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June 2 Final Disssertation UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SANTA CRUZ FRAGMENTS OF A LITURGICAL WORLD: SYRIAC CHRISTIANITY AND THE DUTCH MULTICULTURALISM DEBATES A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in ANTHROPOLOGY by Sarah Bakker June 2013 The Dissertation of Sarah Bakker is approved: ______________________________ Professor Melissa L. Caldwell, Chair ______________________________ Professor Donald L. Brenneis ______________________________ Professor Mayanthi Fernando ______________________________ Professor Susan Ashbrook Harvey __________________________________ Tyrus Miller, Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies Copyright © by Sarah Bakker 2013 Table of Contents Abstract iii Acknowledgements iv Chapter One 1 Liturgical Fragments: Audibility, Scale, and the Ethics of Being a Person “I’m Suryoyo and I Know It!” Coming into Voice: Audibility and the Dialogics of Recognition Imagined Community as Aesthetic Formation Ethics, Morality, and Multiculturalism Ontologies of Difference Chapter Two 32 Liturgical Song in the Age of Electronic Reproduction: Ethical Experiments in Memory and Sound Liturgical Memory Musical Geographies Wide Tuning Secularizing Song The Authority of the Object Chapter Three 73 Merely Religious: A History of Categories in the Secular Episteme A Song for the Umthonoyo Marginalia Everyday Ethnicity Perforations “Legally, We Don’t Exist!” A Private History of Public Categories Historiography in the Secular Episteme Beyond Text Chapter Four 134 The Inaudible Allochthoon: Race, Religion, and the Postcolonial Politics of Misrecognition The Speaking Citizen Between Racism and Race-Thinking Specters of European Ambivalence “Really Living With the Other” iii Organizing Difference To Speak of Normal Things: Religious Silence and Secular Rupture Audience, Scale, and the Audible Citizen Chapter Five 191 Voices of the Spirit: The Ethics of the Singing Subject The Weight of History The Ethics of Motherhood Strapless Party Dresses The Ethics of Kinship The Aesthetics of Ethical Life The Voice of Authority The Ethics of the Singing Subject Chapter Six 230 Being Christian, Becoming Christian: Freedom, Kinship, and the Ethics of Care in the European Politics of Religious Pluralism Cosmological Intimacies Rupture-Thinking ‘Ashirto and the Ebb of Village Politics Freedom, Obligation, and the Allochthonous Family Maryam and the Saint The Subject of Responsibility Conclusion 272 Broken Alliances Bibliography 285 iv Abstract Fragments of a Liturgical World: Syriac Christianity and the Dutch Multiculturalism Debates By Sarah Bakker This dissertation explores the reconfiguration of Syriac Orthodox liturgical tradition among Aramaic-speaking Christian refugees in the Netherlands. Under the pressures of Dutch integration policy and the global politics of secular recognition, the Syriac liturgy is rapidly losing its significance as the central axis of social life and kinship-relations in the Syriac Orthodox diaspora. As such, it has become a site for debate over how to be religiously, culturally, and ethnically distinct despite the narrative binary of Christian Europe and the Muslim Middle East that dominates Dutch multiculturalism discourse. Every week, young Syriac Orthodox women and men congregate at their churches to practice singing the liturgy in classical Syriac. What they sing, and how they decide to sing it, mediates their experiments in religious and ethical reinvention, with implications for their efforts at political representation. Singers contend not only with conditions of inaudibility produced by histories of ethnic cleansing, migration, and assimilation, but also with the fragments of European Christianity that shape the sensory regime of secular modernity. Public debates over the integration of religious minorities illuminate this condition of fragmentation, as well as the contest over competing conceptions of ethical personhood inherent in the politics of pluralism in Europe. v Acknowledgements I am bound by unpayable debts to many different people who have cared for and contributed to the development of this project over the past seven years. My first thanks are for my advisor and the chair of my committee, Melissa Caldwell. She has guided me through graduate school, fieldwork, and dissertation writing with uncommon common-sense, compassion, and a talent for knowing precisely what to say and when to say it. The clarity of her thought and the generosity of her spirit have made me a better scholar. Don Brenneis’s unfailing ability to detect the meaning hidden deep within a convoluted sentence sustained me in the most difficult moments of writing, while providing a safe space to sing out-of-key in his office. Without his instruction and encouragement in the