Geoffrey Hughes
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geofffhughes.bsky.social
Geoffrey Hughes
@geofffhughes.bsky.social
2K followers 620 following 1.8K posts
Teacher, Ethnographer, Arabist; Lecturer in Anthropology and author of Affection and Mercy: Kinship, Islam and the Politics of Marriage in Jordan ♥️🇯🇴♥️🇵🇸 (he/هو)

https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=lLU0JwkAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao
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geofffhughes.bsky.social
Classic New York Times here on the growing academic boycott of complicit Israeli universities. Not a single Palestinian is quoted, but they have this from unnamed Israeli academics speaking on their behalf:
In Europe, Israeli academics say the boycotts, which have roots from two decades ago with the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, are also punishing Arabs because some 19 percent of university students in Israel are Israeli Arabs, who make up roughly 21 percent of the general population.
November 10, 2025 at 9:26 AM
geofffhughes.bsky.social
Like, c'mon guys. Even the New York Post has higher journalistic standards when they want to smear people:
Brad Lander is so Jewish `I almost became a rabbi, rips Andrew Cuomo 7 May 2025 — Lander, who described himself as a “liberal Zionist,” said he has been steeped in Judaism since childhood. “You may be surprised to learn it, ...
November 5, 2025 at 3:40 PM
geofffhughes.bsky.social
My kingdom for a publication with these kind of resources to throw at the story that hadn't already decided in advance that the answer is that the guy is some sort of class traitor
Picture of Mamdani with typically awful headlines from the New York Times: "How a Small Elite College in Maine Influenced Mamdani’s World View "The mayoral candidate has said his education at Bowdoin College was formative. But critics say that his degree exemplifies how colleges steep students in leftist dogma."
November 4, 2025 at 2:06 PM
geofffhughes.bsky.social
I swear it sounds like Borges is describing LLMs here:
Under the beneficent influence of the Company, our customs have become thoroughly impregnated with chance. The buyer of a dozen amphoras of Damascus wine will not be surprised if one of them contains a talisman or a viper. The scribe who draws up a contract scarcely ever fails to introduce some erroneous datum; I myself, in making this hasty declaration, have falsified or invented some grandeur, some atrocity; perhaps, too, a certain mysterious monotony . . . Our historians, the most discerning in the world, have invented a method for correcting chance. It is well known that the operations of this method are (in general) trustworthy; although, naturally, they are not divulged without a measure of deceit. In any case, there is nothing so contaminated with fiction as the history of the Company . . . A paleographic document, unearthed in a temple, may well be the work of yesterday's drawing or that of one lasting a century. No book is ever published without some variant in each copy. Scribes take a secret oath to omit, interpolate, vary.
October 30, 2025 at 10:15 AM
geofffhughes.bsky.social
The kicker is so brutal my body involuntarily recoiled in secondhand embarrassment:
On our last date, we were walking through a park when I told him we couldn’t keep seeing each other, that I disagreed with most of his beliefs and didn’t align with the future he wanted. Confused, he replied that from his point of view, we actually agreed on most things. No, I said, we didn’t, which he would know if he’d asked me any questions about myself. He still leaned in and tried to kiss me. We never saw each other again.
October 29, 2025 at 1:21 PM
geofffhughes.bsky.social
As it happens I'm reading this right now and no matter how bad you think British rule was I guarantee you it was more brutal and stupid than you think.
Cover of /Late Victorian Holocausts/ by Mike Davis. An emaciated child stares at a cow's corpse in a flat dessicated landscape. There is a figure in the background on the right.
October 29, 2025 at 10:25 AM
geofffhughes.bsky.social
This part goes particularly hard
October 28, 2025 at 7:01 AM
geofffhughes.bsky.social
Cover of Abdulrahman Munif's /Cities of Salt/
October 28, 2025 at 7:00 AM
geofffhughes.bsky.social
Keep thinking about this new article about "racket sociality"... A concept I think we might be using a lot in the coming years...
Picture of a journal article: Racket sociality: Investigating intimidation in North India Lucia Michelutti, UCL This article is an ethnographic investigation into acts of intimidation and threats. Theoretically, it dialogues with ‘racket’ – a key analytical term in the sociology of domination, state‐making, and mafias. The anthropology of power, violence, and crime has paid scant attention to the morphology of threats and the ways interpersonal intimidation intertwines with economic and political forms of coercion. Drawing on ethnographic insights from North India, the article examines the way (criminal) intimidation is normalized, consented to, and socially embedded in everyday life. It shows how racketeering is routinized beyond clandestine organized crime. Ultimately, ‘racket sociality’ is proposed as a new method of ethnographic inquiry into theorizing authority and legitimacy in an age of populist strongmen politics and predatory forms of capitalism.
