Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

6-2026

Document Type

Doctoral Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Program

Anthropology

Advisor

Vincent Crapanzano

Committee Members

Karen Strassler

Murphy Halliburton

Subject Categories

Social and Cultural Anthropology

Keywords

Bangladesh, Critical Phenomenology, Islam, Politics of Perception, Secularism, South Asia

Abstract

How does power work by shaping what appears — and what feels — real? This dissertation is an ethnographic study of political conflict through the lens of the governance of perception. Drawing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jacques Rancière, and Birgit Meyer, it conceptualizes politics as a struggle over aisthesis — the historically formed distribution of what can be sensed, felt, and recognized as real. Based on ethnographic and digital fieldwork conducted between 2018 and 2020 in Dhaka and Chittagong, alongside archival analysis of the Bangla blogosphere and social media, the dissertation traces how the political crisis of 2013 fractured the Bangladeshi public into divergent yet entangled aisthetic regimes — systematically trained ways of sensing, feeling, and verifying the real. Focusing on three key events — the murder of blogger Rajib Haider, the "Sayeedi-on-the-moon" phenomenon, and the state crackdown on Hefazat-e-Islam at Shapla Square — it shows how the same images, narratives, and occurrences were apprehended as fundamentally different realities depending on cultivated dispositions of sensing and feeling. Methodologically, the project proposes a non-secular critical phenomenology — one that treats the limits of sensory experience as methodological openings rather than epistemic failures. Integrating phenomenological analysis with event ethnography and digital media analysis, it approaches religious claims such as miracles and divine signs not as epistemic deficits but as alternative modes of sensory verification grounded in distinct moral-aisthetic disciplines. In doing so, it challenges dominant accounts of affect as non-intentional excess by foregrounding the intentional, pre-reflective structuring of perception within historically specific formations. The dissertation argues that both secular and religious publics in Bangladesh are sustained through parallel regimes of aisthetic regulation — one privileging composure, irony, and empirical realism, the other valorizing devotional outrage grounded in embodied piety and attunement to the unseen. These regimes do not simply express political differences; they produce them by converting affect into evidence and shaping whose experiences carry authority and how reality itself is apprehended. By foregrounding the sensory and affective dimensions of political life, the study reframes debates on free speech, blasphemy, and truth as contests over perceptual authority. It shows how miracles are apprehended through moral-sensory attunement rather than epistemic proof, how dreams realize faith through the body, and how the state's documentary realism and believers' revelatory sincerity constitute rival regimes of verification — producing what I call an "aisthetic murk," a constitutive condition of political life where reality is continually remade through affect, vision, and belief. Through the concept of the distribution of the sacred, the dissertation argues that belonging, alienation, and nationhood in Bangladesh are diffracted across sensory, emotional, and experiential registers — revealing "Bengali Muslim" not as a singular identity but as a contested field in which secular and religious sacralities mutually haunt one another. More broadly, it offers a theoretical and methodological intervention into the anthropology of Islam, political anthropology, and sensory studies by demonstrating that politics rests on aisthetic grounds — the sensory and affective infrastructures through which collective life becomes perceptible, persuasive, and contested.

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