Browsing by Author "Gitre, Carmen M. K."

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
  • Thumbnail Image
    Disciplining Religious Bodies, Forming Secular Bodies: Atatürk, Modern Power and Secular Affect
    Pervaiz, Mohammed Naeem (Virginia Tech, 2020-07-07)
    This work is an investigation into secular and religious male embodiment in Turkey. The explorations in this work are interdisciplinary showing how the European body became coded and formed onto the archetype of a universal secular male body. In particular, I show how the secular male body formed during the rupture between empire (Ottoman) and nation-state (Turkey). I focus in particular how the body of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (d. 1938) became the way in which the secular body was disciplined, taught and performed. I explore the enigmatic indeterminacy of the secular male body by showing how the secular functions as a separating power, partitioning men into public (secular) and private (religious) persons. I try and capture how secular life was coherently and discursively constructed in the early Turkish Republic through brute force, humiliation and acquiescence. Thinking with Wittgenstein and Foucault, I do not theorize the secular, nor do I employ special critical theoretical strategies such as archeology or deconstruction to unsettle the secular. Such theoretical strategies may themselves be an expression of secular power. Instead, I follow how secular power works in the utterances, institutions (horizontal power in ordinary life as well as vertical state power) and bodily practices of subjects through what anthropologists influenced by the seminal work of Talal Asad call a "discursive-embodied" tradition. Here, I comment on several Kemalist sources of inspiration such as the journal La Turquie Kemaliste, Atatürk's Anıtkabir Mausoleum, bodies memorialized in Kemalist museums and early Republican newspapers. I go on to examine ethnographically how a contemporary Nekşibendi sufi community in Istanbul practice embodiment and view secular life. For them and many other of my interlocutors, the partitioning of men into public and private persons constituted a separation of a "form" from its "life", what was called to me a "hypocrite" body (munafiq). The munafiq body does not so easily live well with views of embodiment that coalesce "inner" and "outer" life in sufism, thus reifying in some sufi circles in Istanbul the problem of religious and secular embodiment in Turkey today.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Reading in Zion: Book Cultures of Mormon Youth, 1869–1890
    Balli, Tyler A. (Virginia Tech, 2020-06-26)
    This thesis examines the feelings of generational anxiety in the Mormon community from 1869 to 1890 and how those feelings intersected with ideas about reading. During this time, older members of the Mormon community in Utah Territory feared how changes in and threats to Mormon society might negatively affect young people's beliefs, abilities, knowledge, and adherence to their parents' religion. Older Mormons recognized a potential ally and enemy in books, newspapers, and other reading materials, which they believed could dramatically shape young people for good or for ill depending on the quality of the material. This thesis argues these older Mormons borrowed many elements from other US literary cultures and repurposed them for distinctly Mormon ends, including achieving theosis (chapter 1), navigating changing dynamics in Mormon families (chapter 2), and building their utopic society, Zion (chapter 3). This research adds to the work of those scholars who have combined the history of Mormonism with book history. It incorporates the voices of everyday Mormons to bring into focus the entire ecosystem of reading for young Mormons by focusing not only on fiction but also on biography, scripture, "Church works," history, and other genres. It examines not only discourse but also institutionalized programs and actions, such as the 1888 MIA Course of Reading (chapter 4), that shaped Mormons' world of reading. Such an examination begins to sharpen our understanding of the relationship of print and religion in America and what reading meant to Mormons.
  • Thumbnail Image
    We Can Do Very Little With Them:  British Discourse and British Policy on Shi'is in Iraq
    Furrow, Heath A. (Virginia Tech, 2019-06-26)
    This thesis explores the role of metropolitan religious values and discourses in influencing British officials' discourse on Sunni and Shi'i Islam in early mandate Iraq. It also explores the role that this discourse played in informing the policy decisions of British officials. I argue that British officials thought about and described Sunni and Shi'i Islam through a lens of religious values and experiences that led British officials to describe Shi'i Islam as prone to theocracy and religious and intellectual intolerance, traits that British officials saw as detrimental to their efforts to create a modern state in Iraq. These descriptions ultimately led British officials to take active steps to remove Shi'i religions leaders from the civic discourse of Iraq and to support an indigenous government where Sunnis were given most government positions in spite of making up a minority of the overall population of Iraq. This study draws on documents created by British officials serving in Iraq from 1919-1922, including official reports and correspondence, published government reports, personal correspondence and memoirs. It also draws on biographies of British officials, the secondary literature on religion and civil society in Great Britain, and the secondary literature on Shi'i Islam in Iraq. I engage in the historiography surrounding European Imperial perceptions of Islam and argue that historians should pay greater attention to the role that metropolitan religious experiences and values played in informing the way that imperial officials differentiated between different groups within Islam. I also engage in the historiography of British policy in mandate Iraq, offering a deeper view of how British discourse on Shi'i Islam developed and how this discourse influenced the policy decisions of British official.