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 our current analytical 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.

Emrah Yıldız, Global Horizons Junior Fellow, SCAS; Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Middle East and North African Studies, Northwestern University

Ayşe Çağlar, Fellow, SCAS; University Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Vienna; Permanent Fellow, IWM Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna

Shahram Khosravi External link, opens in new window., Professor of Social Anthropology, Stockholm University

The event will be followed by a reception.