Ethnologia Europaea

The symposium “Sleepers, Moles, and Martyrs: Secret Identifications, Societal Integration, and the Differing Meanings of Freedom” was held on October 6–8, 2002 in the conference facility Waldschlösschen in Reinhausen near Göttingen, Germany. Regina Bendix organized the symposium in collaboration with Friedrich Kratochwil and Richard Ned Lebow. Occasioned by the social, political and mass media discourses after the bombings of New York’s World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, an interdisciplinary group of scholars came together to explore the connotations and implications of the term “sleeper”. The biographies of terrorist perpetrators are but one of many permutations of sleeper-like phenomena in late modern polities. Clandestine operatives of the state are sleepers, and both willing and unwilling victims of terrorism are discursively transformed from sleepers into martyrs. Starting with analyses of the discourses about sleepers in Part I – their historical antecedents, narrative emplotment, and semantic differentiation – Part II turns to the hidden or unspoken aspects of the state, the challenge of fundamentalist terrorism to the modern political project and the tensions between neighborly discourse, public display and the state. Part III juxtaposes changing depictions of Shiite martyrdom with the violence done to the term“martyr” within the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In Part IV, cultural secrets encoded in memorials and public silences in academic discourse are addressed. The different cases assembled offer comparative materials and perspectives from the USA, France, the Netherlands, Pakistan, Spain, Iran, Israel, Istria and Sweden.

This paper explores cultural antecedents for the idea of the “sleeper,” the terrorist who appears to adapt to a host culture while secretly harboring plans to destroy it, in the discourse of European and American witch hunts. The idea of an evil infiltrator, who lives hidden within a society, clandestinely conspiring to overthrow it, has deep historical roots. The language used by American political leaders to describe Al-Qaeda echoes that of medieval inquisitors and New England witch hunter Cotton Mather, ferreting out diabolical conspiracies threatening to destroy the foundations of society. In this paper, I explore the similarities between the discourse of witch hunts and that of terrorism, arguing that language which creates an enemy simultaneously alien and internal to the host society accomplishes two rhetorical goals: it projects evil onto a racial, cultural, gendered or social Other, allowing the host culture to see itself as “pure” and “good;” and it dehumanizes the Other, making it easier to deprive him/her of basic human rights.

The idea and expression of “the enemy within” is briefly explored in its multiple uses. A rising parallel with the emergence of individualism, this notion was first tied to the religious ideals of purifying the self, later secularized and revived with the development of the idea of the unconscious. It is especially close to the notion of conspiracy. In folklore, the description of Others, through tales, is mostly ethnocentric and negative. A tentative classification of tales, with respect to visibility and origin, is suggested, and the detours and ambiguities that characterize folklore discussed. The contemporary orientation of conspiracy theories – present in the three realms of folklore, popular fiction, and social protest movements – to denounce “evil elites” is briefly commented on: these theories were widespread in explaining the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks in the U.S. However, the story of “the compassionate terrorist,” one that reflects the detours and ambiguities of folklore,is the most representative of the spontaneous lore linked to terrorist attacks.

The paper addresses three sets of questions: What is the semantic reach of the term “sleeper” and what ambiguities derive from the divergent contexts and genres within which the term has been used? What is the link between sleepers and secrecy, and how do terrorist sleepers interfere with the culturally accepted workings of secrecy in social and political life? What narratives are set lose when sleepers reveal themselves in unexpected action? The paper is guided by Georg Simmel’s recognition of secrecy’s role in social life and seeks to demonstrate the problematic encounter of multiple codes of secrecy in culturally heterogeneous societies.

The 11 September 2001 attacks on New York and Washington have led to renewed public debates on national identity in various countries. This contribution focuses on two of them: Pakistan and the Netherlands. Starting from the assumption that the nation is a project of liberation from a pre-nation past, it is argued that these debates necessarily imply an increased reflection on the nature of this pre-nation past, which is called the nation’s shadow. In Pakistan, the nationis imagined as an Islamic liberation from feudalism, kinship solidarity, and ethnic loyalties. In Holland, the nation is imagined as secular and opposed to a Dutch history of pillarization in which religious authorities acted as intermediaries between the citizen and the state. What are considered the loyalties and sentiments of the past are allowed in private. However, they also inform the imagination of a subversive domain that encroaches upon the nation. Hence, subversion politics in Pakistan is imagined as a form of illicit kinship politics, whereas in Holland subversion is linked to religious – primarily Islamic – mentalities.

