Quotidian Experience Research Articles

A Listening Device: Colombia’s Truth Commission and the Politics of the Audible

Abstract In this brief text I want to offer a personal reflection on my work as a former Commissioner in Colombia’s Commission for the Clarification of Truth, Coexistence and Non-repetition. What is of interest to me is the idea that truth-seeking commission models are complex “listening devices” that render certain forms of violence intelligible while other more systemic types, remain elusive. In contexts of deeply rooted historical and endemic racial and economic inequalities, this is not a minor issue as these material inequalities are at the heart of conflict itself. In fact, what I call the “transitional promise of transformation” often falls short of changing the structures of quotidian experience of people and communities scarred by such historical injuries. Rather, those “transformations” are deferred to a future “liberal peace building” or development-oriented agenda. I examine this way of listening through a particular theoretical lens and aspire not only to contribute with an empathic and a reflexive distance from our work as a Commission but also to posit wider questions.

“Human or Not, Everyone Has Their Own Habits and Tastes”: Food, Identity and Difference in Muslim South Asia

ABSTRACT That India was experiencing a rise in vigilante-style violence linked to the emotive issues of cow slaughter and meat consumption came to widespread public attention in 2015 with a wave of “beef lynchings.” What one ate – beef or not – was being constructed as a fundamental marker of difference between religious communities, and caste groups too. In the communal discourse, protagonists were undifferentiated and immutable: Hindus and Muslims have always been divided, and perhaps inevitably in conflict, because one worships the cow, while the other eats it. As a challenge to this politicized narrative, my article explores how food has been employed as a marker of identity and difference among South Asian Muslims in the modern period. To access more quotidian experience, the main sources are travel narratives, many of which were written by women, who were more occupied with food’s preparation and serving. These writings reveal the ways in which food was used at different historical moments and locations to differentiate between, not just Hindus and Muslims, but also colonizer and colonized, men and women, old nobilities, a new middle class and “the poor,” and Muslims of different regions and locales. As one woman from Delhi indicated during a debate over ghee aboard a pilgrim ship in the early 1920s: “Human or not, everyone has their own habits and tastes.” In other words, food may be a universal human experience, but it is also a means of differentiating self and other that is contingent on history.

Reenchanting the Enlightenment

In light of research which, since the publication of Rousseau and Porter’s Ferment of Knowledge, has demonstrated the continued centrality of magic and the occult to what may be termed “scientific knowledge” in the early modern period, this essay argues that one domain of practice where these concerns remained paramount well into the eighteenth century is the consumption of recipes. Whether exchanged between individuals or collected in print format, these mobile informational media relied on forms of proof under­pinned by personal experience and collective accreditation, with an inductive and empirical focus that was distinct from Cartesian deduction. Because the culture of recipe exchange was so widespread, encompassing scholars, savants and lay readers, secrets offered ways to challenge strict mechanistic interpretations in favour of a view of the natural world as informed by unseen active powers, particularly where the virtues of materials such as magnets or medicinal simples were concerned. Using private library catalogues of book owners, a commonplace book and a scientific periodical produced in France during the decades after 1700, the article traces the way secrets culture continued to foster an epistemological space in which mechanical explanations evidently fell short of accounting for quotidian experience.

Territoriality, Conflict and Citizenship in the India–Myanmar Borderlands

The question of citizenship in northeast India has become a highly contested one due to the persisting ethnic-territoriality and intermittent conflicts that has plagued the region, particularly in the borderlands, since the early decades of Indian independence. The borders between India and Myanmar are largely porous and border crossing is a quotidian experience for people who inhabited on both sides of the border. Conflicts in the region, which were mainly fuelled by the drive for exclusive ethnic homelands in a territory co-inhabited by different ethnic groups, have led to displacements not only within the national border but even beyond. The rehabilitation of such conflict-induced displacements has led to questioning of the citizenship of displaced people. Such claim in contested spaces is nothing but to question the indigeneity of the “other” and their rights to land and its ownership. This politics of indigeneity is pursued in the region today with continued rigour and intensity to mainly ensure ethnodomination or to achieve exclusive ethnic homeland in contested spaces. They are silent and disingenuous on the universal fundamental human rights to leave and return to one’s country.

