Table Of ContentCrowds
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Crowds
Ethnographic Encounters
Edited by
Megan Stefen
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First published 2020 by Bloomsbury Academic
Published 2020 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
Copyright © Megan Steffen and Contributors 2020
Megan Steffen has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act, 1988, to be identified as Editor of this work.
The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has
been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No
Derivatives 4.0 license.
Notice:
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and
are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
Series design: Raven Design. Cover image: Visitors crowd at Chinese Sea of
Death to escape high temperatures, Suining, Sichuan Province of China.
(© VCG/VCG/Getty Images)
Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd.
ISBN 13: 978-1-350-00234-0 (hbk)
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Contents
Figures vi
Contributors vii
Foreword John Borneman, Series Editor x
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction Megan Stefen 1
1 Te Syrian Revolution: Crowds, the Political Field, the Political
Subject John Borneman 23
2 Te Disappearance of the Crowd and the Rise of Dissent in
Tailand Tyrell Haberkorn 39
3 Spectacles of Piety: Prayer and the Politics of Mass Arousal in
Democratic Nigeria Ebenezer Obadare 51
4 Crowds and Transformations: On the Pious Crowds of the
Hajj Abdellah Hammoudi 63
5 “Too Many People”: Crowds and Cliques in Contemporary
China Megan Stefen 79
6 Regarding Others: Metro Crowds, Metro Publics, Metro
Mobs Rashmi Sadana 91
7 Emotional Entrainment in Crowds and Other Social
Formations Douglas Hollan 105
8 Enduring Crowds: Te Ritual Molding of the Anthropos in the
Prolonging of Political Protest Bjørn Tomassen 119
9 Te Ethics of the Digital: Crowds and Popular Justice in
Bangladesh Nusrat Sabina Chowdhury 133
10 Death on the Bund: Crowd Control and the Chinese Dream in
Shanghai Scott Moskowitz 151
Guide to Further Reading Megan Stefen 166
Notes 171
Selected Bibliography 180
Index 189
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Figures
5.1 Performers emerge from the top of moveable type blocks afer a long
routine during the 2008 Beijing Olympic Opening Ceremony 80
9.1 Billboards at Shahbag. March 2013. Photo: Nusrat Sabina Chowdhury 134
9.2 Portrait of a collaborator at Shahbag. Photo: Nusrat Sabina Chowdhury 140
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Contributors
JOHN BORNEMAN is Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University.
He received his PhD from Harvard and has done ethnographic fieldwork in
Germany, Central Europe, Lebanon, and Syria. He was appointed to the Executive
Board (Beirat) of the Internationales Forschungzentrum Kulturwissenschaften
in Vienna and currently sits on the Beirat of the Max Planck Institut-Halle
and the Forum Psychoanalytischer Wissenschaften of the Berliner Institut für
Psychotherapie und Psychoanalyse. He has written on issues of intimacy, kinship,
sexuality, nationality, justice, and political form. His most recent publications
include Cruel Attachments: The Ritual Rehab of Child Molesters in Germany
(2015), Political Crime and the Memory of Loss (2011), (as coeditor) Being There:
The Fieldwork Encounter and the Making of Truth (2009), and Syrian Episodes:
Sons, Fathers, and an Anthropologist in Aleppo (2007).
NUSRAT SABINA CHOWDHURY is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at
Amherst College. She teaches and writes on popular sovereignty and political
communication with particular focus on Bangladesh. Her book, Paradoxes of
the Popular: Crowd Politics in Bangladesh (Stanford University Press, 2019),
makes an original case for the crowd as a defining feature and a foundational
force of democratic practices in and beyond South Asia.
TYRELL HABERKORN is Associate Professor of Asian Languages and Cultures
at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She writes about state violence,
human rights, and dissident cultural politics in Thailand. She is the author
of Revolution Interrupted: Farmers, Students, Law, and Violence in Northern
Thailand (University of Wisconsin Press, 2011) and Voices of a Free Media: The
First Ten Years of Prachatai (Bangkok: FCEM and Heinrich Böll Foundation,
2014), and one of the editors of a Reflections of the Past: Selected Poems from
Sattrisan Magazine, 1970–1976 (Silkworm Books, 2013), a collection of Thai
poetry. She is currently completing a book about the history of impunity for
state violence since the end of the absolute monarchy in Thailand. In addition
to her academic work, she is a frequent contributor of translations of writing by
political prisoners, cultural commentary, and poetry to the online newspaper
Prachatai.
