I am an interdisciplinary scholar working at the intersection of anthropology and history. My research interests are politics of memory, anthropology of body, political piety and militancy, poetics of history and pastness, and Shia transnational militancy. Material religion, visual studies and speculative realism are approaches that inspire my analytical musings. Address: Amsterdam, North Holland, Netherlands
This Special Issue shows that narratives of domination are political
storytelling that promises i... more This Special Issue shows that narratives of domination are political storytelling that promises its audience that ‘becoming the people’ is possible via a shared history that can continue to exist if an obscure ‘they’ and its subjectivity are obliterated. Nowadays, systematic killings and starvation of Palestinians, rampant attacks and murdering Muslims in Britain and Queer peoples in the USA are good examples of why listening closely to political storytelling is called for. It has become paramount to listen closely to political storytelling, its dehumanisation and inhuman capacities and distortion of historical facts since 7th October 2023. The suffering and struggles of Palestinians, the destruction of Gaza and the genocide are misused to either mobilise and appease right wing populism in Western Europe (especially the Netherlands and Germany) or mobilise religious populism in states where Islam is constitutionally acknowledged primary religion (especially Islamic Republic of Iran and Pakistan). Listening closely to political storytelling is about teasing out populism as doing politics rather than thin fables emerging from misinformation and disinformation or deception and malintention.
Parts of Islamist Studies, Security and Conflict Studies, and Terrorism Studies reduce Shia comba... more Parts of Islamist Studies, Security and Conflict Studies, and Terrorism Studies reduce Shia combatants to indoctrinated masses due to their biased scholarship. Their approach remains top-down and macro-level, overlooking lived experiences and individual perceptions of those engaged in political violence. Accordingly, this article critically engages with such scholarship by highlighting how lived experiences and individual perceptions configure non-ideational paths toward political violence. I propose an ethnographically guided phenomenological inquiry of Shia nonstate armed actors and their situatedness in warscapes. I use the concept of warscapes and the complexities of individuation in warscapes to highlight the conceptual necessity of theorizing political violence from relational grounds that blurs the boundaries of micro-level and meso-level analysis. These relational grounds are shaped by inhumanities that predate conflicts and political violence reticulate inhumanities into a network that constitutes warscapes. I show this by combining the ethnography of Shia transnational militancy with the political histories of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. My critical interventions propose that Shia militancy is not only about sectarian divisions in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria or Yemen and the Islamic Republic of Iran’s defending its territories by other means. Shia militancy is also about individual worldviews, governing the multitudes, domestic politics, taming the Shia citizenry and the state keeping entropy and disorder low.
This article redefines sectarianism as sectarian thinking via an ethnography of Shi'i militia fig... more This article redefines sectarianism as sectarian thinking via an ethnography of Shi'i militia fighters in Iraq and their relationships with the past. I explain this redefinition by tracing memories and histories that motivated Iraqi Shi'i veterans of the Iran-Iraq War to join the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF). Accordingly, I argue that everyday sectarian thinking in Iraq is less ideologically grounded than commonly presumed and rather feeds on memories, histories, and socialization in violence. I highlight how acts of non-remembrance and a lack of engagement with memories of the Iran-Iraq War fuel sectarian thinking and justify sectarian inhumanities.
Th e so-called Iranian revolutionary youth's aspirations for martyrdom are not based merely on Is... more Th e so-called Iranian revolutionary youth's aspirations for martyrdom are not based merely on Islamist doctrines or Islamic ideologies. Th ey readily place all fallen combatants in a 'martyrdom box', linking them to Islamic sacrality and claiming they feel martyrs via martyrs' ghostly whispers. Th rough ethnographic journeys in Iran, Lebanon and Iraq, I unpack how they craft the 'martyrdom box' and communicate with the ghostly whispers. I argue that the Iranian revolutionary youth's perceptions of martyrdom and militant subjectivities emerge in relation to disbelieving histories that contest the state's narratives and their mystical relationships with martyrs. Th is article takes Iranian revolutionary youth as exemplars to explain how individuals implicated in political violence craft acts of 'knowing' and render death and dead 'knowable'. In other words, instead of asking what is known, I proceed by unpacking how what is known becomes real and how the act of knowing contributes to the emergence of reality.
Supplements to Method & Theory in the Study of Religion, , 2022
This article critiques anthropological approaches such as Victor Turner’s and his epigones that r... more This article critiques anthropological approaches such as Victor Turner’s and his epigones that reduce objects to sets of meanings, functions and attributes either located in-between matter and reality or in some liminal realm. I borrow from my ethnographic encounters among the Shia nonstate armed combatants in the Middle East since 2007 and especially focus on nonideological/nonreligious elements of conflict such as materiality of combat, material expressions of violence, and pain and pleasure, to find a fresh location for the so-called in-between that upends dualities and dichotomies without compromising on how human and nonhuman relate, how they co-constitute realities and become religious through meanings and representations. By way of guns, martyrdom, and religion, this article pays attention to religion without centering religiosity, religious practices, and religion. Instead, it follows how things gather around religion without becoming religious. In other words, I follow how things of conflict relate to religion, shape religiosity, and collaborate with believers. This is an intentional academic choice, namely, to talk about religion without engaging with religion explicitly to highlight nonhuman partners in religiously framed political violence. I propose a deeper engagement with conflict cosmologies beyond anthropological methodological routines which limit objects to a bundle of qualities both in appearances and meanings or overspreading objects to the sum of their relationships, like Actor Network Theory.
Memories of wars and constantly living with them become the measure of citizenhood, revolutionary... more Memories of wars and constantly living with them become the measure of citizenhood, revolutionary commitments and piety remembering, where an incessant state-sponsored memory machine frames memory as a civil religion. This article argues that memories, remembering and mnemonic acts become the forces that hold a civil religion together, and then explains how mnemonic subjects/remembering individuals contribute to a civil religion through consumption of memories. I ground my argument in anthropological explorations of how the Iranian state choreographs a memory machine that collects, publishes and circulates memories of the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988). The memory machine tries to inspire postwar generations with an Islamic model of piety, invent a militarized civil religion and inculcate the revolutionary youth into it. However, the Iranian revolutionary youth use memories of the war as 'wiggle rooms' to reshape the state-choreographed civil religion without expressing either dissent or absolute compliance. Ethnographically, I highlight that the revolutionary youth's compliance may seem blind obedience but on the contrary, their compliance is an agentive attempt to resist subtly, find individuated sovereignty and craft mnemonic subjectivities under authoritarian conditions.
Hope for a messianic future and the Messiah’s return emerge from
everyday life negotiations o... more Hope for a messianic future and the Messiah’s return emerge from everyday life negotiations of some Iranians within the Islamic Republic of Iran. The Islamic Republic has co-opted the religion, messianic hope and the Messiah to build a mode of religious governance and to maintain pro-regime families and the revolu- tionary youth. I will demonstrate politics of hope in Iran and argue that subscribing to the messianic hope by pro-regime families may appear as a religious expression of futurity or compliance with the Islamic Republic at first glance. However, messianic hope is a mode of world-making to endure militancy, militarization of everyday life, political Islam and the pain caused by a stream of dead bodies coming from different conflict zones. This article builds on the existing debates of hope to show how the reality of ‘the future’ becomes messianic for Shia believers and how social actors carving hope amidst precarities is not an orientation towards the future but rather a mode of making-do.
Rethinking History The Journal of Theory and Practice, 2021
‘We are history’ is a declaration that traverses identity labels, generational
memories and natio... more ‘We are history’ is a declaration that traverses identity labels, generational memories and nation building through history. I demonstrate that announcing we are history is a political-mystical practice, and living with evocative historical affect permeated from the reminiscent of past violence. It allows social actors to indulge in a type of transcendence, which expands them into a cosmological scale that exceeds social imaginaries and banalities of everyday life. I borrow from Iranian revolutionary youth’s experiences and my ethnographic journeys among Iranian volunteer combatants who fought in Iraq and Syria to illustrate how history is localized in settings which socialization occurs in postwar societies. By way of anthropology of history or doing history in anthropology, I explain how the claim we are history is an attempt to become a community of individuals via history and how social actors turn history into a world-making practice that informs political participation and justifies for them to support authoritarian traits of a state.