Acting and Race in Night of the Living Dead (1968)

Acting and Race in <i>Night of the Living Dead</i> (1968)

Bridging bureaucracy and activism: Challenges of activist state-work in the 1980s Greater London Council

An emerging literature on ‘new municipalism’ has identified attempts not only to transform local state functions to respond to the urban crises of neoliberal austerity, but also to transform the structure and practices of the state itself, embedding democratic processes into local government. This article utilises the historical experience of the ‘new urban left’ within the Greater London Council (GLC) from 1981 to 1986 to explore the internal dynamics of state transformation in a context of municipal activism. It situates the GLC’s progressive policy responses to the urban crises of the early 1980s within a more quotidian project of state remaking, in which activists worked in-and-against the established political cultures and practices of the local state. The new urban left’s transformative, rather than simply instrumental, approach to the local state – rooted in the democratic politics of progressive social movements – challenges straightforward dichotomies between state and society. The article frames these nascent municipalist characteristics with a theoretical argument based on an autonomist-Marxist account of the state as a form of social relations, one that emphasises how capitalist crises pivot on the internal contradictions of labour. This reading directs theoretical attention to the ‘prosaic’ labour of state officials, and the article thus considers the quotidian experience of politicised officials in the GLC, whose activity blurred boundaries between political activism and professional labour. The practical contradictions involved in such forms of ‘activist state-work’– working within bureaucratic and legal limits, experimenting with new organisational forms, and negotiating contested workplace subjectivities – reveal forms of boundary-bridging between activism and statehood that highlight the potentially transformative dynamics within the labour of local governance. This unstable tightrope-walk between bureaucratic constraint and political agency at the nexus of state-work contributes to new municipalist thinking about reshaping the conduct of urban governance.

Going to the Countryside: The Rural in the Modern Chinese Cultural Imagination, 1915–1965

Going to the Countryside: The Rural in the Modern Chinese Cultural Imagination, 1915–1965

Philippe Ariés, Childhood and the Everyday

This commentary navigates the oeuvre of Ariés’ writings on childhood, family, private life and death, with a focus on interrogating ‘who is a child?’ Departing from the intellectual history prevalent at the time, Ariés deployed the psychogenic approach to study the cultural history of childhood and family. He examines the quotidian experience of aesthetics and other documents of culture to reveal ‘what was thought about' viz. the mentalities’ of childhood and family spanning a vast canvas from the eleventh to the nineteenth centuries. Ariés provocatively proposes that childhood is a modern construct, highlighting that children were not always seen as precious, dependent and in need of adult protection. The magnitude of his intellectual adventure continues to be debated, particularly in childhood studies. The commentary includes an analysis of Ariés’ methods and insights about childhood that unsettle the narrow prisms that refract how we see, understand and educate children.

A more-than-urban political ecology of bushfire smoke in eastern Australia, 2019–2020

ABSTRACT From September 2019 to February 2020 fires destroyed dwellings, towns and killed farm animals and wildlife in much of eastern Australia. While the threat and experiences of fire differed, smoke became a quotidian experience for millions of people not in direct danger from flames. The disjuncture between the Australian bushfire summer existing within much longer histories of air, respiration and smoke in cities and the experiences of smoke being new to many people highlights important issues relating to nomenclature, boundaries and urban imaginaries. Developing a more-than-urban political ecology of smoke, this paper concludes that understanding smoke as part of atmospheres within which humans live and breathe is necessary to support the integrated management of land, water, air and the living entities in and beyond a particular area or country. A more-than-urban political ecology of smoke will assist people to view themselves and their welfare as being connected with what happens on spaces that are physically distant.

