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Zainab's Traffic: Moving Saints, Selves, and Others across Borders
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Barnes and Noble
Zainab's Traffic: Moving Saints, Selves, and Others across Borders
Current price: $85.00
Barnes and Noble
Zainab's Traffic: Moving Saints, Selves, and Others across Borders
Current price: $85.00
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Size: Hardcover
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What is the value—religious, political, economic, or altogether
—of getting on a bus in Tehran to embark on an eight-hundred-mile journey across two international borders to the Sayyida Zainab shrine outside Damascus? Under what material conditions can such values be established, reassessed, or transgressed, and by whom?
provides answers to these questions alongside the socially embedded—and spatially generative—encounters of ritual, mobility, desire, genealogy, and patronage along the route. Whether it is through the study of the spatial politics of saint veneration in Islam, analysis of cross-border gold trade and sanctions, or examination of pilgrims women’s desire for Syrian lingerie accompanying their pleas with the saint in marital matters, the book develops the idea of visitation as a ritual of mobility across geography, history, and category. Iranian visitors’ experiences on the road to Sayyida Zainab—emerging out of a self-described “poverty of mobility”—demonstrate the utility of a more capacious anthropological understanding of ritual. Rather than thinking of ritual as a scripturally canonized manual for pious self-cultivation,
approaches
as a traffic of pilgrims, goods, and ideas across Iran, Turkey, and Syria.