On Irreconciliation

Drawing connections between local contests over marriage and resources, Nafisa Shah unearths deep historical processes and power relations. In particular, she explores how the state justice system and informal mediations inform each other in state responses to karo kari, and how modern law is implicated in this seemingly ancient cultural practice.

“Anthropologists, as scholars and teachers, should welcome these analyses, as mimesis is at the core of our foundational ethnographic method, participant observation, and also is a popular strategy of hands-on, experiential learning within classrooms. As Bell concludes, ‘mimesis is profoundly engaging anthropologically because of issues it raises about the nature of cross-culture engagement’. Anthropologist see, anthropologist do.”

Queer activism and anthropology are both fundamentally concerned with the concept of difference. Yet they are so in fundamentally different ways. The Italian queer activists in this book value difference as something that must be produced, in opposition to the identity politics they find around them. Conversely, anthropologists find difference in the world around them, and seek to produce an identity between anthropological theory and the ethnographic material it elucidates. This book describes problems faced by an activist “politics of difference,” and issues concerning the identity of anthropological reflection itself—connecting two conceptions of difference whilst simultaneously holding them apart.