Ansari, Narges; (2023) The Prospects of Change: Rituals of mediation and the emergent Shi’a subjects in Iran. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

Abstract

This thesis explores the modalities of action entailed in Shi’i devotional practices of venerating the descendants of the Prophet in contemporary Iran. It focuses on the mediatory role performed by the imams in these contexts, that is, the act of drawing on the position of the imams as “guides” and “allies” to connect and communicate with the Divine in order to accomplish a particular outcome (tavassol kardan). The aim of this study is to unpack the assumptions of agency and subjectivity that inform people’s engagement with these practices. In the contemporary landscape of politics and piety in Iran, both in the build-up and following the 1979 revolution, commonplace reflections on Shi’i rituals and principles associated with the veneration of the imams tend to be dominated by a series of dichotomies such as resistance versus domination, efficacy versus deferral, subversion versus coercion, etc. This thesis problematises the foregrounding of the autonomous liberal subject as a benchmark against which to evaluate the effects and significance of these rituals. Instead, it begins its enquiry by suspending its assumptions of what it means to become a subject of change in the first place, and seeks to understand these rituals, the role assumed by the imams within them, and the ethics and principles through which their effect is both affirmed and assessed from the perspective of those who participate in them. The main argument guiding the thesis is that, in the Shi’i context of Iran, rather than a pre-existing entity for whom agency is a property that is anchored inside a bounded self, the subject of change is better understood as an emerging, prospective potential which is realised as the worthy recipient of Divine intervention. To make this argument, the thesis puts its ethnographically driven analysis of the mediatory role played by the imams in dialogue with ongoing debates regarding both the limits of human agency and the relational conception of the subject in the anthropology of Islam and the ethics and politics of Shi’i piety in post-revolutionary Iran.

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