[...]trengths and vulnerabilities variably express themselves
...pushing a family from a position of relative strength into near destitution


how do we conceptualize relations between potentially hostile neighboring groups? (Singh 2011)


[agonistics & intimacies] --how--> they may traverse different intensities ~~~~> ***differences internal to a life***

agon (contest) --Singh--> agonistic intimacy: a way to understand the co-presence of modes of conflict and cohabitation, (*co-presence of violence and wellness*,) to leave open the possibility of a shared and contested future


jinn: a category of spirit shared by popular hinduism and islam
who, usually turns out, is a lifelong conpanion
*a relation that can be life-giving may also become life-denying
jinn and other minor spirits may also harbor the possibility of madness


[varying thresholds of life]
thinking of the dead, the unborn, spirits, and those participants among living --> what kind of conception of life this requires? --> (Deleuze > Singh's) ***varying thresholds of life*** (=/= Agamben's “bare life” [--✕--> Singh's starting point: how one thinks about life or vitality not just as bare life]) --> as a way of engaging ancestors (such as Ehsan's little girl ghost [#Ehsan's brilliant storytelling gives the “unbeliever” goosebumps from the intensities, the “incredible feeling of an unknown Nature-affect” that he embodies]), spirits, the undead, and the unborn who subsist alongside the living
*threshold:
•to denote points of passage accross phases of life
•refering to varying degrees of intensity (that may continue after death)--> as a spirit/jinn is preserved or recedes, through possession or in visions or memories, enduring in potentially multiple dimensions
*a memory, a dream, even a hallucination is also a threshold of life*
agency of spirits [jinn, abstract spirit of modernity, secular education, Thakur Baba, , ,] = *a threshold of life* (with its own immanent forms of movement and flux)
[-]lets not call it “disenchantment” or mere nostalgia, but *a shift in the quality of life* --> ethnographic investigation can be a form of heightened attentiveness (to varying thresholds of life [to the intensities of Ehsan's ghost-girl, to the cannibal mice, Tehran's earthquake synthesis of affect, , ,]--(these [Tehran's range of moods and intensities] are)--> waxing and waning گام‌های ماه *intensities immanent to a milieu; affecting our ideas of ethics and politics)


the social =? “our” version of the transcendent/immanent metaphysical
how many dimensions is “our” metaphysical composed of (in Tehran)?


(Durkheim starts:) religion = an engagement with a vital animating principle, “a kind of anonymous and impersonal force [...] none possesses it entirely and all share in it”
-spirits, demons, jinns, gods of every rank are the *concrete forms* that capture this energy, this *potentiality*
(later Durkheim reduces this remarkable promising formulation in his signiture from the metaphysical: “the moral authority of society”, ‘religion ==> solidarity انسجام’ }=/= innumerable anthropologists have shown how religion does not necessarily “reawaken solidarity”)

(instead of “the social” lets get interested in more than one dimension of life, lets think, with Singh and Deleuze, of) *vast continuum of human and nonhuman life*


“Baba, I have been troubled for years. What can I do to please my ancestral spirits?”


Beyzai analyzes deities and myths in Iran, negating any potential for spiriual movement between rival groups, even in what is clearly *a form of religious life moving across*
Beyzai preoccupation with defeat doesn't allow him to attend to ‘forms of religious life moving across’
•bottom-up thesis of oppositional negation and from its “top-down” opposite
=/= the idea of spiritual conversation
imitation of [upper caste,,,] values
[***]the fatality of these ideas of negation and of imitation is that they obscure the possibility of a spiritual inheritence that may be shared and contested in ways that create the possibility of a *cohabited future between neighbors and rivals* (Singh)

yes yes the history might be made through bloody contradictions, and yet, we cannot be as Magi, waiting for the big drama to unfold --(we can do better)--> a signature capacity of ethnographic attentiveness in an affirmative lineage of thought --(not to deny contradiction)--> to be able to sense **varying intensities of conflict and cohabitation**
(play and war may both be latent in the give and take of everyday life, and the difference may not always be clear-cut)