October 25, 2025 at 10:37 AM
geofffhughes.bsky.social
If everyone read more Bataille and Mbembe, maybe we could skip over the pantomime of shock and accept that this is the system working as intended
For Bataille, sovereignty therefore has many forms. But ultimately it is the refusal to accept the limits that the fear of death would have the subject respect. The sovereign world, Bataille argues, “is the world in which the limit of death is done away with. Death is present in it, its presence defines that world of violence, but while death is present it is always there only to be negated, never for anything but that. The sovereign,” he concludes, “is he who is, as if death were not. . . . He has no more regard for the limits of identity than he does for limits of death, or rather these limits are the same; he is the transgression of all such limits.” Since the natural domain of prohibitions includes death, among others (e.g., sexuality, filth, excrement), sovereignty requires “the strength to violate the prohibition against killing, although it’s true this will be under the conditions that customs define.” And contrary to subordination that is always rooted in necessity and the alleged need to avoid death, sovereignty definitely calls for the risk of death.14 By treating sovereignty as the violation of prohibitions, Bataille reopens the question of the limits of the political. Politics, in this case, is not the forward dialectical movement of reason. Politics can only be traced as a spiral transgres- sion, as that difference that disorients the very idea of the limit. More specifically, politics is the difference put into play by the violation of a taboo.
October 21, 2025 at 10:13 AM
geofffhughes.bsky.social
Real danger here that Israel's war on Hamas transitions almost seamlessly into Israel's war on Hamas 2 (actual name TBD)...

www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a...
As long as there is an active military presence, you’re going to have people with weapons who want to confront that presence. And I could see, in the future, a low-level indefinite insurgency that then becomes self-justifying, with Israeli leaders saying, “Well, there are all these attacks and the people still have weapons, and that’s why we have to stay.” And then the armed Palestinians saying, “The Israeli soldiers are on our land. Of course, we have to keep fighting them.”
October 15, 2025 at 9:13 AM
geofffhughes.bsky.social
My expectations were low but Jesus Christ...
Picture of the destruction in Gaza with thousands of desperate people in the foreground Headline: Five Palestinians Killed by Israeli forces in Gaza despite ceasefire
October 14, 2025 at 10:10 AM
geofffhughes.bsky.social
A very useful looking article just showed up on my doorstep. Seems widely applicable!
Picture of a journal article: Racket sociality: Investigating intimidation in North India Lucia Michelutti, UCL This article is an ethnographic investigation into acts of intimidation and threats. Theoretically, it dialogues with ‘racket’ – a key analytical term in the sociology of domination, state‐making, and mafias. The anthropology of power, violence, and crime has paid scant attention to the morphology of threats and the ways interpersonal intimidation intertwines with economic and political forms of coercion. Drawing on ethnographic insights from North India, the article examines the way (criminal) intimidation is normalized, consented to, and socially embedded in everyday life. It shows how racketeering is routinized beyond clandestine organized crime. Ultimately, ‘racket sociality’ is proposed as a new method of ethnographic inquiry into theorizing authority and legitimacy in an age of populist strongmen politics and predatory forms of capitalism.
October 14, 2025 at 8:34 AM
geofffhughes.bsky.social
Martyrs, Dreams, and Past Lives: Insurgent Immortality and the Expansive Logic of Debt

By Marlene Schäfers and Maria Kastrinou
Martyrs, Dreams, and Past Lives: Insurgent Immortality and the Expansive Logic of Debt By Marlene Schäfers and Maria Kastrinou Stories of fallen Kurdish revolutionaries who return to the living in dreams, and of Druze souls who circulate across securitized borders gesture at forms of vitality and animation that persist beyond biological death. In this article, we have put forward the concept of “insurgent immortality” to make sense of the political potency of revolutionary martyrs and past lives among Kurdish communities from Turkey and Syrian Druze communities in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. By insisting on the immortality of their dead, we argue, these stateless communities articulate a claim to counter-sovereignty. What makes these communities’ practices aimed at mastering and transcending death different from the sovereignty claimed by nation-states is that apparitions of dead martyrs and past lives work as expansive, boundary-crossing mechanisms, rather than the territorializing logics of enclosure and containment that mark state sovereignty. The immortality we describe in this article is insurgent because it relies on the recognition and cultivation of long-term exchange relations between the living and the dead, through which debt becomes a modality of generative expansion across both this and otherworldly times and spaces. The resulting sense of generalized indebtedness opens up spaces of liminality in which the dead come alive as both inspiring and unsettling figures. We develop insurgent immortality as a comparative concept that emerges from the specific ethnography of each case yet reaches across their contextual boundedness. In this way, we hope to inspire renewed conversation about shared trajectories of resistance, including its ambivalences, that arise in contexts of statelessness, occupation, and disenfranchisement.
