Resolved, That the Declaration passed on the 4th, be fairly engrossed on parchment, with the title and stile of "The unanimous declaration of the thirteen United States of America," and that the same, when engrossed, be signed by every member of Congress. Independence amounted to a new status of interdependence: America thus became a member of the international community, which meant becoming a maker of treaties and alliances, a military ally in diplomacy, and a partner in foreign trade on a more equal basis. The declaration is not divided into formal sections; but it is often discussed as consisting of five parts: Asserts as a matter of Natural Law the ability of a people to assume political independence; acknowledges that the grounds for such independence must be reasonable, and therefore explicable, and ought to be explained.
Outlines a general philosophy of government that justifies revolution when government harms natural rights. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism , it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government , and to provide new Guards for their future security.
A bill of particulars documenting the king's "repeated injuries and usurpations" of the Americans' rights and liberties. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world. Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant , is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.
This section essentially finishes the case for independence. The conditions that justified revolution have been shown. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence.
They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends. The signers assert that there exist conditions under which people must change their government, that the British have produced such conditions and, by necessity, the colonies must throw off political ties with the British Crown and become independent states.
The conclusion contains, at its core, the Lee Resolution that had been passed on July 2. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor. The first and most famous signature on the engrossed copy was that of John Hancock , President of the Continental Congress. Two future presidents Thomas Jefferson and John Adams and a father and great-grandfather of two other presidents Benjamin Harrison were among the signatories.
Edward Rutledge age 26 was the youngest signer, and Benjamin Franklin age 70 was the oldest signer. The fifty-six signers of the Declaration represented the new states as follows from north to south: Historians have often sought to identify the sources that most influenced the words and political philosophy of the Declaration of Independence.
By Jefferson's own admission, the Declaration contained no original ideas, but was instead a statement of sentiments widely shared by supporters of the American Revolution.
As he explained in Neither aiming at originality of principle or sentiment, nor yet copied from any particular and previous writing, it was intended to be an expression of the American mind, and to give to that expression the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion. Jefferson's most immediate sources were two documents written in June Ideas and phrases from both of these documents appear in the Declaration of Independence.
Jefferson wrote that a number of authors exerted a general influence on the words of the Declaration. Becker wrote, "Most Americans had absorbed Locke's works as a kind of political gospel; and the Declaration, in its form, in its phraseology, follows closely certain sentences in Locke's second treatise on government.
Best Sites Download Ebooks.
Historian Ray Forrest Harvey argued in for the dominant influence of Swiss jurist Jean Jacques Burlamaqui , declaring that Jefferson and Locke were at "two opposite poles" in their political philosophy, as evidenced by Jefferson's use in the Declaration of Independence of the phrase "pursuit of happiness" instead of "property". Legal historian John Phillip Reid has written that the emphasis on the political philosophy of the Declaration has been misplaced.
The Declaration is not a philosophical tract about natural rights, argues Reid, but is instead a legal document—an indictment against King George for violating the constitutional rights of the colonists. If the United States were to have any hope of being recognized by the European powers, the American revolutionaries first had to make it clear that they were no longer dependent on Great Britain.
The Declaration became official when Congress voted for it on July 4; signatures of the delegates were not needed to make it official. The handwritten copy of the Declaration of Independence that was signed by Congress is dated July 4, The signatures of fifty-six delegates are affixed; however, the exact date when each person signed it has long been the subject of debate. The Declaration was transposed on paper, adopted by the Continental Congress, and signed by John Hancock , President of the Congress, on July 4, , according to the record of events by the U.
State Department under Secretary Philander C. Historians have generally accepted McKean's version of events, arguing that the famous signed version of the Declaration was created after July 19, and was not signed by Congress until August 2, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. The most famous signature on the engrossed copy is that of John Hancock , who presumably signed first as President of Congress.
I guess King George will be able to read that! Various legends emerged years later about the signing of the Declaration, when the document had become an important national symbol. In one famous story, John Hancock supposedly said that Congress, having signed the Declaration, must now "all hang together", and Benjamin Franklin replied: The Syng inkstand used at the signing was also used at the signing of the United States Constitution in After Congress approved the final wording of the Declaration on July 4, a handwritten copy was sent a few blocks away to the printing shop of John Dunlap.
Through the night, Dunlap printed about broadsides for distribution. Before long, it was being read to audiences and reprinted in newspapers throughout the 13 states. President of Congress John Hancock sent a broadside to General George Washington , instructing him to have it proclaimed "at the Head of the Army in the way you shall think it most proper". Washington and Congress hoped that the Declaration would inspire the soldiers, and encourage others to join the army. An equestrian statue of King George in New York City was pulled down and the lead used to make musket balls.
The first copy of the Declaration sent to France got lost, and the second copy arrived only in November The Spanish-American authorities banned the circulation of the Declaration, but it was widely transmitted and translated: Hutchinson argued that the American Revolution was the work of a few conspirators who wanted independence from the outset, and who had finally achieved it by inducing otherwise loyal colonists to rebel.
William Whipple , a signer of the Declaration of Independence who had fought in the war, freed his slave Prince Whipple because of revolutionary ideals. In the postwar decades, other slaveholders also freed their slaves; from to , the percentage of free blacks in the Upper South increased to 8. The official copy of the Declaration of Independence was the one printed on July 4, , under Jefferson's supervision. It was sent to the states and to the Army and was widely reprinted in newspapers.
The slightly different "engrossed copy" shown at the top of this article was made later for members to sign. The engrossed version is the one widely distributed in the 21st century. Note that the opening lines differ between the two versions. The copy of the Declaration that was signed by Congress is known as the engrossed or parchment copy. It was probably engrossed that is, carefully handwritten by clerk Timothy Matlack. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in , the documents were moved for safekeeping to the United States Bullion Depository at Fort Knox in Kentucky, where they were kept until The document signed by Congress and enshrined in the National Archives is usually regarded as the Declaration of Independence, but historian Julian P.
Boyd argued that the Declaration, like Magna Carta , is not a single document. Boyd considered the printed broadsides ordered by Congress to be official texts, as well. The Declaration was first published as a broadside that was printed the night of July 4 by John Dunlap of Philadelphia. Dunlap printed about broadsides, of which 26 are known to survive. The 26th copy was discovered in The National Archives in England in In , Congress commissioned Mary Katherine Goddard to print a new broadside that listed the signers of the Declaration, unlike the Dunlap broadside.
Several early handwritten copies and drafts of the Declaration have also been preserved. Jefferson kept a four-page draft that late in life he called the "original Rough draught". In , Boyd discovered a fragment of an earlier draft in Jefferson's handwriting. During the writing process, Jefferson showed the rough draft to Adams and Franklin, and perhaps to other members of the drafting committee, [] who made a few more changes.
Franklin, for example, may have been responsible for changing Jefferson's original phrase "We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable" to "We hold these truths to be self-evident". On April 21, , it was announced that a second engrossed copy had been discovered in the archives at West Sussex County Council in Chichester , England.
