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Territorializing Piety: Genealogy, Transnationalism, and Shi‘ite Politics in Modern Lebanon

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 June 2009

Roschanack Shaery-Eisenlohr
Roschanack Shaery-Eisenlohr
Affiliation:
Amsterdam School for Social Science Research, University of Amsterdam
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Extract

Genealogies—representations of kinship and narratives of origin—are in the transnational Shi‘ite world intimately connected to politics of piety, the production of nationalism, and struggles over authority. In this essay, I am concerned with certain inflections in the links between genealogy and piety that make these terms central to contests over notions of territoriality in contemporary Shi‘ite politics. Nationalism replaces the sovereignty of God with the exclusive sovereignty of a “people” over a clearly demarcated territory, but religious language, identifications, and imagery often play prominent roles in how the imagined community of the nation is fashioned and delimited. Here I will show how, mediated through genealogy, religious leaders and pious movements with transnational ties produce religious authority, and create links to territory, to assert themselves as exemplary cultural citizens.

Type
Research Article
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 51 , Issue 3 , July 2009 , pp. 533 - 562
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2009

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