This dissertation coheres together over a hundred insurgent testimonies published from within Arizona State Prison Complex – Perryville, the state’s only prison for women. These testimonies tell a people’s history of Arizona’s largest and most public legal intervention for prisoners’ rights: Parsons v. Ryan. In 2009, after Perryville correctional officers left Marcia Powell to bake to death in the Arizona summer sun, prisoners lit their mattresses on fire to proclaim that their lives were in danger, sparking a wave of resistance, including outside from family members and advocates, which prompted a class action lawsuit against the Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation, and Re-Entry (ADCRR). After years of prisoners’ calls for a systemic reckoning of the death-producing state punishment system, legal intervention distilled their suffering and demands into a set of discrete allegations. Meanwhile, settlement stipulations continue to implore ADCRR to meet minimum constitutional standards. While the accountability Parsons v. Ryan seeks is limited to the administration of medical care and extreme isolation, testimonies in this people’s history reveal a breadth of systemic violences that encompass and surpass the legal claims. These testimonies, which evidence strategies of care work, protest, and covert documentation, delineate the prison’s function to degrade human dignity and inflict physical and psychological harm in virtually every area of basic survival, including access to food, shelter, hygiene, and personal safety. Through use of the “rebel archive,” the resulting narrative, made possible by virtue of prisoners’ organizing for dignity, invokes a critical analysis of the sublimation of their resistance and demands for a project of liberal carceral care as prison reform.

Following the 1991 Gulf War, the ruling royal family of Saudi Arabia constrained the religious establishment by remapping the hierarchy of authority in the kingdom legally, conceptually, and historically. Ṣaddām Ḥusayn’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 constituted an unprecedented crisis in Saudi politics which contributed to the religious establishment questioning the political legitimacy of the ruling royal family, Al Saud. The elite religious establishment, or ulamā, publicly challenged the legitimacy of Al Saud’s unchecked authority when they composed the 1991 Letter of Demands. After the war, I suggest that ruling elites set out to change the basis of their political legitimacy by redefining the religiopolitical orthodoxy which governs their relationship with the religious establishment. I propose that the 1992 Basic Law of Governance—the first positive legal charter for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia—expands the authority of the King while offering the appearance of constraining the exercise of political authority. In this thesis, I analyze the ways in which the text of the Letter of Demands and the Basic Law of Governance offer disparate visions of orthodox Islamic governance according to the Saudi tradition. I hypothesize that the text of the Letter of Demands, as well as the circumstances surrounding its production, involved a reassertion of authority by the elite religious establishment in religious spaces. I suggest that, in response, the Basic Law of Governance expanded the authority of the King and delivered an alternative vision of Saudi orthoprax governance. I contemplate some of the ways that expanding their authority was part of a larger project undertaken by the royal family after the 1991 Gulf War to redefine Saudi religiopolitical orthodoxy. Finally, I offer a meditation on the idea that the project undertaken by Al Saud to redefine Saudi religiopolitical orthodoxy necessitated reformulating the historical narrative of the kingdom’s origin and policy in the twentieth century. In this thesis, I set out to contemplate the epistemic relationship between sociopolitical inflection and diachronic changes to Islamic concepts. In other words, how do Islamic concepts, and the practices they underlie, change over time and in response to moments of social and political crisis? This is where I imagine my work broadly contributing to Religious Studies as a field. I am interested in historical instances where political authorities instrumentalize cultural forms, including historical narratives and religious discourses, to legitimize their own interests, consolidate power, and maintain hegemony. The instrumentalization of religiocultural discourses in order to articulate new modes of state and subject formation is a vital topic of inquiry. I aspire that my work can contribute to this tertiary dialogue by showcasing one historical instance where religious concepts and historical narratives were instrumentalized to legitimize elite interests, consolidate monopolistic political power, and maintain social, political, and cultural forms of hegemony. My aim is to use these narratives about epistemic violence to trouble the power dynamics that get reproduced in Euro-North American knowledge produced about the Global South.

This project assembles incidences of namāz (daily Muslim ritual prayer) offered in jamāt (congregation) by those worshippers who have found themselves marginalized, disciplined, and disoriented from mainstream Muslim ritual life due to their gender or sexual orientation. It follows assays in, and commitments to, a livable Muslim life as it unfolds from the stories of disoriented Muslim worshippers at prayer together. It looks first at the religious life stories of a network of queer Pakistanis contending with the heteropatriarchal and cisgender norms of mainstream Muslim life, in struggle to continue their orientation towards Allāh alongside their own existential reality. It then narrates the last rites of two Pakistani women by describing the circumstances in which their namāz-e-janāza, i.e. their funeral prayers were performed. These funerals are moments and spaces that alter the received understanding of jamāt so that disoriented worshippers who have been made unwelcome in the larger collectivity can reorient towards compassionate convening with each other and with Allāh.  The portraits of Muslims convened for prayer that are drawn together here bring into conversation multiple ways of being Muslim and describe an emergent queer Muslim praxis that expands the parameters of what is thinkable in Islam. This narrative ethnography sheds light on how it is that mainstream Pakistani religious life disorients women as well as transgender and queer folks by narrowing the space available to these bodies within the jamāt. Deploying multiple methodological approaches in a number of research sites, this dissertation draws on events and lived experiences of ritual and religious convenings to propose and advance an understanding of the jamāt as both a congregation of worship and a congregation of care. This dissertation is an exploration of the conditions of possibility for livable life for those who are disoriented in the space of Muslim communal gathering—a life that is queer, Muslim, safe from harm, and joyful—arguing that for queer and disoriented Muslims, solidarity and a livable life go hand in hand.