How it came to be in England is not yet known, but the finders believe that the randomness of the signatures points to an origin with signatory James Wilson , who had argued strongly that the Declaration was made not by the States but by the whole people. The Declaration was given little attention in the years immediately following the American Revolution, having served its original purpose in announcing the independence of the United States. The act of declaring independence was considered important, whereas the text announcing that act attracted little attention.
Many leaders of the French Revolution admired the Declaration of Independence [] but were also interested in the new American state constitutions. The document had a particular impact on the Decembrist revolt and other Russian thinkers. According to historian David Armitage , the Declaration of Independence did prove to be internationally influential, but not as a statement of human rights. Armitage argued that the Declaration was the first in a new genre of declarations of independence that announced the creation of new states. Other French leaders were directly influenced by the text of the Declaration of Independence itself.
The Manifesto of the Province of Flanders was the first foreign derivation of the Declaration; [] others include the Venezuelan Declaration of Independence , the Liberian Declaration of Independence , the declarations of secession by the Confederate States of America —61 , and the Vietnamese Proclamation of Independence Other countries have used the Declaration as inspiration or have directly copied sections from it.
The Rhodesian declaration of independence , ratified in November , is based on the American one as well; however, it omits the phrases " all men are created equal " and " the consent of the governed ". Declaration of Independence, though it, like the Rhodesian one, omits references to "all men are created equal" and "consent of the governed". Interest in the Declaration was revived in the s with the emergence of the United States's first political parties. Federalists insisted that Congress's act of declaring independence, in which Federalist John Adams had played a major role, was more important than the document announcing it.
A less partisan appreciation for the Declaration emerged in the years following the War of , thanks to a growing American nationalism and a renewed interest in the history of the Revolution. When interest in the Declaration was revived, the sections that were most important in were no longer relevant: But the second paragraph was applicable long after the war had ended, with its talk of self-evident truths and unalienable rights. John Trumbull 's painting Declaration of Independence has played a significant role in popular conceptions of the Declaration of Independence.
The painting is byfoot 3. It is sometimes described as the signing of the Declaration of Independence, but it actually shows the Committee of Five presenting their draft of the Declaration to the Second Continental Congress on June 28, , and not the signing of the document, which took place later. Trumbull painted the figures from life whenever possible, but some had died and images could not be located; hence, the painting does not include all the signers of the Declaration.
UBC Theses and Dissertations
One figure had participated in the drafting but did not sign the final document; another refused to sign. In fact, the membership of the Second Continental Congress changed as time passed, and the figures in the painting were never in the same room at the same time. It is, however, an accurate depiction of the room in Independence Hall , the centerpiece of the Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Trumbull's painting has been depicted multiple times on U. A few years later, the steel engraving used in printing the bank notes was used to produce a cent stamp, issued as part of the Pictorial Issue.
An engraving of the signing scene has been featured on the reverse side of the United States two-dollar bill since The apparent contradiction between the claim that "all men are created equal" and the existence of American slavery attracted comment when the Declaration was first published. As mentioned above, Jefferson had included a paragraph in his initial draft that strongly indicted Great Britain's role in the slave trade, but this was deleted from the final version.
In the 19th century, the Declaration took on a special significance for the abolitionist movement. Historian Bertram Wyatt-Brown wrote that "abolitionists tended to interpret the Declaration of Independence as a theological as well as a political document". Garrison called for the destruction of the government under the Constitution, and the creation of a new state dedicated to the principles of the Declaration.
The controversial question of whether to add additional slave states to the United States coincided with the growing stature of the Declaration. The first major public debate about slavery and the Declaration took place during the Missouri controversy of to With the antislavery movement gaining momentum, defenders of slavery such as John Randolph and John C. Calhoun found it necessary to argue that the Declaration's assertion that "all men are created equal" was false, or at least that it did not apply to black people.
Chase and Benjamin Wade , defended the Declaration and what they saw as its antislavery principles. The Declaration's relationship to slavery was taken up in by Abraham Lincoln , a little-known former Congressman who idolized the Founding Fathers. In his October Peoria speech , Lincoln said:. Nearly eighty years ago we began by declaring that all men are created equal; but now from that beginning we have run down to the other declaration, that for some men to enslave others is a "sacred right of self-government". Let us re-adopt the Declaration of Independence, and with it, the practices, and policy, which harmonize with it.
The meaning of the Declaration was a recurring topic in the famed debates between Lincoln and Stephen Douglas in Douglas argued that the phrase "all men are created equal" in the Declaration referred to white men only. The purpose of the Declaration, he said, had simply been to justify the independence of the United States, and not to proclaim the equality of any "inferior or degraded race".
I think the authors of that notable instrument intended to include all men, but they did not mean to declare all men equal in all respects. They did not mean to say all men were equal in color, size, intellect, moral development, or social capacity. They defined with tolerable distinctness in what they did consider all men created equal—equal in "certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. They did not mean to assert the obvious untruth that all were then actually enjoying that equality, or yet that they were about to confer it immediately upon them.
In fact, they had no power to confer such a boon. They meant simply to declare the right, so that the enforcement of it might follow as fast as circumstances should permit. They meant to set up a standard maxim for free society which should be familiar to all, constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even, though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people, of all colors, everywhere.
According to Pauline Maier, Douglas's interpretation was more historically accurate, but Lincoln's view ultimately prevailed. Like Daniel Webster , James Wilson , and Joseph Story before him, Lincoln argued that the Declaration of Independence was a founding document of the United States, and that this had important implications for interpreting the Constitution, which had been ratified more than a decade after the Declaration.
Lincoln's view of the Declaration became influential, seeing it as a moral guide to interpreting the Constitution. Jaffa praised this development. Critics of Lincoln, notably Willmoore Kendall and Mel Bradford , argued that Lincoln dangerously expanded the scope of the national government and violated states' rights by reading the Declaration into the Constitution.
In their " Declaration of Sentiments ", patterned on the Declaration of Independence, the convention members demanded social and political equality for women. Their motto was that "All men and women are created equal" and the convention demanded suffrage for women. The Declaration was chosen to be the first digitized text The adoption of the Declaration of Independence was dramatized in the Tony Award—winning musical and the film version , as well as in the television miniseries John Adams. It was first performed on the Ed Sullivan Show on December 7, , and it was taken as a song of protest against the Vietnam War.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. United States Declaration of Independence facsimile of the engrossed copy. This Day the Congress has passed the most important Resolution, that ever was taken in America. Physical history of the United States Declaration of Independence. The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America,. Stephen Hopkins , William Ellery Connecticut: Edward Rutledge , Thomas Heyward Jr. Signing of the United States Declaration of Independence. Declaration of Independence Trumbull. Slavery in the colonial United States.
I hold that he is as much entitled to these as the white man. You ought to do it. Reason second, I am obnoxious, suspected, and unpopular. You are very much otherwise. Reason third, you can write ten times better than I can. When you have drawn it up, we will have a meeting.