Narratives, stories and memories of pasts mutate through times,
politics and sociocultural practi... more Narratives, stories and memories of pasts mutate through times, politics and sociocultural practices. The mute-ability of past is a visible trend in post-war societies like Iran, where the state apparatus operates incessantly as a memory machine. However, muting the past cannot be limited to the state as a political actor. I have explored the role of social actors in sociocultural processes that mute the pasts. I draw from my ethnographic encounters and fieldwork among Iranian revolutionary youth who display commitment to political Islam and armed resistance to explain how social actors consume memories of past conflicts and contribute to muting/mutating histories. I argue the mute-ability of a past is not about changes and transformation of the past but about what social actors do with the past and how they render it mute to manage the present era. An exploration of mute-ability and how pasts are rendered silent is required, via an anthropology of history/past to show agency in compliance and agentive capacities of people in shaping the past from the present era. This article explores how remembering works when forgetting is not an option and the remembrance of martyrdom is the standard of civic piety in Iran.
I portray mnemonic practices of Iranians who engaged with the past and keep the memories of marty... more I portray mnemonic practices of Iranians who engaged with the past and keep the memories of martyrs of the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988) alive within frames and words. Through pictures taken during the annual commemoration of martyrs in southern Iran, I show how religiosity, politics and generational guilt are entangled in postwar Iran. I move against the grains of memory studies and visual anthropology by maintaining the silences and what is left unsaid instead of rendering war memories, acts of remembering and ways of seeing epistemologically coherent. I argue remembering is a practice locally shaped according the politics of everyday life and not by imagined presupposition of memory scholars. Therefore, I draw an ontological approach towards memories in Iran by ways of seeing and religious worldview of those implicated in the Iranian memory machine.
Emotions and feelings overwhelm mnemonic practices of any collective with traces of violence in i... more Emotions and feelings overwhelm mnemonic practices of any collective with traces of violence in its history. The violent history has become the means for the Iranian regime to regulate the nation's political consciousness. The regime formulates the political consciousness by way of politics of memory and enforcing a master narrative drawn from Shi'i history. I trace elicited emotions, within the war veterans' memoirs, to explain feelings and consciousness in the realm of situated bodies. By way of those emotions, the article outlines an anthropology of emotions that rejects universal codes of emotions and instead proposes following an embodied consciousness through emotions along with histories that evoke them. My argument broadens Sarah Ahmed's idea of history and emotions to arrive at the assemblage of mnemonic practices in postwar Iran and advocate a historically informed anthropology of emotions. k e y w o r d s : memoirs, emotions, corporeality, anthropology of emotions, Middle East War Emotions are visible in the everyday lives of Iranians whose narratives of war and revolution are framed by the experiences of martyrdom and remembrance of their turbulent political history. For instance, Khomeini, the late
Iranian Shi'i believers claim that capturing sorrow and lamentation in their fullest sense falls ... more Iranian Shi'i believers claim that capturing sorrow and lamentation in their fullest sense falls beyond language and reason. Th ey constantly refer to their inability to articulate in order to explain martyrdom and highlight a form of unsaid that explains all that appears impalpable for them. I undertake a journey among Iranian Shi'i youth to trace the unarticulated and the sense of wonder generated via religious experiences. By way of an ethnography of Muharram lamentation ceremonies , this article highlights how the unarticulated and the un said are socially and politically used in service of Shi'i militancy. I explore those uncharted terrains in the darkness of the Lacanian Real and in terms of how the Real is authenticated in order to address how realities are craft ed and religious subjectivities are enacted in the realm of militancy.
Things/objects/materials/nonhumans are integral components of everyday material ecology of humans... more Things/objects/materials/nonhumans are integral components of everyday material ecology of humans. The nonhuman elements contribute to sociality, socialization and configuration of political subjectivities. We explore the dynamics of subject-object relationships via ethnographies of urban gardens and robotic labs. We trace the dynamics of man-plant relationships in urban gardens of Cuba and engineer-humanoid relationships in the United States to highlight how these relationships inform the politics and ethical complexity of human-centred ecologies. This collaborative effort offers two different case studies to broaden the notions of materi-ality while critiquing the relationality bound between subjects and objects instead of exploring the emergent properties of their relationship. Our ethnographies are a form of hands-on anthropology that outlines the third entity that emerges from the subject object relationship and configures the material ecology of everyday lives. Our discussion contributes to the complexities of politics of everyday life and to the challenges of our contemporary era by highlighting the importance of details of everyday lives and how we craft relationships with nonhuman people.
Prayer beads, through processes of craftsmanship and trade,
arrive at meanings, significations, a... more Prayer beads, through processes of craftsmanship and trade, arrive at meanings, significations, and imaginative associations that are inscribed by religious-cultural codes or social networks. The shadows of meanings overwhelm their material existence as prayer beads despite their lives beginning before their enactment within the socio-cultural and religious networks. Therefore, alongside an Iranian Sufi murshid, I follow the object-ness and the life of rosaries and prayer beads in an "apprenticeship ethnographic" journey. I address the material life of rosaries to explain how their object-ness contributes to their materiality and meaning formation that they gain in a Sufi order. An approach informed by speculative realism and object-oriented ontology (OOO) is chosen to examine what it means to study a religious object-in-itself. I follow the religiously loaded object and its spiritual traces by way of OOO to forgo the meanings and relationships that shadow the objects.
The battle between Iran and Iraq ended with a ceasefire being signed in 1988 but the war continue... more The battle between Iran and Iraq ended with a ceasefire being signed in 1988 but the war continued for most Iranians and their leadership. Even today after three decades, the war continues for Iranians who live in the borderlands as they struggle with the landmines and left-overs of the battles. Mehdi Monem, a celebrated Iranian war photographer, frames the pain of Iranians in the borderlands as the counter-narrative that challenges the mainstream frames of propaganda. He challenges the master narrative of the Islamic Republic of Iran that generates meanings for the frames of the war through notions of martyrdom and sacrifice. Hence, I follow his work in the context of the visual culture of martyrdom via an ethnography that explains how Iranians receive the pain of others 30 years after the war at home and abroad.
The social sciences speak of violence through its meaning, performances,
manifestations and repr... more The social sciences speak of violence through its meaning, performances,
manifestations and representations; however, the inner
workings of violence are less explored. In order to suggest a
different mode of seeing violence, I explore the inner workings
of violence through the pleasures of and fun among Shi’i volunteer
combatants. I apply Walter Benjamin’s motion of pure means
to explain how violence becomes self-referential and nonrepresentational
via combat-zone ethnography amongst Iraqi
Shi’i militants who fought against ISIS in Iraq. I address the fine
line between pleasure and fun in order to highlight the inner
workings of violence during combat and to encourage a fresh
bottom-up anthropological perspective in assessing the parameters
of the persistence and resilience of volunteer combatants.
My approach advocates moving beyond recruitment and ideological
interpolation by questioning the allure of combat through an
ontological framework that includes combatants’ perspectives and
narratives
I explore the slipperiness of violence, its destructive and reproductive emergence, by way of tex... more I explore the slipperiness of violence, its destructive and reproductive emergence, by way of textures. Through tales of an ethnography undertaken in combat zones of Shi'i combatants fighting ISIS, I address the textures of violence, that is, those capacities that can be accessed not via meanings but rather through the moments in which meanings are reimagined and nothing exists except the very act that refers to itself. These moments and acts highlight the borders between pleasure and fun to seek out not only the inner workings of violence but also how one speaks anthropologically of an action that conveys no meaning except itself. My pursuit of the mode of engagement with violence among combatants challenged me to think differently about pleasure and fun at the frontlines by encouraging me to traverse understandings of Islamic militancy and combat motivations within the limitations of ideology and religiosity.
Martyrdom, sacrifice, and the dedication of one's life to fight for a higher cause are central th... more Martyrdom, sacrifice, and the dedication of one's life to fight for a higher cause are central themes of Shi'i militancy. I recount my journey among Iranian Shi'i youth who fought or enlisted to fight in Lebanon, Iraq, and Syria, to trace their ineffable experiences and silences, which they used to justify desires for martyrdom. I explore by way of an ethnography of mourning and the lamentation ceremonies of Muharram how individuals' ineffable experiences and perplexities emerge as explanations of their own commitment to the cause. I call on the Laca-nian Real to discuss how people craft the unarticulated, the unsaid and networks to navigate their subjectivity while they encounter the divine. I broaden the Lacanian Real through an exploration of Shi'i mystical notions, in order to address how Lacan's work can be applied in non-European traditions of the unsaid and the unarticulated.
