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- Convenors:
-
Timothy Cooper
(University of Cambridge)
Vindhya Buthpitiya (University of St Andrews)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- 6 College Park (6CP), 0G/007
- Sessions:
- Friday 29 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
If political order is a form of organizing death, what does mourning bring about in the social world? Bringing together the study of mourning with the study of mediation, we explore what role empathy, condolement, and arbitration play in the material, visual, digital, and sonic cultures of loss.
Long Abstract:
If, following Achille Mbembe, political order is a form of organizing death, what does mourning bring about in the social world? Anthropologists have long engaged with the funerary and the commemorative as rites of transformation that re-assert social order and political legitimacy. In the aftermaths of political violence, atrocities, and human rights violations, the publicity of mourning also underpins demands for truth, justice, and accountability. The extent to which mourning or grieving might serve as a call for justice owes much to doctrines of redemptive suffering inherited from Roman Catholic theology. Should the pursuit of justice, as the ultimate end to mourning, simply mean asserting normativity in the righting of wrongs? Can redemption promise more than vindication or the clearing of a debt?
In the context of politicised or ritualised grief, this panel seeks to think beyond the doctrine of redemptive suffering to ask how and to what ends mourning is mediated and made present to those outside of its communities of shared sentiment? We consider how mourning unfolds in a broad repertoire of sensations, interfaces, and affects that strives to mediate emotional and political solidarity through mediums for their circulation. Expressed through media aesthetics and sensational forms, mourning can challenge existing conditions of sociality and conflict rather than reproduce them. Bringing together the study of mourning with the study of mediation, we explore what role empathy, condolement, and arbitration play in the material, visual, digital, and sonic cultures of loss.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 29 July, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
Against the background of a minority demonstration of ritual mourning in Pakistan, this paper asks how do material, visual, digital, and sonic mediums and modes of circulation come together to create mass-mediated periods of moral exception?
Paper long abstract:
During the first ten days of the Islamic month of Muharram the minority Twelver Shi’i branch of Islam observe a period mourning for Imam Hussain and the family of the Prophet Muhammad killed or humiliated the Battle of Karbala in 680CE. In Pakistan, the Shi’a make up around a fifth of the population, so the public unfolding and moral atmosphere of Muharram is heavily reliant on the participation, empathy, or ambivalence of denominational others, who in many cases observe the period of mourning as they would do for a neighbour grieving a lost family member. Music, films, celebrations such as weddings, and the act of starting anything afresh, such as opening a new deck of cards, are all avoided.
Muharram is shaped by Shi’i theology and practice that considers mourning divine exemplars to be a form of protest against worldly forms of tyranny and injustice. Unlike other kinds of public ritual, the aim of the commemorations is not the reassertion of the status quo. Rather, its aim is the elicitation of a sensory domain that is open to all and characterized by emotional vulnerability. That is, the vulnerability to be outraged by tyranny and affectively stirred by injustice. This paper asks, how are the moods that characterise the ten days of Muharram mediated to those outside of Shi’i communities in ways that elicit emotional and political solidarity? How do material, visual, digital, and sonic mediums and modes of circulation come together to create mass-mediated periods of moral exception?
Paper long abstract:
How does the Alevi community employ theater to transmit historical trauma and to deal with the post-traumatic feelings? My presentation will explore this question in the light of extensive archival and ethnographic research.
The Alevi religious minority makes up the largest religious minority in Turkey. The history of Alevis has been one of oppression and persecution, especially since the 16th century, as the followers of a local Islamic tradition under the hegemony of Sunni Islam in the Ottoman Empire. The Alevis were marginalized since then, and through the discourse of heresy, their exclusion and persecution were justified. In the face of such adversity, Alevis preferred to live as closed communities, isolated in the highest villages. The inception of the Republic of Turkey as a secular nation-state in 1923 was initially promising for them, but the regime remained implicitly Sunni Muslim. Thus, the Alevi community’s experiences of citizenship and belonging continued to be characterized by precarity as they occupied a category of ‘national abjection.’
The Alevi community engaged theatre into their struggle after they became politically active in the 1970s. The plays staged by Alevi community theatres and professional groups in Turkey and its diasporas have focused primarily on the histories of violence and persecution against Alevis. Most of these plays, often written by members of the community, have been re-enactments of specific traumatic events. Theatre is a way to challenge the official narratives of those traumatic events, to reveal what is systematically hidden and what is not told, and to fill the narrative gaps of the nation from the perspectives of marginalized and oppressed subjects. As such, theatre becomes a means of the perpetuation of grief, and it functions as a site for the transmission of post-traumatic feelings to the young generations of the Alevi community.