The Mystery of the Lost Original , p. National Archives and Records Administration. Retrieved July 4, A History , The U. Context and Criticism , Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, , p. The Declaration of Independence: The text of the king's speech is online , published by the American Memory project. The modern scholarly consensus is that the best-known and earliest of the local declarations is most likely inauthentic, the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence , allegedly adopted in May a full year before other local declarations ; Maier, American Scripture , For the full text of the May 10 resolve, see the Journals of the Continental Congress.
The text of Adams's letter is online. For the full text of the May 15 preamble see the Journals of the Continental Congress. Retrieved July 1, The quotation is from Jefferson's notes; Boyd, Papers of Jefferson , 1: Ferling , Setting the World Ablaze: Letters of Abigail and John Adams. Boyd, "The Declaration of Independence: The Mystery of the Lost Original". Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography , number 4 October , p. Retrieved October 12, The Online Library of Liberty. Retrieved March 8, Armitage discounts the influence of the Scottish and Dutch acts, and writes that neither was called "declarations of independence" until fairly recently Global History , pp.
For the argument in favor of the influence of the Dutch act, see Stephen E. Lucas, "The 'Plakkaat van Verlatinge': Retrieved June 13, Jefferson identified Bacon , Locke , and Newton as "the three greatest men that have ever lived, without any exception". Their works in the physical and moral sciences were instrumental in Jefferson's education and world view. In a similar vein, historian Robert Middlekauff argues that the political ideas of the independence movement took their origins mainly from the "eighteenth-century commonwealthmen , the radical Whig ideology", which in turn drew on the political thought of John Milton , James Harrington , and John Locke.
See also Kenneth S. Lynn, "Falsifying Jefferson", Commentary 66 Oct. Ralph Luker , in "Garry Wills and the New Debate Over the Declaration of Independence" The Virginia Quarterly Review , Spring , —61 agreed that Wills overstated Hutcheson's influence to provide a communitarian reading of the Declaration, but he also argued that Wills's critics similarly read their own views into the document.
Albert Henry Smyth New York: Ellis, US Jefferson's Declaration of Independence , p. Now More Than Ever , p. State Department , The Declaration of Independence, , pp. Archived from the original PDF on May 10, Retrieved October 6, Retrieved March 9, A Multitude of Amendments, Alterations and Additions: Boyd Papers of Jefferson , 1: Boyd argued that, if a document was signed on July 4 which he thought unlikely , it would have been the Fair Copy, and probably would have been signed only by Hancock and Thomson. All of these copies were then destroyed, theorizes Ritz, to preserve secrecy.
Retrieved April 22, The Coming of the French Revolution. American Constitutionalism Heard Round the World, — French Lightning, American Light pp. Sourcebook on Public International Law First ed. United Nations action in the question of Southern Rhodesia First ed.
Leiden and New York: They hold the power to terrify and frustrate me, reduce me to tears, make me happy, confuse me, influence my thinking, and make me doubt my convictions and commitments. They demand my help, offer me assistance, and tolerate me in their homes and kitchens. In most cases, my research interlocutors have extended gestures of kindness and friendship as long as I am willing to learn their rules of 6 engagement. My interlocutors are not securely placed within their families or communities. The protective guarantees of the state, community, or family rarely hold for them.
Their demands and expectations are out-of-this-world in terms of the sheer magnitude of the material and philological risks they are compelled to undertake. Instead, their hyper-vulnerabilities exclusions on steroids offer a unique view of sociality, one that remains unfazed by the readily available and analytically insufficient categories of family, community, or sovereignty. Their karwi-batain atrocious truths allow me to disentangle relations of power, decode social hierarchies, and notice discord and fragmentation in places which otherwise appear beautifully put-together.
While their modes of inhabiting the world are practical, humble, materially grounded- they are exceptionally sophisticated in their theoretical offerings and raise urgent concerns which far exceed the tools I have as a researcher. Therefore, this study is about clearing obstacles material, philological, or conceptual to allow a grammar of life to emerge that can accommodate the willfulness of my interlocutors. Historically, queer the non-normative has encompassed sexual practices and orientations that exceed permissible knowledge and sociality.
Does the falling away from normality compel individuals to offer up their bodies and their stories to the State? It is organized mainly around six interconnected scenes. A scene is an insistence on finding relation and another way of connecting text: State University of New York Press, , Duke University Press, , University of California Press, , x-xi. Roma Chatterji New York: Fordham University Press, , It is an idea. It is an incomplete illustration. Swain believes a scene is a unit of conflict: Its structure is 1 goal 2 conflict 3 disaster.
Vintage Books, , Secondly, when read in parallel, they offer a conceptual web that acknowledges plural and multiple readings of repair. At various points in the text, these two purposes may be seen as competing or complementing each other or both. This is a tension that runs throughout the text.
The scenes are not evenly written, and each performs certain work. They do not need to be read in any particular order and are written as complete manuscripts. Their numbering does not suggest sequence but simply implies quantity. This is a modest effort on my part to challenge the temporality and sequence of evidence building and theory generation.
This is an important caveat given chronicity does not have a singular timescape, nor is it composed of a continuously flowing current of successive and irreversible moments. These are taken by myself, as well as by my research interlocutors and research assistants. They provide a narrative arc of their own. Some of the images are titled for context and others are purposefully left untitled, so that their generative offerings are not undermined. The photographs contribute to the sensory dimensions of entanglement: He writes about Henri, a retired tax inspector and aspiring writer in Paris who becomes homeless.
Chris Turner Seagull Books, , vii. This implicit focus on learning is also helpful for considering the researcher who stumbles, falls, and makes mistakes during research. This is one reason why this dissertation was written in the Department of Educational Studies. I also chose the department to minimize disciplinary demands and expectations. Of course, over time, I have developed my own intellectual biases and inclinations, but these are ones that I can substantiate and call my own.
In other words, the project draws upon multiple bodies, frames, and aesthetics of knowledge, to extend understandings of social repair and chronicity in ways that are defiant and irreverent, for they do not pay homage to any singular discipline or tradition. There are many bodies in the room which inform this work despite not directly making their way into its pages. The project would not have taken its current direction without their insistence that we do not always need to create spaces of listening; but they often already exist amongst us, and sometimes all that is required is to learn their rules of engagement.
My research assistants have made important contributions to this project and the multiple journeys it necessitated. Experiments in Multimodal Ethnography 1, no. It is a labile, plastic sort of a look, more inclined to move than to focus. Sensuous Theory Minnesota, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, , 8.
For now, I have only opted for their modest inclusion in these pages. I have attempted to invoke them at critical moments in the text as quiet notes on their presence and contributions. I am mindful of the need to think more carefully about how to better honor our allies within our writings. As a parting token of appreciation, I feel compelled to take their names: At the very least, I am indebted to them for placing their trust in me and extending an invitation into their communities. I am hopeful that the following pages will demonstrate that I did not take this privilege lightly.
Gulab Jan photograph by Saeed Khan 12 Image 3. A shrine photograph by the author 13 Image 4. Mubashir and Zakir photograph by the author 14 Image 5. A wedding ceremony photograph by Ali Akbar Shah 15 Image 6. Untitled photograph by the author 16 Image 7. Untitled photograph by the author 18 Image 9. These remains stand near the Line of Control which divides Kashmir between Pakistan and India photograph by the author 19 Image Untitled photograph by Rihanna Tahir 20 Image Untitled photograph by the author 21 Image Naqsh Jan photograph by Fawad Khan 22 Image Untitled photograph by Rihanna Tahir 23 Image Untitled photograph by the author 24 Image I turn towards the heart and ask what does an analysis from the heart offer?