War photographs have remained essential to the propaganda machinery of the Iranian state since th... more War photographs have remained essential to the propaganda machinery of the Iranian state since the inception of the war with Iraq. These photographs contribute to the visual culture of martyrdom and are celebrated within a dominant meaning-making regime. However, there are rare counter-narratives that unsettle the master narrative of the Iranian state and I turn to that of a war photographer whose work is sidelined by the state. I explore this counter-narrative to discover the workings of the state-sanctioned narrative through modes of reception of the photographs by Iranians both inside and outside Iran. I strive to trace the reception of the pain of others through politics of frame and the ethnography of the visual culture of martyrdom after almost three decades since the war
Sufi mystical experiences and practices are populated with objects. Objects exist among masters ... more Sufi mystical experiences and practices are populated with objects. Objects exist among masters as well as disciples and followers regardless of the meanings and significations that practices impose on them. The life of these objects begins before they are enacted into sociocultural and religious relationships, as they are crafted or
traded before they take on the overwhelming semiosis ascribed to them by religious cultural codes or social networks. This article presents an apprenticeship ethnographic journey in which I follow an Iranian Sufi master and, along with him, the tensile life of Sufi prayer beads, or tasbihs. I address prayer beads as an object prior to their gaining
of any religious meaning in the networks of everyday life. Tracing the material life of prayer beads reveals how the objectness of the rosary preexists the material practices that give it meaning in the Sufi order. Through the approach of speculative realism I examine what it means to study a religious-object-in-itself. I follow the religiously loaded object and its spiritual emergence by way of object-oriented ontology to forgo
the meanings and relationships that shadow the objects.
This Special Issue shows that narratives of domination are political
storytelling that promises i... more This Special Issue shows that narratives of domination are political storytelling that promises its audience that ‘becoming the people’ is possible via a shared history that can continue to exist if an obscure ‘they’ and its subjectivity are obliterated. Nowadays, systematic killings and starvation of Palestinians, rampant attacks and murdering Muslims in Britain and Queer peoples in the USA are good examples of why listening closely to political storytelling is called for. It has become paramount to listen closely to political storytelling, its dehumanisation and inhuman capacities and distortion of historical facts since 7th October 2023. The suffering and struggles of Palestinians, the destruction of Gaza and the genocide are misused to either mobilise and appease right wing populism in Western Europe (especially the Netherlands and Germany) or mobilise religious populism in states where Islam is constitutionally acknowledged primary religion (especially Islamic Republic of Iran and Pakistan). Listening closely to political storytelling is about teasing out populism as doing politics rather than thin fables emerging from misinformation and disinformation or deception and malintention.
Parts of Islamist Studies, Security and Conflict Studies, and Terrorism Studies reduce Shia comba... more Parts of Islamist Studies, Security and Conflict Studies, and Terrorism Studies reduce Shia combatants to indoctrinated masses due to their biased scholarship. Their approach remains top-down and macro-level, overlooking lived experiences and individual perceptions of those engaged in political violence. Accordingly, this article critically engages with such scholarship by highlighting how lived experiences and individual perceptions configure non-ideational paths toward political violence. I propose an ethnographically guided phenomenological inquiry of Shia nonstate armed actors and their situatedness in warscapes. I use the concept of warscapes and the complexities of individuation in warscapes to highlight the conceptual necessity of theorizing political violence from relational grounds that blurs the boundaries of micro-level and meso-level analysis. These relational grounds are shaped by inhumanities that predate conflicts and political violence reticulate inhumanities into a network that constitutes warscapes. I show this by combining the ethnography of Shia transnational militancy with the political histories of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. My critical interventions propose that Shia militancy is not only about sectarian divisions in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria or Yemen and the Islamic Republic of Iran’s defending its territories by other means. Shia militancy is also about individual worldviews, governing the multitudes, domestic politics, taming the Shia citizenry and the state keeping entropy and disorder low.
This article redefines sectarianism as sectarian thinking via an ethnography of Shi'i militia fig... more This article redefines sectarianism as sectarian thinking via an ethnography of Shi'i militia fighters in Iraq and their relationships with the past. I explain this redefinition by tracing memories and histories that motivated Iraqi Shi'i veterans of the Iran-Iraq War to join the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF). Accordingly, I argue that everyday sectarian thinking in Iraq is less ideologically grounded than commonly presumed and rather feeds on memories, histories, and socialization in violence. I highlight how acts of non-remembrance and a lack of engagement with memories of the Iran-Iraq War fuel sectarian thinking and justify sectarian inhumanities.
Th e so-called Iranian revolutionary youth's aspirations for martyrdom are not based merely on Is... more Th e so-called Iranian revolutionary youth's aspirations for martyrdom are not based merely on Islamist doctrines or Islamic ideologies. Th ey readily place all fallen combatants in a 'martyrdom box', linking them to Islamic sacrality and claiming they feel martyrs via martyrs' ghostly whispers. Th rough ethnographic journeys in Iran, Lebanon and Iraq, I unpack how they craft the 'martyrdom box' and communicate with the ghostly whispers. I argue that the Iranian revolutionary youth's perceptions of martyrdom and militant subjectivities emerge in relation to disbelieving histories that contest the state's narratives and their mystical relationships with martyrs. Th is article takes Iranian revolutionary youth as exemplars to explain how individuals implicated in political violence craft acts of 'knowing' and render death and dead 'knowable'. In other words, instead of asking what is known, I proceed by unpacking how what is known becomes real and how the act of knowing contributes to the emergence of reality.
Supplements to Method & Theory in the Study of Religion, , 2022
This article critiques anthropological approaches such as Victor Turner’s and his epigones that r... more This article critiques anthropological approaches such as Victor Turner’s and his epigones that reduce objects to sets of meanings, functions and attributes either located in-between matter and reality or in some liminal realm. I borrow from my ethnographic encounters among the Shia nonstate armed combatants in the Middle East since 2007 and especially focus on nonideological/nonreligious elements of conflict such as materiality of combat, material expressions of violence, and pain and pleasure, to find a fresh location for the so-called in-between that upends dualities and dichotomies without compromising on how human and nonhuman relate, how they co-constitute realities and become religious through meanings and representations. By way of guns, martyrdom, and religion, this article pays attention to religion without centering religiosity, religious practices, and religion. Instead, it follows how things gather around religion without becoming religious. In other words, I follow how things of conflict relate to religion, shape religiosity, and collaborate with believers. This is an intentional academic choice, namely, to talk about religion without engaging with religion explicitly to highlight nonhuman partners in religiously framed political violence. I propose a deeper engagement with conflict cosmologies beyond anthropological methodological routines which limit objects to a bundle of qualities both in appearances and meanings or overspreading objects to the sum of their relationships, like Actor Network Theory.
Memories of wars and constantly living with them become the measure of citizenhood, revolutionary... more Memories of wars and constantly living with them become the measure of citizenhood, revolutionary commitments and piety remembering, where an incessant state-sponsored memory machine frames memory as a civil religion. This article argues that memories, remembering and mnemonic acts become the forces that hold a civil religion together, and then explains how mnemonic subjects/remembering individuals contribute to a civil religion through consumption of memories. I ground my argument in anthropological explorations of how the Iranian state choreographs a memory machine that collects, publishes and circulates memories of the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988). The memory machine tries to inspire postwar generations with an Islamic model of piety, invent a militarized civil religion and inculcate the revolutionary youth into it. However, the Iranian revolutionary youth use memories of the war as 'wiggle rooms' to reshape the state-choreographed civil religion without expressing either dissent or absolute compliance. Ethnographically, I highlight that the revolutionary youth's compliance may seem blind obedience but on the contrary, their compliance is an agentive attempt to resist subtly, find individuated sovereignty and craft mnemonic subjectivities under authoritarian conditions.
Hope for a messianic future and the Messiah’s return emerge from
everyday life negotiations o... more Hope for a messianic future and the Messiah’s return emerge from everyday life negotiations of some Iranians within the Islamic Republic of Iran. The Islamic Republic has co-opted the religion, messianic hope and the Messiah to build a mode of religious governance and to maintain pro-regime families and the revolu- tionary youth. I will demonstrate politics of hope in Iran and argue that subscribing to the messianic hope by pro-regime families may appear as a religious expression of futurity or compliance with the Islamic Republic at first glance. However, messianic hope is a mode of world-making to endure militancy, militarization of everyday life, political Islam and the pain caused by a stream of dead bodies coming from different conflict zones. This article builds on the existing debates of hope to show how the reality of ‘the future’ becomes messianic for Shia believers and how social actors carving hope amidst precarities is not an orientation towards the future but rather a mode of making-do.
