Join the Society of Fellows and the Heyman Center for the Humanities
for a talk by Aamer Ibraheem, chaired by Karuna Mantena
The Part which Has Two Parts: Reincarnation, Sovereignty, and Implicated Subjects in the Golan Heights
Thursday, November 6
12:15-2pm
Second Floor Common Room
Heyman Center
This talk presents an ethnography of the contradictory and often brutal experience of the self under a political condition marked by the excess of state sovereignty. It is an ethnography that enters the inner worlds of those living on the mountains of the Golan Heights—a post-war landscape shaped by the aftermath of the 1967 Six-Day War. In this occupied zone, a population of over twenty-five thousand Druze sees its history claimed and interpellated by the Syrian state, past and present, while being saturated with Israeli rule and political logic. At the heart of this sovereign conjuncture stands the powerful and pervasive reincarnated figure: men and women who recall their vivid past-life memories, but whose memories belong to histories that contradict and often trouble the present in the here and now. This talk attends ethnographically to this figure and sets out to understand the notion of the “implicated subject,” exploring how people and communities find themselves folded into events and social dramas that are far larger than themselves.
Aamer Ibraheem is a sociocultural anthropologist, whose research weaves anthropology with history in multiple languages including Arabic, Hebrew, and French, to study the formation of political attachments and the production of historical claims among mountain communities in the modern Middle East, with a focus on the realms of war, self, and theology. His work centers on questions around the colonial registers of tradition and their temporal modes of subjection. His current book project, Present Interruptus, traces how the Druze tradition of reincarnation was inaugurated as an anthropological object of knowledge external to the community since the 19th century. Located in the Golan Heights, this ethnography proposes a radical rethinking of past-life memories by taking seriously the politically paradoxical subject positions they produce.
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The SOF/ Heyman Center Fall Thursday Lecture Series events are open to Columbia-affiliated faculty, students, and invited guests. All others interested in attending, please email the SOF/Heyman at sofheyman@columbia.edu.
