Iterations of lament: Anachronism and affect in a Shi‘i Islamic revival in Turkey

Abstract

Many Alevis in Turkey today view their community's traditions of ritual weeping as anachronistic in the modern world. In this article, I situate such sensibilities within a political context in which Turkish state agencies have vigorously regulated norms of public affect. I describe the efforts of one Alevi group to counter such sensibilities by cultivating a susceptibility to affective excitation in line with Shi‘i traditions of lamentation. The group's practices are exemplary of many Islamic revival movements, which aim simultaneously to spread a religious message and to transform the affective conditions in which that message might be received.

Historicity and Anthropology

“…These prayers have become more generally and pervasively chronotopic, producing a sense of immersion in the past (Henig 2017). The performative ritual technique of prayer affectively connects the recent dead with earlier martyrs from Ottoman times in a topological history (Tambar 2011, p. 486, Argenti 2017.…”

Zainab's traffic: spatial lives of an Islamic ritual across Southwest Asia

“…Some in the group would gently drum on their chests and shout the name of the saint whenever it was mentioned. As Kabir Tambar (2011) has argued in the case of Alevi ritual practices in Turkey – listening to sermons, wailing, weeping, and praising – they produce rather than simply externalize, generate rather than reiterate, an embodied appreciation for the saint. In other words, the rituals do not simply repeat an already formed religious conviction about virtue; they provide the conditions of possibility for such religious convictions to emerge from the improvised practice itself.…”

‘Live has an atmosphere of its own’: azadari, ethical orientation, and tuned presence in Shi‘i media praxis

“…To explore the question of how it might be possible to understand the staging or reproducibility of affect, Kabir Tambar examines associations who work towards ‘creating contexts for the cultivation of devotional emotions’ (2011: 485). This idea of a collective joined on the basis of ‘creating contexts’ is an interesting one and evokes David Pinault's monograph on the Shi‘i collectives in Indian Hyderabad he called the men's mourning ‘guilds’ (1992: 86).…”

“…In the first, Kabir Tambar explores how followers of the Shi‘i Islamic heterodox tradition of Alevism in Turkey attempt to transform the affective conditions within which they might perform their practices. Tambar argues that the organization of communal mourning calls for ethnographic attention to the ‘iterability of affect’ (2011: 485) as the ability to repeat, mediate, and circulate contexts conducive to emotional efficacy. Yet as Yasmin Moll argues in her work on television preachers in Egypt, when the technical grounds of such forms of mediation happen to be media usually associated with secular entertainment or Western modernity, moral thresholds of usage need to be demarcated in order to assuage anxiety over finding the right contours in religious uses of media.…”