What if we see the world this way? I draw upon Islamic and feminist epistemologies to learn more about the heart. I focus on heartbeats to understand data as gift and heartwork as being integral to honoring entanglements with research interlocutors. Imam Ghazali , a renown Muslim theologian, jurist, and philosopher was returning home after spending several years seeking knowledge in Nishapur a city in contemporary Iran which at the time was an important hub for Islamic scholarship.
He has with him in a neat bundle all his notes which he painstakingly maintained while attending various study circles and lectures. He joins a caravan to travel home. At some point in the journey, the convoy is attacked by a band of thieves who one by one strip each traveler of their valuables. If you take them, all my knowledge will be lost!
If I burn them, what will be left behind? Is your knowledge on pieces of paper, when it should be in your heart? The heart is also the first place of encounter with knowledge, the primary site where knowledge makes it mark. The heart is emotive, reactive, insightful: It can sink, rise to your throat, or it can ground. It symbolizes strength and conviction but is also extremely vulnerable; a source of inspiration and desire as well as a site of profound injury and great sensitivity.
The heart is full of contradictions: I ask what does an analysis from the heart offer? Routledge, , First, I trace the heart within Islamic and feminist traditions to see how the heart is understood in complementary ways, particularly as a site, source, receiver, repository, and adjudicator of knowledge.
Finally, I focus on another important quality of the heart: I draw attention to heartaches and heartbreaks as productive conditions, not lamentable states which must be wished away but necessary ontological positions needed to understand life in chronicity. I conclude that an investment of the heart warrants the redrawing of the very parameters of research, not only regarding how we approach data but also what constitutes our site of engagement, and how we choose to express our devotion and to whom.
He dreams an audience of students and selects one to focus on but fails to generate a fully-formed individual. He then tries a new method: Only then he is successful. Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 1, no. I simply turn to Islam and feminism as modes of engagement with the world. I want to understand the heart in relation to knowledge in both traditions to then return to my earlier assertion that very powerful research can be produced when one chooses to honor the heart. Why am I turning to Islam to look for language on the heart? For one, my research interlocutors are Muslim and adhere to multiple forms of spiritual devotions which I recognize as Islam.
Secondly, I am also Muslim and so far, I have not been encouraged by my academic training to welcome Islam as a body of knowledge into my writings. This then becomes a doubly-decolonial move. This is a perfect political moment to signify the centrality of the heart in both modes of engagement to suggest multiple proliferations and formations within Islam s and feminism s and their overlaps. I appreciate the challenges in attempting this given the tensions between feminism and Islam23 but I am also mindful of the common grounds that exist. Anitta Kynselehto Tampaere, Finland: However, many classical texts on Islam have been written in this language.
Dar al-Fikr, , Dar al-Qalam, , Why cannot Muslims as well as those who do not identify spiritually with Islam, learn from Islam, the same way those within and outside the feminist movement are free to draw from it? Islamic scholarship too has its internal struggles with categories and dichotomies. Nasr argues against the need to separate cognition from emotion and understands perception, comprehension, and understanding as essential dimensions of the heart.
Elisabeth Arweck and Martin D. Stringer Birmingham, United Kingdom: The University of Birmingham Press, , Jane Ripken Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, , 5. Shambhala Publications, , Mektebetu Eser, , Critical Middle Eastern Studies 11, no. University of California Press, and Omid Safi, ed. Progressive Muslims Oxford, United Kingdom: State University of New York Press, For Imam Ghazali, a person is as human as their heart.
Walter James Skellie Kentucky: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 15, no. This can be both burdensome and exhausting. Pollock explains that heart failure is not a result of any intrinsic injury of the heart but rather from the excessive burden placed by the body everything around it. What does a model of an object that is intrinsically burdened and thus doomed do…… for feminist theory? Journal of Women in Culture and Society 9, no. Thompson, Teaching with Tenderness Champaign, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, It further alludes that the heart must also be adequately cultivated and nurtured for it to be able to honor knowledge.
The restaurant has made headlines in local newspapers and on television and people come from near and far to see the robot in action.
Navigation menu
We have put a scarf around her neck to make clear that it is a female robot. Finding a Way to the Heart Winnipeg, Manitoba: University of Manitoba Press, It cannot take orders or interact with customers: Moreover, the robot does not even have a name. In other words, the robot cannot attune to heartbeats. Contrast the pizzeria robot -a robot without a heart- with Data from Star Trek who is all heart. According to his Wikipedia page: Data from Star Trek image obtained from Wikipedia 35 Data is an artificial intelligence and synthetic life form Data is a self-aware, sapient, sentient, and anatomically fully functional android who serves as the second officer and chief operations officer aboard the Federation starships USS Enterprise-D and USS Enterprise-E.
His positronic brain allows him impressive computational capabilities. Data experienced ongoing difficulties during the early years of his life with understanding various aspects of human behavior and was unable to feel emotion or understand certain human idiosyncrasies, inspiring him to strive for his own humanity. This goal eventually led to the addition of an "emotion chip"…Although Data's endeavor to increase his humanity and desire for human emotional experience is a significant plot point and source of humor throughout the series, he consistently shows a nuanced sense of wisdom, sensitivity, and curiosity, garnering immense respect from his peers and colleagues.
Data as Gift My work seeks to understand chronicity and social repair as gleaned from the lived and felt experiences of my research interlocutors in Northern Pakistan and Kashmir. One day, one of my interlocutors could not contain himself. He burst out angrily: You keep on saying that you are giving me this money in exchange for the time I have spent with you. I am making room for you in my life, I am inviting you into my home, I am giving you my time, take it as a gift, not as some object of transaction [and exchange]. I respond to this question in two ways, first by trying to understand a gift as an invitation towards reciprocity and second by focusing on its affective dimensions.
He offers a definition of a gift: It is dangerous to equate data with such an understanding of a gift, without worrying about its exploitation and about epistemic violence. Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3, no. In Islamic epistemology, a gift requires reciprocity but there are no expectations of equivalence. For example, according to Prophet Mohammed one is obliged to return a gift or a favor in ways that exceed it or match it or in ways in which it does not. If one does not have the material resources to repay a gift, then one is encouraged to pray for the gift-giver and extend well-wishes make added room in the heart.
Ibn Taymiyah a Muslim theologian alive between stated that Sadaqah charity is that which is given for the sake of Allah as an act of worship, without intending to give it to a specific person and without seeking anything in return. Rather Sadaqah is given for charitable causes, such as to the needy. A gift is given with the intention of honoring a specific person, either because the recipient is your friend whom you love, or because you want something in return.
People would often give me their choicest cucumber plucked from their gardens as a gift to take home photograph by the author Vaughan understands reciprocity in gift-giving outside of a contractual exchange-based interaction. Clark notes that gifting is often considered in a finite economic system in which the objects in circulation are limited and stoic.