Paper short abstract:
This paper offers an emergent case analysis of public mourning of a doctor treating people who used illegal drugs in Norway. Theorizing how mediated mourning (re)shapes the object of grief, the paper contributes to the existing discussions on politicized grief.
Paper long abstract:
On September 12, 2021, a man in Norway dies. In the weeks after, Norway hears about the doctor who in years had defied authorities to help people addicted to illegal drugs: Sverre Eika – “the addicts’ doctor” (narkomanes lege). Media describe desperation and fear within a community left in mourning. There are reports of acute hospitalizations and even suicides among Eika’s patients. Media interview and quote mourning activists warning about a rise of overdoses and who demands establishing clinics in his honor. Politicians demanded emergent measures while advocating for drug policy reform during memorial service describing Eika as “drug policy reform in two shoes”. Grief after Eika actualized the precarious situation of people addicted to illegal drugs, the inadequate care, and the political tensions. Through the ways it was mediated, it became a metonymy for the broken care system, the inhuman drug policy in Norway, and the ungrievable “addicts.”
This paper offers an emergent analysis of this social and political event, which illustrates mourning’s political dimensions and complicates the existing theorization of political grief. While mourning was mediated to the public, to “those outside of its communities of shared sentiments” through the diverse voices, forms, and engagements, the object of grief was continuously reformulated. These insights will contribute to the existing theoretical approaches to politicized grief by making a distinction between two somewhat established concepts: “political grief” and “politics of grief.” I will conceptualize the difference between these two, and their relation to the mediated object of grief.
Paper short abstract:
This study investigates the role of mourning through published personal photos that took place in the occupied Tahrir Square in 2011. The various modalities, with which mourning had been performed, had targeted the socio-spatial production of memory, and the creation of new social bonds of care.
Paper long abstract:
This study aims to investigate the role of mourning through published personal photos that took place in the occupied Tahrir Square in 2011.
The massive use of photography at this period of revolutionary actions seemed to have the creation of international public awareness of the local struggles as its goal. At the same time, as Lara Baladi (2017) stated about Tahrir's photography of 2011, photographing meant belonging, as personal photography took a social aspect, it had a kind of sense of social responsibility.
Based on the perspective of Ariella Azoulay (2012), who introduces the event of photography, describing the interrelated connections of actors and environment at the time of the shooting, I started exploring the published amateur photos. I focused on those depicting mourning practices that seem to have reproduced at a very fast pace in various ways and contexts. The portraits of the Martyrs of Tahrir were used simultaneously as signs of bravery and vulnerability, and also as strong traces of presence.
The various modalities, with which mourning had been performed, had targeted the socio-spatial production of memory, and the creation of new and strong social bonds of solidarity and care. As Stavrides (2019) claims, the spatial qualities of the commoning practices contain the elements of a potential emancipative future. The collective experience of mourning seemed to have a transformative role in the transient habitation of the city, which explores new formations of the public in public space.
Paper short abstract:
Where ethno-nationalist conflict magnified the political resonance of war death within fraught imaginaries of nation, state and citizenship, this paper explores visual practices associated with martyrs’ portraits, public mourning and commemoration among the Tamil community in northern Sri Lanka.
Paper long abstract:
During the Sri Lankan civil war (1983-2009), funerary and memorial practices were intensely politicised in the service of state-building aspirations and cultivating ideal citizenries bound to expanding militarism, total devotion to the nation and sacrifice of the self. A visual economy of war death spanning memorial portraiture to atrocity images underpinned conceptions of an ethno-political self and other coupled with divergent elicitations of ‘terror’.
Following the government forces’ military victory over the Tamil militancy, mediated elicitations of death endure in the postwar, illustrating contested territorial claims and narratives of homeland, histories of resistance, community archiving, and demands for truth and accountability. Images of the war dead continue to pervade communal acts of remembrance, spaces of civilian protest, expressions of political and citizenship grievances as well as demands for justice and accountability for state terror and atrocity.
Where ethno-nationalist conflict magnified the political resonance of war death within fraught imaginaries of the nation, state and citizenship, this paper explores visual practices associated with public mourning and commemoration among the Tamil community in northern Sri Lanka. Centred on the post/war circulation, display, concealment and destruction of Tamil martyrs’ portraits, I will examine how these uses conjure imaginings of alternative political futures as both necessity and possibility.