On the Comedy of Race

On the Comedy of Race Albert Sergio Laguna (bio) Early on in my research for this article on race and comedy, I came upon a novel by Jessie Redmon Fauset titled Comedy: American Style (1933). Fauset, a prominent yet understudied writer and editor active during the Harlem Renaissance, tells the tragic story of Olivia, her family, and their relationship to the shifting nature of the color line through the prism of "passing" and social class. Critics debate the effectiveness of Fauset's treatment of these issues, but for me it is the title that is most provocative. Because, you see, Comedy: American Style is not funny at all. Cherene Sherrard-Johnson puts it plainly in her introduction to the latest print edition, calling the novel "anything but humorous" and explaining the title by suggesting that Fauset may have had a "Shakespearean understanding of comedy as a form in which the conflict revolves around marriages plots" (xvi). A plausible explanation, but this doesn't change the simple fact that the book is not funny. It is not even trying to be. What was Fauset suggesting about the relationship between comedy and race? With that title, Fauset asks the reader to think about a tragic passing narrative filled with familial tension, estrangement, and even suicide as a kind of "American" comedy. Though laughs are hard to come by, there are elements of the novel that gesture toward the comic: the passing narrative as a kind of misdirection or misidentification so popular in stage comedies; characters who are often single-minded and flat in their representation of particular ideas or traits; and most bluntly, the moment when the narrator conveys the thoughts of a character who has explained the phenomenon of passing as "a sense of perpetrating a huge joke" (70).1 For Fauset, then, race is not simply a topic for comedy but comic unto itself on the level of form. Race is a kind of "American style" of comedy at its core. [End Page 104] The goal of this article is to take Fauset's provocation seriously and to begin to think about the relationship between comedy and race on the level of form.2 To do this work, I take Fauset's insight out of the world of literature and her novel and into the realm of popular culture where the intersections of comedy and race have been a fertile source of creativity and consternation. I propose the term "the comedy of race" to explain how comedy is of race, how the very architecture of comedy and what makes us laugh can help us better understand how race itself works with, and independent of, comedy. Comedy stages the mechanics of racialization. By invoking comedy, I do not seek to pin it down to a single kind of manifestation.3 I am more interested in comedy as a mode that suffuses a range of genres, cultural production, and the everyday forms of relationality that constitute quotidian experience. Instead of trying to define lines where comedy might begin and end, this essay concerns itself with the signifying strategies comedy and race hold in common.4 Ultimately, I argue that race and comedy share formal qualities for producing meaning in the world—excess, ambiguity, and repetition—to advance two objectives. First, I explain the challenges that these formal similarities between comedy and race have posed to race and ethnic studies and how and why that has limited scholarly investigation. To understand form in this context is to better grasp why race and comedy have been such a provocative and often explosive pairing. Second, I aim to begin to imagine the critical possibilities that arise when the comic structure of race becomes the analytical emphasis. In addition to formal considerations, the critical productivity of pairing race and comedy together is enhanced by how deeply they imbue quotidian life on their own and when they intersect to produce racial comedy. Race and comedy inform how we imagine, and relate to, ourselves and others. From on-demand streaming entertainment and satirical news shows to our lives online mediated by memes, viral videos, and Twitter ripostes, comedy is what "people increasingly come to expect in the kinds...

A History of Now

The connection between history and COVID-19 might appear counter-intuitive. We are used to being told by media outlets and employers, government officials and friends that we are ‘living in unprecedented times’. The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the rhythms of our daily lives, but not every response to COVID-19 has been new. It has also been understood through history.&#x0D; This article comes from a roundtable discussion that was held as part of NSW History Week on 11 September 2020. Bringing together historians, curators and archivists, this panel explored the way that history has been used to understand COVID-19. Particular attention was paid to attempts to record and archive our experiences through the pandemic, comparisons between COVID-19 and the ‘Spanish’ flu as well as shifting understandings of temporality during the pandemic. Although the COVID-19 pandemic has ruptured our quotidian experience, it is not a moment beyond history. This panel examined how history is being used as an anchor point, a source of inspiration and an educational tool with which to tackle ‘these uncertain times’.

“It Will Take a Man Person with you to … Keep the Place Up”: Family, Gender, and Power in Confederate Common White Households

Abstract This article provides fresh insight on the ways in which the American Civil War challenged and destabilized understandings of familial and gendered power within the Confederate States. It is well established that the impressive extent of the Confederacy’s military mobilization significantly altered the gendered demographics and dynamics of the home front. While not rejecting this orthodox view, this article does challenge its tendency to overemphasize the extent to which the rural South was sapped of men. In doing so, it not only underscores the important roles some men, most notably those too old for military service, continued to play in ordinary households but also how this pattern unsettled familial power in terms of generation and age as well as gender. Finally, this article endeavors to excavate the more quotidian experience of Confederate common white families and, in order to do so, utilizes three microbiographies of specific households from the state of South Carolina.

