Talk by Adeem Suhail (Anthropology, Franklin & Marshall College)

This talk is based on ethnographic explorations of the broken worlds the denizens of contemporary Karachi, Pakistan, inhabit. It examines the period between two catastrophic floods in 2020 and 2022. By observing the efforts of the Wasted to piece together new realities amidst the ruins, the study seeks to understand the everyday processes and practices involved in conjuring through faith a commons as an infrastructure for troubled times. In Karachi, the ruptures caused by a convergence of crises have disrupted the city's function as a labor-driven engine of value creation. With the demise of postcolonial modernity, the city has entered a different temporality, characterized by multiple broken worlds experienced by its inhabitants. Engaging in cosmological speculation, conspiracy theories, and mythopoesis, individuals grapple with uncertainties and possibilities rooted in post-colonial and decolonial practices that produce ambivalent outcomes. Crises here manifest in jagged details that cut. Highlighting the vitality and creativity of the marginalized in contrast to the oppressive practices of the ruling classes who have dubbed these multitudes as being already-sacrificed (nazar hona) and thus Wasted (zaya hona), the talk proposes the idea of a new politics of the Sacrificed and the Wasted.

Adeem Suhail is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Franklin and Marshall College. His research addresses issues in the anthropology of violence, social theory, and urban studies. His current project, Machines of Violent Desire, interrogates how non-state violence and transnational kinship networks contribute to order-making in urban South Asia, especially in the context of ecological and political fracture. He is concurrently working on another co-authored book project with David L. Nugent, titled Sacropolitics, which addresses how human communities confront emergent ecological and political crises across the globe through a politics of repair and rejuvenation. His recent publications include Urban Rearrangements: A Movement in Five Suites (IJURR, 2023) and Unarchiving Baloch History: ‘Small’ account of Baloch women that make waves in the Indian Ocean (2023).