DSR Lecture Series: "Zainab’s Traffic: Moving Saints, Selves, and Others across Borders"

What is the value—religious, political, economic, or altogether social—of getting on a bus in Tehran to embark on an eight-hundred-mile journey across two international borders to the Sayyida Zainab shrine outside Damascus? Under what material conditions can such values be established, reassessed, or transgressed, and by whom? Yildiz's book, Zainab’s Traffic: Moving Saints, Selves, and Others, provides answers to these questions alongside the socially embedded—and spatially generative—encounters of ritual, mobility, desire, genealogy, and patronage along the route. The book and this talk develop the idea of visitation as a traffic of pilgrims, goods, and ideas across Iran, Turkey, and Syria.

About the speaker

Emrah Yıldız works as assistant professor of anthropology and Middle East and North African studies at Northwestern University. He is the author of Zainab’s Traffic: Moving Saints, Selves, and Others across Borders (2024),. editor of “kaçak | qaçax | قاچاق : Fugitive Forms of Bureaucracy and Economy across Southwest Asia” (2024), and co-editor of “Resistance Everywhere: The Gezi Protests and Dissident Visions of Turkey” (2014).

In conversation with Department for the Study of Religion professors Simon Coleman and Nada Moumtaz.