Affiliation
Utrecht University
Biography
David Henig’s work, anthropologically and historically grounded, explores how people remake their lifeworlds in the wake of dramatic societal ruptures. He has conducted research in multiple fieldsites throughout West Asia and Europe, which has been broadly focused on: conflict and coexistence; violence and memory; Muslim politics, revival and transnational mobility; postsocialism; charity; informal economies; military waste; and everyday diplomacy. He is currently working on projects related to the entanglements between religion and geopolitics in the post-imperial and post-Cold War contexts. Over the past decade, Henig has carried out extensive fieldwork in Bosnia and Herzegovina, where he studied the transformation of political economy and reconfiguration of religious institutions and practices in the face of ruptures caused by the political violence and cultural and economic dispossession ensuing from the violent disintegration of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1992 and its aftermaths. This research resulted in numerous publications including: Remaking Muslim Lives: Everyday Islam in Postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina, Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2020.
Publications related to the project’s theme
David Henig, Remaking Muslim Lives: Everyday Islam in Postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina, Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2020
David Henig, Magnus Marsden, ‘Muslim Circulations and Networks in West Asia: Ethnographic Perspectives on Transregional Connectivity’, Journal of Eurasian Studies 10/1 (2019): 11-21
David Henig, ‘Economic Theologies of Abundance: Halal Exchange and the Limits of Neoliberal Effects in Post-War Bosnia-Herzegovina’, Ethnos 84/2 (2019): 223-40
David Henig, ‘Prayer as a History: Of Witnesses, Martyrs, and Plural Pasts in Postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina’, Social Analysis 61/1 (2017): 41-54
Tone Bringa, David Henig, ‘Seeking Blessing and Earning Merit: Muslim Travellers in Bosnia-Herzegovina, in I. Flaskerud & R. Natvig, ed., Muslim Pilgrimage in Europe, London: Routledge, 2017: 83-97
David Henig, Nicolette Makovicky, ed., Economies of Favour after Socialism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017
David Henig, ‘Crossing the Bosphorus: Connected Histories of “Other” Muslims in the Post-Imperial Borderlands of Southeast Europe’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 58/4 (2016): 908-34
David Henig, ‘Contested Choreographies of Sacred Spaces in Muslim Bosnia’, in K. Barkey & E. Barkan, ed., Choreography of Sacred Space: State, Religion and Conflict Resolution, New York: Columbia University Press, 2014: 130-60
Karolina Bielenin-Lenczowska, David Henig, ed., Being Muslim in the Balkans: Ethnographies of Identity, Politics and Vernacular Islam in South-East Europe, Anthropological Journal of European Cultures 22/2 (2013)
David Henig, ‘“This is Our Little Hajj”: Muslim Holy Sites and Reappropriation of the Sacred Landscape in Contemporary Bosnia’, American Ethnologist 39/4 (2012): 752-66
Iain R. Edgar, David Henig, ‘Istikhara: The Guidance and Practice of Islamic Dream Incubation through Ethnographic Comparison’, History and Anthropology 21/3 (2010): 251-62
