We are history: historical affect, memory and militancy among revolutionary youth in postwar Iran
Rethinking History: the Journal of Theory and Practice, 2021, 25 (3): 327-346
Download here: https://doi.org/10.1080/13642529.2021.1985225 Open Access
Hope, Messiah and troubles of messianic futures in Iran: exploring martyrdom and politics of hope amongst the Iranian revolutionary youth
British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 2021, 50 (3): 681-696
Download here https://doi.org/10.1080/13530194.2021.1997714 Open Access
Memories, piety and formation of civil religions: Do revolutionary youth sing along with the memory machine in Iran?
Memory Studies, 2022, Online First.
Download here: https://doi.org/10.1177/17506980221101110 Open Access
The South Side of Heaven: A Journey along the Iranian Collective Memory in Iran-Iraq War Memorial Sites
Anthropology of the Middle East, 2019, 14 (1): 125-141.
Mute-ability of the past and the culture of martyrdom in Iran: remembering the Iran–Iraq war and civic piety amongst the revolutionaries of postwar generations
History and Anthropology, 2021, Online First
Download here: https://doi.org/10.1080/02757206.2021.1983563 Open Access
Emotions of Felt Memories: Looking for Interplay of Emotions and Histories in Iranian Political Consciousness Since Iran–Iraq War (1980–1988)
Anthropology of Consciousness, 2019, 30 (2):132-151
Download here: https://doi.org/10.1111/anoc.12115 Open Access
Collective (Non-)Memory of the Iran-Iraq War and Sectarian Thinking among Veterans-Turned-Shi'i Militia Fighters
The Middle East Journal, 2024, 77(3-4): 290-305
Download here: https://doi.org/10.3751/77.34.12
Abstract
‘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.
Abstract
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 revolutionary 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.
Abstract
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.
Abstract
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 post-war 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 to 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.
Abstract
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.
Abstract
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 post-war Iran and advocate a historically informed anthropology of emotions.
Abstract
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 socialisation 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.