نیرومندی و کثرت اهالی و تعارضات کشمکش و جماع
(how?) (to be able to) sense varying intensities [کیفیتی با شدت و سختی و حجم ~= انقباض ,در هم کشیدگی + شتافتن ,گرفته شدن + فراهم آمدن ,گرفتگی ,ترنجیدگی] of conflict and cohabitation[: my sister thinks of this term as family in small scale]
--> differential [داراى ضريب متغير، افتراقی، تشخیص دهنده the result of differentiation =/= different تمایز] intensities


bawdy مستهجن

intimate insults ==> accumulate deadly force

shifting intensities between a festival and a riot (are not necessarily a “modern” degeneration of traditional festivity) --> the case of new year's eve in Köln 2016
(bad or good) heightened intensities ==(may animate)==> new political and social movements or sustain the vitality of collective life --> intensities may also wane and become deadended

concept of vitality:
•Deleuze: intensity
•Nietzsche: will to power
•Bergson: elan vital
•Spinoza: conatus


as an ___ I respond to this challange with an ___ic persona

officiator

***(my methodology:) let's include in our dedication to X also a butt of jokes and mimicry


i see you, among other things, as ethical actors

(recent work in anthropology ==>) ethic =/= simply instantiating “categorical imperatives” and obligations, a journy from war (or politics, as the “continuation of war by other means”) to a nonagonistic equilibrium of “perpetual peace” (تعادل ناهنجارانه صلح دائمی)
*life often produces intensities and conflicts that cannot be accounted for by a priori rules and obligations


nobility = refusal of revenge

(Nietzsche:) to sanctify revenge with the term justuce <-- characteristic debasement of agonistic ethics (رستم)
as though justice were simply a further development of the feeling of having been wronged ***
*agon* can morph into a nobler, more animated form. it (can) come closer to life than to death


**(singular) energetic expression of vital life is not always “individual” **

noble and base --> they name a coordinate within (in excess) of which life forces flow and way and wane

Deleuze + Guattari + Nietzsche --> an ethical imperative to examine the kinds of life forces we affirm. negation is not expelled --(Singh reading D+G+N's ethnographic intuition)--> what ‘is’ may be richer than any ideal ‘ought’ ==> anthropology and philosophy, then, are two distinct but related ways in which life may be examined

to think affirmativelt ==> our negations become sharper


my recent knee-jerk reaction (for example to Olearius) would be to invoke Eurocentrism
(resist: “west” and “non-west”, built on entirely negative images of Europe, from which perspective postcolonial settings appear with double negativity from which they can never recover)


thoughtful moments among friends but scholastic and conversational traditions (--> Greek) =/= “sage”, part of a larger conversational contest culture (not always between “friends” but is an agon -->? Kelile-o Demne)
-other conceptual-conversational traditions (in Iran,,,?) [for example “taking an author from behind and giving him a child that would be his own offspring, yet monstrous”, producing an anthropologically oriented Deleuze, a reading of ___ that produces a ___ically oriented ___]
*** it is not a question of negating dialectices but of setting out a different style of thought and examining the ethnographic and political consequences that follow ***


“when you asked him the question about deities, you began a type of conversation called gyan-charcha --> knowledge-talk technique (<-- my favorite mode of reading of literature, and basically everything, is like that)


?which concept(s) you use to think through these things:
•bonded and legitimate labor
•power relations
•marriage
•sacrifice
•kinship
•intimacy
•buying
•selling
•
}--> the fabric of human relatedness depends on it


*[lunar enlightenment]*
(Singh's beautiful lunar reterritorialization of “enlighting”:) what kind of light do we assume as our image of plenitude?
عجایب ماه #moon's inflow-ence, waxing and waning intensities, fluctuating thresholds, the rise and fall of gods, tutelage of moon, a lunar rather than a solar sense of enlightenment, blemished and inconstant, the moon is nondialectical, *neighbors lunacy*


Derridean moment of negative transcendence

waxing and waning plenitude of that flux

Singh:
•varying thresholds and intensities
•logics of a/not-a
•ethics and energetics @Sana
•
•

*** a shift of even a degree (say, a different mode of contract or force) could be the difference between social life and death, happiness and despair, or exploitation and freedom ***
(Singh teaching me to think about Tehranians)

دروغ بد را با دروغ بهتر جایگزین کنیم نه با حقیقت

Nietzsche's double affirmation, yes yes
Deleuze, “the ass does not know how to say no because he says yes to everything with is no” --> to affirm is “to release, to set free what lives”
--> the idea of “challage your presuppositions” --> this is a dialectical habit of thought: the idea that the signature moment of thinking is a determinate negation (of State, Islam, Europe, etc.) Singh asks: how did this particular mode of reflexivity come to stand in for “true” anthropological thought?



would it have been better to leave things more “fluid” and “complex and contradictory”? @Eszter


ethnographic labor:
1- a form of hunting and gathering impressions
2- sifting الک کردن and cultivating expressions

(my work in apass:) our relation to concepts becomes more explicit, as we turn impressions into considered thoughts

...................................