study of sound, this project would never have been born. Mayanthi Fernando set me on the path to thinking critically about secularism and my own categorical assumptions about religious difference, and I have benefited from the eagle-eyed precision of her reading and feedback. I am endlessly grateful for the serendipity that put me on a cross-country train in the Netherlands with Susan Ashbrook Harvey in the summer of 2008. As my out-of-department committee member, her empathy and concern for this project have kept me going in tough times, while her expertise in ancient Syriac history has saved me from error time and again. The anthropology department at UC Santa Cruz is a warm and nurturing home for a budding anthropologist, and I have benefited from the generosity and wisdom of many. Dan Linger was a kindly guide through the first-year fog and it was in his class vi on ethnographic practices where I learned the artful skill of deep ethnographic listening. Carolyn Martin-Shaw shaped my project from the beginning by training me in feminist theory and by reading and commenting on countless early drafts of my project proposal. Susan Harding pushed me to investigate more explicitly the entanglement of the secular and the religious in the Netherlands, while Jim Clifford provided a crucial early reading that helped me think more broadly about diaspora. I am grateful to Danilyn Rutherford for reading multiple chapter drafts and helping me clarify my thought both in Ethnographic Engagement workshops and in the Religious and Secular Entanglements Research Cluster. Megan Moodie provided important commentary on an early version of chapter three in an Ethnographic Engagements workshop. My identity as a scholar began to take shape in classes I took from Anna Tsing who taught me to pay attention to what happens to ideas and theories when they travel, and from Lisa Rofel, who introduced me to Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism. I also owe specific thanks to Donna Haraway, Mark Anderson, Triloki Pandey, and others among the faculty at UC Santa Cruz, all of whom contributed to making me an anthropologist. My life as a graduate student would have been impossible without Allyson Ramage, Fred Deakin, and Debbie Neal. I am infinitely thankful for my intellectual family: Patricia Alvarez Astacio, Nellie Chu, Sarah Chee, Carla Takaki-Richardson, Peter Leykam, Aimee Villareal, Josh Brahinsky, Heather Swanson, Sarah Kelman, Stephie McCallum, Colin Hoag, Celina Callahan-Kapoor, Nishita Trisal, Heath Cabot, Danny Soloman, Xochitl vii Chavez, Rebecca Feinberg, Kim Cameron-Dominguez, Bettina Stoetzer, and many other colleagues, past and present, who have left their mark on the pages that follow. Neither in Santa Cruz nor in the Netherlands would I have gotten anywhere without Bregje van Eekelen. I have been fortunate for opportunities to have my work read and responded to by many outside my home department. The Society for the Anthropology of Europe facilitated my friendship with Rachel Ceasar and Elif Babul by honoring us with recognition from the 2010 Graduate Student Paper Prize at a roundtable discussion with Michael Herzfeld, Susan Gal, and Matti Bunzl—though Michael Herzfeld does double duty as a caring intellectual grandfather. My thanks go to the selection committee Andrea Muehlenbach, Jillian Cavanaugh, and Neringa Klumbyte. I have also benefited from important conversations with Lihi Ben Shitrit, Matt Ellis, Fahad Bishara and other colleagues in the Austin 2011 cohort of the Social Science Research Council’s International Dissertation Research Fellows’ Workshop. Charles Hirschkind has been a kind ally and advocate, in addition to inspiring me with his example in embodying the ethics of listening. I am grateful for preliminary fieldwork grants provided by the Institute of European Studies at UC Berkeley and the UC Santa Cruz anthropology department. I received generous funding for extended fieldwork from the Wenner-Gren Foundation and from the Social Science Research Council’s International Dissertation Research Fellowship. I was able to complete my dissertation with a writing fellowship from the Charlotte W. Newcombe Foundation. My time as a graduate student at UC Santa viii Cruz was supported with an early Regent’s Fellowship, teaching fellowships in the anthropology department and the Writing Program, and teaching assistantships in the politics and anthropology departments. During my fieldwork in the Netherlands, I would have been lost without the kindness and generosity of scholars working in my area. Dr. Naures Atto has been a good friend and confidante, while her path-clearing research has been indispensable to my own. Dr. Jan Sukkink provided an invaluable introduction to the local history of the Syriac Orthodox refugee
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