Plain View Press, And therefore, gifts are materially and affectively generative producing unknowable and immeasurable outcomes, a radical opening up of unknowable events, a debt that a body owes to another. If later I give you a gift, it is a new offering, with its own asymmetry.
University of California Press, , —5. The equality that our relation of giving creates between us is produced by the substantive and temporal difference which I here call asymmetry. It surely has affective properties. It took me another six months to get to it.
When I finally did develop the courage to pull out my notebooks, audio recorders, cameras, and transcripts, I decided to spend the next several months meticulously organizing the material. I used colored coded binders, labels, tabs - whatever would help me achieve some order. Indiana University Press, , For me, this was important preparation to work with the data, a journey in its own self. Again, I am not talking about coding and analysis but developing the vocabulary, courage, and the affective tools to thoughtfully engage with the material.
What shall I write to them? University of California Press, , Much like working with your hands, such as knitting and weaving, thinking too is a material and affective, a form of praxis where ideas are weaved into the fabric of human existence. Returning to my dilemma: How to demonstrate progress to the university? You need to stop stealing from the pain of others.
A Midsummer Night's Dream - Wikipedia
How can anyone stop feeling the pain of others? Every time you step out into the world, imagine a bubble around you, or imagine yourself wrapped in bubble wrap, separate yourself. Imagine you are surrounded by a protective shield. But that is the opposite of a feminist engagement and the etiquettes of being a Muslim, how can I write about my interlocutors without understanding the corporeal, spiritual, and affective dimensions of the harms and exclusions they face?
But by taking on their pain, you are taking away something from them, it hampers their ability to fully experience that pain. If you take on the pain of others, you take away from their experience, it taints your ability to see them and listen. What kind of seeing and listening is this? You should understand that by allowing people to speak and voice their experiences to you, you are providing incredible therapeutic possibilities for them. Then I am sure I must have changed many lives. My advice to you, is to develop strategies to minimize your emotional investment.
You need to clinically remove yourself, so you can see impartially. But listening is an embodied experience. It is meant to be exhausting and depleting. That is why it prompts you to work. Keep doing the work that will take you back to see where this will lead you. No one likes to speak like this. Just keep reading and then tell them everything.
Wesleyan University Press, , Teju Cole's provocation screen shot taken from Teju Cole's public Facebook page 91 There is growing literature on the experiences of researchers who work in uncomfortable settings such as war and disasters. Some have even argued that the focus on self-care is part and parcel of the neoliberal turn96 which seeks to localize the material and affective inequities and injustices of our times to our bodies and minds.
Why is there an expectation that the study of chronicity should be safe? Why is the researcher expected to walk out of the experience, only slightly unhinged, to be put back together by therapeutic interventions? Instead of just focusing on burnout, healing, trauma, it is also important to focus on heartache as a productive condition. This makes even more sense if we continue with the premise that data is a gift, an offering of corporeal generosity, that which moves us. The researcher in this configuration is someone who listens and receives deeply, someone who is attentive to heartbeats.
In my opinion, the focus of the researcher is then not to merely create spaces of listening but bring into purview those spaces that already exist and learn their rules of engagement. Listening and receiving deeply are one such rules of engagement. I consider listening deeply an embodied investment counter to my counsellor , as heartwork which requires the removal of all protective shields, bubbles, or bubble wraps.
It is a state of considered vulnerability, a falling apart, the incommensurability of politics, a 94 See, e. This allows for truer conceptual and written forms that better accommodate the willfulness and genres of life research interlocutors suggest, regardless of how this enhances or disrupts existing discourse. In my opinion, such a form of solidarity allows for more opportunity to minimize the epistemic harms perpetuated by research and to intercept lived and felt experience in ways that are generative, indefinite, and plural.
Researching within communities is inherently a disruptive process, the dangers are immense, and the discomfort is expected to be crippling and enabling- why should it be otherwise? Sometimes this will prevent us from working within communities that we are not a part of or have very little stake in, other times it will encourage us to make our interventions even bolder. There is no easy answer, a clear this or that. The important thing is to allow the data to work on the heart: Society and Space, , http: University of Minnesota Press, What are the methods? Instead of a slavish devotion to any one method, Das advocates for an ethical stance of receptivity how we sense, perceive, and acknowledge the Other which cannot be reduced to any singular methodological framework.
The lack of a guidebook, manual, or pathway does not make this easy. These are embodied forms of unease and awkwardness, such as when one attempts to use un-waxed floss: Denzin and Yvonna S. What forms of vulnerable writing can emerge from such modes of being? Page believes vulnerable writing is not only that which reflects how the researcher is impacted during research but also reveals the fragility of knowledge assembly-as a form of receptivity and wounding. This unsettled uncertainty of the research process, rather than foreclosing on further understandings, provides space for new forms of unknowing and continued attempts at understanding the stories of others.
Duke University Press, Also see, Nishta J. This is work which extends far beyond the immediacy of the felt encounter. Who can say what will come out? Once as I was leaving his village, he reminded me: However, now I wonder whether he also meant to allow the experiences I had with him, sit with me in far richer ways. What if baba was asking me to hold onto his words as much and as far as I can? This involves developing new language and vocabulary to accommodate multiple genres of life, but also the realization of my own limits. I am not referring to ethics in an institutional regulatory way, but as an engagement with the ethical complexities of heartwork.
Similarly, should accountability to the reader be also considered an important component of the ethical framework of heartwork? It is in your hands. When you plan social change, you have to imagine the world that you could promise, the world that could be seductive, the world you could induce people to want to leap into.
This led to a rather lengthy period of adjustment, where my ethnographic intrusions took a variety of shapes and forms to facilitate the kinds of telling my research interlocutors insisted upon. Stories never leave, they are meant to unsettle. Their very stickiness is homework and heartwork. The process of knowledge generation is as important as the knowledge to be created. While the urgency and stakes of understanding violence and marginality are high, the accountability is low.
I am not convinced whether faulty knowledges emanating from spaces of disruption which fragment, undermine, instrumentalize, parse, and diffuse subjects of violence are morally, ethically, or instrumentally any better than the very violence they seek to render visible. University of Chicago Press, , Heartwork is allowing yourself to become decentered by heartbeats. It includes never fully coming to terms with the betrayals implicit in working with people but yet learning to live with that ontological insecurity.
During the earlier days of my PhD, when I was struggling to put together a reading list for my comprehensive examinations, my supervisor suggested: This simultaneously opens up many ways to understand feminism and being Muslim, as generative sites of experimentation, a playground of sorts, and not as fragile assemblages of knowledge which need to be protected. Should more also be demanded from the reader?
Like the author, the reader may or may not pose significant obstacles to the flourishing of the subject of research. The reader may accept the gifts of heartwork or they might reject it. Upon receiving the gifts of heartwork, they may or may not say: By posing this question, the reader bounces the responsibility of receiving deeply back to the author, who is now cornered to clearly s-p-e-l-l o-u-t the contributions of heartwork, so they can be consumed in a rote like fashion without frustration, injury, and wounding.
