khan was interviewed by Le Monde, France, to share his insights into the social, historical and religious factors behind recent honor killings in Pakistan.

Excerpts:

Arsalan Khan, an associate professor of anthropology specializing in religion, gender, and violence in Pakistan at the University of Tennessee, analyzes virality as a double-edged sword: “The government acts when there is a huge scandal and pressure from civil society, urban groups, and human rights organizations, and when something becomes international.”

On the other hand, “documenting crime or punishment through video is part of the process of restoring honor within tribes; it is proof of honor saved for families.” According to him, in the case of the video of the murder of Bano Bibi Satakzai and Ehsan Ullah Samalani, “it is clear that the video was produced for internal purposes. It is quite possible that it was to build evidence to ‘restore honor.'”

Honor killings highlight the lack of regulation of jirgas, traditional tribal councils, which are responsible for extrajudicial decisions that perpetuate patriarchal values ​​in Pakistan’s provinces. “Tribal organizations are organized around the idea of ​​male descent, hence the desire to control women’s sexuality in order to preserve tribal unity,” explains Arsalan Khan.

For Arsalan Khan, the colonial period also played a key role in maintaining jirgas and perpetuating honor killings. According to him, the British regime strengthened these informal courts through its use of indirect rule, “a set of laws and policies that supported local authorities and involved a process of formalizing customary law in the 19th century.” “Jirgas still remain instruments through which the state is able to govern rural areas through them,” the researcher explains.

Read the full article

From the Field

This past year, cultural anthropology doctoral candidate Mac Archer has been busy conducting research alongside the Haitian social welfare department, IBESR, and the child protection organization, LFBS. 

Mac’s research focuses on the importance of emotional labor in orphanages where destitute children are cared for by nannies drawn from poor communities, sometimes the very communities that these children hail from. In her research Mac centers the complicated racial, class, and gender dynamics at play within Haiti’s orphanage system, where the major players running orphanages tend to be US-based, faith-based organizations. 

“Over the past year I have connected with some amazing people, heard both heartbreaking and inspiring testimonies from various members of these organizations,” Mac said. 

She has also worked as a monitoring and evaluation specialist for the Kellogg Foundation-funded organization, Hope for Haiti, conducting research in schools located in remote areas of the island. With a research regimen that can be physically and emotionally daunting, Mac has found her expertise as a yoga teacher helpful as an avenue to help recuperate while also serving the small expatriate community in Les Cayes. 

“I have also been grateful to teach yoga twice a week to a community of expats in Les Cayes since March,” she said. “This past year has been a wonderful experience and adventure.” 

Ethnographic fieldwork can be immensely challenging, but nevertheless rewarding academically and as a life-experience.

Anthropology’s Southern Foodways Garden

In March 2022, Kandi Hollenbach planted a southern foodways garden in a bed adjacent to the Cottage behind Strong Hall with the assistance of students and faculty members. Kandi teaches about plants and foodways in the classroom, but photos do little justice to the vibrant energy of a living garden.

When we think of southern food, cornbread, grits, barbecue, fried green tomatoes, and fried okra come to mind. We owe these ingredients and techniques to Native Americans and enslaved Africans from the South’s colonial past. During the inaugural season of the garden, Kandi focused on plants associated with both groups.

 Plants cultivated by Native Americans include sunflowers and the familiar “Three Sisters’ Garden” of corn, beans, and squash. She replaced squash with bottle gourd to limit the amount of food produced, since the chemical inputs drifting into the garden are currently unclear. Bottle gourds are the oldest cultivated crop in the Americas, dating to at least 10,000 years ago. Squashes are a close cousin, domesticated around 5,000 years ago by groups living in the Eastern Woodlands of North America. These groups also domesticated sunflowers by 4,200 years ago. Farming peoples in East Tennessee added corn to their food plots about 1,000 years ago, and beans 700 years ago, both of which were passed along routes that connected all the way to Mesoamerica. 

 Other plants in the garden, including okra and black-eyed peas (or cowpeas), highlight crops that enslaved Africans brought with them on their forced journey across the Atlantic. They may have also brought bottle gourds with them—plants that Africans also domesticated at least 4,000 years ago—or they may have been relieved to see bottle gourds growing locally when they arrived in the Americas. Africans and Native Americans used bottle gourds for a wide range of purposes, from containers to fishing floats to musical instruments. 

 Kandi and her assistants planted the garden in complementary groupings rather than orderly rows: the beans and black-eyed peas climbed up the corn stalks and okra and sunflower stems for support. Bottle gourd vines meandered at will, shading the soil to keep in moisture and outcompete weeds for sunlight. After several weeks of regular rain showers, the gourd vines were riotous and took over the whole patch! 

The gardeners have learned a lot from the garden already – about the timing of plantings, sunlight requirements, responsiveness to rain, attraction of a wide range of wildlife, reduction in weeds over the course of the season as leaves and vines spread, timing of ripened pods, and harvest and drying of seeds and gourds for storage. Students in the spring 2023 paleoethnobotany class will package the seeds, along with information about their cultural uses, and distribute them to 4H groups in East Tennessee.