September 29, 2025 at 8:17 PM
geofffhughes.bsky.social
Here's an excerpt from a forthcoming review I've written to encourage you to check it out:
Work Reviewed: NO GOD BUT MAN: ON RACE, KNOWLEDGE AND TERRORISM by Atiya Husain. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Pp. 208. Paper. $26.95. Reviewer: Geoffrey Hughes Keywords: Afropessimism, Anthropology, Anthropometry, Critical Terrorism Studies, Policing At a time of heightened domestic political repression in the United States, when the language of terrorism is increasingly wielded against wide swaths of the population and especially People of Color, Atiya Husain’s No God but Man: On Race, Knowledge, and Terrorism is in many ways an extremely prescient book. A wide-ranging work of interpretation, Husain’s argument gains its coherence through its insistent return to a set of iconic images: “wanted” posters deployed in the hunt for—depending on one’s perspective—the celebrated Black liberation activist or terrorist cop-killer Assata Shakur (née JoAnne Deborah Byron and usually referred to as Joanne Chesimard in police and court documents). With its illuminating forays into anthropology, science and technology studies, the history of policing, Black studies, Islamic studies, and religious studies, the book has something to offer a wide range of readerships who tend not to think of themselves as involved in a shared intellectual project. Husain is to be commended for meeting the moment with verve and moral clarity and using her research to trouble fables that we have become all too comfortable repeating to each other. As I read her, I was reminded of the story of young Abraham as related in both the Qur’an and the midrashim, though here I defer more to the Quranic telling. Finding the people worshipping idols that they had apparently fashioned for themselves, Abraham smashes all but the largest of them. When accused of having destroyed them himself, Abraham replies that it was the largest of the idols that smashed the others—and invites his audience to ask the idol if they doubt him. There is more to the story and earlier pre-Quranic versions make a lot more of the enraged idolaters’ unsuccessful attempts to burn him alive and the miracle of his survival. Yet it strikes me that Husain succeeds here in living up to the best in what we might call an Abrahamic mode of “immanent critique”: an argument by demonstration in which she destroys our idols by revealing them to be incapable of doing what we need them to do.
September 28, 2025 at 2:17 PM
geofffhughes.bsky.social
With Assata Shakur's recent passing, I wanted to highlight a new book that examines her life in light of wider debates in critical terrorism studies on the relationship between terrorism, racialization and Islam: No God But Man by Atiya Husain
Cover of /No God But Man: On Race, Knowledge, and Terrorism/ by Atiya Husain
September 28, 2025 at 2:12 PM
geofffhughes.bsky.social
Suggested reading:

files.libcom.org/files/Lo%C3%...
Cover of Loïc Wacquant's "Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity"
September 6, 2025 at 5:44 AM
geofffhughes.bsky.social
My own very humble contribution to these debates. Do I think the Jordanian model where they've hybridized policing and tribal blood feuds is ideal? Lol, absolutely not. But I do think a lot of people in the West are in a real mental rut when it comes to thinking creatively about these questions:
Beyond retributive and restorative justice: In search of mercy with Jordan's Bedouin Abstract Popular debates about criminal justice reform often pose restorative justice as a humane (if utopian) alternative to retributive justice. Drawing on fieldwork with Jordan’s Bedouin, I offer an unvarnished account of a longstanding and still-vibrant tradition of restorative justice that also includes violent and punitive elements. While acknowledging how Bedouin justice can fail women, the poor and the poorly connected, I highlight how Bedouin justice also cultivates mercy as a social good, transforming enmity into forgiveness (if not friendship) and encouraging perpetrators to materially compensate victims. I conclude by considering how contemporary Jordanian practices of mercy might inform efforts to escape from the seeming inevitability of mass incarceration in modern society. KEYWORDS abolition, alternative dispute resolution, mediation, policing, restorative justice
September 1, 2025 at 9:50 AM
geofffhughes.bsky.social
Another fun thing is bridewealth, which everyone said was "all lies". As we reach the 1930s, everything converges *suspiciously* on "thirty Palestinian Guineas received in the hand of the bride's agent with her permission."
August 30, 2025 at 7:21 AM
geofffhughes.bsky.social
But it always like that. Fathers and brother always figured prominently, but in a good ten percent or more of cases, the bride's agent has no real standing in Sharia. They often list relationships, but you can double check against the name itself because middle names are dad + grandad + tribe...
