RESEARCH IN PROGRESS SEMINAR SERIES
AT THE ROYAL ANTHROPOLOGICAL INSTITUTE
Friday 22 April 2016, 4.30pm
Auditing Muslim Audition
Adeel Khan, University of Cambridge
This event is free, but places must be booked. To book tickets please go to: http://adeelkhan.eventbrite.co.uk
Discussing the place of propriety of speech and act in Euro-America has from George Minois to J. M. Bernstein favored the visual sense of analyzing ‘pretense’ and ‘mis-recognition’ that have semiotic and hermeneutic connections with cognition. Anthropologists of the auditory sense like Alfred Gell, Veena Das, Charles Hirschkind and Ana Gautier (also Lisa Blackman and Robert Hapgood) have instead made a convincing case for the value of hearing in human sociality. The proposed article will be written in response to both these trajectories of analysis, while attempting to work through three humorous events of Muslim mishearing; categorized as external, internal and intentional. I will further relate my analysis to the discussion of ‘appropriate cognition’ in Pakistan. The questions guiding my writing this article will be; how to write about humour humorously? And is civic humour possible?