Heartwork is inconvenient, gritty, and uncomfortable, it is work on top of work. Fear is another impediment; the unsafety of tracing constellations and looking elsewhere, and the unpredictability and danger this brings. Heartwork affords possibilities of doing research in ways that do not seek to conform to the expectations of the reader or any adjudicator of knowledge. The bird is in your hands we have to figure out how to be in this world, what to do with this mess of heartaches - that is on us.
And not worrying too much about where all this will lead us. This is what I mean, when I say: How can one do that anyways, when the reader holds continual power over the author? The author can only make an offering in the form of text, the reader has the power of choice: Or perhaps a better way to imagine this relationship is that of friction, the reader and author exist in encounter with one other, and the text is their battleground or chai stall or living room. Their relationship can be antagonistic, troubled, or perhaps that of friendship, caring, and accommodation.
However, my concerns are three-fold: And, 3 Why are both forms of accountability necessary, particularly in relation to heartwork and the minimization of epistemic harms? Heartwork is ultimately about accountability; the author to the text and to interlocutors, the reader to the text and to interlocutors, and author and reader to each other. My intention behind invoking the reader is to draw attention to each of these accountabilities and develop further language on them.
I should also point out that both the author and reader have their offerings, biases, and limitations, and neither is consistently righteous despite having moral evidence. Heartwork provides the resources to also love your reader. This is my modest attempt at being accountable to the reader and loving them. They are fairly self-contained but receptive to interlinkages. Earlier, I wrote that the numbering of the scenes does not suggest chronology but simply implies quantity, yet I have numbered them sequentially in English but out of sequence in Urdu.
These inconsistencies in form are also modest attempts to write against the progression of evidence building and theory generation, and to elaborate interconnection and interdependence in ways that are outside of the expectations of linearity and coherence. Of course, this is an impossible task, given that this is a text bound together as a book, or an electronic file, where one chapter follows the next.
Thus, despite my imperfect refusals of linearity and consistency, to function within these constraints, some decisions were made in their placement.
How to acknowledge my hand in these arrangements which are both purposeful and purposeless? Well, I do not have a whole lot of profound things to say regarding how I have organized these scenes, on their sequence. But perhaps in this lack of profundity, lies some profundity? For example, I placed scene six at the "end" because that was the first chapter I wrote. I thought instead of showing a progression of ideas and growing sophistication of writing style which comes with practice, it might be revealing to do the opposite, share what you wrote first - last.
I chose to place scene one in the first slot because it is on landscape and the rest of the scenes are on my interlocutors, even though landscape is also an important interlocutor. But the opening scene only focusses on one of my field sites Neelum, and not Siran , rendering this logic unsatisfactory. As for the scenes in between, I cannot adequately explain why I placed them the way I did, the impetus came from the gut and the heart.
But when I did, they felt right, so they stayed. In quick succession, he flung both his loafers at the President, shouting: This is from the widows, the orphans, and those who were killed in Iraq. He did not say anything; the shoe did all the talking. While President Bush ducked and dodged his assailant, I welcomed mine straight in the face. Other times I think a lot about the shoe. What compels people to fling things? In many ways, this text too is the work of complaint.
It is complaint that stems from my biography, history, location, experience. Some will see me in these pages, others will not. For the latter, I anticipate frustration. What is your location? How can the reader ever fully trust a text, if they do not know who wrote it?
I have written myself as a character, next to landscape, next to Amal, next to Akbar, next to Chandni, next to Niaz, next to Sattar. I have placed myself in each of their stories in my narcissism, awkwardness, heartbreak, frustration, neuroticism. For those who cannot see me, I promise I am here. Sometimes like a wallflower. Sometimes like the wind. Sometimes like an angry wasp. Neelum as sculpted and carved by the masculine gaze such as those of the nation-state and humanitarians - indicates closure.
These mobilities are stitched in the material inconveniences and intimacies of daily life in the valley. They are sustained by affective entanglements between human and more-than-human bodies constituting mutual processes of emplacement that are paradoxically unbounded and generative.
In these movements and flows are analytical and philological opportunities to articulate fully formed visions of Kashmir. But this necessitates the location of theory and methodology as mutually constitutive within our literary genres not outside of them to elaborate narrative writing as praxis. Zutshi argues that forced attempts at a territorial solution to Kashmir may in fact be counterproductive.
The Magazine, July , www. Columbia University Press, Peter Berger and Frank Heidemann London: By foregrounding the power of bodies to counter maps and the intimacies which frustrate geopolitics, I seek to disentangle what it may mean to be Kashmiri from the epistemic violence of the nation-state. Affective ecologies draw attention to how human and more-than-human relations are implicated in the reproduction of ecological, social, economic, cultural, and political formations.
Daily life in Neelum is heavily reliant on its landscapes which are materially and existentially necessary for its residents and are sites where human and more-than-human relationships or ecology constitute processes of localization which are paradoxically unbounded and generative.
Neelum is suitable for this work because of the gendered nature of life and mobility as in the Mahasweta Devi, Imaginary Maps, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak New York: Shands, Embracing Space Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Publishing Group, and Kerstin W. Based on ethnographic research in the Gurez Valley, Indian administered Kashmir, Bauer and Bhan urge us to note the very bodies and relations in which well-being gets invested. Cambridge University Press, Two years after the ceasefire, an earthquake devastated the region followed by massive flash flooding , opening the valley to intense humanitarian action.
If we understand Kashmir as fluid and heterogeneously lived, what understandings can emerge that are possible only by intimate and comparative area knowledge which considers Kashmir as a site of data collection and theory generation? These exist side by side newly constructed homes, shops, and guesthouses photograph by Nusrat Jamal Illaqa When I first got to Neelum, I noticed that the performative gestures of politeness which one gets used to in urban Pakistan were somewhat absent.
Research interlocutors would snap at me when offended, and even ask me to come back another day if they got annoyed by my presence. One day, slightly beaten and broken, I mustered the courage to ask Shahzad - my research assistant and resident of Neelum- why are people here so mean?
He responds with much amusement: This is because you are in our illaqa territory. When we are in Islamabad [capital city], we may appear friendlier. We might smile at you, appear agreeable. But when we come back to Neelum, we become shair lions! No one can harm us here, we are the badshah king of the land.
This is intriguing, particularly for understanding belonging and attachment in ways that are not possible by a geopolitical understanding of citizenship and identity. Abrar, one of my research interlocutors, shares a story concerning some Pakistani tourists: I was leading a hike with these amir zada rich or privileged guests from Islamabad. One of them really had to pee.
We were passing over a bridge over the Neelum river, when the guest exclaimed: Bharvay your wife is a whore! This is Kashmir, and this is our water. How can we understand these intense emotional entanglements with landscape and the confidence these connections inspire? More importantly, how can we use these insights to advance understandings of Kashmir which exceed the current offerings of geopolitics?