Rethinking History The Journal of Theory and Practice, 2021
‘We are history’ is a declaration that traverses identity labels, generational
memories and natio... more ‘We are history’ is a declaration that traverses identity labels, generational memories and nation building through history. I demonstrate that announcing we are history is a political-mystical practice, and living with evocative historical affect permeated from the reminiscent of past violence. It allows social actors to indulge in a type of transcendence, which expands them into a cosmological scale that exceeds social imaginaries and banalities of everyday life. I borrow from Iranian revolutionary youth’s experiences and my ethnographic journeys among Iranian volunteer combatants who fought in Iraq and Syria to illustrate how history is localized in settings which socialization occurs in postwar societies. By way of anthropology of history or doing history in anthropology, I explain how the claim we are history is an attempt to become a community of individuals via history and how social actors turn history into a world-making practice that informs political participation and justifies for them to support authoritarian traits of a state.
Narratives, stories and memories of pasts mutate through times,
politics and sociocultural practi... more Narratives, stories and memories of pasts mutate through times, politics and sociocultural practices. The mute-ability of past is a visible trend in post-war societies like Iran, where the state apparatus operates incessantly as a memory machine. However, muting the past cannot be limited to the state as a political actor. I have explored the role of social actors in sociocultural processes that mute the pasts. I draw from my ethnographic encounters and fieldwork among Iranian revolutionary youth who display commitment to political Islam and armed resistance to explain how social actors consume memories of past conflicts and contribute to muting/mutating histories. I argue the mute-ability of a past is not about changes and transformation of the past but about what social actors do with the past and how they render it mute to manage the present era. An exploration of mute-ability and how pasts are rendered silent is required, via an anthropology of history/past to show agency in compliance and agentive capacities of people in shaping the past from the present era. This article explores how remembering works when forgetting is not an option and the remembrance of martyrdom is the standard of civic piety in Iran.
I portray mnemonic practices of Iranians who engaged with the past and keep the memories of marty... more I portray mnemonic practices of Iranians who engaged with the past and keep the memories of martyrs of the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988) alive within frames and words. Through pictures taken during the annual commemoration of martyrs in southern Iran, I show how religiosity, politics and generational guilt are entangled in postwar Iran. I move against the grains of memory studies and visual anthropology by maintaining the silences and what is left unsaid instead of rendering war memories, acts of remembering and ways of seeing epistemologically coherent. I argue remembering is a practice locally shaped according the politics of everyday life and not by imagined presupposition of memory scholars. Therefore, I draw an ontological approach towards memories in Iran by ways of seeing and religious worldview of those implicated in the Iranian memory machine.
Emotions and feelings overwhelm mnemonic practices of any collective with traces of violence in i... more Emotions and feelings overwhelm mnemonic practices of any collective with traces of violence in its history. The violent history has become the means for the Iranian regime to regulate the nation's political consciousness. The regime formulates the political consciousness by way of politics of memory and enforcing a master narrative drawn from Shi'i history. I trace elicited emotions, within the war veterans' memoirs, to explain feelings and consciousness in the realm of situated bodies. By way of those emotions, the article outlines an anthropology of emotions that rejects universal codes of emotions and instead proposes following an embodied consciousness through emotions along with histories that evoke them. My argument broadens Sarah Ahmed's idea of history and emotions to arrive at the assemblage of mnemonic practices in postwar Iran and advocate a historically informed anthropology of emotions. k e y w o r d s : memoirs, emotions, corporeality, anthropology of emotions, Middle East War Emotions are visible in the everyday lives of Iranians whose narratives of war and revolution are framed by the experiences of martyrdom and remembrance of their turbulent political history. For instance, Khomeini, the late
Iranian Shi'i believers claim that capturing sorrow and lamentation in their fullest sense falls ... more Iranian Shi'i believers claim that capturing sorrow and lamentation in their fullest sense falls beyond language and reason. Th ey constantly refer to their inability to articulate in order to explain martyrdom and highlight a form of unsaid that explains all that appears impalpable for them. I undertake a journey among Iranian Shi'i youth to trace the unarticulated and the sense of wonder generated via religious experiences. By way of an ethnography of Muharram lamentation ceremonies , this article highlights how the unarticulated and the un said are socially and politically used in service of Shi'i militancy. I explore those uncharted terrains in the darkness of the Lacanian Real and in terms of how the Real is authenticated in order to address how realities are craft ed and religious subjectivities are enacted in the realm of militancy.
Things/objects/materials/nonhumans are integral components of everyday material ecology of humans... more Things/objects/materials/nonhumans are integral components of everyday material ecology of humans. The nonhuman elements contribute to sociality, socialization and configuration of political subjectivities. We explore the dynamics of subject-object relationships via ethnographies of urban gardens and robotic labs. We trace the dynamics of man-plant relationships in urban gardens of Cuba and engineer-humanoid relationships in the United States to highlight how these relationships inform the politics and ethical complexity of human-centred ecologies. This collaborative effort offers two different case studies to broaden the notions of materi-ality while critiquing the relationality bound between subjects and objects instead of exploring the emergent properties of their relationship. Our ethnographies are a form of hands-on anthropology that outlines the third entity that emerges from the subject object relationship and configures the material ecology of everyday lives. Our discussion contributes to the complexities of politics of everyday life and to the challenges of our contemporary era by highlighting the importance of details of everyday lives and how we craft relationships with nonhuman people.
Prayer beads, through processes of craftsmanship and trade,
arrive at meanings, significations, a... more Prayer beads, through processes of craftsmanship and trade, arrive at meanings, significations, and imaginative associations that are inscribed by religious-cultural codes or social networks. The shadows of meanings overwhelm their material existence as prayer beads despite their lives beginning before their enactment within the socio-cultural and religious networks. Therefore, alongside an Iranian Sufi murshid, I follow the object-ness and the life of rosaries and prayer beads in an "apprenticeship ethnographic" journey. I address the material life of rosaries to explain how their object-ness contributes to their materiality and meaning formation that they gain in a Sufi order. An approach informed by speculative realism and object-oriented ontology (OOO) is chosen to examine what it means to study a religious object-in-itself. I follow the religiously loaded object and its spiritual traces by way of OOO to forgo the meanings and relationships that shadow the objects.
The battle between Iran and Iraq ended with a ceasefire being signed in 1988 but the war continue... more The battle between Iran and Iraq ended with a ceasefire being signed in 1988 but the war continued for most Iranians and their leadership. Even today after three decades, the war continues for Iranians who live in the borderlands as they struggle with the landmines and left-overs of the battles. Mehdi Monem, a celebrated Iranian war photographer, frames the pain of Iranians in the borderlands as the counter-narrative that challenges the mainstream frames of propaganda. He challenges the master narrative of the Islamic Republic of Iran that generates meanings for the frames of the war through notions of martyrdom and sacrifice. Hence, I follow his work in the context of the visual culture of martyrdom via an ethnography that explains how Iranians receive the pain of others 30 years after the war at home and abroad.
The social sciences speak of violence through its meaning, performances,
manifestations and repr... more The social sciences speak of violence through its meaning, performances,
manifestations and representations; however, the inner
workings of violence are less explored. In order to suggest a
different mode of seeing violence, I explore the inner workings
of violence through the pleasures of and fun among Shi’i volunteer
combatants. I apply Walter Benjamin’s motion of pure means
to explain how violence becomes self-referential and nonrepresentational
via combat-zone ethnography amongst Iraqi
Shi’i militants who fought against ISIS in Iraq. I address the fine
line between pleasure and fun in order to highlight the inner
workings of violence during combat and to encourage a fresh
bottom-up anthropological perspective in assessing the parameters
of the persistence and resilience of volunteer combatants.
