Bruce M. Knauft
National Endowment for the Humanities
Resident Scholar 2003-2004
Crisis and Culture in a Post-9/11 World
Stunned by the shocking events of September 11, 2001,
Americans were immediately infused with the sense that “everything
had changed.” Yet as Bruce Knauft charts the response of the United
States to this crisis against the background of geopolitical history
and the context of cultures around the world, he suggests that, in fact,
much is the same.
“On the one hand, many things did change: our
sense of being invulnerable, our perceptions of Bush and of radical Islam being
an enemy, for instance. That’s the public cultural story and it has a powerful
and important reality. On the other hand, the United States has been an imperial
power for a long time using various ways to influence other countries to get
its way,” Knauft observes. “In the wake of 9/11, the United States
has projected a local crisis to a global scale. This event has become a mandate
for the global deployment of political and military force, making the construction
and dissemination of crisis of central importance to the United States.”
In Culture and Crisis in a Post-9/11 World,
Knauft uses the “effect and illusion” of 9/11 to examine “how
lines of geopolitical division, opposition, and crisis are culturally formulated,
and how these divisions are influenced, willingly or unwillingly, by global forces,
national agendas, and popular responses.” By tracking how other areas of
the world have responded to and been affected by 9/11—including Saudi Arabia,
Indonesia, Mexico, and areas of Africa—Knauft will illustrate “how
a relatively small event on a world historical scale—the death of approximately
3,000 people in the U.S. on September 11, 2001—has spawned geopolitical
realignment backed by military force.”
A distinctively anthropological perspective on this
issue seems particularly important, Knauft contends, “to complement the
culturally narrower viewpoint of many political scientists, policy makers, and
global analysts, on the one hand, and the less scholarly accounts of many journalists
and mass media pundits, on the other. At larger issue is how ideologies of ‘progress’ and ‘development’ are
re-negotiated, complicated, or resisted in a post 9/11 world.”
Affiliation at time of fellowship: Samuel C. Dobbs
Professor, Department of Anthropology, Emory University
