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? Zainab’s Traffic provides answers to these questions alongside the socially embedded—and spatially generative—encounters of ritual, mobility, desire, genealogy, and patronage along the route.
Whether it is through the study of the spatial politics of saint veneration in Islam, analysis of cross-border gold trade and sanctions, or examination of pilgrims women’s desire for Syrian lingerie accompanying their pleas with the saint in marital matters, the book and this talk develops the idea of visitation as a ritual of mobility across geography, history, and category. Iranian visitors’ experiences on the road to Sayyida Zainab—emerging out of a self-described “poverty of mobility”—demonstrate the utility of a more capacious anthropological understanding of ritual than current anthropological predicaments allow for. Rather than thinking of ritual as a scripturally canonized manual for pious self-cultivation, Zainab’s Traffic approaches ziyarat as a traffic of pilgrims, goods, and ideas across Iran, Turkey, and Syria.
About the Speaker:
Emrah Yıldız (he/him/o) is a sociocultural anthropologist of cross-border mobility and region formation, and author of Zainab’s Traffic: Moving Saints, Selves, and Others across Borders (University of California Press, 2024). Editor of “kaçak | qaçax | قاچاق : Fugitive Forms of Bureaucracy and Economy across Southwest Asia” (Journal of Cultural Economy 17(2) 2024) and co-editor of “Resistance Everywhere”: The Gezi Protests and Dissident Visions of Turkey (JadMag 1(4) 2014), Yıldız published research articles on saint visitation and mobility in Islam; contraband commerce and currencies under sanctions; and queer asylum, borders and their territorial states with Cultural Anthropology, d i f f e r e n c e s, Journal of Cultural Economy, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, International Journal of Middle East Studies, and Toplum ve Bilim. His short-form analyses, translations, and interviews featured in Asoo, Bianet, Counterpunch, and Jadaliyya. Yıldız works as assistant professor of anthropology and Middle East and North African studies at Northwestern University, where he serves as faculty board member for the Keyman Modern Turkish Studies Program, and founding co-convener of the Colloquium for Global Iran Studies (CoGIS). He is the 2024-2025 Global Horizons Junior Fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study.
