Search for other papers by Sana Chavoshian in
Current site
Google Scholar
Abstract
What does secularity feel like when blown through the air rather than designated by state secularism? How does dust-wind unsettle the distinction between religion and politics? This article places dust-wind at the centre of an ethnographic engagement with material effects and affective resonances that shape the problem-space of secularism in Iran. In the past decade, the eruption of dust-winds across the Iran-Iraq borderlands has drastically impacted people’s relations with their environment: in religious discourse, dust undergirds various modes of veneration and commemoration among the Shi’i inhabitants. However, when risen in the air it intrudes breathing and invokes transgressive interpretations. I analyse material secularity through the phenomenon of bad air and the distinction between the religious ‘respiratory sacrifice’ and the secular ‘right to breathe’. While ‘respiratory sacrifice’ connotes dust as a reliquary of martyrs, the ‘right to breathe’ concerns dust-winds and necessary repairs. I draw on two notions of ‘atmosphere’, one spiritual and orchestrated, the other, meteorologically hazardous bad air. Together they make up contesting atmospheric collectives that unsettle formal religious scripts. I argue that atmospheric collectives recalibrate environmental protests while dilating dust to produce a secular materiality.
Purchase
Buy instant access (PDF download and unlimited online access):
Institutional Login
Log in with Open Athens, Shibboleth, or your institutional credentials
Personal login
Log in with your brill.com account
-
Agrama, Hussein Ali. 2012. Questioning Secularism: Islam, Sovereignty, and the Rule of Law in Modern Egypt. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
-
Ahmann, Chloe, and Alison Kenner. 2020. ‘Breathing Late Industrialism’. Engaging Science, Technology, and Society 6: 416–438. https://doi.org/10.17351/ests2020.673.
-
Ahmann, Chloe, 2020. ‘Atmospheric Coalition: Shifting the Middle in Post Industrial Baltimore’. Engaging Science, Technology and Society 6: 469–485. https://doi.org/10.17351/ests2020.421
-
Amato, Joseph. 2000. Dust: A History of the Small and the Invisible. Berkeley: University of California Press.
-
Asad, Talal. 2003. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
-
Bachelard, Gaston. 2019. ‘Metaphysics of Dust’. Parrhesia 31, 17–32. http://www.parrhesiajournal.org/parrhesia31/parrhesia31_bachelard.pdf
-
Bender, Courtney and Todne Thomas. 2021. Neoliberalism and Ambient Apocalypse. Immanent Frame. https://tif.ssrc.org/2021/03/03/neoliberalism-and-ambient-apocalypse/
-
Benjamin, Walter. 1978. ‘Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia’. New Left Review 108, 47–56.
-
Berndtson, Petri, and Lenart Škof. 2019. Atmospheres of Breathing. Reprint edition. Albany: State University of New York Press.
-
Bille, Mikkel. 2017. ‘Ecstatic Things: The Power of Light in Shaping Bedouin Homes’. Home Cultures 14 (1): 25–49. https://doi.org/10.1080/17406315.2017.1319533.
-
Böhme, Gernot. 2013. ‘The Art of the Stage Set as a Paradigm for an Aesthetics of Atmospheres’. Ambiances. Environnement Sensible, Architecture et Espace Urbain. https://doi.org/10.4000/ambiances.315.
-
Blanchot, Joseph. 2022. The Secular Paradox: The Religiosity of Not Religious. New York: New York University Press.
-
Chavoshian, Sana. 2019. ‘Secular Atmospheres: Unveiling and Urban Space in Early 20th Century Iran’. Historical Social Research 44, (3): 180–205. https://doi.org/10.12759/hsr.44.2019.3.180-205.
-
Chavoshian, Sana. 2025a. Suspension: Dust Winds in Iran under Sanctions. Journal of Iranian Studies, forthcoming.
-
Chavoshian, Sana. 2025b. Women Martyrs and Stones in Post-war Iran. Edinburgh University Press.
-
Choy, Timothy. 2011. Ecologies of Comparison: An Ethnography of Endangerment in Hong Kong. Experimental Futures: Technological Lives, Scientific Arts, Anthropological Voices. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
-
Choy, Timothy, and Jerry Zee. 2015. ‘Condition—Suspension’. Cultural Anthropology 30 (2): 210–223. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca30.2.04.
-
Das, Veena. 1983. ‘Language of Sacrifice’. Man 18 (3): 445–462. https://doi.org/10.2307/2801591.
-
Darwish Mohammad & Hamidreza Abbasi. 2016. A Solution for the Dust-Wind Crisis in Khuzestan (in Persian). in Shabake-ye Mutale’at-e Siyasatgozari-e Omumi.
-
Derrida, Jacques. 1994. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. Psychology Press.
-
Eisenlohr, Patrick. 2024. ‘Atmospheres: The Multisensoriality of Spatially Extended Emotions,’ Ethos 52 (1): 37–50. https://doi.org/10.1111/etho.12417.
-
Engelke, Matthew. 2015. ‘The Coffin Question: Death and Materiality in Humanistic Funerals.’ Material Religion 11, no. 1: 26–49. 10.2752/205393215X14259900061553
-
Evans-Pritchard, E.E. 1964. ‘The Meaning of Sacrifice Among the Nuer’. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 84 (1/2): 21–33. https://doi.org/10.2307/2843998.
