Stanford University
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Kabir Tambar
Associate Professor of Anthropology
BioKabir Tambar has been conducting ethnographic and historical research in Turkey since 2003, primarily focused on the critical study of secularism and semiotic approaches in anthropology. His work centers on questions of temporality in political modernity, or the narrative threads that bind our sense of the present to both an inherited past and an anticipated future.
Tambar’s first book, The Reckoning of Pluralism (Stanford, 2014), explored how Alevis in central Anatolia encounter and interrogate the promises of secular modernity. The book offered a critical study of how state authorities (along with academics, journalists, and intellectuals) seek to define and discipline the parameters of religious difference, such that ostensibly epistemological questions about the writing of history have come to shape governing imperatives to regiment public enactments of Alevi religion. The book is also especially interested to reveal how Alevi engagements with Islamic tradition, including in practices of ritual mourning, enable alternative ways of narrating the religious past and its inheritance in the present.
After completing this research project, Tambar began to study inter-communal expressions of solidarity. Initially, the work developed in response to the massive, country-wide Gezi Park protests, with particular attention to the tensions and misunderstandings that accompany the emergence of new political friendships. From this starting point, Tambar began a decade-long inquiry into the history of irresolute and foiled friendships that have unsteadied the politics of the nation-state for over a century. He is now completing a new book manuscript, tentatively titled After Friendship: An Ottoman History of Disaffection, that examines the erosion of friendship as a credible discourse of late Ottoman and Turkish republican politics in the past century. Rather than redeem friendship as a normative ground for understanding political possibilities today, the book excavates the failing of friendship as a historical problem, asking how social actors — especially Armenians, Greeks, and Kurds — have grappled with the attenuation of solidarity and the estrangement of political identification. -
Ariel Yingqi Tang
Postdoctoral Scholar, Political Science
BioAriel Yingqi Tang's research is broadly concerned with the interactions between culture and nature in the history of political thought and contemporary political theory. Her ongoing projects investigate the realization of nature by means of culture via education, the limits of culture’s claim over nature, as well as the dichotomy between the two categories.
Ariel’s dissertation-based book manuscript, “Bildung and the Anthropological Foundation of Politics”, reconstructs the entangled history of the Enlightenment and the idea of Bildung, the foundational principle of the modern research university. Tracing the genealogies of key notions underlying modern educational institutions, including aesthetic education, academic freedom, and the global curriculum in the European context and beyond, the book seeks to resuscitate the humanistic strand of Enlightenment political thought and prompts us to reconsider the promise of liberal education in modern academies.
Besides research, Ariel is committed to translation both as a scholarly activity and a vehicle for self-understanding. Her book-length translation has appeared with the Commercial Press in Shanghai. She also maintains research and teaching interests in the history of knowledge, philosophy and literature, and environmental humanities.
