Jinneography: Post-Soviet passages of traumatic exemplarity.
Transcultural psychiatry April 1, 2016 Khashayar Beigi 2 citations
After the USSR collapsed, new migration patterns between Russia and Central Asia changed how Muslims relate to one another. The concept of ibra, an Islamic pedagogical practice of learning from worldly events, helps explain this shift. Analyzing a spirit possession session of a Tajik migrant in Russia, the author argues that collective participation in the ritual turns the trauma of Tajikistan's civil war and ongoing terror into a cipher for learning and a desire to draw closer to the divine. The session pedagogically invokes and extends post-Soviet historical experience as an exemplary passage, showing how migrants recognize each other as fellow Muslims in a theological geography formed on the ruins of Soviet universal comradeship.