Dream-Realities: Dust and Other Micro-relics in Wartime Iran

“A grey layer of dust on things is dreams’ highest faculty today” - Walter Bejamin

This session places dust at the centre of an engagement with the senses, material effects and affective resonances that rise in the encounter with the environments of war. I will draw on a range of haptic experiences that render dust into dream- and waking-worlds, and how they make new modes of religious veneration and memorialization. Anthropologists and scholars of religion often approach things from an objective distance and/or from their certain positions in rituals, museums and photographs. This objective distance is complicit in the ways material objects are categorized as religious, heritagized between generations or invested in rituals economy as sacred. The state of dust as a quasi-object, both visible and invisible that sticks to the fingertips, covers surfaces and fills the space, helps us challenge this objective distance. In this talk, I highlight the multiple roles that dust plays in dreams of the fallen soldiers of the Iran-Iraq war, and at the military memorialized environments such as former battlefields, cemeteries and sites of commemoration of war. Dust in these spaces carries, invokes, lends and furnishes certain affects and is in this sense a part of the auratic experience of the visitors. While the notion of aura refers to religious, cultic and archaic genealogies, we will attend its affordance in referring to ambiguities, contradictions and irritations that dust gives rise to.

Webex Room: Berlin Anthropology Seminars
Link: https://fu-berlin.webex.com/fu-berlin/j.php?MTID=m17f1ed284085e3ad247db1626ac2ca67

More information:

https://www.polsoz.fu-berlin.de/ethnologie/forschung/bas/bas_sommer2026.html