AIJAZI, OMER. Atmospheric Violence: Disaster and Repair in Kashmir. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024. 281pp. ISBN 9781512823622

Keywords: Ethnography; radical humanist anthropology; disaster studies; affect theory; decolonization; conflict; borderland. 

Lata Mani (2022) reminds us that our task as anthropologists is to represent and interpret a world that is infinitely messy, playful, mysterious and magical. Omer Aijazi’s first monograph upholds this potential. Engaging with the afterlife of environmental disasters and armed conflicts, Atmospheric Violence stands as a searing witness to an alternative form of living in Azad Kashmir, or Pakistan administered Kashmir.

In an atmosphere of chronic violence, the borderland in Aijazi’s lyrical work features as a conglomeration of movement, intensity and affect. The militarized, ecologically brittle valleys or the mountainous periphery where the ethnography is based becomes the center of life. A form of life that people continue to live despite the atrocities, formulating and reformulating their own politics of breath. Addressing all the writers, dreamers and the world makers, making this his heart work, Aijazi puts critical studies of disaster in conversation with radical humanist anthropology, black studies, indigenous studies, affect theory and Islamic philosophy.  This kind of scholastic tapestry is a breath of fresh air.  Breaking the obsession with area studies, establishing cross disciplinary dialogues, Aijazi looks for the political in the intimate every day.

Moving away from the grand narratives revolving around the nation state and the sovereign citizen, Aijazi launches an epistemic disobedience. Flowing from one fragment to the other, fragments that make and break lives, locating theory in the flesh, Ajazi attempts to dismantle the myriad hermeneutical injustices that the social sciences are inundated with. Using a decolonial approach to disaster studies centering not on trauma but repair, Aijazi grapples with multiple forms of violence. Immeasurable forms of violence that are foregrounded in the mountains in and through the textures of the ordinary. Illuminating these miniscule textures, this magnificent ethnography immerses the readers into the precarious lives of the people in the borderland. These are lives that are lived in a state of debilitating fear and world annihilation.

Uncommonly beautiful and mortally dangerous is how Azad Kashmir comes alive in and through Ajazi’s pen of immense might. He thinks collaboratively and across traditions, weaving an intellectual assemblage, shattering the normative episteme conditioning Kashmir studies. Replete with various kinds of scholastic drifts ricocheting between various kinds of belonging and non-belonging, this book embodies a creative contradiction. This contradiction is both – of life and of anti-disciplinarity. Commanding a wide breath of scholarship, Aijazi shows that his interlocuters attempt to live despite the world.  They refuse to accept the norm and forge a life in and of contradiction.

Seamlessly blurring the stringent divides between theory and activism, inside and outside, fact and fiction, for Aijazi, knowledge production becomes a form of attunement rather than capture. Shunning the dominant discourses on Kashmir revolving around geopolitical territories and security analysis, Ajazi marvelously documents the alternative memories and aspirations of Kashmir, steadily nestling in the crevasses of the mountains.

In this work, the ordinary throws itself together out of forms, flows, powers, pleasures, distrac