Séminaire EHESS 2021 - « Off-site » : penser des pratiques ethnographiques sans présence sur le terrain

Jeudi 4 février 2021 : Séance d'introduction
Penser le terrain sans présence physique : choix stratégiques, politiques et méthodologiques, Chowra Makaremi (chercheure CNRS/IRIS)

Penser le terrain sans présence physique, Chowra Makaremi (chercheure CNRS/IRIS)

Séminaire EHESS 2021 - « Off-site » : penser des pratiques ethnographiques sans présence sur le terrain

Jeudi 4 mars 2021 
Ethnographier la révolution syrienne à la frontière de la guerre, Montasir Sakhi (docteur en anthropologie LAVUE/CNRS et ATER Université de Rouen)

Ethnographier la révolution syrienne à la frontière de la guerre, Montassir Sakhi(LAVUE/CNRS)

Séminaire « Off-site » : penser des pratiques ethnographiques sans présence sur le terrain

Jeudi 4 mars 2021
Exil politique et iconographie : les images comme alternative ou complément au travail de terrain ? Tony Rublon (doctorant MIGRINTER/CEPED)

Les images comme alternative ou complément au travail de terrain ? Tony Rublon (MIGRINTER/CEPED)

Séminaire « Off-site » : penser des pratiques ethnographiques sans présence sur le terrain

Jeudi 1er avril 2021
Enquêter sur la répression des ouïghours en Chine, Dilnur Reyhan (docteure en sociologie, enseignante INALCO)

Enquêter sur la répression des ouïghours en Chine, Dilnur Reyhan (docteure en sociologie, INALCO)

Séminaire « Off-site » 2021 : penser des pratiques ethnographiques sans présence sur le terrain

"Online, offline and in between". Une ethnographie à distance du gouvernement de la santé en Iran, Sahar Aurore Saeidnia (postdoctorante COFUND Marie Curie ULB)

Ethnographie à distance du gouvernement de la santé en Iran, Sahar Saeidnia (COFUND Marie Curie ULB)

TUESDAY 10 SEPTEMBER 2019
Naming the Dead. Archiving the Silenced Side of EU Border Regime
Carolina Kobelinsky, CNRS/LESC
"Archiving, secrecy and off-site research", A workshop of the ERC Off-Site

Naming the Dead. Archiving the Silenced Side of EU Border Regime, Carolina Kobelinsky, CNRS/LESC

The Islamic Republic who drew its ideology from an iconoclastic religion, set up however, in the 1980s, a tremendous image generation system. Thus, image has become one of the pillars of the new Islamic regime, and the control of the images has been one of the tools of the historical memory construction. The « over-visibility » of these images leads to wonder about what, on the contrary, remains invisible. Indeed, beside this image generation machine the I.R.I created an absolute image deficiency ; a singular strategy has been used to result in an almost total absence of image of the political crimes committed by the Islamic Regime during the 1980s. « Missing image » would be the most appropriate term in reference to the political destruction that occured in Iran throughout this decade. However, in the newspaper's archives of the exiled political parties, there are images from which one could see emerge the missing image. The importance of these « substitute» images doesn't lie exclusively in their historic nature or in their aesthetic quality, but in the way they are interpreted or, one might say, read, in the context of this destruction. These photographic images which do not allow to construct a detailed historical narrative, can be called, adopting a Benjaminian approach, a « dialectical image ». My paper focuses on the analysis of the few pictures taken in July 29th 1988, in Khavaran, of the last episode of the 1980s politicide, which is the massacre of the political prisonners. The aim is to know how to read them, understand their language and use the opportunities for reflection that they offer. The reading, that can be described as alternative, of this reproducible trace, that is the photo (as object of thought), takes on a form of criticism towards the offical history of this decade and refers inevitably to the issue of violence.

Missing Images of the 1980s Political Repression of Iran - B. Majdzadeh (Aix-Marseille)

This presentation is a tentative attempt at an international historical materialist account of state violence in post-revolutionary Iran. It argues that the immense violence accompanying state-formation in post-revolutionary Iran had its origins in a set of structural contradictions that were broadly similar to those that animated the reign of terror of the French Jacobins’ ‘republic of virtue’. In broadest terms, these contradictions were generated by (i) the recognition of private property and universal equality; (ii) the practice of direct democracy and parliamentary politics; (iii) the construction of a unitary nation from a culturally diverse population. Like their Jacobin forebears, Khomeini and his followers could not negotiate these contradictions within their Weltanschauung and hence resorted to systematic violence as the only possible foundation for an impossible republic of virtue. The totality of this contradictory and unstable constellation was the product of wider processes of uneven and combined development central to which is the conjunctural coplacement of divergent temporalities or what Ernst Bloch called ‘the simultaneity of the non-simultaneous’. This circumstance, the paper concludes, lies at the heart of the systemic violence and periodic upheaval throughout the life of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