Hazrat Suleman was flying over this region with his trusted Jinn on duty. He looked down and noticed a sparkling, crystalline body of water. He asked the Jinn: The Jinn then inspired life in the region, shaping pahars and land. This is how Kashmir was created. Narratives such as this there are many others , are refusals against placing Kashmir in its current geopolitical emplotment.
They insist that Kashmir has its own historicity, a freedom of sorts. The skepticism towards Kashmiris is also shared by ordinary Pakistanis and not just by the military and its secret police. A Kashmiri student studying at a university in Rawalpindi explains: The slightest of slips can be construed by my classmates as an indication of disloyalty to the Pakistani state. A sign in a government office in Neelum photograph by the author Arrival Entry into Neelum resembles a heavily guarded border crossing. Foreigners are not allowed to enter, Pakistanis are only tolerated as tourists, and only after elaborate security checks.
I first arrived in Neelum in , to try to understand how residents negotiate chronicity - the confluence of multiple forms of violence- in their everyday lives. I wanted to understand social repair, how people enable the continuity life in some viable form despite being immersed in ongoing and overwhelming structures of constraint.
United States Declaration of Independence
Kashmir is romanticized, fetishized, and offers an allure of raw, untouched beauty, and clear blue waters. Growing up in Pakistan, I was enthralled by the mysticism of Kashmir: Admittedly, my foray into Neelum as a researcher is indeed a problematic extension of decades of objectification and romanticization of the Kashmiri people by the Pakistani state and its citizens. I am no exception. Luker points out that research methods are not truths in themselves, but normative choices which are historically, socially, and politically located in both time and place.
I spent time with my interlocutors in a variety of ways: Harvard University Press, Sage, , The kitchen often generated the richest of conversations photograph by the author My presence in Neelum was nothing short of a spectacle. I asked baba, my host: Sometimes, I worry about you. In most other places that I have worked in e. In Neelum, this was not the case. Firstly, the topography was at times so intense, that I was physically unable to access certain spaces, community locations, and neighborhoods.
Secondly, mobility within the pahars is gendered and particular, some routes are dedicated for women and children, others for animals, and 70 some for remaining villagers. For example, tourists are expected to only stick to the main road or popular hiking tracks. Perhaps accentuated by its remoteness and the feeling of expansiveness, different rules were in place in Neelum regarding who is acceptable in the landscape and to what proximity to a community.
Therefore, instead of relying solely on my body to explore and experience various lived spaces, and keeping in mind the limitations of my mobility, it made sense to make extensive use of photo-voice or participatory photography, allowing my research interlocutors to share only what they considered acceptable. Therefore, this chapter as the rest of the text includes photographs which open Neelum for us in ways that my words cannot. Residents went out of their way to remind me of where I am, by pointing in the direction of Islamabad and clarifying: The LoC cuts right through Neelum, creating its own history and unique political entanglements.
In , after a tense ceasefire between Pakistan and India, two bridges were inaugurated to link the valley across the LoC. Once a month, residents are permitted to cross on either side to reunite with relatives but only after elaborate paperwork and specialized travel documents. Depending on the political climate of the region, some months the crossings are even closed. The bridges and the difficulties they pose - administrative specialized documents are required and temporal crossings only open certain time a year -further highlight the absurdity of the LoC.
Those who are lucky enough to cross bring back objects, stories, and memories. Finally, in , after waiting for nearly 16 months for his documents to be The LoC is heavily monitored and guarded by the military on both sides. This comprises of a double row of fencing and electrified wiring connected to a network of motion sensors, thermal imaging devices, lighting systems, alarms, and land mines. Is it any different from Pakistani Kashmir? This is Kashmir and so is that, I have merely come to the same home. Shahzad slightly annoyed, snapped back at me: It is difficult for me to say which is better, an overt assault on our political freedoms and social sensibilities [India] or betrayal and false friendships [Pakistan]?
This adds to the thrill of visiting Neelum. Perhaps due to its geopolitical edginess or perceived remoteness, Neelum is considered as a space outside of the realm of morality and sexual governance. While most tourists are either men or tidy families organized around heteronormative expectations, for some Pakistanis, Neelum lies outside the moral codes imposed on them by their citizenry. To mitigate this, guesthouses are required to check the marriage certificates of men and women travelling together. This practice is also enforced at various military and police checkpoints dotting the valley.
Female tourists are particularly scrutinized and judged on their placement within or outside the heteronormative, state sanctioned familial unit.
Those female tourists who are seen as being outside the family, such as perceived to be with their boyfriends, unmarried partners, or even with male colleagues, are particularly vilified for being corrupted and corrupting the women of Neelum. A young male resident angrily pointed at a bus of university students: Look at the besharam larkyan young women without modesty. Look at the clothes they wear, tightly fitted shalwars trousers.
They corrupt our girls who now want to follow similar fashions and behave in unacceptable ways around our men. A large number of humanitarian and development NGOs set up shop in Neelum after the recent disasters. They too were very interested in women. NGOs have a bad reputation in Neelum. Within days their duppatas head coverings came off, and they would travel with men in big Pajeros late into the evening.
This is the outcome of specific and situated social practices and gendered norms, consistent with what we know about the gender and the environment: I use the following series of photographs to further highlight this point. Maizescapes leading to a home photograph by the author Maize, the staple crop of the region, is grown in abundance in Neelum, typically around a homestead. It is usually hand-picked, the kernels are separated from the husk and stored in large wooden boxes.
However, maize plantations provide more than just food and are equally appreciated for their dense networks and camouflaging ability. Qari Safir, the local Imam remarked: Women are expected to defecate only during daylight within the maize fields, very early in the morning, but men can go as they please outside of the time generally reserved for women. Conversely, maizescapes are also considered to be sites of danger and harm, and are feared to harbor snakes, scorpions, and stray dogs, whose presence is amplified after sunset when visibility is greatly diminished.
Women and young children are discouraged from navigating these maize plantations and, therefore, much of the landscape, after sunset. In this way, these maizescapes allow selective gendered mobilities and access to the land, safe enough to defecate in and traverse the village with during daytime, but dangerous enough to be harmful after nightfall. A community installed and maintained bridge photograph by Shafiqa Butt The Pakistani state has minimal investments in infrastructure in Neelum. In response to this lack, in many places, residents have put in place their own micro-infrastructure such as the bridge pictured above.
Bridges like the one pictured above dot the valley and offer some respite in the seemingly inhospitable terrain. Unique rock formations ideal for soaking and washing clothes photograph by Shafiqa Butt There are a few suspension bridges maintained by the Pakistani army at various strategic points in the valley, but these have more to do with providing the army with ready access to LoC as opposed to alleviating the daily inconveniences of topography.
The photographs above show useful rock formations near a stream which are amenable for washing and drying clothes. For example, the following photograph shows an oddly shaped rock formation, which serves as an identifier and even draws children to play in its vicinity. Even the streams and various smaller water bodies crisscrossing the villages changed their pathways, rendering some bridges useless, and creating the need for new ones.
Land that was previously safe to live on became dangerous, and the fertility of the soil changed, opening new opportunities in some areas, and closing hope in others. There were even shifts in the water quality of the Neelum river and the types and quantity of fish it sustained. These reconstructed pathways often took the form of a series of cemented steps crisscrossing the pahars, as shown in the photograph below.
