The aesthetics of ritual--contested identities and conflicting performances in the Iraqi Shi’a diaspora: Ritual, performance and identity change

What are the processes through which identity change takes place at the individual and collective level? How might a focus on embodied religious performance and ritual contribute to understandings of such identity change? Through an ethnographic analysis of the Muharram rituals of Iraqi Shi’is in London, I take religious rites as a starting point from which to theorise a performative theory of identity change to highlight the role of ritual and performance in shaping changing notions of identity at both the individual and collective level. Such a project necessarily engages both with processes of identity change and with the paradox of identity/difference, particularly the ways in which articulations of subjective identity are ontologically dependent on an external ‘other’. Ultimately, I argue that paying close critical attention to the performative and (re)iterative processes of micro-level identificatory practices allows a more nuanced understanding of the mechanisms through which identity change comes to take effect, both at the level of individual subjectivity and that of collective social belonging

Fragmented realities: The ‘sectarianisation’of space among Iraqi Shias in London

How do the spaces we inhabit shape our lived experiences? And how do those lived experiences in turn come to shape and influence our political subjectivity? Such questions are rendered all the more important in studies of migrant or diaspora populations who, by definition, conduct their daily lives in spaces and places that were initially alien to them. The way in which migrants interact with the spaces around them can tell us much about the social, political, and religious engagements they invest in, as well as the very real way in which they experience their local milieu. Through a detailed study of Iraqi Shiis living in London, specifically in the north-western borough of Brent, this article will seek to trace the ways in which religious institutions have carved up the physical and social landscape of north-west London in ways that have enduring effect on the communities with which they engage. The increasing diversification of different religious establishments, I argue, has led to a fragmentation of the city-as-lived, in which the vast majority of practising Iraqi Shiis engage with only small isolated pockets of the urban environment on a daily basis. Moreover, the growing number of specifically Shia schools, charities, mosques, community centres and other such institutions has resulted in what I call a ‘sectarianisation’ of space in Brent, in which individuals hailing from different branches of Islam inhabit different spaces within the city despite often living within metres of each other. Drawing on a mixture of interviews, participant observation, and mapping techniques, I bring together theory and practice in order to sketch out the ways migrant lives can come to be localised in certain spaces, and what that can ultimately mean in terms of their political subjectivity and engagement