My approach advocates moving beyond recruitment and ideological
interpolation by questioning the allure of combat through an
ontological framework that includes combatants’ perspectives and
narratives
I explore the slipperiness of violence, its destructive and reproductive emergence, by way of tex... more I explore the slipperiness of violence, its destructive and reproductive emergence, by way of textures. Through tales of an ethnography undertaken in combat zones of Shi'i combatants fighting ISIS, I address the textures of violence, that is, those capacities that can be accessed not via meanings but rather through the moments in which meanings are reimagined and nothing exists except the very act that refers to itself. These moments and acts highlight the borders between pleasure and fun to seek out not only the inner workings of violence but also how one speaks anthropologically of an action that conveys no meaning except itself. My pursuit of the mode of engagement with violence among combatants challenged me to think differently about pleasure and fun at the frontlines by encouraging me to traverse understandings of Islamic militancy and combat motivations within the limitations of ideology and religiosity.
Martyrdom, sacrifice, and the dedication of one's life to fight for a higher cause are central th... more Martyrdom, sacrifice, and the dedication of one's life to fight for a higher cause are central themes of Shi'i militancy. I recount my journey among Iranian Shi'i youth who fought or enlisted to fight in Lebanon, Iraq, and Syria, to trace their ineffable experiences and silences, which they used to justify desires for martyrdom. I explore by way of an ethnography of mourning and the lamentation ceremonies of Muharram how individuals' ineffable experiences and perplexities emerge as explanations of their own commitment to the cause. I call on the Laca-nian Real to discuss how people craft the unarticulated, the unsaid and networks to navigate their subjectivity while they encounter the divine. I broaden the Lacanian Real through an exploration of Shi'i mystical notions, in order to address how Lacan's work can be applied in non-European traditions of the unsaid and the unarticulated.
War photographs have remained essential to the propaganda machinery of the Iranian state since th... more War photographs have remained essential to the propaganda machinery of the Iranian state since the inception of the war with Iraq. These photographs contribute to the visual culture of martyrdom and are celebrated within a dominant meaning-making regime. However, there are rare counter-narratives that unsettle the master narrative of the Iranian state and I turn to that of a war photographer whose work is sidelined by the state. I explore this counter-narrative to discover the workings of the state-sanctioned narrative through modes of reception of the photographs by Iranians both inside and outside Iran. I strive to trace the reception of the pain of others through politics of frame and the ethnography of the visual culture of martyrdom after almost three decades since the war
Sufi mystical experiences and practices are populated with objects. Objects exist among masters ... more Sufi mystical experiences and practices are populated with objects. Objects exist among masters as well as disciples and followers regardless of the meanings and significations that practices impose on them. The life of these objects begins before they are enacted into sociocultural and religious relationships, as they are crafted or
traded before they take on the overwhelming semiosis ascribed to them by religious cultural codes or social networks. This article presents an apprenticeship ethnographic journey in which I follow an Iranian Sufi master and, along with him, the tensile life of Sufi prayer beads, or tasbihs. I address prayer beads as an object prior to their gaining
of any religious meaning in the networks of everyday life. Tracing the material life of prayer beads reveals how the objectness of the rosary preexists the material practices that give it meaning in the Sufi order. Through the approach of speculative realism I examine what it means to study a religious-object-in-itself. I follow the religiously loaded object and its spiritual emergence by way of object-oriented ontology to forgo
the meanings and relationships that shadow the objects.
In this review, I take a look at Sefat's book Revolution of Things and I reflect on his ethnograp... more In this review, I take a look at Sefat's book Revolution of Things and I reflect on his ethnography of things in Iran and his application of Latourian thoughts in Iran.
Anthropologists and ethnographers are fascinating storytellers, but their storytelling skill does... more Anthropologists and ethnographers are fascinating storytellers, but their storytelling skill does not make them any less weird and challenging to comprehend. Matthew Engelke’s book is an intriguing invitation to demystify the oddity and weirdness of anthropological thinking.
Reviews: The role of commodities in social life 5 There is only one (not too great) flaw in this ... more Reviews: The role of commodities in social life 5 There is only one (not too great) flaw in this work, and that is its lack of explanation for the patchiness of the chronology. Teaiwa most carefully traces people, flows, and contexts from the turn of the 20th century to the Second World War. She discusses the Banabans' lawsuits (in the 1960s and 1970s) to force the British government to provide greater compensation and rehabilitate their island – the Banabans lost. We are also presented with evolving kinship patterns and dance traditions, mid-century to the present, and with Teaiwa's fieldwork in the 1990s and 2000s. But detail on other decades (the 1940s, 1950s, and 1980s, for example) is scarce, and the 19th century seems homogeneous. A drought in the 1870s killed a large part of Banaba's population: how did this set the stage for European mining? We are told that the Japanese occupation of Banaba was extremely harsh, that all the islanders were forcibly evacuated, and that one British ship picked up the remnants and dropped them off on Rabi in the middle of a tropical storm. Teaiwa wisely focuses on her strengths, narrative, archival, and ethnographic. But the hastiness with which she glosses over certain periods sits poorly with her consistent and subtle insistence on space and time. The back cover provides such terms as 'anthropology,' 'environmental studies,' and 'globalization,' but because this monograph succeeds in presenting Banaba as a negotiation , it makes keywords feel even more constricting that usual. Generalization emerges organically: the Banaban term Te aba (simultaneously meaning 'land' and 'people') helped me better understand the groundedness of Romanian peasants – and Teaiwa admirably resists turning such terms into career-enhancing buzzwords. Ultimately, the bone bed and personhood of Ocean Island has, with and without Banaban aid and acquiescence, been spread around the soils and waters of our globe. Teaiwa's achievement in tracing this process is to produce a rare work of elegance and relevance. The very phrase 'digital materiality' provokes a multitude of opinions and interpretations. Scholars of design studies, architects, and cultural critics have provided definitions of digital materiality while separating the digital and the material from each other. In the
Dreams are unsettling for dreamers regardless of their creed or communal identity. However, how l... more Dreams are unsettling for dreamers regardless of their creed or communal identity. However, how long dreams haunt dreamers is an entirely different story. While studying in seminary, I encountered many perplexities with respect to dreams. I remember a senior theologian who reminded his pupils about the importance of dreams. He once attempted to explain the meaning behind the appearance of the rivers of heaven in dreams by virtue of Quranic verses, insisting that they do not imply the promise of grace or paradise but, rather, they foretell that one will end up with a wife who urinates in her bed. I was amazed at how a theologian could extrapolate such interpretations. In the work under review, Elizabeth Sirriyeh tries to situate such amazement in a larger historical trajectory in order to reveal the impact of earlier traditions on dreaming in the " world of Islam. " Sirriyeh elucidates the history of dreams and dream interpretation and their social functions in Islamicate culture over the course of nine chapters. Although it is not formally organized in this manner, I think it is beneficial to divide the book into two sections: the first three chapters examine dreams and dream interpretation historically from pre-Islamic to Islamic societies, and in the remaining chapters she shifts attention to the social imaginaries of dreaming among subsequent people of the faith. The first chapter explores the patterns of dreaming and interpreting dreams in pre-Islamic contexts. Sirriyeh pays special attention to Artemidorus's manual on the modes of dream interpretation. Identifying the patterns articulated therein, she demonstrates how they reoccur in the Abrahamic traditions' methods of interpreting dreams, even to the extent of sharing identical readings of specific symbols. She gives the example of how both Jewish rabbis, based on the Babylonian Talmud, and Artemidorus understood " a raven seen in a dream as representing an adulterer " (23). Another fascinating observation Sirriyeh makes in this chapter is how within the Christian tradition the appearance of angels in dreams " could help to explain conversions or perhaps encourage them " (26). After outlining common narratives and similar interpretative models found in dream manuals from the pre-Islamic to early Islamic eras, she concludes that there were " essentially conservative qualities of dream interpretation in the region " (28). As to the questions, why do dreams matter and why do believers in and practitioners of the Abrahamic traditions seek ways to interpret them, Sirriyeh proffers a poetic answer: " to release the dreamer from the powerful and evil hold of the uninterpreted dream " (12).
Welcoming, absorbing, intriguing, bonding and unique spaces:
the small-scale urban gardens of cen... more Welcoming, absorbing, intriguing, bonding and unique spaces: the small-scale urban gardens of central Havana play a fundamental role in our ethnographic stories. In this chapter we introduce the urban garden to emphasize the poetics of gardening through our personal engagement with the gardeners and how they inhabit these spaces. We began our anthropological journey by way of ethnographic gardening and remained open to unexpected changes, the irregular or the indefinite. Our open approach was not only to remain creative in our anthropological craft but to adjust our methods to the challenges of the research environment. We narrate everyday life (the micro perspective) under the authoritative Cuban state through the lived/living experiences of urban gardeners. These experiences are not ‘thick descriptions’ that are linked to larger political issues but rhizomatic observations that highlight the relationships between human and non-humans within the natureculture debate.
