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This article explores how provincial Iranian laymen and officials who support the regime (here, Basijis) mobilize the bodies and blood of martyrs to sacralize the national landscape in Post-Revolutionary Iran. Since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, a powerful cohort of religious scholars and everyday citizens has emphasized the need to (re)generate the authentically Islamic interior of the nation while resisting an immoral, "Westernstruck" exterior. A significant part of this sacred defense against Western cultural invasion has been the exhumation of bodies of Iran-Iraq War (1980-88) martyrs from the battlefront for reburial and commemoration at sites across the national landscape. This article, based on 15 months of ethnographic research in the Fars Province of Iran, investigates these ongoing practices of reburying and memorializing martyrs. I argue that the exhumations and reburials of martyrs are strategic religious practices that organize the bodies of Iranian subjects around key reference points, specifically the martyrdom of the Imam Husayn at the Battle of Karbala, the 1979 Revolution, and the Iran-Iraq War. In addition, I show how acts of commemorating martyrs emphasize the sacrificial blood of male citizens, a bodily substance that draws further symbolic efficacy from its associations with the life-giving blood of kinship. This is the first ethnographic account of how martyrs are interred and commemorated in provincial Iran.

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A B S T R A C TIn Iran, ideas and practices of the family are integral to religious nation-making. State elites and supporters (here members of the Basij, Iran's paramilitary organization) tie the blood of kinship to the blood and sacrifice of Iran-Iraq War martyrs. They harness blood's relational and sacred properties in museum displays and commemorations to delineate and sanctify an Islamic nation composed of pure, kindred citizens. Food has similar efficacy: pious acts of sharing food at home infuse the rituals of state power, creating "what should be"-that is, citizens who embody familial piety, purity, and closeness to God. The Iranian case compels us to consider how a full spectrum of immaterial qualities, substances, and acts of kin making can inform the nation and its politics. [kinship, nation, blood, food, Basij, Islam, Iran]

This article explores the political life of jello, or zheleh, among Basiji Shi‘i families in the contemporary Islamic Republic of Iran. Since the inception of the 1979 Constitution, Islamic laws concerning halal food, drink, and culinary etiquette have been heavily emphasized by state policy makers. This article focuses on jello, a popular gelatin dessert among state supporting Shi‘i families (here members of the Basij, Iran's paramilitary organization), to explore the scope and form of moral and religious foodways in the present-day Islamic Republic. I argue that jello reveals a complex milieu of sparring Western, cosmopolitan, national, and religious food practices that are connected with ideas and practices of (religious) citizenship. This article draws from fifteen months of ethnographic research in Fars Province of Iran and in Tehran, and from research of jurisprudence and popular media.