master's thesis
Tags: grad school
Outline - Forming the Present Through Husseiniyya Rituals
- Each center chapter follows a single character and tries to focus the lens around them, zooming out to describe the concept
- Goal is to move towards a theory of a constructed present
- Starts with the center of the ritual (radood and audience), goes to describing the institutions, then goes to describe how a “normal” person participates
Introduction
- Thesis: rituals as a sight of constructing the present
- Lead in: evoking the Imam as a nearhuman construction (Johnson - Automatic Religion)
- Various rituals of approaching the shrine
- One understudied area is the role of the radood
- Main key is that the majlis with radood is a specific form ritual that binds individual and society, future and past
- Main questions to answer:
- How do ritual participants view themselves? Do they see rituals as subsuming the self?
- What about the “violent” nature of specific rituals?
- How are these rituals sustained?
- Look to al-Wardi lamahat vol 2
Chapter 1 - Majilis Husseini/al-3aza Experience
- Mainly enthographic chapter
- Main character might be Mutathir the radood
- Main questions to answer:
- What is it like to be in a ritual? Radood audience interaction to draw in the audience
- Where do the rituals happen? What contexts are they performed in?
- What are the casual forms of difference (between Pakistani, Iraqi, Indian, etc)
- What is invoked and evoked with the ritual? Is it saddness for Hussein (as some ritual participants have said), or is it something more?
- Banal nature of the rituals, and how it is not necessarily different than music festivals
- The banality of these rituals actually make it much more interesting, because it reveals how easily new views of the world are fashioned even without a clear sacred/profane distinction
- Look to Geertz here, what symbols are floating around? For Sahlins, what kind of kinship is being produced in this moment? How are the symbols alive here (al-Shur?)
- Also potentially useful to look at Tanya Luhrmann’s work on Evanglicial Christian prayers and esoteric mental states of trance
Chapter 2 - Institutions of the Radoods and Mowkebs
- Investigative chapter around what religious institutions sustain the radoods
- Main character: Ali the radood school teacher
- How does Ali engage by creating the institution of radoods
- Who comes to school? What are their backgrounds?
- Questions to answer
- What seemingly non-religious work needs to be done to sustain this structure?
- How is authority created? Who creates these authorities, and are they done by the “religious” or “secular”? Is that even an useful distinction to draw here?
Chapter 3 - Majilis as a pilgrimage
- Main character: Fathal the security guard
- Karbalaei native, but not particularly religious
- Goal is to show how “regular” people engage with religion
- Look to Asad here, what types of self is attempting to be molded by going to this pilgrimage?
- How do pilgrims signal to each other about the status of their pilgrimage? How does the shrine institutions support this?
- This chapter might be cut or revised, it’s a little vague right now
Conclusion
- Husseiniyya rituals draw in the audience and participants through N ways
- This allows the audience to view themselves in a different way, constructing a different present
- One underaddressed aspect within this study is the register of tragedy, which is potential for future work
Old
Peacebuilding
- Reintegration of Iraqi Militias
- PMF Command Structures
- PMF command structures are vastly different, from KH’s Hezbollah-like situation to brigade 30
- Money laundering and ghost soldiers
- Who is lining their pockets and benefiting from different command structures?
- PMF command structures are vastly different, from KH’s Hezbollah-like situation to brigade 30
- Sectarian conflicts
- PMF cross cuts class, race, and religion
- Shia Turkmen, Christians, pro-sistani vs pro-iran
- What kind of nationalism is being created? Alternatively, what kinds of sub-state nationalism (borrowing Toby Dodge) is being created?
- PMF cross cuts class, race, and religion
- Similar reintegration histories?
- Peacebuilding in
- Balkans
- Reintegration of Bosnia mujahadeen?
- “Recyled” militia in Serbia armed groups?
- Lebanon
- Hezbollah and similarities there?
- Nepal
- Ideaologically driven - were maoist. Does this hold similarities?