August 30, 2025 at 7:15 AM
geofffhughes.bsky.social
Disco Stu points at a graph showing exponential growth in record sales and says "if these trends continue, ayyyyy!"
August 27, 2025 at 5:57 PM
geofffhughes.bsky.social
This article was a total gestalt switch for me in terms of how I think about crime. It also helps illuminate the cross-ideological conceptual distortions that have led to the current crisis

www.nplusonemag.com/issue-13/pol...
Crime has not fallen in the United States—it’s been shifted. Just as Wall Street connived with regulators to transfer financial risk from spendthrift banks to careless home buyers, so have federal, state, and local legislatures succeeded in rerouting criminal risk away from urban centers and concentrating it in a proliferating web of hyperhells. The statistics touting the country’s crime-reduction miracle, when juxtaposed with those documenting the quantity of rape and assault that takes place each year within the correctional system, are exposed as not merely a lie, or even a damn lie—but as the single most shameful lie in American life.
August 26, 2025 at 8:22 AM
geofffhughes.bsky.social
A new banger from the Alan Colmes of Democratic Socialism (for /The Atlantic/, naturally...
August 24, 2025 at 6:01 PM
geofffhughes.bsky.social
Fair to say it resembles the Western interpretation of cargo cult, but Melanesianists like Roy Wagner have argued that for members of these millenarian movements, it's the moral relationships that are key and that they aren't "looking for a transistorized handout." From /The Invention of Culture/:
The "cargo" is seldom thought of in the way we might expect, as simple material wealth; its significance is based rather on the symbolic use of European wealth to represent the redemption of native society. In this usage it resembles those other "cargoes," the more traditionally symbolic constituents of the bride price, or the activity and products of gardening, that embody the central meaning of human relations for Melanesians, and that we tend to interpret in materialist, economic terms. Cargo is really an antisymbol to "culture"; it metaphorizes the sterile orders of technique and self-fulfilling production as life and human relation, just as "culture" does the reverse. In the words of Kenelm Burridge, who distinguishes a capitalized sense of "cargo" from the ordinary sense, much as we have done with "culture": It is clear that if cargo means manufactured goods, Cargo embraces a set of acute moral problems; that Cargo movements are not due simply to a misunderstanding concerning the origin of manufactured goods, but that they are embodied in, and arise from, a complex total situation. . .7 The symbol of "cargo," quite as much as that of "culture," draws its force and its meaning from its ambiguities; it is simultaneously the enigmatic and tantalizing phenomenon of Western material goods and their profound human implication for the native mind. When the symbol is invoked, the second of these senses incorporates the first into a powerful analogous relation, which both restructures the phenomenon and gives it meaning. This relation, and the meaning that it compels, encompasses all aspects of the moral dilemma; it is access to the cargo, the rapport entailed by a sharing of the cargo, and the millennial conditions necessary for the arrival of the cargo. Moreover, since "cargo," like "culture," is a term of mediation between different peoples, the relation that it embodies becomes that of Melanesian to Western society. The fact that "cargo" and "culture" metaphorize the same inter-societal relation, while doing so in opposite directions, so to speak, makes them effectively metaphorizations of each other. "Culture" extends the significance of technique, mode, and artifact to human thought and relationship; "cargo" extends that of human relation and mutual production to manufactured artifacts: each concept uses the extensive bias of the other as its symbol. Thus it is easy for Westerners to "literalize" the significance of "cargo," and assume that it means simply manufactured goods, or Western modes of production, "Culture," that is, in the narrow sense. This kind of simplification, the short-circuiting of a symbol, is in fact the popularized, Sunday-supplement view of cargo cult, a counterpart of mission ideology about saving the "lost" heathens, or the sentimentality that perceives tribal peoples as impoverished relatives begging for a transistorized handout.
August 19, 2025 at 9:24 AM
geofffhughes.bsky.social
I can't tell you how badly I want to demand that this man let me inspect his wallet:
Do universities bear any responsibility for the situation? Yes. What we all want to know is how much of the indirect monies that come with our grants go to maintaining people and programs that are not part of the research effort. Is the money going to DEI or some other political effort to promote people or recruit them or favour them just for their immutable characteristics instead of for their scientific expertise or other relevant qualifications? I don’t know and my fellow faculty members don’t know either. The universities are not transparent about the money flow. If they were willing to show us an accounting of the indirect funds and an argument for how they were used to maintain and build the relevant scientific infrastructure, I could go to the mat for them. But then, I might also learn other facts that would diminish my willingness to defend my employer.
August 14, 2025 at 12:33 PM