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?
- 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