- Afghanistan
- Taliban
- Namibia
- Colombia
- Paramilitary demobilization, and it’s failures
- Chechnya
- Militias as spoilers of the Chechen state, does this occur in Iraq?
- Ivory Coast
- “Warrior generation”, political violence similar levels, are there models to be drawn here?
- Balkans
- Peacebuilding in
- Post-conflict peacebuilding within formal state structures
- The Iraqi state did not totally collapse and fought off an insurgency, is this different than integrating militias in newly formed states?
- External actors
- UNAMI
- US
- Iran
- etc
- Mechanics of peacebuilding
- Combants to civilains -> Has this happened?
- Post-conflict state -> Has Iraqi society reached “post-conflict”? What determines post-conflict?
- “Big” questions
- Current government framing of Iraq
- Lack of legitmacy on several key institutions
- “Supreme” court has no constitutional legitmacy
- Lack of legitmacy on several key institutions
- KRG
- Resolved issues of KRG disputes, how do the peshmerga fit into this equation?
- What constitutes as “rehabilitation” and “reintegration”?
- UN has often sought “reintegration” by waiting it out, which has rarely worked. Succesful examples are Nepal and Namibia, which sought greater reintegration via massive state-sponsered jobs programs
- How does this change in a world of low interest rates? Namibia and Nepal had difficulties borrowing money, does the shift in the global markets affect this?
- “Big” reintegration - who are the funders of reintegration for previous states? Who funds reintegration for the Iraqi state?
- Who directs reintegration? Often times funded and directed in DC, but acted upon in other states
- What do we reintegrate back into? Reintegration implies return to prewar “normalcy” – the same conditions that gestated the conflict.
- Sierra Leone of 2005 looks like the Sierra Leone of 1991
- What structural changes are available?
- What does this look like in the backdrop of Arab Spring? Of the 2019/2020 protests?
- UN has often sought “reintegration” by waiting it out, which has rarely worked. Succesful examples are Nepal and Namibia, which sought greater reintegration via massive state-sponsered jobs programs
- Current government framing of Iraq
- Unknown quesitons
- War veterans in post-war situations
- Refusal to reintegrate?
- Similarities to societal groups like Turkey’s war vets?
- Refusal to reintegrate?
- External communities
- How do the communities reintegrating the militia members feel?
- What about disapora?
- Generational questions
- “Reintegration” implies that there is a life to go back to. Are militia members who spent their lives in conflict have this open as an opportunity?
- War veterans in post-war situations
- PMF Command Structures
Similar/Previous Work
- survey - Structure and Interpretation of the Hashd al-Shaabi
- migrant violence - [[e_activity_4_who_bears_responsibility_for_refugee_violence_lebanon.md][Where does responsibility for violence suffered by migrants
Peacebuilding and islam in iraq
- can we draw conclusions from islam?
- mixed work like Li - The Universal Enemy
- half sociological half computation?
- like Meeker - A Nation of Empire?
peacebuilding with hashd al-shaabi and infrastructure?
- how are they building infrastructure
- weapons depots, telecommunications, etc
- osint on their locations, monitor communications
- the build up of telecommunication infrastructure and how they deliver money? how are payments delivered into communities?
important part of writing a thesis
- don’t get caught up in the sequences
- do things you thnink you’re not ready to do
- how to identify one thing
FINAL Religious rituals, authority, and identity in modern Iraq
- Modern Iraq is fractured blah blah blah
- Many modes of belonging
- How do the rituals reflect that? Do religious rituals in the shrine cities demarkate anything useful? Recongition of multiple poles of power as not independent, but mixed together
- Islamic law angle?
- Qi card angle?
- Shia kurds -> fayli kurds? How do they travel? Do they buy into a shia identity?
- As the iraqi state becomes more and more shia-centric, does buying into shia identity mean buying into iraqi identity?
- Ali al wardi stuff
- To the people who attend these rituals, how do they feel about it?
- Rituals as a language, and language as a tool of citizenship and identity formation, how language itself is key to identity formationg