War and waring are extremely playful events. Warriors playfully lighten the burden of brutalities... more War and waring are extremely playful events. Warriors playfully lighten the burden of brutalities that either their anticipation hunts them or they are exposed to in combats. However, warriors' playfulness is considered intensely transgressive fun by civilians and those disengaged from wars. For instance, brutal hazing among military personnel depicted in movies such as Full Metal Jacket (1987), G.I. Jane (1997), and Jarhead (2005) or documentaries such as Lohaamim (20121) has evoked moral judgment among civilians. They overlook these brutalities, and the hazing are funacts that pale away brutalities and inhumanities seen or expected to see in combat. In other words, one's fun is brutality for another. Of course, this relative
this is an interview with Advalvas on how Canvas is blocked for Iran due to Knowledge sanctions a... more this is an interview with Advalvas on how Canvas is blocked for Iran due to Knowledge sanctions against Iran.
This is a partisan and critical reading of an article published by Mariam Abaspour. Her work look... more This is a partisan and critical reading of an article published by Mariam Abaspour. Her work looked at music and its place in Shi'i jurisprudence
Right-wing populists (as well as ultra-conservative Islamists) often
mobilise a national past in ... more Right-wing populists (as well as ultra-conservative Islamists) often mobilise a national past in the name of ‘anti-globalism’, e.g. in the German AfD’s fascination with Otto van Bismarck or Barbarossa or both Shia and Sunni Islamists repeating Iranian or Egyptian contributions to 14th century as the Islamic Golden of Age. However, there is also a translocal dimension to these narrations both in terms of conceptions of world order (De Orellana and Michelsen 2019) and considering the participation of those with migration backgrounds to the nativist and populist narratives. Accordingly, this workshop proposes to think about the role of the past in the rise of populist storytelling into distinctive yet interrelated directions: First, narratives of the past work translocally and allow populists to build their own imagined– nativist –communities revolving around the cleavage between ‘globalists’ and ‘patriots’ (Abrahamsen et al. 2020). Migration within/across borders and social media boosting connectivity, mobilities and the elasticity of concepts has shown that the past, narrated by right-wing populists, is not confined to national territories. In fact, an increasing number of far-right and populist actors do not see the nation-state but ‘civilisations’ or ‘cultures’ as the nodes of world order (Crone 2021). Second, looking at the tumultuous political landscape such as alliances between Hindu nationalists and populists in the UK and the USA, Iranian-Germans standing with AfD or supporting populists in Sweden, or we see that narrations of the past feed transnational populism, engaging migrant communities and sometimes mobilising them in support of populists in their homelands. In Western Europe, some Turks and Turkish descent support AKP; in Scandinavia, some Estonians in support EKRE and some Ecuadorians in Spain support APAIS (Jakobson et al. 2022). Against this background, we ask: What kind of histories and stories do right wing populists and ultra-conservative religious actors tell, and how do those stories become appealing translocally?
Boredom has often been defined as idleness, slowness, doing nothing, doing something over and ove... more Boredom has often been defined as idleness, slowness, doing nothing, doing something over and over again, and waiting (Smith 1981, Daren 1999, Maeland & Brunstad 2009, Bergstein 2009, Prozak 2017). These definitions suggest that boredom is an experience that does not generate meanings and ideas by itself about itself. Boredom remains constantly relevant to sociocultural and political spheres only through its opposite. It is portrayed as the empty bubble, or the vacuum of functionality that gains relevance only through what it is not. Nietzsche (1974, 108) explains, "Boredom is that disagreeable 'windless calm' of the soul that precedes a happy voyage and cheerful winds." He highlights boredom only through what it comes after it. However, we would like to suggest boredom encourages and stimulates thoughts, meanings, and ideas, snapping almost 'magically' out of itself. In another words, boredom is the way in and out of boredom. These approaches to boredom overlook the affective quality of boredom and its political capacities, because they only locate boredom through lack, absence and nothingness. This lack, absence and nothingness largely refers to inaction and disappearance of action. We identify this implicit dichotomy of 'action versus inaction,' and addressing inaction as the absence of action as a major theoretical and analytical glitch in understanding boredom. The action/inaction dichotomy overlooks how boredom becomes political and affective through the bodies and collectives that choose to do nothing, remain inactive and slip into the split between agency and subjectivity (Protevi 2011). By acknowledging the action/inaction dichotomy and problematizing its link with boredom, we would like to ask how militarized bodies and weaponized subjectivities actually experience inaction and boredom? How do military personnel or non state-armed actors experience, explain and utter inaction? What is the other side of inaction and boredom for them? Does inaction and boredom influence their worldviews, their combat performances, and the perceptions of violence? Finally, how do boredom and inaction produce a vision of future and post-deployment? We invite papers that address: • Boredom, inaction and violence • Boredom, inaction and creative aggression • Boredom, inaction and transgressive play
When William Murray, Lieutenant Colonel in the Western Fronts (1914-1919) wrote: "We ceased fight... more When William Murray, Lieutenant Colonel in the Western Fronts (1914-1919) wrote: "We ceased fighting today and I have seen the last shot fired… No more danger, no more wars and no more mud and misery" he spoke of the future; the future that would be without dangers, wars, mud and misery. He inscribed the future within possibilities that his present offered to him. His future and present were entangled through the war that it was becoming his past. Future, present and past don't stand by themselves anymore when an armed conflict occurs or an ideological force interrupts the political life of a society. The fury of conflict or the chaos of revolution and any radical change unstructure the temporal chronology and consequently, future, present and past fall entangled into each other. Especially, a past that it has witnessed armed conflicts, it swallows future and fills it with memories, nostalgia, narratives and images to produce a future past. A future past offers a vision for the time-yet-to-come; a vision for a future speculated and awaited. This vision is crafted and guided by memories, histories and narratives of past and they accordingly shape future to act as the mirror of past. Such a future shapes and configures social imaginaries, individual desires and national politics located in a present. The configuration of imaginaries, desires and politics occur through a set of ideologies, ideas and value systems that were already fixed and prescribed in past. A future past, as the entanglement of past and future, is expressed through public memories and collective commemorations which are filled by sociocultural symbols and signifiers. These symbols and signifiers are neither fully constructed by political and cultural authorities (states, supranational institution, parastatal organizations and intelligentsia) nor completely produced organically in everyday social interactions. They emerge inbetween imaginaries prescribed by authorities, institutionalized heritage politics and imaginations. Therefore, by following what Chiara Bottici (2014) called 'imaginal', we invite academics and curious minds to move beyond 'social imaginaries' (Tylor 2003) and imaginations of 'imagined communities' (Anderson 1983) to locate the imaginal politics which administers future past, networks of power and its mnemonic expressions. The notion of imaginal permits us to distinguish between imagination as a faculty of individuals and imaginary that is suggested as a mode of perpetuation of visual representations, depictions and contents. We stress on imaginal politics to highlight
I was inspired by Oliver Sacks's famous essay, "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat" (1970), a... more I was inspired by Oliver Sacks's famous essay, "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat" (1970), and reworked his title for this chapter. In his essay, Sacks recounts the challenges faced by a patient of his who suffered from visual agnosia, an illness that impairs one's ability to recognize presented objects and people's faces. Sacks challenges the conventional assumption that visual agnosia, through damage to the brain, renders the sufferer unable to form abstract attitudes about the world and reduces them to merely a pile of emotions. Instead, he suggests that there are those who experience visual agnosia the other way around-that is, they have an abstract attitude only toward objects and people. Sacks refers to his patient Mr. P, "who lost the concrete, the personal, the 'real' [and reduced it] to the abstract and the categorical" (1970, 8). In a similar manner, I contend in this chapter that Iranian national narratives of martyrs and martyrdom display a collective agnosia of sorts, that takes death for life. In Iran, any bearded man shown in an image in a khaki uniform toting an AK-47 in front of a blue background (preferably a cloudy paradise with white doves, as in the murals, posters, and other propaganda materials distributed by the Iranian state) is seen as a martyr. No history, biography, or face need be recognized; an abstract existence called "martyr" is nonetheless evoked. "Martyr" becomes a general category of man, a species
The Routledge Handbook of Material Religion , 2023
This chapter expands my argument from historical instances to the
present time, in which rifles s... more This chapter expands my argument from historical instances to the present time, in which rifles such as the AK-47 and the Dragunov sniper rifle are familiar icons of transnational Islamist militias. I begin by exploring the entanglement of Islamic traditions with ergonomics and affordances of weaponry and by highlighting the notions of masculinity that shape the social life of weaponry in the present. Weaponry, I argue, explains the emergence of warrior subjectivities from subject-object relationships cultivated in the name of God.