Cosmopolitan Revolutionaries: Masculinity, Migration, and Gender Performativity in Latin American London

This article explores the relational dynamics by which a particular group of young Colombian men strategically construct and perform masculinity within context of Latin American London. Focusing on quotidian experience and seeking to move beyond stereotypical narratives of masculine “loss” or “adjustment” relating to machismo, it demonstrates how “traditional” hegemonic norms are resourced as constitutive elements in the articulation of new modalities of gendered orientation. Observing that with migration Latin American men are often placed under contradictory pressure to both conform to and subvert cultural stereotypes of machismo and hegemonic masculinity, here young male Colombian migrants are seen to harness vernacular cosmopolitanism as an important moral orientation through which to creatively rearticulate machismo, dynamically reframing their subjectivities in ways that meaningfully engage with their life predicaments. What emerges are expressions of a subject position referred to here as the ‘cosmopolitan revolutionary,’ a performative orientation that encourages the expression of masculine authority and decisiveness while also emphasising anti-authoritarian and egalitarian principles of positive reciprocity and worldly care.

Fake News

I was invited to respond, as an early modernist, to two essays on medieval fictionality by Julie Orlemanski and Michelle Karnes. Both writers take issue with Catherine Gallagher's well-known assertion that fiction was "invented" in the early eighteenth century, with the rise of the novel. In "my" period, 16th-17thcentury England, debate raged in the wake of the Protestant Reformation about the relationship of truth to the world of quotidian experience. The truths of Christianity violate everyday expectations, but which disruptions are miraculous and which are frauds is highly contested. Reformers satirize and debunk Catholic rituals and miracles, and Catholics similarly ridicule Protestant beliefs and practices. Which events present themselves as "true" seems to depend upon literary genre and the horizons of plausibility that those genres imply. Shakespeare, I argue, explores issues about truth and fraudulence, and their inextricability from questions of literary genre, with special self-consciousness in his tragicomedies, in particular The Winter's Tale, and also in Othello.

Toffee Men, Travelling Drapers and Black-Market Perfumers-South Asian Networks of Petty Trade in Early Twentieth Century Britain.

Selling small wares, novelties, and affordable luxuries manufactured from artificial silk, the South Asian door-to-door pedlar or 'travelling draper', and his compatriot the 'Indian toffee man', were once fairly commonplace figures in British working-class life and the object of fond childhood recollections for many. Unfortunately, they have now largely drifted from popular memory, having left little trace in the historical record. However, this article's reconstruction of their lives offers a new perspective on the pivotal role inter-racial social networks played in pioneering South Asian immigration, settlement, and trade in Britain. New research into this pre-Partition, pre-Windrush immigration, particularly in and around the English industrial city of Sheffield, provides a more detailed and more nuanced understanding of their quotidian experience, their relationship to British society, and their reception by the working-class neighbourhoods within which they lived and plied their trade. The article emphasizes the men's enduring sense of agency and economic autonomy, despite the attempts of various departments of state to prevent them from exercising their right, as British subjects, to live and work in Britain.

Performing the Electrical: Ecologies of the Imaginary and Fem-technologies

As speculative aesthetics, what might feminist ontologies and artist imaginings do for rethinking the “real” assemblages and infrastructures of our quotidian experience, particularly with respect to those that standardize aggressive capital agendas, maximum industrial output and extreme waste? This paper draws connections between female artists’ image and event-making, speculative design and tacit knowledge, as sensing tools for technological possibilities at a time when energy dependency, in the form of electricity, is the greatest generator of fossil fuel waste and pollution. I use Remedios Varo’s paintings from the mid 1930–1960s as a springboard to think about sustainability and ecological design from an embodied, fem-magic and deep-time perspective, and I draw from other female artists whose work explores technologies and energy, such as Alice Aycock, Tania Candiani, Cassie Meador and Hito Steyerl. An analysis of these artists’ works allows me to explore the ways that feminist imaginings function as an ontological orientation that shifts power away from contemporary infrastructures, to decolonize and re-feminize electrical possibilities as alternative ways of engaging with and sensing assemblages.

