Papers by Sana Chavoshian
Religion that Matters: Shi'i Materiality beyond Karbala, 2024
Consanguinity is a common form of status among Shiʿis that frames, for
example, the descendants o... more Consanguinity is a common form of status among Shiʿis that frames, for
example, the descendants of the Prophet Muhammad as Sayyids. This chapter explores an affective and alternative perception of consanguinity based on a haptic relationship or encounter with the blood of the fallen soldiers of the Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988), who are perceived as martyrs. My ethnographic study among washwomen of wartime draws on theories of affect and material religion to indicate how the practice of washing blood from old and damaged military uniforms constitutes women’s experience of martyrdom, motherhood, and intimate attachment to the martyrs. Experiencing the war from the support stations interlaced kinship, spirituality and handwork, especially for washwomen whose sons were on the frontline. I argue for an intergenerational relation, where the infinitesimal act of washing bloodstained uniforms undergirds a claim to justice: Washwomen demand the recognition of the support stations where they served during the war as sites of commemoration.
ZMO Pragmatic Text Series No.15, 2023
A peculiar aura of uncertainty and difficulty of knowing surrounds class, and especially its tran... more A peculiar aura of uncertainty and difficulty of knowing surrounds class, and especially its transmission from one generation to another. In this programmatic text we trace silences around the reproduction of class through our ethnographic research in Kenya, Egypt, Iran, Kyrgyzstan, and Palestine, and among migrant diasporas that link those countries with Somalia, Afghanistan, Western Europe, Russia, and the Arab Gulf states. We propose a comparative and nuanced attention to the ways in which concealment and silences-that is, ways of not displaying things or not speaking openly about them even while they may be known; secrets-that is, knowledge that is actively prevented from circulating; and ignorance-that is, ways of not knowing or not addressing something, together contribute to the reproduction of social status across generations. That reproduction, we argue, is in need of not being known or addressed because the moral and institutional claims and the public image that are inherent to status are frequently contradicted or complicated by the process in which the resources have been gathered, and by the ways in which they are passed on. The passing on of status from one generation to another therefore needs to be understood in a way that is not restricted to its discursive and performative dimension of explicit markers and accomplishments. Marks of distinction, accomplishment of status-and also stigmas of discrimination and stories of failure-are likely to consist equally of aspects that are concealed, forcibly kept secret, or not addressed. At the same time, every display and utterance that qualitatively or quantitatively values a person's or group's standing vis-à-vis others is likely to be enabled and accompanied by blind spots and silences. These can be best studied from the bottom up through a qualitative enquiry.
Handbook of Oriental Studies 159/3.In: The Presence of the Prophet in Early Modern and Contemporary Islam (eds. Nelly Amir, Stefan Reichmuth, Rachida Chih), 2023
In a new contribution to the anthropology of dreaming, I explore the epistemological and affectiv... more In a new contribution to the anthropology of dreaming, I explore the epistemological and affective excess of prophetic dreams, in an aura of dream-images dream-images. Collective engagement with dreams occurs through experiencing olfactory registers which are perceived together as divine intervention. Drawing on an ethnographic fieldwork in Shīʿī women’s pious circles in Teheran, this chapter discusses the largely unexamined dreamscape of Muslim women beyond tropes and symbols of Islamic dream interpretation (taʿbīr). I focus on women whose experience of losing sons and husbands during the Iran-Iraq war (1980–88), without retrieving their bodies for a proper funeral, engages them with an intimate attachment to Fāṭima, the daughter of the Prophet. Through a close examination of the experiences and context of their visions, and of the collective practices they trigger in the pious circles, this study illuminates how the intrinsic distance between the dream and waking world dissolves through claims of feeling the aura.
The portrayal of Fāṭima plays a major role in the formal governmental discourse of Islamic womanhood in post-revolutionary Iran. The state has succeeded to link its political agenda on veiling and motherhood to her sacred persona. I argue that women’s dreams momentarily suspend this formal discourse, while regenerating and embellishing it in itself.
Politics, Religion & Ideology, Mar 28, 2023
What about the militarism that seeks to absorb spaces, humans, and things into its machinery; wha... more What about the militarism that seeks to absorb spaces, humans, and things into its machinery; what about an opposition to all of that? These are the breaking lines that Nomi Stone tackles in her book 'Pinelandia. And it is these unorthodox anthropological questions, thinking deeply in the field while going beyond it, that makes Stone's book a must read for scholars interested in the US military and militarism as well as those with a more general interest in the interminglement of war and displacement, affect studies, and the critique of oriental- ism. Since 1974 in the deep forests of North Carolina and hidden from public eyes, the mock military village of Pinelandia serves soldiers for pre deployment training and the cultural literacy of warring. Nomi Stone has written a compelling, poetic, and detailed ethnography of Pinelandia as a site of rehearsing war-games of the US-led War on Terror at the time of its 'Iraq rotation'. The book provides a full-fledged ethnography of the training camp that is designed to resembles the Middle Eastern landscape not only through its decoration but also by deploying Iragi migrants as role players. It interweaves Stone's celebrated field-poe- tries, published as Kill Class (Tupelo Press, 2019), into thick descriptions of the woods and participatory observation with Iraqi role-players. As the 'play' button is pressed, the architects of the war-game, military commanders, soldiers, Iraqi and local contractors, gunshots, coffins, tears, and screams fill the stage in perhaps the most surrealist yet logistically and strategically grounded mode of living and training war.