 The students will also plant maygrass, little barley, and sochan this spring – another set of plants tended by Native Americans in this region beginning about 4,000 years ago – and develop signage for the garden. By May, they will harvest those seeds and plant the next round of crops for the summer. 

 If you find yourself near the corner of Cumberland Avenue and 16th Street, come by and check out what’s growing in our southern foodways garden!

Dr. Dominique Somda: Women, race, identity and memory in contemporary African societies

Dr. Somda’s research focuses on the complex legacies of slavery and its memorialization in Madagascar, Benin, and South Africa, especially in the ways in which the latter relates to common assumptions about race and identity, driving the politics of essentialization and ethnicization in contemporary African societies. Dr. Somda also studies the representational politics around the depiction of women’s agency, slavery and colonialism in film, most notably in recent films like The Woman King, and Black Panther. Her ongoing multi-sited ethnographic work continues to shed light on the everyday lives of African women, as they navigate and contend with challenges and possibilities presented by social, economic and political crises and struggles in the present era.

Dr. Dominique Somda is a Research Fellow with the Institute for Humanities in Africa (HUMA) at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. After earning a Ph.D. from the University of Paris Ouest Nanterre, where she was a member of the Laboratoire d’Ethnologie et de Sociologie Comparative, Dr. Somda conducted research and taught at various institutions in Europe, North America, and Africa, including Fondation des Maisons des Sciences de l’Homme in Paris, London School of Economics, University of Pennsylvania, and Reed College. Her work focuses on how inequality − or conversely egalitarianism − emerges through everyday practices, and engages the anthropology of slavery, democracy, Christianity, as well as feminist and postcolonial studies.

Caste in India: A Conversation with filmaker Leena Manimekalai about her film Maadathy – An Unfairy Tale

The Disasters, Displacement and Human Rights (DDHR) Program in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, presented a free screening of the award-winning Tamil language film (with English subtitles) Maadathy: An Unfairy Tale, followed by a virtual conversation with its director Leena Manimekalai, hosted by Dr. Prashanth Kuganathan and Dr. Raja Swamy. The event was sponsored by the Chancellors’ Council on Diversity and Inclusion and the UTK Department of Religious Studies.

Manimekalai is an acclaimed independent filmmaker and activist from Chennai, India. Her film Maadathy: An Unfairy Tale depicts the violence in rural Tamil Nadu against a caste group that is considered not only “untouchable” but also “unseeable.” This violence continues to plague much of India today. Caste and gender are two of India’s primary victim demographics of violence, particularly of a sexual nature. While gender-based violence is global, caste-based discrimination is restricted to South Asia and its diasporas. The category of caste is unlike any other in the United States. While similar to the concept of class, it is hereditary, sanctioned by religious text, and enforced by violence. This film and discussion with its director will provide attendees with a unique perspective into a system of contemporary apartheid that is not based on skin color or physical attributes but instead on more intangible categories of human classification.

Documenting LGBTQ+ experiences

Assistant Professor Tamar Shirinian joined the department this fall after serving for two years as a post-doctoral teaching associate. She is working on a book manuscript, Survival of a Perverse Nation: Queer Transformations in Postsocialist Armenia, in which she critically analyzes the popular rhetoric of “perversion” in the post-Soviet Republic of Armenia. 

Following the end of state socialism, Armenia experienced profound political and economic changes that also had social implications  for kinship, gender, and sexuality. In the book, Shirinian argues that the “crisis” regarding homosexuality and feminism – both said to be sexually perverse and threatening the survival of the nation – is intimately tied to aggressive privatization measures, the concentration of public wealth into the hands of a few, and the rise of an oligarchy class who rules through authoritarian power. She traces the ways in which these latter changes are also frequently described as morally perverse. The book offers a queer theory that not only takes political economy seriously, but as its object of study.

In addition to her research on Armenia, Shirinian is collaborating with Professor Donna Braquet on the Voices Out Loud project, an archives and oral history project that chronicles the history of LGBTQ+ people in East Tennessee. They began a new collaboration in spring 2021 focusing on the experiences of LGBTQ+ people in the region during the COVID-19 outbreak. Having conducted 12 in-depth interviews thus far, and looking forward to holding focus groups as well, the team has made some interesting discoveries. While many queer folks in East Tennessee had extreme financial and health difficulties, some also took the time as an opportunity to make life-altering changes, such as having children or transitioning gender without daily public scrutiny or surveillance. Some also felt that their normalized levels of angst had decreased as a result of not having to be in public and thus not having to explain themselves, or deal with microaggressions about their appearance, and fear for their safety. Shirinian is working out some of these discoveries through a framework that considers the space of lock-down and quarantine as “sanctuary,” focusing in on the question of what it means when a space of crisis becomes a comfort.