In recent years, privately owned and operated residential programs for troubled youth have been at the forefront of national discussion on institutional child abuse in state-sanctioned carceral facilities. Survivors and their advocates have argued that these programs should be regulated by state agencies and closed because they are harmful to residents and divert resources from effective treatment options. In opposition to the survivor movement stand owners, practitioners, and “tough on crime” politicians, who claim that that state intervention in the Troubled Teen Industry (TTI) would curtail effective treatment options for families, and in the case of faith-based programs, violate their constitutionally protected religious freedoms. Guided by the fields of Mad Studies and Critical Prison Studies, this research offers a political history of the TTI, focused on the faith-based residential facilities of Lester Roloff and Herman Fountain. It also draws on first-person interviews with three survivors of a faith-based bootcamp called Bethel Boys Academy, of the World Wide Association of Specialty Programs to delineate how these survivors make sense of their experiences before, during, and after being held captive. I conclude by arguing that the TTI survivor movement and prison abolitionists should cooperate to dismantle white supremacist political structures and improve access to meaningful treatment options for vulnerable youth.

Much of the anthropological and Islamic studies focus in recent years has addressed the shifting forms of Islamic piety across Muslim majority societies. The analysis of this shift in Islamic practice and belief has enveloped the changing sensibilities around technologies, social strata, democracy, law, and everyday life. In light of these transformations, after the fall of the Indonesian New Order in 1998, the performances of Islamic devotional songs (salawat) by Habib Syech bin Abdul Qadir Assegaf (Habib Syech) began bringing millions of people together across Indonesia, Malaysia, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Thailand, South Korea, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen. Although salawat has typically been performed in remembrance of the birth of Prophet Muhammad (mawlid) in localized celebrations. The performances of salawat by Habib Syech, on the other hand, occur fifteen or more times a month with crowds swelling to tens of thousands across multiple nation-states. Habib Syech’s salawat performances furthermore appeal to and bring together diverse Muslim populations that have historically been more divided. Habib Syech’s gatherings reveal how popular forms of piety are shifting in conjunction with profound societal changes in Indonesia and other Muslim communities. In untangling the popularity of Habib Syech’s gatherings, it was not until I became entangled in the rhythm of salawat that baraka, often translated as blessings, emerged as a slippery, elusive, and living helping propel the popularity of this phenomena. The guttural cries of my interlocutors (baraka, baraka, baraka) resonate and summon a methodology that takes the visible and invisible together in understanding the concept and life of baraka. I, like my interlocutors, began hunting baraka as an alternative, living concept that challenges understandings of Islam in Indonesia driven by Islamic civil organizations, prescriptive vs everyday Islamic piety, and Western interpretations of the world as disenchanted. This dissertation is an exploration of new opportunities for understanding religion in the modern world that emerge from the ethnographic field through the life of baraka.

The traditional site of Rachel's Tomb is located just south of Jerusalem on the border of Bethlehem. In recent years, Rachel's Tomb architectural appearance and cultural significance have shifted dramatically in the last two decades and the Biblical figure of Rachel has evolved in the Jewish imagination as a figure "emplaced" there as well. The original stories that have drawn visitors to the site have developed from Biblical and Rabbinic texts, yet contemporary visitors to the site have their own perspectives and stories to tell, grounded in religious tradition, nostalgia, and current political and social realities. At the traditional site of her tomb, Rachel has served for at least the last century as something like a "patron saint" for Jewish women's domestic issues, but her intercessory abilities have recently been expanded. Her special relationship to Zionism through her connections to the Biblical notions of Jewish "return" and end-times "redemption" have been recast to fit contemporary political viewpoints and contestations. In addition, she has developed into a kind of national "mater dolorosa," representing the collective grief for deaths through acts of political violence, particularly women's deaths. This project traces the ways in which current narrative and praxis at the traditional site of Rachel's Tomb have developed as well as the ways in which current perceptions of the site-and Rachel as the cultural figure associated with the space-draw upon temporally-situated interpretations of her textual tradition, as well as affective discourse and collective cultural memory.