Monika Wohlrab Sahr, Sana Chavoshian in Soziale Welt (Special Issue 25: Islam in Europe), 2022
Wir verfolgen mit diesem Aufsatz eine doppelte Absicht: Zunächst rekonstruieren wir im Rekurs auf... more Wir verfolgen mit diesem Aufsatz eine doppelte Absicht: Zunächst rekonstruieren wir im Rekurs auf Bourdieus Feldanalyse in einem historischen Zugriff die Autonomisierung der Islamwissenschaft als wissenschaftliches Feld mit einer eigenen Doxa und die Herausforderungen durch Sozialwissenschaften, Cultural Studies undneuerdings-Islamische Theologie als Fächer des erweiterten Feldes islambezogener Wissenschaften. Dabei kommen Dynamiken, Grenzziehungen und Intrusionen in den Blick. Im Zuge der Analyse werden kursorisch Vergleiche zu den USA und Frankreich gezogen, in denen diese Herausforderungen jeweils anders akzentuiert sind und anders beantwortet werden. In einem zweiten Schritt werden auf der Grundlage offener Experteninterviews die Positionierungen von Wissenschaftler/ innen in diesem Feld rekonstruiert. Dabei fungieren die Haltungen zur Säkularität-d.h. zur Frage nach den Grenzen des Islam und den Grenzziehungen der Islamwissenschaft als Wissenschaft-als Linse, durch die diese Positionierungen erkennbar werden. In den Positionen hallen grundlegende Formen der Verhältnisbestimmung von Islam und Westen bzw. westlicher Moderne nach.
Asiatische Studien, 75 (3) , 2021
I analyse two ethnographic scenes, one showing the entanglement of the official discourse of mart... more I analyse two ethnographic scenes, one showing the entanglement of the official discourse of martyrdom with the statist culture, and the other, how the atmosphere of grief and veneration during the martyrs’ funeral processions unsettle the dichotomies between compliance and resistance, orchestrated and emergent affects. These observations open a new vista on the mutual processes of singularity and the collective subjectivation that goes beyond one-sided causal explanations of heroic individuality on the one hand and blatantly dramatised expressions of the state’s religious policies on the other.
Religion and Society: Advances in Research (Special Section: Elsewhere Affects, eds. Omar Kasmani, Nasima Selim, Hansjörg Dilger, Dominik Mattes), 2020
Casting the fallen soldiers of the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988) as 'martyrs' plays a crucial role in... more Casting the fallen soldiers of the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988) as 'martyrs' plays a crucial role in the legitimation discourse of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The government has succeeded in integrating many 'martyr families' into a state-revering political cult. This ethnographic study draws on theories of affect and atmosphere to investigate how practices around saintly dreams and their materialization in photographs and gravestones of martyrs have challenged the state narratives and discourses. I approach the veneration of martyrs through both affective and narrative sources and explore gravestones as new saintly localities. These localities are spaces of divinely intermediation with intimate connection to the transcendental realm. The multifaceted atmosphere of these sites offers nonconformist and heterogeneous entanglements in which dream-images of martyrs allow for the momentary subversion of the state's political cult.
GENDER: Zeitschrift für Geschlecht, Kultur und Gesellschaft, 2017
The agency of women in Islamicate societies is largely anchored in ideas over pious circles and g... more The agency of women in Islamicate societies is largely anchored in ideas over pious circles and gender-specific rituals. Recent studies attest religious modes of women's presence in the public space a high significance. Taking the case of Iran, the urging question is how and to which extent religious agency within female pious circles-which were formed before the 1978/9 Revolution and fashioned after it-has been able to attain broader civil significance beyond these circles. This study explores the inner dynamics of female pious circles among women as related to structural power relations. It spells out the process of "self-spiritualization" to characterize interactions within the circles that act as a tool for self-elevation and self-authorization and as a mode of spiritually legitimated construction of hierarchies within the circles' spiritual em-powerment. It is argued that a type of pious competition between the women unfolds leading to an affirmation of gender segregation and concomitantly, of submission to in-stitutionalized structures of masculine hierarchy and power. Finally, it pursues the effects of unfolding "self-spiritualization" through elevation, authenticity and self-authorization that might achieve a considerable degree of self-empowerment for negotiating gender roles and political life attitudes.
