master's thesis

Tags: grad school

New Outline (September 10, 2022)

Similar to old one, but focused on the concept of change
start with institutions representing the past, and shaabi representing the future

Introduction

What is a ritual? Literature review on the main ideas
- I depart from these because
  - permanent/recurring pilgrimage (Shikoku pilgrims)
  - looking at people who service pilgrims, and how they see it as a permanent pilgrimage
  - ritualistic voyeurism
  - the confrontation of moral life and actual life create the space and confirm and create the power of religious symbols
  - symbols are imposed yet not seen to be created
In addition, this work serves as a brief overview of a history of Karbala, and it’s grapple with politics, militias, religious authority, and pilgrims, as well as an ethnographic account of ritual shaabi

Chapter 1 - The (near but distant) Past - Infrastructures

Institutions of mokwebs, radoods, and their history
Main character
- Ali Qazwini
- Ali the radood school teacher
Authority is mixed here, use this chapter to explain how political (hashd, religious authority, history)
The physical space of the shrines, where rituals perform next to each other, where funerals are next to other rituals, children running around as others bury the body
- graduation ceremonies as well
Radood, poet, mowkeb, radat
- radoods work with certain poets
  - each pmowkeb has a few poets that stay with them and write
  - anywhere there is a shrine there is a radat, in kathimiya, in najaf
  - taraf abassiyya is famous for having political mowkebs, even though everyone says they’re political
- hasan kathim interview here
actual ritual performance in bayn haramiin, with signs, then howdij, then radat, and then ends with a latm
tatbir and it’s nature
how does the hashd and military feed into this? performance of “security” carried out
lala can and her book?
mowkeb facts
- 3000 service mowkebs in Karbs
- 75 from karbala itself
- 115 majalis al-aza
- people visit the administration for all sorts of reasons
- each mowkeb is from a historical place, sometimes there is an expansion from the baladiyya
- permissions needed:
  - interior ministry within the city
  - baladia
  - local permission
  - polics
- each mokweb collects money from people
- donations start the day after arabeen for the next year’s mowkeb
- 90% (sus number) are wrong
- new ones learn from the old ones
- 200 make majlis
- 3000 for services
radood school experience

Chapter 2 - The Present - Participation

Main character: Muntazir the radood
What does participating in a ritual look like?
Participating in ego boundary reduction
Karbalaei natives as a different type of prilgrim
Majlis experience, radoods
- Zaman Hawnawi, again threats of being wal’ai
- register of vernacular
- majlis husseni and majlis aza
Latm and Radat draw in participants
talk about the differences between ritual shaabi and ritual 3di
- hajj sayyid interview here

Chapter 3 - The Future as an Alternative Present - Repetition

main character, taraf abassiyya
- list out the main old mowkebs here
The repetition and performance allows for a particular voyeuristic view
How is it voyeuristic? How does this create a different future?
- self flattering notions, such as the guy faked who sings about putting dirt in their eyes
Notions of competition, and status making
Because it is so public, it serves as a platform for statements of piety or politics
Because it is an oral tradition, it must be constantly reproduced
- Under saddam years, it’s noted that these rituals survived through houses
Because one has to be recognized as a pilgrim and a servant through this public nature
- through this mutual recognition, we can see…something
- they access a particular time through this harmonization
- it’s not just about being a good pilgrim, but about being seen as a good pilgrim
- finding husbands for women and showing off for men
Karbala offers a platform for the surival of rituals, people can envision a variety of futures (watan, hosa, religion, etc)
- Azerbaijani flag, Iraqi flags
is this repetition to be in the presence of something, like the salafists

Conclusion

Audience view themselves as part of a shared understanding
future studies
- Register of tradgey is particularly susceptible to notions of the future?
- al-shur, ulema, criticisms of how people believe what the radood instead of what the shiekh says, contention of authority
- tatbir and it’s fitna
- zangeel
- discrimination of karbala and baghdad

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?
- 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?
- 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?
- 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
  - 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?
- Unknown quesitons
  - War veterans in post-war situations
    - Refusal to reintegrate?
      - Similarities to societal groups like Turkey’s war vets?
  - 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?

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

Links to this note

problems and methods - final