Papers by Younes Saramifar
Politics, Religion & Ideology , 2024
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.
Studies in Conflict and Terrorism , 2024
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.
Middle East Institute Journal , 2024
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.
Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale, 2022
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.
Memory Studies, 2022
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.
British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 2021
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.
History and Anthropology, 2021
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.
Anthropology of the Middle East, 2019
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.
Anthropology of Consciousness, 2019
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
Focaal , 2019
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.
Journal of Cultural Research, 2018
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.
Critical Studies on Terrorism, 2019
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
Journal of Contemporary Islam, 2017
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.
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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.