The echoes of Women, Life, Freedom during the recent turmoil have reached beyond Iran’s geographi... more The echoes of Women, Life, Freedom during the recent turmoil have reached beyond Iran’s geographical territories. Iranian diaspora marched, protested and assembled to express their opposition, disagreements and disenchantments with the Islamic Republic’s Islamist theocratic military complex as a whole. A growing literature discusses the protests, Iranians and groups opposing Iran. Some journalistic writing and biased, Whitewashed scholarship of those who align with Toni Blair’s warmongering discourse (see Arabi and Golkar 2023) discuss Basij and IRGC perpetrators. However, they over-generalise and lack a nuanced understanding of what it means for some Iranians to act as a pro-regime and support it in tumultuous times. There is no in-depth academic writing and attention on how those supporting the Islamic Republic experience, understand, interpret and justify the killing of Gina Amini, the subsequent violent suppression of protestors and the indiscriminate killing of Balouch and Kurdish protestors. Similarly, there is no attention to how supporters of the Islamic Republic and regime-inclined Iranians beyond Iran respond, experience and interpret the diaspora activism that opposes the Islamic Republic. Based on ethnographic observations, interviews and social media digital tracking, I will explain in this round table what it means to support the Islamic Republic and be ‘regime-inclined’ in Europe. In other words, my contribution explains what the Islamic Republic is beyond Iran.
Uploads
Papers by Younes Saramifar
storytelling that promises its audience that ‘becoming the people’ is
possible via a shared history that can continue to exist if an obscure
‘they’ and its subjectivity are obliterated. Nowadays, systematic
killings and starvation of Palestinians, rampant attacks and
murdering Muslims in Britain and Queer peoples in the USA are
good examples of why listening closely to political storytelling is
called for. It has become paramount to listen closely to political
storytelling, its dehumanisation and inhuman capacities and
distortion of historical facts since 7th October 2023. The suffering
and struggles of Palestinians, the destruction of Gaza and the
genocide are misused to either mobilise and appease right wing
populism in Western Europe (especially the Netherlands and
Germany) or mobilise religious populism in states where Islam is
constitutionally acknowledged primary religion (especially Islamic
Republic of Iran and Pakistan). Listening closely to political
storytelling is about teasing out populism as doing politics rather
than thin fables emerging from misinformation and disinformation
or deception and malintention.
everyday life negotiations of some Iranians within the Islamic
Republic of Iran. The Islamic Republic has co-opted the religion,
messianic hope and the Messiah to build a mode of religious
governance and to maintain pro-regime families and the revolu-
tionary youth. I will demonstrate politics of hope in Iran and argue
that subscribing to the messianic hope by pro-regime families may
appear as a religious expression of futurity or compliance with the
Islamic Republic at first glance. However, messianic hope is a mode
of world-making to endure militancy, militarization of everyday life,
political Islam and the pain caused by a stream of dead bodies
coming from different conflict zones. This article builds on the
existing debates of hope to show how the reality of ‘the future’
becomes messianic for Shia believers and how social actors carving
hope amidst precarities is not an orientation towards the future but
rather a mode of making-do.
memories and nation building through history. I demonstrate that announcing we are history is a political-mystical practice, and living with evocative historical affect permeated from the reminiscent of past violence. It allows social actors to indulge in a type of transcendence, which expands them into a cosmological scale that exceeds social imaginaries and banalities of everyday life. I borrow from Iranian revolutionary youth’s experiences and my ethnographic journeys
among Iranian volunteer combatants who fought in Iraq and Syria to illustrate how history is localized in settings which socialization occurs in postwar societies. By way of anthropology of history or doing history in anthropology, I explain how the claim we are history is an attempt to become a community of individuals via history and how social actors turn history into a world-making practice that informs political participation and justifies for them to support authoritarian traits of a state.
politics and sociocultural practices. The mute-ability of past is a
visible trend in post-war societies like Iran, where the state
apparatus operates incessantly as a memory machine. However,
muting the past cannot be limited to the state as a political actor.
I have explored the role of social actors in sociocultural processes
that mute the pasts. I draw from my ethnographic encounters
and fieldwork among Iranian revolutionary youth who display
commitment to political Islam and armed resistance to explain
how social actors consume memories of past conflicts and
contribute to muting/mutating histories. I argue the mute-ability
of a past is not about changes and transformation of the past but
about what social actors do with the past and how they render it
mute to manage the present era. An exploration of mute-ability
and how pasts are rendered silent is required, via an
anthropology of history/past to show agency in compliance and
agentive capacities of people in shaping the past from the
present era. This article explores how remembering works when
forgetting is not an option and the remembrance of martyrdom
is the standard of civic piety in Iran.
arrive at meanings, significations, and imaginative associations
that are inscribed by religious-cultural codes or social networks.
The shadows of meanings overwhelm their material existence
as prayer beads despite their lives beginning before their
enactment within the socio-cultural and religious networks.
Therefore, alongside an Iranian Sufi murshid, I follow the
object-ness and the life of rosaries and prayer beads in an
"apprenticeship ethnographic" journey. I address the material
life of rosaries to explain how their object-ness contributes to
their materiality and meaning formation that they gain in a
Sufi order. An approach informed by speculative realism and
object-oriented ontology (OOO) is chosen to examine what it
means to study a religious object-in-itself. I follow the religiously
loaded object and its spiritual traces by way of OOO to forgo the
meanings and relationships that shadow the objects.
manifestations and representations; however, the inner
workings of violence are less explored. In order to suggest a
different mode of seeing violence, I explore the inner workings
of violence through the pleasures of and fun among Shi’i volunteer
combatants. I apply Walter Benjamin’s motion of pure means
to explain how violence becomes self-referential and nonrepresentational
via combat-zone ethnography amongst Iraqi
Shi’i militants who fought against ISIS in Iraq. I address the fine
line between pleasure and fun in order to highlight the inner
workings of violence during combat and to encourage a fresh
bottom-up anthropological perspective in assessing the parameters
of the persistence and resilience of volunteer combatants.
My approach advocates moving beyond recruitment and ideological
interpolation by questioning the allure of combat through an
ontological framework that includes combatants’ perspectives and
narratives
of the Iranian state and I turn to that of a war photographer whose work is sidelined by the state. I explore this counter-narrative to discover the workings of the state-sanctioned narrative through modes of reception of the photographs by Iranians both inside and outside Iran. I strive to trace the reception of the pain of others through politics of frame and the ethnography of the visual culture of martyrdom after almost three decades since the war
traded before they take on the overwhelming semiosis ascribed to them by religious cultural codes or social networks. This article presents an apprenticeship ethnographic journey in which I follow an Iranian Sufi master and, along with him, the tensile life of Sufi prayer beads, or tasbihs. I address prayer beads as an object prior to their gaining
of any religious meaning in the networks of everyday life. Tracing the material life of prayer beads reveals how the objectness of the rosary preexists the material practices that give it meaning in the Sufi order. Through the approach of speculative realism I examine what it means to study a religious-object-in-itself. I follow the religiously loaded object and its spiritual emergence by way of object-oriented ontology to forgo
the meanings and relationships that shadow the objects.
storytelling that promises its audience that ‘becoming the people’ is
possible via a shared history that can continue to exist if an obscure
‘they’ and its subjectivity are obliterated. Nowadays, systematic
killings and starvation of Palestinians, rampant attacks and
murdering Muslims in Britain and Queer peoples in the USA are
good examples of why listening closely to political storytelling is
called for. It has become paramount to listen closely to political
storytelling, its dehumanisation and inhuman capacities and
distortion of historical facts since 7th October 2023. The suffering
and struggles of Palestinians, the destruction of Gaza and the
genocide are misused to either mobilise and appease right wing
populism in Western Europe (especially the Netherlands and
Germany) or mobilise religious populism in states where Islam is
constitutionally acknowledged primary religion (especially Islamic
Republic of Iran and Pakistan). Listening closely to political
storytelling is about teasing out populism as doing politics rather
than thin fables emerging from misinformation and disinformation
or deception and malintention.