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viii Contributors
ABDELLAH HAMMOUDI teaches anthropology at Princeton University.
Educated in Morocco and France, he has also taught in both countries and
run seminars at the Autonoma University in Spain. Early in his career, he
conducted fieldwork on the development of tourism in eastern France as well
on development projects in North Africa, and since then he has done research
in Morocco, Libya, and Saudi Arabia. He has published extensively in English,
French, and Arabic on forms of religious authority, ritual and religion, colonial
anthropology, and culture and authoritarianism in Arab societies. He has also
written on phenomenology, theories of practice, and ethnography. His books
include A Season in Mecca (Hill and Wang) and Being There edited with John
Borneman (University of California Press). His two most recent books in
Arabic are Identity and Modernity (2015) and Distance and Analysis: Toward an
Anthropology in the Arabic Language (2019).
DOUGLAS HOLLAN is Professor of Anthropology and Luckman Distinguished
Teacher at UCLA and an instructor at the New Center for Psychoanalysis at
UCLA. He is a cultural and psychological anthropologist whose primary focus
is on how social experience affects health, emotions, empathy, embodiment,
and different states of consciousness and nonconsciousness, including sleeping
and dreaming. His recent publications include a coedited book entitled, The
Anthropology of Empathy: Experiencing the Lives of Others in Pacific Societies
(2011), and a coedited special issue of the journal Ethos (2008) entitled “Whatever
Happened to Empathy?”
SCOTT MOSKOWITZ is a PhD candidate in sociology at Princeton. He studies
consumption, identity formation, and China’s rising middle class. He is currently
working on a project about soft power, regional identity, and the globalization of
sport by examining the emergence and obsession of “superfan” organizations in
Chinese Professional Soccer.
EBENEZER OBADARE is Professor of Sociology at the University of Kansas,
USA, and Research Fellow, Institute for Theology and Religion, University of
South Africa. He is coeditor of Journal of Modern African Studies. His latest book
is Pentecostal Republic: Religion and the Struggle for State Power in Nigeria (Zed,
2018).
RASHMI SADANA is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and
Anthropology at George Mason University. She received her PhD in anthropology
from U.C. Berkeley in 2003 and is the author of English Heart, Hindi Heartland:
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Contributors ix
The Political Life of Literature in India (University of California Press, 2012). She
coedited (with Vasudha Dalmia) The Cambridge Companion to Modern Indian
Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2012). A 2019–20 American Council of
Learned Societies Fellow and Weatherhead Fellow at the School of Advanced
Research in Santa Fe, she is currently completing a book on the new forms of
sociality and politics of urban space, design, and planning as seen through and
on the Delhi Metro.
MEGAN STEFFEN received her PhD in anthropology from Princeton University
in 2016. She conducted over two years of fieldwork on unpredictability, intimacy,
mobility, decision-making, and mass transportation in Zhengzhou, the capital of
Henan Province in the People’s Republic of China. She currently works as a user
experience researcher in Mountain View, California.
BJØRN THOMASSEN is Professor at the Department of Social Sciences and
Business, Roskilde University. With BA and MA degrees in anthropology
(University of Copenhagen), a doctoral degree in political and social science
(European University Institute, Florence), and a postdoc in sociology (University
College of Cork), he works broadly across the social and political sciences.
Research areas and interests include urban studies, cultural and political
dimensions of globalization, nationalism, identity, and memory politics. He is
generally interested in anthropological approaches to political and social change,
including the study of political revolutions. Recent books are Italian Modernities,
Competing Narratives of Nationhood (coauthored, Palgrave, 2016), Liminality
and the Modern, Living through the In-Between (Ashgate, 2014), Global Rome,
Changing Faces of the Eternal City (edited, Indiana University Press, 2014), and
Breaking Boundaries: Varieties of Liminality (edited, Berghahn, 2015).
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