Substance, Spirit, and Sociality Among Shi‘i Muslims in Iran

Sacralizing kinship, naturalizing the nation: Blood and food in postrevolutionary Iran

“…On the night of Imam Husayn [or Ashura, a day that commemorates the Imam Husayn's martyrdom], I cook saffron sweet rice [ sholeh zard ]. I believe in this very strongly” (Wellman ). Here, food has been blessed by those who cook, eat, stir, or come into contact with it, and such food is more nourishing both to body and soul than any other type of food.…”

“…Kin relations can be formed through materials such as food, land, hearths, and houses, and they can be constituted through “processes of doing” such as care, nurturance, feeding, exchange, and making choices (Bahloul ; Carsten ; Labby ; McKinnon ; McKinnon and Cannell ; Weston ). Kin relations can further be created or demarcated via immaterial, ethical, or sacred acts and qualities that work alone or alongside the substances of kinship (Cannell 2013; Wellman ). This fuller spectrum of kin making—in and beyond blood and law—can inform nation making by naturalizing (and sacralizing) the nation.…”

“…While some of this negative influence was inadvertent, some was intentional. The worst threat was the “un‐Islamic” practice of “prayer taking,” a form of witchcraft over tea or food consumed by the afflicted and a major cause of calamity, mental illness, and family “schism” ( qahr kardan ): specifically, infighting among siblings or between parents and children (Wellman ). Although Nushin, her relatives, and neighbors admitted that such practices were not an “official” part of Islam, suggesting that their religious leaders might perceive them as wrong or superstitious, they nevertheless saw them as a constant threat to the purity and harmony of kin relations.…”

Biocultural Lactation: Integrated Approaches to Studying Lactation Within and Beyond Anthropology

“…The anthropological, and anthropologically informed, literature on milk donation, cooperative lactation, and human milk feeding is replete with ethnographically informed research that demonstrates the common yet diverse nature of the mutually constitutive nature of breastfeeding, milk, and relationality in diverse societies and cultural contexts Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org. Carroll 2015, Carter & Reyes-Foster 2020, Cassidy & Dykes 2019, El Guindi 2016, El Guindi & al-Othman 2013, Falls 2017, Fioole 2015, Hewlett & Winn 2014, Kramer & Veile 2018, Malcolm 2021, Naef 2017, Nita 2018, Oreg 2020, Oreg & Appe 2020, Palmquist 2015, Rahbari 2020, Rock-Singer 2020, Ross & Waltz 2016, Wellman 2017, Wilson 2018). Finally, Van Esterik & O'Connor (2017 argue that centering breastfeeding as nurture offers a path forward that resists dominant, reductionist, or romanticized models and refocuses the importance of lactation as a relational practice that, when structurally supported, has powerful potential to reclaim and restore cultural histories that were broken by extractive colonial and neocolonial capitalism.…”

‘They have shown me what I need to know’: spirits, the eternal family, and collective ethical responsibility in Utah Mormonism

“…Chapters in New directions in spiritual kinship (Thomas, Malik & Wellman 2017), in which Cannell's work on collective salvation appears, emphasize kinship as ethical relationship. Don Seeman's chapter (2017) builds on Sahlins's work by questioning what kinship as mutuality entails, and Rose Wellman's chapter (2017) responds that kinship as mutuality is an ethical project, exemplified in how Iranians cultivate an ethical family through prayer and food. The nature of kin relationships in Mormon northern Utah similarly involves mutual ethical responsibility and ethical fashioning.…”