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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 



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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, distractions, 

drudgery, denials, practical solutions, shape-shifting forms of violence, daydreams and 

opportunities lost and found. Braiding a humongous range of theory with ethnographic vignettes, 

Aijazi organizes the book in five scenes- relational instances where a text is connected with another 

and the self is connected to the other. Seeing and feeling the intensities of the ‘other’, abundantly 

using photographs for the reader’s sensory delight, Aijazi introduces us to five scenes. Featuring 

five protagonists, there are scenes- of betrayal, of kindness, a scene of friendship, a scene where 

ugly feelings feature and a scene on opacity or refusal. 

 



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In the first scene, where Aijazi intertwines form and content, we meet Niaz, an aspiring school 

teacher, whose failed body refuses to recover just like the disaster- stricken landscape. Niaz 

disrupts the synchronicity of the present, betraying it, opening a future that evades it. By refusing 

repair, Niaz dwells in the interstices, opening up an alternate ontology or a modality of life. Loss 

is not the only ramification of violence in Aijazi’s work. Locating violence in the mundane every 

day, this deft ethnography churns out the generative potentialities and the redeeming aspects of 

life amidst violence.  

 

In the second scene, Aijazi introduces us to Parveen- a midwife who makes her way to the clinic 

every morning. She hopes her deceased husband will be blessed if she continues with her hard 

work of serving others. Kindness becomes her modality of being, a set of ethical relations that 

revolve around compassion and a life lived well together with others- both visible and invisible, 

creating an alternate sociality. 

 

The elderly Sattar Shah and his friendship with god imbricates the third scene. A polyvalent 

character, Sattar Shah reconciles immanence and transcendence through his poetic knowledge and 

spiritual longing. Once again, through Sattar Shah’s narrative, Aijazi effectively breaks the binary 

between this world and a divine elsewhere. Following scholars like Leela Fernandes, Schileke 

Samuli and others, Aijazi effectively decolonizes the divine giving us a fecund space for thinking 

sacred subjectivities and metaphysical yearnings anew.  

 

In the fourth scene we meet with an irritated Abrar. Abrar’s exasperation is materially grounded in 

his lifeworld. Aijazi names Abrar’s ongoing frustrations as minor anger. Minor anger draws much 

needed attention to the frictions arising from a form of life that is destabilized by fixed sovereignty 

of any kind. Rendering singular sovereignty non-operational, Aijazi shows how minor anger or 

ugly feelings in everyday gestures compel for an ethical urgency. Succumbing to this ethical 

urgency people often engage with those elements that impede the daily flow of life. In this chapter, 

Aijazi incisively argues that such engagements often generate an alternate way of living instead of 

being counterproductive to life and flourishing. 

 



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Chandni bibi enters in the last scene. She survives at the end of the world refusing a unilinear 

representation, clamoring for opacity. Opening up to the discrepant possibilities that the perilous 

everyday has to offer, Chandni bibi like Sattar Shah and Niaz inculcates an expectation from life 

that no one can satisfy. Aijazi terms this as sovereignty in the making and I call it fractured 

sovereignty. In this web of expectations, nothing is final or stable. There is always something that 

is yet to come- an element of wonder. Throughout this endlessly generative book, Aijazi tells 

stories that restore our belief in wholeness or entanglements incorporating both- life and non-life. 

These are stories of resilience. Stories that restore our faith in the human kind. Merging the ethical 

and the political in a geo-politically disputed area, Aijazi brilliance lies in disturbing the sovereign 

subject in and through the practice of breathing and kindness. Kindness puts the breath back and 

breathing sews myriad relationalities, conditioning kaleidoscopic life worlds.  

 

Omer Ajazi’s writing is poetic, radical and uncannily perceptive. His work will deeply resonate 

with scholars interested in knowing life in its entirety, life amidst chaos and ruins. A political 

necessity, Aijazi’s book holds valuable insights for anyone who breathes. It’s a rarity and a pleasure 

to encounter this kind of scholarship that oscillates between heartbeats and heartaches. This is the 

kind of scholarship that continually simplifies the self and amplifies the other, healing our souls, 

shaking our mind-hearts. 

 

 

WORK CITED: 

 

Mani, Lata. Myriad intimacies. Duke University Press, 2022. 

 

 

Akashleena Basu is a PhD student in the department of Anthropology at the University of 

Minnesota, Twin Cities. 

 

 

 

© 2018 Akashleena Basu 