-
Hubert, Henri, and Marcel Mauss. 1981. Sacrifice: Its Nature and Functions. Translated by W.D. Halls. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo26504625.html.
-
Irigaray, Luce, 2004. ‘The Age of Breath’ in Luce Irigaray Key Writings, London: Continuum.
-
Irigaray, Luce, and Michael Marder. 2015. ‘Ethical Gestures Towards the Other’, 253–271. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137453020_18.
-
Latour, Bruno, 1991. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
-
Kenner, Alison.2018. Breathtaking: Asthma Care in a Time of Climate Change: Asthma Care in a Time of Climate Change. Illustrated edition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
-
Madani, Saeed. 2023. ‘Iran’s Khuzestan: Thirst and Turmoil’, Brussel: International Crisis Group. https://icg-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/2023-08/241-khuzestan-thirst-and-turmoil.pdf
-
Mbembe, Achille, Carolyn Shread. 2021. ‘The Universal Right to Breathe’. Critical Inquiry 47 (1): S58–62. https://doi.org/10.1086/711437.
-
Meyer, Birgit. 2014. Mediation and Genesis of the Presence: Towar a Material Approach to Religion. with a response on comments by Hans Belting, Pamela Klassen, Chris Pinney, Monique Scheer, Religion & Society: Advances in Research 5: 205–254.
-
Meyer, Brigit. 2015. ‘How Pictures Matter: Religious Objects and the Imagination in Ghana.’ In Objects and Imagination: Perspectives on Materialization and Meaning, ed. Øivind Fuglerud and Leon Wainwright, New York: Berghahn Books, 160–184.
-
Orsi, Robert A. 2011. ‘Belief’. Material Religion 7 (1): 10–16. https://doi.org/10.2752/175183411X12968355481773.
-
Peters, John Durham. 2015. The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
-
Rubaii, Kali. 2020. ‘Birth Defects and the Toxic Legacy of War in Iraq’. Middle East Reoport Online MERIP. https://merip.org/2020/09/birth-defects-and-the-toxic-legacy-of-war-in-iraq/.
-
Salehi-Isfahani, Djavad, Narges Bajoghli, Ali Vaez, and Vali Nasr. 2024. How Sanctions Work: Iran and the Impact of Economic Warfare. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
-
Scott, David. 2004. Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
-
Sefat, Kusha. 2022. The Revolution of Things NJ: Princeton University Press
-
Starlow, Jeremy. 2020. Some Notes on the Visualization of the Pandemic Body. Dossier Corona Series of Religious Matters in an Entangled World. https://religiousmatters.nl/some-notes-on-the-visualization-of-the-pandemic-body/
-
Stone, Nomi and Carole McGranahan. 2020. ‘Flash Ethnography: An Introduction’, American Ethnologist website. https://americanethnologist.org/features/collections/flash-ethnography/flash-ethnography-an-introduction
-
Taussig, Michael. 2006. Walter Benjamin’s Grave. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/W/bo3770836.html.
-
Turner, Tamara. 2019. ‘The Right Kind of Hal: Feeling and Foregrounding Atmospheric Identity in an Algerian Music Ritual.’ In Music as Atmosphere: Collective Feeling and Affective Sounds ed. Friedlind Riedel and Juha Torvinen. London and New York: Routledge, 112–130.
-
Wool, Zoë. 2023. ‘All That Is Solid Burns into Smoke: US Military Burn Pits, Petrochemical Toxicity, and the Racial Geopolitics of Displacement’. Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 9 (1). https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v9i1.38452.
-
Yıldız, Emrah. 2021. ‘Of Nuclear Rials and Golden Shoes: Scaling Commodities and Currencies across Sanctions on Iran’. International Journal of Middle East Studies 53 (4): 604–619. https://doi.org/10.1017/S002074382100043X.
-
Zee, Jerry C. 2022. Continent in Dust: Experiments in a Chinese Weather System, Berkley: University of California Press.
| All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Views | 603 | 300 | 15 |
| Full Text Views | 13 | 6 | 0 |
| PDF Views & Downloads | 17 | 14 | 0 |
Search for other papers by Sana Chavoshian in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
Abstract
What does secularity feel like when blown through the air rather than designated by state secularism? How does dust-wind unsettle the distinction between religion and politics? This article places dust-wind at the centre of an ethnographic engagement with material effects and affective resonances that shape the problem-space of secularism in Iran. In the past decade, the eruption of dust-winds across the Iran-Iraq borderlands has drastically impacted people’s relations with their environment: in religious discourse, dust undergirds various modes of veneration and commemoration among the Shi’i inhabitants. However, when risen in the air it intrudes breathing and invokes transgressive interpretations. I analyse material secularity through the phenomenon of bad air and the distinction between the religious ‘respiratory sacrifice’ and the secular ‘right to breathe’. While ‘respiratory sacrifice’ connotes dust as a reliquary of martyrs, the ‘right to breathe’ concerns dust-winds and necessary repairs. I draw on two notions of ‘atmosphere’, one spiritual and orchestrated, the other, meteorologically hazardous bad air. Together they make up contesting atmospheric collectives that unsettle formal religious scripts. I argue that atmospheric collectives recalibrate environmental protests while dilating dust to produce a secular materiality.
| All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Views | 603 | 300 | 15 |
| Full Text Views | 13 | 6 | 0 |
| PDF Views & Downloads | 17 | 14 | 0 |