everyday life negotiations of some Iranians within the Islamic
Republic of Iran. The Islamic Republic has co-opted the religion,
messianic hope and the Messiah to build a mode of religious
governance and to maintain pro-regime families and the revolu-
tionary youth. I will demonstrate politics of hope in Iran and argue
that subscribing to the messianic hope by pro-regime families may
appear as a religious expression of futurity or compliance with the
Islamic Republic at first glance. However, messianic hope is a mode
of world-making to endure militancy, militarization of everyday life,
political Islam and the pain caused by a stream of dead bodies
coming from different conflict zones. This article builds on the
existing debates of hope to show how the reality of ‘the future’
becomes messianic for Shia believers and how social actors carving
hope amidst precarities is not an orientation towards the future but
rather a mode of making-do.
memories and nation building through history. I demonstrate that announcing we are history is a political-mystical practice, and living with evocative historical affect permeated from the reminiscent of past violence. It allows social actors to indulge in a type of transcendence, which expands them into a cosmological scale that exceeds social imaginaries and banalities of everyday life. I borrow from Iranian revolutionary youth’s experiences and my ethnographic journeys
among Iranian volunteer combatants who fought in Iraq and Syria to illustrate how history is localized in settings which socialization occurs in postwar societies. By way of anthropology of history or doing history in anthropology, I explain how the claim we are history is an attempt to become a community of individuals via history and how social actors turn history into a world-making practice that informs political participation and justifies for them to support authoritarian traits of a state.
politics and sociocultural practices. The mute-ability of past is a
visible trend in post-war societies like Iran, where the state
apparatus operates incessantly as a memory machine. However,
muting the past cannot be limited to the state as a political actor.
I have explored the role of social actors in sociocultural processes
that mute the pasts. I draw from my ethnographic encounters
and fieldwork among Iranian revolutionary youth who display
commitment to political Islam and armed resistance to explain
how social actors consume memories of past conflicts and
contribute to muting/mutating histories. I argue the mute-ability
of a past is not about changes and transformation of the past but
about what social actors do with the past and how they render it
mute to manage the present era. An exploration of mute-ability
and how pasts are rendered silent is required, via an
anthropology of history/past to show agency in compliance and
agentive capacities of people in shaping the past from the
present era. This article explores how remembering works when
forgetting is not an option and the remembrance of martyrdom
is the standard of civic piety in Iran.
arrive at meanings, significations, and imaginative associations
that are inscribed by religious-cultural codes or social networks.
The shadows of meanings overwhelm their material existence
as prayer beads despite their lives beginning before their
enactment within the socio-cultural and religious networks.
Therefore, alongside an Iranian Sufi murshid, I follow the
object-ness and the life of rosaries and prayer beads in an
"apprenticeship ethnographic" journey. I address the material
life of rosaries to explain how their object-ness contributes to
their materiality and meaning formation that they gain in a
Sufi order. An approach informed by speculative realism and
object-oriented ontology (OOO) is chosen to examine what it
means to study a religious object-in-itself. I follow the religiously
loaded object and its spiritual traces by way of OOO to forgo the
meanings and relationships that shadow the objects.
manifestations and representations; however, the inner
workings of violence are less explored. In order to suggest a
different mode of seeing violence, I explore the inner workings
of violence through the pleasures of and fun among Shi’i volunteer
combatants. I apply Walter Benjamin’s motion of pure means
to explain how violence becomes self-referential and nonrepresentational
via combat-zone ethnography amongst Iraqi
Shi’i militants who fought against ISIS in Iraq. I address the fine
line between pleasure and fun in order to highlight the inner
workings of violence during combat and to encourage a fresh
bottom-up anthropological perspective in assessing the parameters
of the persistence and resilience of volunteer combatants.
My approach advocates moving beyond recruitment and ideological
interpolation by questioning the allure of combat through an
ontological framework that includes combatants’ perspectives and
narratives
of the Iranian state and I turn to that of a war photographer whose work is sidelined by the state. I explore this counter-narrative to discover the workings of the state-sanctioned narrative through modes of reception of the photographs by Iranians both inside and outside Iran. I strive to trace the reception of the pain of others through politics of frame and the ethnography of the visual culture of martyrdom after almost three decades since the war
traded before they take on the overwhelming semiosis ascribed to them by religious cultural codes or social networks. This article presents an apprenticeship ethnographic journey in which I follow an Iranian Sufi master and, along with him, the tensile life of Sufi prayer beads, or tasbihs. I address prayer beads as an object prior to their gaining
of any religious meaning in the networks of everyday life. Tracing the material life of prayer beads reveals how the objectness of the rosary preexists the material practices that give it meaning in the Sufi order. Through the approach of speculative realism I examine what it means to study a religious-object-in-itself. I follow the religiously loaded object and its spiritual emergence by way of object-oriented ontology to forgo
the meanings and relationships that shadow the objects.
the small-scale urban gardens of central Havana play a fundamental role in
our ethnographic stories. In this chapter we introduce the urban garden to
emphasize the poetics of gardening through our personal engagement
with the gardeners and how they inhabit these spaces. We began our
anthropological journey by way of ethnographic gardening and remained
open to unexpected changes, the irregular or the indefinite. Our open
approach was not only to remain creative in our anthropological craft but
to adjust our methods to the challenges of the research environment. We
narrate everyday life (the micro perspective) under the authoritative Cuban
state through the lived/living experiences of urban gardeners. These experiences are not ‘thick descriptions’ that are linked to larger political issues but rhizomatic observations that highlight the relationships between
human and non-humans within the natureculture debate.
mobilise a national past in the name of ‘anti-globalism’, e.g. in the German AfD’s
fascination with Otto van Bismarck or Barbarossa or both Shia and Sunni
Islamists repeating Iranian or Egyptian contributions to 14th century as the Islamic
Golden of Age. However, there is also a translocal dimension to these narrations
both in terms of conceptions of world order (De Orellana and Michelsen 2019)
and considering the participation of those with migration backgrounds to the
nativist and populist narratives. Accordingly, this workshop proposes to think
about the role of the past in the rise of populist storytelling into distinctive yet
interrelated directions:
First, narratives of the past work translocally and allow populists to build
their own imagined– nativist –communities revolving around the cleavage
between ‘globalists’ and ‘patriots’ (Abrahamsen et al. 2020). Migration
within/across borders and social media boosting connectivity, mobilities and the elasticity of concepts has shown that the past, narrated by right-wing populists, is not confined to national territories. In fact, an increasing number of far-right and populist actors do not see the nation-state but ‘civilisations’ or ‘cultures’ as the nodes of world order (Crone 2021). Second, looking at the tumultuous political landscape such as alliances between Hindu nationalists and populists in the UK and the USA, Iranian-Germans standing with AfD or supporting populists in Sweden, or we see that narrations of the past feed transnational populism, engaging migrant communities and sometimes mobilising them in support of populists in their homelands. In Western Europe, some Turks and Turkish descent support AKP; in Scandinavia, some Estonians in support EKRE and some Ecuadorians in Spain support APAIS (Jakobson et al. 2022). Against this background, we ask: What kind of histories and stories do right wing populists and ultra-conservative religious actors tell, and how do those stories become appealing translocally?
present time, in which rifles such as the AK-47 and the Dragunov sniper rifle are familiar icons of transnational Islamist militias. I begin by exploring the entanglement of Islamic traditions with ergonomics and affordances of weaponry and by highlighting the notions of
masculinity that shape the social life of weaponry in the present. Weaponry, I argue, explains the emergence of warrior subjectivities from subject-object relationships cultivated in the name of God.
Similarly, there is no attention to how supporters of the Islamic Republic and regime-inclined Iranians beyond Iran respond, experience and interpret the diaspora activism that opposes the Islamic Republic. Based on ethnographic observations, interviews and social media digital tracking, I will explain in this round table what it means to support the Islamic Republic and be ‘regime-inclined’ in Europe. In other words, my contribution explains what the Islamic Republic is beyond Iran.