The Jacobin Origins of Khomeini’s Reign of Terror - K. Matin (Uni. of Sussex)

The Iranian province of Khuzestan has been the epicenter of modernization projects and significant national events since the turn of the 20th century.  A seemingly endless stream of oil extraction and affiliated industries, major agribusinesses, large dams and irrigation works, industrial projects, ports, roads, railroads, urbanization schemes, etc. have been conceptualized and implemented by successive political regimes- both the Pahlavis and the Islamic Republic- in this border region as strategies of modernizing the nation and its populations. These modernization schemes have transformed the geography, ecology, and social fabric of this region, dispossessing and dismantling pastoral, tribal, urban and rural communities and forging new social formations, imaginaries, and identities in the process. Khuzestan has also been the epicenter of political upheavals of great significance, from the protracted struggles over the oil industry and its nationalization, repression of the tribes, the land reforms of the 1960s , the 1979 Revolution, the Iran-Iraq War, and the highly contested state-led efforts for the post-war reconstruction. As a result of these interventions & upheavals, Khuzestan has also become the epicenter of new social movements of the subaltern- militant urban and industrial labor movements, restive ethno-separatism, and the more recent waves of militant social protests of the poor against inequality and environmental degradation. 

This paper will present a comparative, and critical analysis of this history of contested and coercive modernization schemes, conceptualized and implemented by successive political regimes- both the Monarchy and the Islamic republic- always with the promise of delivering a golden age of modernity and national (whether Islamic or secular) grandeur. Their scale and complexity came to symbolize the state’s will to overcome a perceived local backwardness and/or dubious political loyalty, and to act as a rapid pathway to prosperity, national independence, and a deserved high status among advanced nations. At inception, all these spectacular projects were highly contested. They stretched public and social resources to the limit and had significant adverse consequences for local communities and environments. Their implementations were often violent and predicated on the dispossession of populations and commons. Virtually none have performed as promised, economically, but they continued to be upheld as models. The paper deconstructs the genealogy of these development projects, various institutional actors who championed them, and how they were conceptualized and implemented under successive political regimes. It documents the resistance, rivalries, and obstacles that these projects faced, and evaluates their economic, social, spatial, and environmental consequences and the extent to which they accomplished their lofty initial promises. It concludes that these projects embody the discursive and material power struggles and alliances among rival factions of technical experts and political actors, rather than accomplish the miraculous pathway to a promised modernity that was promised at their inception.

The Violence of Development & State Consolidation in Khuzestan / K. Ehsani (De Paul's College)

On 9 February 1979, the Imperial Guard stormed the Air Force base to punish the units that had pledged allegiance to Khomeini the day before. To defend themselves, the latter left their barracks and took up positions in the eastern districts of Tehran with the help of local population. The Fedayeen and the Mojahedin immediately joined them. Armed insurrection broke out. During the next two days, the arms depots were stormed and the population seized the strategic centers of the city. Khomeini and officials fearful that the Fedayeen and the Mojahedin might find themselves at the head of the revolutionary movement, immediately dispatched emissaries to the military staff to find compromise to end the fighting. In the late afternoon of February 11, the Army declared its neutrality. From then on, Khomeini took over the political hand and proclaimed by a radio message the victory of the “Islamic revolution” and asked the people to stop fighting, to give up arms and to ensure that “the arms do not fall into the hands of enemies of Islam ”. 
The main purpose of this article is to emphasize the crucial importance of these three insurrectional days which consequences have had a profound impact on the balance of power that would be established after the overthrow of the monarchy between the Islamist leaders and left and secular revolutionary forces.

3 Insurrectional Days That Nearly Changed the Destiny of the Revolution - M. Ladier-Fouladi (CNRS)

Insofar as a revolution results in a radical and violent change in political organization and ideological framework of the State, the control of the collective historical memory becomes of strategic importance for the stability of the new political regime. This being the case of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, access to the Iranian archives remain under severe restrictions. The open-source data movement seems to have some impact on the Iranian government’s policy regarding the Revolution memorialization process. Since the beginning of 2000s, Iranian national heritage institutions, governmental bodies and private organizations backed by the government are engaged in the creation of digital historical collections. By doing so, they pretend to make widely open and easily accessible historical primary sources: witness testimonies, original archival documents, and press of the time. Nevertheless, in the field of academic research, the possibility of checking the authenticity of sources must take precedence over analytical work. Indeed, when subjected to closer scrutiny, these Web historical data presented in its raw state form a highly unreliable environment. To ensure effective quality control of these data in terms of traceability, reliability and integrity of data sources would be a long and hard slog.
Isolated original archival documents are put together with the so-called “digital-born data” produced by persons whose professional profile is not clear. Are they librarians, archivists, or historians? Archival references are not accurate or lack. Being removed from the original fonds d’archives or other original documentary environment, the isolated original historical sources put online represent an artificial assemblage of documents without regard to their provenance. Being brought together accordingly to a certain ideology, these online historical data touch the feelings constructing the history through the emotional and imaginative appeal of associated objects.
The aim of the OFF-SITE team is to produce a critical analysis of these digital historical collections as the sources for the history of the 1979 Revolution. Doing this from the point of view of the very concept of archives and “classic” archival practices, we are also investigating the prevailing narratives produced on the basis of these digital collections.