Since 1998 and as recently as November 2018, 165 Tibetans have burned themselves alive in public protest, both inside Tibet and in exile. This study foregrounds Tibetan refugees’ interpretations of the self-immolation protests and examines how the exile community has socially, politically, and emotionally interrogated and assimilated this resistance movement. Based upon eleven months of ethnographic field research and 150 hours of formal interviews with different groups of Tibetan refugees in northern India, including: freedom activists, former political prisoners, members of the exile parliament, teachers of Tibetan Buddhism, families of self-immolators, and survivors of self-immolation, this project asks: What does activism look like in a time of martyrdom? What are the practices of solidarity with the dead? How does a refugee community that has been in exile for over three generations make sense of a wave of death occurring in a homeland most cannot access? Does the tactic of self-immolation challenge Tibetan held conceptions of resistance and the conceived relationship between politics, religion and nation? These questions are examined with attention to the sociopolitical expectations and vulnerabilities that the refugee community face. This study thus analyzes what it means to mourn those one never knew, and examines the fractious connections between resistance, solidarity, trauma, representation, political exigency, and community cohesion. By examining the uncomfortable affect around self-immolation, its memorialization and representation, the author argues that self-immolation is a relational act that creates and ushers forth witnesses. As such, one must analyze the obligations of witnessing, the barriers to witnessing, and the expectations of solidarity. This project offers the theory of exigent solidarity, whereby solidarity is understood as a contested space, borne of expectation, pressure, and responsibility, with its expression complex and its execution seemingly impossible. It calls for attention to the affective labor of solidarity in a time of ongoing martyrdom, and demonstrates that in the need to maintain solidarity and social cohesion, a sense of mutual-becoming occurs whereby the community is reconciled uneasily into a shared fate.

This dissertation examines the embodied experiences of domestic workers and their children as they emerged in organizing campaigns aimed at achieving a Domestic Worker Bill of Rights in California. I analyze the ways domestic worker organizers have historically conceptualized their movements around demands for dignified labor and immigration reform. I argue that their demands for protections and rights force them into a contradictory space that perpetuates vulnerability and recasts illegality—a space where domestic workers’ bodies get continuously figured as exploited and in pain in order to validate demands for rights. I trace this pattern in organizational survey material across generations, where worker’s voices resisted prefigured mappings of their bodies in pain, and where they laid out their own demands for a movement that challenged normative frameworks of fair labor and United States citizenship that continue to center race and gender in the transnational mobility of migrant women from Mexico and Central America. Furthermore, I explore the embodied experiences of domestic workers’ children, and the embedded power relations uncovered in their memories as they narrate their childhood accompanying their mothers to work. Their memories provided an affective landscape of memory where the repetitive, and demeaning aspects of domestic work are pried apart from western, colonial arrangements of power. I argue that their collective embodied knowledge marks a reframing of pain where transfiguration is possible and transformative patterns of becoming are prioritized. I propose interpreting these collective, embodied memories as a constellation of shimmers—luminous points that align to expose the relationships between workers, their children, employers, and their families, and the specific context in which they were produced. Altogether, they create what I call a brown luminosity—forces activated by their mothers’ labor that created multiple worlds of possibilities for their children, resulting in nomadic memories which move beyond victimizing their mother’s bodies to enable an ever-changing perspective of the ways their labor has radically transformed homes, livelihoods, and transnational spaces.

This thesis explores the power of food to transcend cultural and racial borders and to act as a common ground, bringing people of all different backgrounds together. Through globalization, there is an increased movement of people from their homeland to different regions around the world and with this migration comes the spread of their culture and cuisine to new areas. This spreading of culture often creates friction and tension amongst other cultures, however as this thesis argues, with increased diversity, there is the great potential for greater interaction with other cultures and therefore greater appreciation. The key aspect of this thesis is the ways in which food can be used as a tool to overcome racial barriers and serve as a means of positive expression of a culture. I hope to show that by engaging with a culture through its cuisine, one can arguably build a greater appreciation for that culture and therefore lower their preconceived notions and stereotypes.

Guantánamo: The Amen Temple of Empire connects the fetishization of the trauma of nine/eleven with the co-constitution of subjects at Guantánamo—that of the contained Muslim terrorist prisoner silhouetted against the ideal nationalistic military body—circulated as ‘afterimages’ that carry ideological narratives about U.S. Empire. These narratives in turn religiously and racially charge the new normative practices of the security state and its historically haunted symbolic order. As individuals with complex subjectivities, the prisoners and guards are, of course, not reducible to the standardizing imprimatur of the state or its narratives. Despite the circulation of these ‘afterimages’ as fixed currency, the prisoners and guards produce their own metanarratives, through their para-ethnographic accounts of containment and of self. From within the panopticon of the prison, they seek sight lines, and gaze back at the state. This dissertation is thus a meditation on US militarism, violence, torture, race, and carceral practices, revealed thematically through metaphors of hungry ghosts, nature, journey and death, liminality, time, space, community, and salvage. Based on a multi-sited, empirical and imaginary ethnography, as well as textual and discourse analysis, I draw on the writing and testimony of prisoners, and military and intelligence personnel, whom I consider insightful para-ethnographers of the haunting valence of this fetishized historical event.