Public Spectacles of Violence. Sensational Cinema and Journalismin Early Twentieth-Century Mexico and Brazil by Rielle Navitski

Reviewed by: Public Spectacles of Violence. Sensational Cinema and Journalismin Early Twentieth-Century Mexico and Brazil by Rielle Navitski Odile Cisneros Navitski, Rielle. Public Spectacles of Violence. Sensational Cinema and Journalism in Early Twentieth-Century Mexico and Brazil. Duke UP, 2017. 325 pp. This new study of early sensational cinema and journalism begins with an eye-catching statement: "Films that restaged public spectacles of real-life violence became the first popular successes of both Mexican and Brazilian cinema" (1). Violence, priority, and mass success thus characterize this understudied corpus of cinema and journalism in Mexico and Brazil and drive its analysis, even as some of the artifacts in question have barely survived the test of time, both metaphorically and literally. By examining largely forgotten films and lost ones reconstructed from journalistic narratives and other extant texts, Rielle Navitski attempts to show how "the sensational mode is uniquely revealing of the transformation of quotidian experience and public life" in contexts where "modernization … often accentuated profound social divides" (2). More specifically, Navitski links the thematics of violence to modernity, arguing that "the sensational visual culture of early twentieth-century Mexico and Brazil voiced profound desires for economic and technological development and an implicit acceptance of modernization's costs" (12). The book is organized geographically and chronologically, devoting two chapters to the case of Mexico and three to the case of Brazil. Besides providing [End Page 798] some historical and economic background, the introduction lays out the study's theoretical and methodological groundwork. The methodology includes an articulation of fictional and non-fictional conventions, a recuperation of the ephemeral artifacts of popular visual culture (as opposed to precious studies of "high" culture), and an intermedial approach that reads these early sensational cinemas "through their intertexts in print culture and popular entertainment, examining local horizons of film reception and production alongside region-wide affinities and international exchanges" (9). Covering both the Porfirian as well as revolutionary periods in Mexican history, the first chapter explores how images of crime, punishment and conflict simultaneously portray state control and its crisis. Early illustrated journalism and non-fiction films gave way to adaptations of true stories, such as the crime serial El automóvil gris (Enrique Rosas, 1919), which profited from public violence as popular entertainment, curiously linking such criminal activity to Mexico's emergence within cosmopolitan modernity. The post-revolutionary period discussed in chapter two is characterized by adventure films with a nationalist cultural agenda. Movies such as El tren fantasma (1926) and El puño de hierro (1927) were received by the popular press with both enthusiasm for their violent subject matter as well as skepticism prompted by their perceived cultural dependence on Hollywood. In the case of Brazil, Navitski argues in chapter three that the fast-growing cities of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo became the scenarios of violent spectacles, in word and in deed. Real-life theft, murders, and crimes of passion in the press inspired sensationalist films, literary, and stage adaptations rife with drama and moral messages. Among the films studied in this chapter are Os estranguladores (The Stranglers, 1908), documenting a famous murder case known as the Crime of Carioca Street, and the fictionalization of robbery aboard a steamship, O caso dos caixotes (The Case of the Strongboxes, 1912). Chapter four looks more closely at the case of imported serial films which held wide and popular appeal in Rio de Janeiro, prompting both locally-themed films and novelizations. Productions highlighted, and were appreciated for, their successful stunts and cinematic effects. Exploring the intersection of national and foreign as well as print and film media, this chapter tackles the cross-medial form of the cinematic serial novel, a national tradition of serial literature that interacted with imported crime and adventure serials. Examining the production, exhibition, and journalistic reception of sensational melodramas in regions outside the two large urban centres of Brazil, chapter five addresses both the geographic and economic disparities in the country. The productions employed adventure melodrama conventions while attempting to make use of local color by shooting on location and taking advantage of actors' and cinematographers' skills. Violence does not play as fundamental a role in this chapter, but...