Like most humanitarian interventions, and under the pretext of vulnerability, women, children, and the elderly were considered the official beneficiaries for these initiatives. An NGO supported cemented pathway, this one is in reasonably better shape photograph by Rihana Tahir 83 Humanitarian intentions might be noble, the yearning to build community infrastructure through wider participation even commendable- but the cemented pathways reflect humanitarian desires of order, control, and technocracy more than anything else.
This is apparent just from the way connectivity is imagined and its ideals reproduced as infrastructure. The differences in NGO pathways above and those that exist otherwise see earlier photographs are not just reflective of a lack of technical and engineering skills but hinge on other considerations, such as what kind of connectivity is desired, by whom, and for what purpose? It rains and snows much of the year in Neelum. The cemented pathways turn dangerously slippery under these weather conditions and residents find it safer to walk outside of them.
I noted narrow pathways created by regular foot traffic crisscrossing the pahars, often adjacent to these cemented stairways. Not surprisingly, livestock and carrier animals such as donkeys and mules also find it incredibly difficult to walk on the cemented pathways even outside of the rainy season. Their upkeep requires monetary expenditure and specialized tools which communities cannot sustain. While connectivity between villages and even within villages from one house to the next is strained, efficiency and time are important considerations which are considered when choosing a particular route.
Often this means choosing the shortest route as opposed to the safest or easiest route. Cemented pathways do not necessarily adhere to this consideration of timeliness. I often chose the cemented pathway since they appeared easier to navigate. One day, a passer-by asked me in awe: Why are you taking this route to get to Sehri [a village]? This will take you over an hour. Go from here, between these rocks, past the shrubs, across the waterfall—you 84 will get there fatafat immediately, at the snap of your fingers.
It took me nearly 2. The humanitarians were keen to bring in engineers, foreign materials such as cement, and specialized tools to work towards a particular kind of built environment. Malis are grazing pastures and forests at dizzying altitudes which are collectively accessed by communities. Malis are not bounded geographies with a fixed address but refer to a conglomeration of ancestral spaces which offer increased access to resources, cool temperatures, and even respite from the male gaze.
During summer, women and children along with their livestock migrate to the malis. Men are usually not allowed to access the malis, though specific accommodations are sometimes made. The animals are fattened in the malis and the forests are combed for vegetables, mushrooms, and medicinal plants.
On account of their altitude, the malis also provide respite from the summer heat. The safety advice they impart in their civilian trainings is to discourage residents specifically women and children from taking their animals on unfamiliar routes for grazing. Per their records, hundreds of livestock die every year due to landmines and dozens of women and children either die or suffer from lifelong disabilities.
The PRCS encourages residents not to venture into unchartered territories, and by doing so they are perpetuating yet another border within Neelum, which runs in parallel to the LoC. More-than-Human Bodies As my research interlocutors became more confident in our relationship, the nature of food I was served also shifted. It went from the usual biryani and chicken karhai to more region-specific dishes such as locally sourced saags spinaches and mushrooms.
The sugar in the tea changed from regular refined sugar to gur unprocessed brown sugar and the milk from Milkpack a very popular brand of pasteurized milk to unpasteurized, raw milk. I read this in two ways: And second, that local foods communicated a profound sense of pride, belonging, and rootedness which cannot be articulated through the language of geopolitics. In this section I examine more-than-human bodies, such as edible 89 plants, mushrooms, and animals and how they open up landscape. Intimacies of food Hameeda, a resident of Neelum, only uses jangli payyaz for cooking which she handpicks from the malis.
Hameeda dries them in the sun and stores them in little plastic containers for use during winter. I dislike the onions you can purchase from the bazaar which are trucked in from Pakistan. They have no flavor and they are grown using harmful fertilizers and chemicals. Jangli payyaz smells of Neelum and tastes like Neelum.
Jangli payyaz are found at dizzying heights and often in difficult to access and dangerous areas such as those prone to landslides - spaces which one would not consider accessing otherwise. Collecting jangli payyaz puts the body at tangible risk. They grow in small clusters and therefore large tracts of inaccessible landscape have to be carefully navigated for their sufficient collection.
Andaza, another resident, speaks about shirley, a local variety of mushrooms also found in the malis. They grow on specific trees and there is no guarantee that they will re-appear in the same spot they did last season. They are very delicate. I go to the malis with our animals [goats, cows], as they graze, I scan the forest for shirley. They must be collected within 3 days of appearing. Upon appearing, within days they ripen, it is at this point they have to collected or they dry out and are no 90 longer edible.
Shirley are very delicate mushrooms, and women are invested in their protection over repeated trips to the areas where they were initially spotted. Shirley draw the same bodies back to the landscape in relationships of care and anticipation. The interconnectivities and circulations of bodies in landscapes are also interlinked 91 with ideas of the social, how it is produced, maintained, preserved, and extended. For example, the malis also have their own culinary traditions.
Since animals have better grazing opportunities, they produce more milk. The shelf life of milk is increased by turning milk into lassi a watered yoghurt drink , bhagoray cheese curds , and ghee clarified butter. These are consumed in the beheks but also brought back to the villages where their circulation amongst friends, family, and neighbors creates and maintains kinship and closeness.
- Einsatz und Rückzug an Schulen: Engagement und Disengagement bei Lehrern, Schulleitern und Schülern (German Edition).
- Vertigo Comics.
- Mumble Jumble - Abysmal Lyrics.
- A Catholic Interlinear New Testament Polyglot: Volume III: The Catholic Epistles and The Apocalypse in Latin, English and Greek;
- Night Herding Song.
- Best Sites Download Ebooks. | Page 4.
- Raven Flight: Shadowfell 2.
Since the malis are predominately accessed by women and children, they also serve as amenable spaces of interconnectivity and interactivity exclusively between women. Bhagoray cheese curds prepared in the beheks, these are fried in ghee with spices photograph by the author Women particularly senior women, such as the mother-in-law or grandmother take pride in growing vegetables.
These practices not only directly emplace women within 92 landscape but also cement them to other people. My dadi [paternal grandmother] has a passion for growing vegetables. She regularly tends to them and even takes her shoes off before entering the vegetable garden [out of respect]. She strictly instructs other to do the same. We often have surplus vegetables and regularly send cucumbers, potatoes [and other produce] to neighbors and family members.
Our neighbors and relatives do the same. My host interrupted my gaze: Livestock in particular are referred to as maal wealth , reflecting not only their status as assets but the value they bring to everyday life. Children often introduced me to their goats and told me their names.
The act of naming implies love and attachment, perhaps formed as a result of large amounts of solitary time spent with animals. As legitimate bodies in Neelum, animals are very closely intertwined with the opening and maintenance of illaqa. Since ambulatory animals such as cows and goats are also prohibited from crossing over the LoC they get blown away by landmines , they, too, are geopolitically restricted. Additionally, migrations to the malis are intrinsically tied to the sustenance of livestock, who accompany their caretakers to benefit from unrestricted grazing pastures.