The paper addresses two issues: the events of September 11 in terms of the traditional vocabulary of terrorism, and the implications of these acts for the modern political project. I argue that the traditional vocabulary of the law of war, adapted to the circumstances of armed conflict, remains useful. In appraising the effect of these actions on the realization of the political project of modernity, I look to Hobbes, as he suggested peace was possible only when “fundamentalist”questions were eliminated from the political agenda. Only under a secular version of political rule can the sovereign become an effective guarantor of law. Hobbes’s arguments resulted in a new vision of politics based on fear and its manipulation, but also on a certain rationality allowing individuals (and sovereign states) to pursue their own interests. Insofar as both the domestic and international social order is based on such notions, the emergence of fundamentalist-inspired terrorism decisively challenges the modern political project.

The arrests of alleged Al-Qaeda members in Spain reactivated a longstanding local discourse on the insoluble tensions between individual, state, and community. In two 19th century fictions and two 21st century news stories, I show how the figure of the neighbor and the framing device of the façade are invoked to explore the limitations – both negative and positive – of the liberal project in Spain. In these façade narratives, the twin behaviors of secrecy and display call attention to animbalance between the private space of the individual and the public space of the community. The state proving inadequate as a regulator of the commerce between these two spheres, equilibrium is restored through an act of violence across the façade that separates them. This violence is at the same time the means by which individuals are accorded social recognition.

Ever since the political changes in Iran more than twenty years ago, ideological discussions have manifested themselves in various arenas of political and societal concern. Apart from the traditional means of propaganda such as print-media and modern mass communication, Iranian political institutions employ a large range of other media to propagate their intentions and ideas. Of these, representations in writing and illustration in public spaces deserve particular attention, since they combine traditional modes of artistic expression with intentions of contemporary concernfor Shiite Iran.In Tehran, walls on large buildings have been used for pictorial illustrations of moral and political standards pertaining to the presently propagated Shia ideals. Mural art serves various ends, such as glorifying the Shiite martyrs, reminding the people of the righteous leadership, and, more recently, substituting nature as a means to humanize the concrete habitat of moderncities. All of these ends aim to stabilize the present value-system byunderlining its intention, outlining its basic values, or simply offering comfort in times of depression.

This paper attempts to capture the violence and immediacy of current events by applying semiotic analysis. The mutual cruelties acted out by Israelis and Palestinians is analyzed in terms of the growing usage of words from religious contexts to legitimize violence and to attach powerful collective emotions to it. The focus is on the use of the term“martyr” to refer on the one hand to Palestinian victims or suicide bombers, on the other hand to Israeli victims. A concise historicalanalysis of the word “martyr” in Jewish sources points at its contingent changes in various situations. In the twentieth century the vocabulary of death has radically changed in European discourse, but probably specifically in Jewish discourse. The analysis points to mechanisms of appropriation of individual lives and deaths as a result of the application of the term “martyr”. The analysis of such language use hopes to contribute to some better understanding and greater tolerance.

When the actual terror is over, how do you reconcile without trying to pay back? With the falling apart of Yugoslavia, past, suppressed injustices remerged and were frequently used to connect the present with bitter memories. In the ethnically diverse region of Istria, however, it has been difficult for any group to claim its interpretation of history to be superior to others. Seeking to explain the Istrian case and within it the role of the esuli, the article juxtaposes the material discourse represented by monuments with the workings of memory and the dynamics which jostle sleeping, hidden, or private memory into public discourse. It is argued that in Istria, the absence of an ethnic “master narrative,” and the coexistence of many different groups sharing the territory has been useful for keeping nightmarish memory of ethnic violence at bay. Instead, place has come to matter more than history. Within landscapes and monuments, experiences of terror and narratives of martyrdom find a resting place, however uneasy.

The silences surrounding Jews and Jewish culture within the Swedish folklife sphere and within the historiography of Swedish folklife studies are examined in this paper. Emphasis is placed on one national institution, the Nordic Museum in Stockholm.The sleep at issue, then, is the undergrowth of embarrassed, taken-for granted or hostile silences concerning ethnic/religious difference that could be found more or less throughout the 20th century, not only among the majority of the population but also among experts in the study of culture. It is argued that the silences and the lack of clear stances at a national cultural institution contributed to legitimizing xenophobia in the past and might well continue to do so among people who are lost, violently inclined, looking for scape-goats, and waiting to strike when the time is right.