Sufism: A New History of Islamic Mysticism by Alexander Knysh

Reviewed by: Sufism: A New History of Islamic Mysticism by Alexander Knysh Benjamin Powergriffin (bio) Sufism: A New History of Islamic Mysticism. By Alexander Knysh. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Press, 2017. 389 pp. $29.95 The question of who decides the essential nature of a mystical tradition is paramount to understanding how it functions as a lived spirituality. With Sufism: A New History of Islamic Mysticism, University of Michigan Professor of Islamic Studies Alexander Knysh has written a concise but remarkably thorough history of Sufism that addresses the myriad of complications inherent in defining Sufism both in a Western, often Orientalist, context as well as how it has been historically defined within the wider Islamic tradition. Pursuing the topic with pointed neutrality, Knysh has written a history of Sufism that both honors and reimagines historic approaches to Islam's ascetic-mystical heritage. From the start, Knysh makes it clear that honing in on a precise, historically satisfactory definition of Sufism is difficult, if not outright impossible. This is not simply due to Sufism's own wide-ranging expressions within Muslim cultures but also because of its reconstruction within the Western imagination. Rather than attempt to disentangle Sufism from this in order to elucidate a supposedly pure Islamic form, Knysh attempts instead to "explore [the] dimensions of the ascetic-mystical stream of Islam… without sliding into either unbridled partisanship or adverse criticism of the subject and of its conceptualizations by both insiders and outsiders." (8) In doing so, Knysh is able to offer both an insight into the quotidian experience of Sufi communities as well as a history of how Sufism has been envisioned by various outside thinkers. In Chapter One, Knysh explores this thesis by offering several potential models for Sufism's origin. These models range from Marxist interpretations of political unrest to various Sufi thinkers' own self-understanding as pursuing the purest form of Muslim devotion. Knysh notes as well the undeniable influence of other religious traditions, especially the proximity of Christianity's own mystical expressions, on the development of Sufism early on while also recognizing the potential complications inherent with such comparison. As such, Knysh states Sufism is only truly real "in the sense that it has long-ranging and tangible sociopolitical, practical, cultural, and institutional implications" (p.34) developed through a vast variety of imaginations. Holding the tension between these influences allows Knysh to explore the complications of Sufism as an evolving concept as well as living spirituality. Knysh deepens this analysis in Chapter Two by considering how Sufism came to be understood as a unique Islamic practice. He discusses early elements of Sufi development such as walaya, spiritual authority of teachers, transmitted not only through their texts but through the teacher's lived example. This, in turn, would serve as a basis for a cult of devotion surrounding Sufi saints, solidifying [End Page 369] the development of spiritual lineages. Knysh utilizes these foundational concepts to reveal the differences between Muslim and Western understanding of Sufism's functionality. Whereas the Muslim approach along the Sunni/Shi'i divide focuses largely on the sociopolitical role played by such schools, the West often looks to the discourses created by spiritual authorities to delineate between Sufism's various focus on philosophy or occult sciences. Knysh astutely observes how privileging texts over social structures significantly alters how Sufism is conceived. At the end of this chapter, Knysh offers a succinct and helpful list of traits that might be seen as essential to Sufism (p. 60–61), helping the reader understand Sufi spirituality vis-à-vis the efficacy of spiritual authorities to reveal esoteric knowledge and shape their worldview. Chapter Three concerns Sufism's exegetical tradition and will undoubtedly be the most engaging for the outside readers that Knysh envisions. Largely focused on the characteristics of Ibn Arabi's Akbarian school and Najm al-din (al-)Kubra's Kubrawi school, this chapter offers the deepest look into the "cosmology and gnoseology" (p.120) that has so captured Western attention. Exploring various ways in which these schools read both the Quranic and Hadith texts, this chapter gives the reader a sense of not only how their philosophy functions but also how its implications are transmitted...

The Formative Role of Art: John Dewey’s Art as Quotidian Experience

The Formative Role of Art: John Dewey’s Art as Quotidian Experience

Everyday Life after Collapse: A Bioarchaeological Examination of Entheseal Change and Accidental Injury in Postcolonial Nubia

Bioarchaeological perspectives of collapse scenarios have contributed to our understanding of the persistence and regeneration of communities after the fall of states and empires. We suggest that the osteological examination of everyday lived experience can further elucidate local lifeways during these transitory periods. Focusing on ancient Nubia after the decline of the colonial Egyptian New Kingdom Empire, we examine musculoskeletal activity patterns (entheseal changes) and traumatic injury in remains uncovered at Tombos, a cemetery at the Third Cataract of the Nile. We find evidence that entheseal changes increased at Tombos from the New Kingdom Period to the postcolonial Third Intermediate/Napatan Periods; however, accidental trauma does not significantly increase between the two periods. With regard to the elevated entheseal changes, we suggest that Nubians may have been engaged in quarrying, agropastoralism, and construction efforts. Furthermore, there is evidence to suggest that this population was biologically resilient, which may have limited accidental/occupational traumatic injury. We view these changes to the Tombos quotidian experience from an agent-centered perspective; we posit that during the postcolonial period, Nubians revitalized their sociopolitical and economic systems through these everyday practices, which contributed to the independent and powerful Napatan state.