An Agnotological Outlook into the Digital Archives of the Islamic Rep. of Iran / N. Pashkeeva (CNRS)

Tavabization, i.e., indoctrination within Islamic doctrine, represents the Islamic state of Iran’s attempt at creating new political subjectivities during the first decade after the revolution.  The objectives of tavabization goes beyond banishing dissidents from the society, extracting information, setting examples or exacting retribution. In the process of tavabization physical and psychological violence is used to break and reduce a prisoner’s subjectivity to that which is concerned for its own continued physical existence. I call this new subject a survival-ego with a survivalist-subjectivity. From this reduced subjectivity, one exists as the institution’s object, its ‘thing’. In other words, tavabization, consists of elaborate, continuous and systematic attempts to eradicate the prisoner’s sociality by confining her to her body, while offering her the system’s meanings and values. Depending on the dialectic of the effects of violence and internalization of the offered value system, the new subjectivity falls somewhere and moves on a spectrum from a full identification with the system to a pragmatist historical denial and escapism.

Imprisonment, Tavabization, Political Subjectivity - S. Sakhi (York University)

Welcome and Introduction - Chowra Makaremi (IRIS - CNRS)

Studying the history of state violence after the Iranian revolution confronts us with many boundaries of power and knowledge that are conveyed in the popular, complex yet taken-for-granted expression of “red line” (khat-e ghermez).
Scholars have learned to “navigate the red lines”. But the changing conditions of possibility of empirical research (evolving political context, global pandemia, new technologies of documentation and information) brings us to a question: is it possible, rather than navigating the red lines, to free ourselves from them, by relying on the critical power of knowledge? The first step of this approach is to take these borders themselves as a subject of inquiry, through reflexive and epistemic analyses that question how khat-e ghermez are established: by what processes are they recognized, acknowledged, learned, interiorized, subverted? In this questioning, the genealogy of post-revolution state violence (the history of political repression, terror, and civilian massacres) is both a case-study –a sensitive red line — but also the very mechanism by which this relationship between society and the state has been instituted.
Using auto-ethnography and visual research, this paper proposes an “off-site” investigation of the destruction of political graves and mass-graves in the last decade, drawing the outline of an archeology of violence – both literally and figuratively. The history of urban renovation and site destruction shows the relationship between violence and justice in light of denial, understood as a micro-politics of power. I argue that excluding certain citizens – through death, exile, erasure of traces – not only forges a national community purified of dissident expression, but it reconfigures, and constantly renews, the rules of political participation, and the boundaries of dissent and belonging.

Khat-e Ghermez: Tracing Power and the Micro-History of Violence - C. Makaremi (CNRS)

Webinar Map of the Absentees: Cartography, Memory, History of post-revolutionary Iran

Bahar Majdzadeh (Aix-Marseille University) - Webinar Map of the Absentees - 22 June 2022

Map of the Absentees:
Cartography, Memory, History of post-revolutionary Iran
22 JUNE 2022

Chowra Makaremi (CNRS, Paris) - Webinar Map of the Absentees -  22 June 2022

Michael Falk(Heurist, The University of Sydney) - Webinar Map of the Absentees - 22 June 2022

Karen O’Rourke (University Jean Monnet, Saint-Etienne) - Webinar Map of the Absentees - 22 June 2022

Soulèvement populaire et crise de pouvoir en Iran : septembre 2022-mars 2023
Table ronde du CETOBaC
Jeudi 16 mars 2023 de 11h à 13h

Six mois après le déclenchement de la révolte « Femme, Vie, Liberté », les mobilisations semblent ralentir. Cela ne signifie pourtant pas un retour à la normale. La tension est toujours palpable et une étincelle peut à chaque moment faire tout exploser.

Les changements survenus au cours des six derniers mois ont produit de nouveaux acteurs sociaux, culturels et politiques dont le rôle sera décisif dans la suite et l’orientation que prendra la révolte « Femme, Vie, Liberté ». L’objet de cette deuxième table ronde consacrée au soulèvement populaire en Iran est d’analyser ces dynamiques à l’œuvre avec la participation de :

Hamit Bozarslan, Stéphane A. Dudoignon, Marie Ladier-Fouladi et Chowra Makaremi

Popular tracks by Off-Site