Talal Asad and Timothy Mitchell

Born in Saudi Arabia, Talal Asad grew up in British India and Pakistan. After several failures (in Architecture and in History) he succeeded in getting a university education in Britain. He taught for many years in Britain and the US (where he now lives permanently in retirement), and for limited periods in Sudan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. He has specialized in the anthropology of religion, and in Middle Eastern cultures and societies as well as in some aspects of European history. His books include The Kababish Arabs (1970), Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (1973), Genealogies of Religion (1993), Formations of the Secular (2003), and On Suicide Bombing (2007). 

He has been a friend of Michael Gilsenan’s for over half a century, having both been students of E.E. Evans-Pritchard at Oxford and then following parallel and sometimes intersecting intellectual paths. 

Timothy Mitchell is the Ransford professor of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University. He teaches and writes about colonialism, political economy, the politics of energy, and the making of expert knowledge. Trained in the fields of law, history, and political theory, he works across the disciplinary boundaries of history and the social sciences, all of which intersect with Michael’s interests. Many of his writings explore materials from the history and contemporary politics of Egypt. His books include Colonising Egypt (1988/1991); Rule of Experts (2002); and Carbon Democracy (2012). A forthcoming book, The Alibi of Capitalism, is about how the more durable apparatuses for capturing wealth characteristic of late nineteenth-century colonialism produced a new method of extracting income from the future, a future we now inhabit precariously.

Since meeting Michael in Oxford in 1986, they have been friends and, once Michael moved to NYU, colleagues. 

Festpod conversation with Michael was about shifting interests in religion, political economy, and history.