thinking postcolonial urbanism with Anand Taneja

(this is the question of the limitations of imagination:)
how (for a generation of scholars [or artists]) rural (india) [or syria, Iran, or South Korea] has become simply a space of disasters, statistics, and deaths --✕--> Anand's work is a counter-example [i am learning from him to be attentive to my own imagination's stopping-points. to resist stories that render life in those milieus unthinkable] --> that those spaces are not only of abjection but also of imagination and curiosity --> to think about alternative (conceptual) vocabularies to think about those abjected places, religion, and ajayeb [that does not only negate those milieus]
-to think about religion is super usefull and relevant, because it is also about what secularism is

how people (in rural areas) conceive of vitality and advancement?
*how people imagine a better life?* --> (to think non-unilateral and non-static) *picture of aspiration* (in a world like Tehran; #proposal to research on ‘the image of growth’ رشد roshd, slow growth, [roshd-e bi-raviye رشد بی رویه of toxins and species, and so on] in the context of contemporary Tehran)
-imitations of forms

(i am activating a rhizomatic mode of perception [learning from Anand learning from Deleuze and Guattari])--> how one aspect of life leads to another =/= paritioning of the milieu


anthropology of the state : how one engages the state in an every day level


*historically one crucial exit point from the system of ruler-relation was to become ascetic (زهد): disregard for sovereign authority (حاکم hakem, hakemiat) --> a different form of power that one let's to lead to self-rule

[bare life =? life without a way of life --✕--> there is no life without a way of life]
(Singh:) someone's life cut off from their source of vitality
a local body of thought (jinn, etc.)

...................................

(Anand asking) what does it means to live in a city of jinns?
the jinn:
•serves as witnesses of times long gone
•figures of authority whose shrine blesses remembered forms of urban religious life
•forgotten by the amnesia of the postcolonial state
•rendered unislamic by the selective amnesia of revivalist tradition

jinn --> revive that old orientalist trope, constituted not only by bazzar, mosque, and hammam, but also of the antinomian potentials that have long been part of the Islamic tradition

...................................

vita
lives of saints
تذکرة الاولیا Tazkirat al-Awliya
concerned with canonization, education, and collective recollection of contemplative life
(vita as a biological genre recounting the lives of holly men and women in several religious traditions: Bhaktamala, Theravada buddhism, Therigata, etc.)

Singh asking: how would we narrate a scholarly life? (and i add to that: who could be oulia اولیا Arahant [further ones] today? queer or nonhuman)
*participated in the world historical “isms” (--> ajayeb)
--Singh--> narrating a conceptual life, vita

*uncertainties of reception* (in Attar's Tazkirat al-Awliya)

singularity of trajectory of Attar's saints =/= my random sampling of themes

anthropology: to write about anything that exists or imagined

can we talk affirmatively of a postmodern ethnography of ajayeb? =/= “totalizing vision” of culture

recovery of a human voice as a moral imperative (--> Hoda)

(?your history as a) telos of increasingly self-awareness

-Derrida's philosophical style tending to negative transcendence (différance: an absence that transcends ‘a’ and ‘not a’)
-Deleuze's tradition of affirmative immanence

(Singh > Deleuze > Strauss:) structure is composed of “pre-individual singularities” ~ nomadic distribution of potential --immanent--> contradictions, accidents, mutations

pure/impure
suspicious/inauspicious
life/death

heretic --> reorder and obliterate the partitioning of categories that compose the structural order of religion [--> Veena on Sikhism and Hinduism: symbolism of Sikhism understood in relation to Hinduism structural order, annihilating the categorical prioritise (intellectual and social) of the medieval world. Sikhism rejecting the opposition between categories of: the rulers, the caste system, and the orders of renunciation --> investment of the virtues of all three *in a single body of faith* and conduct]

heterodox sects
rebellious thinkers
--> negation of the organizing conceptual order

(social and) ritual order generates its own forms of instability

...ambivalences of key concepts ==bring==> “play” to the structure, for good and ill ~ liminality

(Veena's) liminial situation: a form of instability where the individual experiences his social world as separated from the cosmic --> death: disarticulation --> must be undone by inhabiting the liminality : ritually rejoining the flow of life

similarities of ritual mourner and ascetic: transcending the categories of the social and the cosmic

incorporation of the liminal undead (preta) with ritually incorporated ancestors (pitri) [job of the mourner]

(crucial task of the) ritual: conveying the dead from the threshold of liminality into an ancestral flow of life

emphasis on the system is (always?) at the cost of the event
(eternal investment of the artists in foregrounding of the event rather than the structure --> rapture with structure as caste, tradition, state, norm, system, etc. at the cost of missing the practical kinship transcribed into the social contract, leadership, and laws of encounter)

***modernity is composed (neither by continuities nor rupture then, but) by transfigurations***
(Singh + Veena)

critical event
critical structure

[*]event: institute a new modality of historical action which is not inscribed in the inventory of that situation
(for Furet: French revolution is an even[...]