Zainab's Traffic(English, Hardcover, Yildiz Emrah)

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Zainab's Traffic(English, Hardcover, Yildiz Emrah) is written by Yildiz Emrah and published by University of California Press. It's available with International Standard Book Number or ISBN identification 0520379829 (ISBN 10) and 9780520379824 (ISBN 13).

What is the value-religious, political, economic, or altogether social-of getting on a bus in Tehran to embark on an eight-hundred-mile journey across two international borders to the Sayyida Zainab shrine outside Damascus? Under what material conditions can such values be established, reassessed, or transgressed, and by whom? Zainab's Traffic provides answers to these questions alongside the socially embedded-and spatially generative-encounters of ritual, mobility, desire, genealogy, and patronage along the route. Whether it is through the study of the spatial politics of saint veneration in Islam, analysis of cross-border gold trade and sanctions, or examination of pilgrims women's desire for Syrian lingerie accompanying their pleas with the saint in marital matters, the book develops the idea of visitation as a ritual of mobility across geography, history, and category. Iranian visitors' experiences on the road to Sayyida Zainab-emerging out of a self-described "poverty of mobility"-demonstrate the utility of a more capacious anthropological understanding of ritual. Rather than thinking of ritual as a scripturally canonized manual for pious self-cultivation, Zainab's Traffic approaches ziyarat as a traffic of pilgrims, goods, and ideas across Iran, Turkey, and Syria.