Historical Social Research (Special Issue Islamicate Secularities, eds. Markus Dreßler, Armando Salvatore, Monika Wohlrab-Sahr), 2019
Säkulare Atmosphäre: ‚Entschleierung' und urbane Raum im Iran des frühen 20. Jahrhunderts«. Drawi... more Säkulare Atmosphäre: ‚Entschleierung' und urbane Raum im Iran des frühen 20. Jahrhunderts«. Drawing on sociological approaches to urbanism and secularization, as well as the affective turn in anthropology, this article explores the implementation of secular policies in Iran after the 1936 Unveiling Decree. I argue that constructing transparent social relations reflects the emergence of a new level of secular binds and relies upon the modalities of urban infrastructure and architecture. I find that modernization and secularization in Iran are interlinked by transformations in urban planning that tended to eliminate sites of ambiguity and to homogenize structures and forms of interaction in public and domestic spaces. The article makes use of autobiographical narratives that give witness to manifest changes in the urban atmosphere between the 1930s and 1950s. I will show how the Pahlavi regime took an active role in attempting to build a secular city by invoking segmentations and divisions in urban spaces to promote a secular atmosphere and limit religious ideas.
Conference Presentations by Sana Chavoshian
Deutsche Arbeitsgemeinschaft Vorderer Orient / German Middle East Studies Association (DAVO). Göttingen, Germany. September 26-28, 2024
Discussants: Patrick Eisenlohr (University of Göttingen) and Rob Gleave (University of Exeter) ... more Discussants: Patrick Eisenlohr (University of Göttingen) and Rob Gleave (University of Exeter) | This panel aims to introduce and discuss "Religion That Matters: Shiʿi Materiality Beyond Karbala" (2024, Brill). This book comprises twelve chapters which examine the material media – images, objects, clothes, food, incense, holy waters, spaces, and sounds – that instantiate somatic, corporeal, and visceral expressions and experiences of Shiʿi Muslim devotion and religiosity. Drawing on this rich empirical material, Religion That Matters engages with conceptual debates in the fields of Religious Studies, Material Religion, Anthropology of Religion, Media Studies, and Cultural and Heritage Studies. By examining how material things and less thing-like materialities make the praesentia and potentia of the Sacred tangible, how they cultivate intimate relations between human and more-than-human beings, and how they act as links and gateways to the Elsewhere and Otherworldly, the book makes propositions that push the frontiers of the social and anthropological study of religion. It also examines how materialities are integral to processes of heritagization that are shaped by competing social and political actors involved in the construction and canonization of religious — in this case, Shiʿi — heritage. Leading scholars in Religious Studies and Material Religion have described Religion That Matters as a “programmatic intervention” and a “significant contribution … towards analyzing complex aesthetic formations, the creation and transformation of religious spaces and atmospheres and the material and rather mundane techniques and technologies that might involve”
Leibniz Zentrum Moderner Orient, 2023
The conference Un/Growing into Generational Roles aims at understanding intergenerational relatio... more The conference Un/Growing into Generational Roles aims at understanding intergenerational relations as a key intersection where the transformation of family relations, social power relations, and trans-local transformation processes can be observed. Social and cultural transformations and also continuities result for an important part from strivings to grow into generational roles in times of heightened mobility, expectations of modernity and material improvement, as well as often violent crises and conflicts. Intergenerational relations are an issue that recurs across social and cultural contexts, which invites a comparative, interdisciplinary focus that specifically looks at entanglements and movement between locations.
Given the diversification and dis/re-embedding of martyrdom in the context of post-heroic stateho... more Given the diversification and dis/re-embedding of martyrdom in the context of post-heroic statehood, buttressed through war-at-distance technologies and the end of compulsory conscription on the one hand, and its reinforcement in fields ranging from terror in the name of religion to environmental activism on the other, this workshop breaks new ground by
aiming at an empirically informed sociology of the afterlives of martyrdom, taking a multidisciplinary approach, bridging religious, political and conflict studies and drawing on sociology, anthropology and political science.
EASA, 2022
Is hope a matter of the present or does it orient social actors toward the future? How do hope an... more Is hope a matter of the present or does it orient social actors toward the future? How do hope and survival function in former warzones where splintered affectivity frames the landscape of feelings? Former warzones and borderlands are fertile grounds of remembrance, infrastructural claims, securitization, extraction and abandonment of military waste and they host broken socialities and ecologies. They are claimed by states as security sensitive and commercially viable borderlands, appropriated by veterans as sites of remembrance and reclaimed by locals as everyday spaces in need of development. Hence, this panel thinks through former warzones in broad terms to follow interlinkages of politics of hoping, hope, survival and transformation.
