Paper short abstract:

Photography is used to demonstrate the making of subjective Sufi spaces through a gesture of defining centers and sharing identities, thereby expressing concepts like liminality, hierarchy, and a dynamical creativity, counterpoised today through a gesture of drawing borders and confrontation.

Paper long abstract:

This lecture uses the photographic image to interpret Sufism in Pakistan. It argues that photography allows, as opposed to popular conceptions assuming it showing a transparent reality, for a personal perspective contained in the photographer's frozen view. With regard to the lecture's topic, the photographic image lends itself, in conjunction with the written word, to explore the subjective spaces in which participants find evolving the mystical experience - including notions of the liminal, hierarchy, power, and creativity, that is, the habitus and the discourses which form the notion of a shrine. Thus I will outline the intellectual gesture which primarily informs the formation of space in Sufi localities, and I will argue that the original gesture is one of defining spaces from the center outward and of sharing identities, a gesture which creates subjective foci which together make up a holy space, related to each other hierarchically as well as sharing each others' identity, generating a dynamic and creative impetus. I will also show that this gesture is in these days, particularly in the urban Punjab, counterpoised by one of exercising power through drawing borders and confronting exclusive entities, a change which is visible in the redefinition of holy spaces which in the process acquire a new, normative quality of separate divisions. 12-15 Photographic images will be shown in order not only to illustrate, but to interpret this proposition.