Of Nuclear Rials and Golden Shoes: Scaling Commodities and Currencies across Sanctions on Iran

Abstract

Since the 2012 sanctions that dis-embedded the Iranian economy from global markets, contraband commerce has become an explosive issue in Iran. Increasingly Iranians came to regard sanctions as enforced by both international powers and their own state officials, who criminalized certain kinds of cross-border trade, but not others. Although Iranian state actors distinguish between the trader—praised for contributing to the economy—and the traitor—denounced for undermining its integrity—what both unites and blurs the line between them is their shared struggle with a devaluing currency that some Iranians call nuclear. This article examines the “nuclear rial” by extending insights from anthropological scholarship on money to the study of sanctions to advance a dynamic understanding of currency. Studying Iranian trade in gold proves productive for understanding how people negotiate the effects of sanctions in an unevenly financialized world. At stake in the negotiations is a conditional articulation of monetary value that relies on contingent conversions between commodities and currencies and among currencies.

Decolonizing Middle East anthropology

“…As Rubaii (2022, p. 362) asks, "What would happen to our analysis if we treated the twin towers falling not as a destruction-taboo, but as a scene of crumbling concrete without fetish, without unconditional and unidirectional safety and sovereignty?" A broader notion of security requires attending more to the lived realities of the drone war (Lin, 2010;Tahir, 2017) and to US sanctions policies (Baker et al, 2022;Yıldız, 2021). We can also put US political imaginaries in context, including such concepts as "occupation," which can be either a colonial or a protest technique (Y.…”

“…Anthropology of the war on terror and other ethnographies of the region challenge that war's assertions about who deserves freedom (Li, 2019) and security (Dardiry & Hermez, 2020; Porter, 2020), and even about whose past matters, and on what terms (Emberling & Hanson, 2008). As Rubaii (2022, p. 362) asks, “What would happen to our analysis if we treated the twin towers falling not as a destruction‐taboo, but as a scene of crumbling concrete without fetish, without unconditional and unidirectional safety and sovereignty?” A broader notion of security requires attending more to the lived realities of the drone war (Lin, 2010; Tahir, 2017) and to US sanctions policies (Baker et al., 2022; Yıldız, 2021). We can also put US political imaginaries in context, including such concepts as “occupation,” which can be either a colonial or a protest technique (Y. Al‐Bulushi, 2014, p. 5).…”

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

“…I conducted four years of ethnographic and archival research (including a twentysix-month stretch from June 2011 to August 2013 across Iran, Turkey, Lebanon, and Kurdistan) during which I observed pilgrims, merchants, contraband couriers, and shrine heirs, participated in bus trips, visited the shrine, met the Damascene family whose waqf (religious charitable endowment) supports the shrine, and tracked media reports and commentaries on Iranians' ziyarat to the Hazrat-e Zainab being rerouted via Iraq as early as 2015. Bazaars, bus stations, buses, and the borders they connected were my most productive settings for fieldwork (Yıldız 2016). To cast it in the words of anthropologist Kath Weston (2008: 12), the rhythms of the buses were often how I moved from listening to overhearing, and from wondering to joining in conversationsmostly when invited.…”

“…With its focus on social actors and vehicles, traffic as analytic helps us think across the mobility/immobility divide more precisely in terms of the varied ‘force, speed, rhythm, route, experience and friction’ of mobility (Creswell 2010: 17) 7. Taking these lessons learned from exacting studies of mobility and extending them into the anthropological study of rituals like saint visitation helps fine‐tune traffic into an analytic and method for multisited, multitemporal, multilingual, and ‘multiscalar’ ethnography (Xiang 2013; Yıldız 2021). Such an ethnography of a moving object like saint visitation in turn reintroduces into the anthropology of Islam a conceptualization of ritual that is, like traffic, spatially and materially improvised across contingent divides of gender, class, and genealogy.…”

“…Here, I want to take seriously Nour Khanum's play on the moniker for the visitation of Hazrat‐i Zainab, and think about the connections between the restrictions placed on Iranians’ mobility in conjunction with ziyarat and the historical and spatial production of these routes. In particular, the post‐1979 restrictions, including a singularly sustained and intensified regime of sanctions placed on Iran's entire population by targeting its national currency (Yıldız 2021), are as much a part of the ziyarat geographies described herein as the manuals for conduct in the presence of Hazrat‐i Zainab. I find such an interpretative turn away from the Karbala paradigm productive in that it centres our analysis on not only among but also against whom that Shiʿi communitas comes to be defined and how those definitions inevitably implicate those who restricted Iranians’ mobility on political grounds.…”