Like Yoni, I was conflicted about Warring Souls, and I can’t be sure how effected I was by seeing her present this exact work in her Peripheral Visions talk at the beginning of the semester. Her lecture gave me certain insights into the book, but at the same time amplified its shortcomings.
The central question that I was ultimately left with is, what is her project? I don't understand what she means by, "In this work I aim to narrate the political poem of the Islamic republic through the lens of anthropology, framed by the mystical allegory of the journey." (5) This seems like a whole different kind of jargon.
While she focuses on cultural production at the Iran/Iraq warfront, and she tracks the appropriation of martyrdom as state policy, I feel confused about what she’s really trying to get at. I found myself writing many question marks in the margins, as her citations and references sometimes disprove or contradict her own objective! For example, in chapter 3, when speaking about the film crew that claimed they had no formal film training, and were then merely recording events rather than manipulating the images they made, she asserts this was a myth that gave the Revayat-e Fath a false authenticity or “truthful” image production. But in the footnote, she compares this to the Basij, who have no formal combat training and are thus rendered unexpectedly ineffective soldiers. She’s saying that filmmaking is agentive in its own right, that filmmakers do not necessarily need to be trained to be effectively enact a process of political image-making, but the same is NOT true for the soldiers, so how can she say, “the same argument can be made”? (237)
The structure of the book was correlatively disjointed, with images that are not explained or integrated into the text, but hover in a separate, liminal space. At times, it seemed like her actual project, the explication of her theory was in the footnotes, while the main text served as a hodgepodge of fiction, ethnographic data and historical background. She doesn’t deal with propaganda and discourse as carefully as Yurchak, image production (or the death image for that matter) as thoughtfully as Klima, or the mutually reciprocal creation of subjects/creation of representations of subjects as articulately as Inoue. Yet she does pay cursory lip service to all of these themes.
I’m interested to see what people have to say about her “ethnography,” particularly her use of fictional passages. While she says in the book (and said in her talk) that fiction allowed her to overcome her own self-censorship, I wonder if this isn’t just a way of sidestepping the problematic all anthropologists find themselves faced with when trying to interpolate real lives with theoretical/political/cultural constructs.
As I read Warring Souls, I wondered what the book was about. I think that Varzi wants to set up the book as a kind of journey, but I am not sure if the book is a depiction of a journey, or if reading the book is a journey itself. That is, the book depicts the journey of the idea of “losing the self” to gain the self from ancient Persian texts to revolutionary and then to post-Revolutionary Iran. The idea of losing and gaining the self changes as it is interpreted by the architects of the revolution, religious leaders and by the Basij. This image changes also in different media from books, to speeches, to monumental visual artwork to film. Then Varzi shows that in a way, in order to “find themselves” youth in post-revolutionary Iran are looking back to the “originals” to the texts by Hafiz and sometimes to the Basij.
One question that emerged in my mind after reading the text is, “what is it that writing does that film cannot?” I think we discussed this in relation to Alan Klima’s book and film—as it seemed that he felt that when dealing with visual imagery, film is somehow a superior representational form. Although Klima, more than other writers we’ve read, tapped into the capacity of the mind to produce visual images while reading writing, some of us in class felt that his foray into film somehow showed that he felt that the mind’s visual images were not good enough. It seems that Varzi feels this way also. I felt at times that she was saying “if you could see these images, these films, that would be the best, but reading my descriptions of them are OK since you can’t”. But we know from her very text that writing possesses its own special way with visual imagery, because so much visual imagery---the murals, the television shows, the films—sprang from the early Persian writings. Her story in the beginning of the book shows how Hafiz’s writing was able to bring vivid images to her imprisoned uncle. Somehow this power of writing gets lost in her discussion. Perhaps her fiction insertions are a way of getting back to this power of writing and the production of images.
2 Comments:
At 4:14 PM,
amber said…
Like Yoni, I was conflicted about Warring Souls, and I can’t be sure how effected I was by seeing her present this exact work in her Peripheral Visions talk at the beginning of the semester. Her lecture gave me certain insights into the book, but at the same time amplified its shortcomings.
The central question that I was ultimately left with is, what is her project? I don't understand what she means by, "In this work I aim to narrate the political poem of the Islamic republic through the lens of anthropology, framed by the mystical allegory of the journey." (5) This seems like a whole different kind of jargon.
While she focuses on cultural production at the Iran/Iraq warfront, and she tracks the appropriation of martyrdom as state policy, I feel confused about what she’s really trying to get at. I found myself writing many question marks in the margins, as her citations and references sometimes disprove or contradict her own objective! For example, in chapter 3, when speaking about the film crew that claimed they had no formal film training, and were then merely recording events rather than manipulating the images they made, she asserts this was a myth that gave the Revayat-e Fath a false authenticity or “truthful” image production. But in the footnote, she compares this to the Basij, who have no formal combat training and are thus rendered unexpectedly ineffective soldiers. She’s saying that filmmaking is agentive in its own right, that filmmakers do not necessarily need to be trained to be effectively enact a process of political image-making, but the same is NOT true for the soldiers, so how can she say, “the same argument can be made”? (237)
The structure of the book was correlatively disjointed, with images that are not explained or integrated into the text, but hover in a separate, liminal space. At times, it seemed like her actual project, the explication of her theory was in the footnotes, while the main text served as a hodgepodge of fiction, ethnographic data and historical background. She doesn’t deal with propaganda and discourse as carefully as Yurchak, image production (or the death image for that matter) as thoughtfully as Klima, or the mutually reciprocal creation of subjects/creation of representations of subjects as articulately as Inoue. Yet she does pay cursory lip service to all of these themes.
I’m interested to see what people have to say about her “ethnography,” particularly her use of fictional passages. While she says in the book (and said in her talk) that fiction allowed her to overcome her own self-censorship, I wonder if this isn’t just a way of sidestepping the problematic all anthropologists find themselves faced with when trying to interpolate real lives with theoretical/political/cultural constructs.
At 8:51 PM,
Kadija Ferryman said…
As I read Warring Souls, I wondered what the book was about. I think that Varzi wants to set up the book as a kind of journey, but I am not sure if the book is a depiction of a journey, or if reading the book is a journey itself. That is, the book depicts the journey of the idea of “losing the self” to gain the self from ancient Persian texts to revolutionary and then to post-Revolutionary Iran. The idea of losing and gaining the self changes as it is interpreted by the architects of the revolution, religious leaders and by the Basij. This image changes also in different media from books, to speeches, to monumental visual artwork to film. Then Varzi shows that in a way, in order to “find themselves” youth in post-revolutionary Iran are looking back to the “originals” to the texts by Hafiz and sometimes to the Basij.
One question that emerged in my mind after reading the text is, “what is it that writing does that film cannot?” I think we discussed this in relation to Alan Klima’s book and film—as it seemed that he felt that when dealing with visual imagery, film is somehow a superior representational form. Although Klima, more than other writers we’ve read, tapped into the capacity of the mind to produce visual images while reading writing, some of us in class felt that his foray into film somehow showed that he felt that the mind’s visual images were not good enough. It seems that Varzi feels this way also. I felt at times that she was saying “if you could see these images, these films, that would be the best, but reading my descriptions of them are OK since you can’t”. But we know from her very text that writing possesses its own special way with visual imagery, because so much visual imagery---the murals, the television shows, the films—sprang from the early Persian writings. Her story in the beginning of the book shows how Hafiz’s writing was able to bring vivid images to her imprisoned uncle. Somehow this power of writing gets lost in her discussion. Perhaps her fiction insertions are a way of getting back to this power of writing and the production of images.
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