The panel follows hope in postwar conditions and reconstructions when hope is co-opted by increased governmentality, regimes of death, conflicts' wreckages and survival revolves around morality and precarity. We look at the intersection of spatial and emotional belonging, infrastructural breakdown and scarcity of resources (water, soil) to find how hope is salvaged in communal debates on security, solidarity and conflict. The panel unpacks constituting components of hope and survival and how the flow of power relationships amongst them shapes the future. We aim to traverse hope as a sense of resilience and sustenance that delays/triggers solidarity and promotes in/actions. We seek dialogue on how hope is the emergent quality of local conditions. The panel focuses on three themes, first, how future-forward postwar reconstruction is shaped by past; second, ecology and survival in former warzones; third veteran justice and belonging.
Book Reviews by Sana Chavoshian
American Ethnologist, 2024
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Papers by Sana Chavoshian
example, the descendants of the Prophet Muhammad as Sayyids. This chapter explores an affective and alternative perception of consanguinity based on a haptic relationship or encounter with the blood of the fallen soldiers of the Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988), who are perceived as martyrs. My ethnographic study among washwomen of wartime draws on theories of affect and material religion to indicate how the practice of washing blood from old and damaged military uniforms constitutes women’s experience of martyrdom, motherhood, and intimate attachment to the martyrs. Experiencing the war from the support stations interlaced kinship, spirituality and handwork, especially for washwomen whose sons were on the frontline. I argue for an intergenerational relation, where the infinitesimal act of washing bloodstained uniforms undergirds a claim to justice: Washwomen demand the recognition of the support stations where they served during the war as sites of commemoration.
The portrayal of Fāṭima plays a major role in the formal governmental discourse of Islamic womanhood in post-revolutionary Iran. The state has succeeded to link its political agenda on veiling and motherhood to her sacred persona. I argue that women’s dreams momentarily suspend this formal discourse, while regenerating and embellishing it in itself.
Conference Presentations by Sana Chavoshian
aiming at an empirically informed sociology of the afterlives of martyrdom, taking a multidisciplinary approach, bridging religious, political and conflict studies and drawing on sociology, anthropology and political science.
The panel follows hope in postwar conditions and reconstructions when hope is co-opted by increased governmentality, regimes of death, conflicts' wreckages and survival revolves around morality and precarity. We look at the intersection of spatial and emotional belonging, infrastructural breakdown and scarcity of resources (water, soil) to find how hope is salvaged in communal debates on security, solidarity and conflict. The panel unpacks constituting components of hope and survival and how the flow of power relationships amongst them shapes the future. We aim to traverse hope as a sense of resilience and sustenance that delays/triggers solidarity and promotes in/actions. We seek dialogue on how hope is the emergent quality of local conditions. The panel focuses on three themes, first, how future-forward postwar reconstruction is shaped by past; second, ecology and survival in former warzones; third veteran justice and belonging.
Book Reviews by Sana Chavoshian
example, the descendants of the Prophet Muhammad as Sayyids. This chapter explores an affective and alternative perception of consanguinity based on a haptic relationship or encounter with the blood of the fallen soldiers of the Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988), who are perceived as martyrs. My ethnographic study among washwomen of wartime draws on theories of affect and material religion to indicate how the practice of washing blood from old and damaged military uniforms constitutes women’s experience of martyrdom, motherhood, and intimate attachment to the martyrs. Experiencing the war from the support stations interlaced kinship, spirituality and handwork, especially for washwomen whose sons were on the frontline. I argue for an intergenerational relation, where the infinitesimal act of washing bloodstained uniforms undergirds a claim to justice: Washwomen demand the recognition of the support stations where they served during the war as sites of commemoration.
The portrayal of Fāṭima plays a major role in the formal governmental discourse of Islamic womanhood in post-revolutionary Iran. The state has succeeded to link its political agenda on veiling and motherhood to her sacred persona. I argue that women’s dreams momentarily suspend this formal discourse, while regenerating and embellishing it in itself.
aiming at an empirically informed sociology of the afterlives of martyrdom, taking a multidisciplinary approach, bridging religious, political and conflict studies and drawing on sociology, anthropology and political science.
The panel follows hope in postwar conditions and reconstructions when hope is co-opted by increased governmentality, regimes of death, conflicts' wreckages and survival revolves around morality and precarity. We look at the intersection of spatial and emotional belonging, infrastructural breakdown and scarcity of resources (water, soil) to find how hope is salvaged in communal debates on security, solidarity and conflict. The panel unpacks constituting components of hope and survival and how the flow of power relationships amongst them shapes the future. We aim to traverse hope as a sense of resilience and sustenance that delays/triggers solidarity and promotes in/actions. We seek dialogue on how hope is the emergent quality of local conditions. The panel focuses on three themes, first, how future-forward postwar reconstruction is shaped by past; second, ecology and survival in former warzones; third veteran justice and belonging.