Pnina Werbner

Pnina Werbner ( Gluckman/Gillon; 3 December 1944 – 17 January 2023) was a British social anthropologist. Her work focused on Sufi mysticism, diasporas, Muslim women and public sector unions in Botswana. She wrote extensively about the Arab Spring. Werbner was married to anthropologist Richard Werbner, and was the niece of Max Gluckman.

On cultural hybridity, Werbner argued, with particular reference to the Satanic Verses affair and other global cultural conflicts, for the need to recognise the key distinction first coined by Bakhtin between intentional and organic hybridity, in order to understand the Muslim diasporic offence while avoiding futile debates about cultural reification. In relation to the 'failure' of multiculturalism debate, she advocated analysing multiculturalism from below, and not merely as a top-down policy.

From 2000, Werbner studied the women's movement and the Manual Workers Union in Botswana. Her ethnography, which won an Honorable Mention in 2015 in the Elliot P. Skinner Award from the AAA Association of Africanist Anthropology, analysed the legal mobilisation and struggle for dignity and a living wage of manual public sector workers, both men and women, and traced the evolution of a rooted, working class identity and culture in Botswana, which is both local and cosmopolitan, through cultural performance.

Her work highlighted the vernacular, situated cosmopolitanism of rights activists, trade unionists and feminists in the global south, transnational labour migrants and Sufis. She rejected, however, optimistic views of transnationalism as effacing national boundaries, and argued for the need to recognise the illusion of simultaneity, disguising the ruptures that transnational movement engenders.

She argued that diasporas are internally heterogeneous, imaginatively constructed, transnational moral communities of co-responsibility. She saw the materiality of diaspora as manifested both affectively and aesthetically, with its members willing to mobilize politically and economically across borders in response to the sufferings of fellow diasporans or crises in the 'home' country.

Werbner was Professor Emerita at Keele University.

Werbner died of a pulmonary embolism on 17 January 2023, at the age of 78.