... been dominant. Instead this article draws on the anthropology of divination to argue that capitalist action is provoked by technologies of the imagination that generate speculation. These issues are explored in the context of changing forms of governance of the Hooghly riverine economy by bureaucrats...

...Caroline Brown “A Divine Madness: The Secret Language of Trauma in the Novels of Bessie Head and Calixthe Beyala” examines Head's A Question of Power and The Sun Hath Looked upon Me , by Beyala. In both novels, trauma serves as a metaphor for the disruption caused by gendered and/or racialized...

...Joud Alkorani; Amira Mittermaier Abstract This special section reflects upon how divine-human relations are shaped by the socioeconomic and political circumstances in which they are cultivated. The four articles treat God not as a rigidly defined, unchanging being borne of ageless scripture...

...Hassan Yusefi-Eshkevari This essay's purpose is twofold: to problematize the question of the urfi (secular) system versus the religious system and to examine the question of faithful life in a modern and urfi world. As for the first part, the Islamic state is defined by “divine legitimacy of power...

... does not feel estranged anywhere he or she travels, since the world—and the divine—are in continuity with the human subject. The real exile is a psychological experience resulting from the disruption of monist unity and harmony between human and divine, man and the world. This conception of exile...

...Alireza Doostdar Abstract This article examines the power of God in postrevolutionary Iran through an exploration of divine ambiguity in relation to political experience. Over the past four decades, the Iranian political-theological landscape has gone through dramatic transformations in imagining...

... divine tests; and 3) an emphasis on tawakkul (reliance) upon God. In all three elements, the agency, role, and responsibility of other humans and institutions in shaping one's world are backgrounded, obscuring the politics inherent to divine-human relations and the power struggles that suffuse...

... activity was shaped by Orthodox models of social activism where “heaven starts from earth.” Theological concepts of service were activated in relation to a divine management that addressed concrete needs and in response to economic uncertainty. Together, they authenticated a pragmatic God working through...

... at the center of analysis, attending to people's understandings of waste of time ( daya‘ al-waqt ) in relation to divine power allows for moving beyond secular, materialistic understandings of time. Placing God at the center of analysis, the article explores how temporal inequalities created in and through...

... that they constituted divine signs, al-Suyuti chronicled 130 earthquakes that occurred in the Muslim world. Curiously, Zalzala reemerged more than three centuries later in the modern world of colonial expansions. In the aftermath of the 1927 earthquake in Palestine, American seismologist and Stanford professor Bailey...

...Yunus Doğan Telliel Abstract Since the end of the nineteenth century, Muslims have pursued the idea that the Quran foreshadows new scientific discoveries. Linked to claims that the Quran's divine truth is continually substantiated, rather than disproved, by new scientific discoveries, certain...

... of martyrdom in the Cinema of Sacred Defense, born of a complex history, are attempts to make the divine manifest in film and in real life. While the Cinema of Sacred Defense is often claimed to be a marked departure from previous Iranian films, some of its preoccupations remain much in line with the now...

... and twentieth centuries; for the latter, these children featured as subjects in a miracle narrative, in which they were preserved from harm against all odds by their divinely animated lupine foster mothers. This history limns the curious trajectory that begins with an anthropology of the cultures that sacrifice...

... convincingly show the theoretical and narrative possibilities of methodological attunement to the other-worldly and transcendent, to the divine. As I finished reading the section, I was struck by how the ethnographic task of reckoning with God seemed to end up meaning mostly reckoning with theology...

.... Our approach reveals the governmentalities, public cultures, and market actions that are characteristic of the present pursuit of value for profit and survival. © 2015 by Duke University Press 2015 Speculation Divination Finance Economic Governance Uncertainty Vernacular Capitalism...

...- their maneuvering among languages, genres, and tionary Iran in regard to the questions of the self, citation styles, these letters simultaneously demon- community, justice, time, responsibility, revolution, strate an entanglement with the official discourse state, the divine, and the ever-­present figure...

... into twelve sec- worshiper of the true divinity finally reaches perfection and never suffers any tions, each of which is titled a “flash” lam‘a(  ) , a diminution. term with a long history...

... interest here is also that simplest possible summary of the shared ele- Kamba’s Tamil version of the story was used by ments in the narratives might run as follows: A the seventeenth-century author Umaru Palovar divinely guided individual who is portrayed as as a “literary model for a Tamil...

... for a theosophical belief in a divine reward; there life must be considered the first required step was no suggestion or promise of any possible on the path...

... of the body” in the “air of divine compas- everything. But understanding the generic features and con- sion.”9 Ironically, it was our search for patterns that led us to ventions is key to entering the concentric universes built the skipping hare as well as to the shifting borders of dis- around each...