Yassaman Ameri, images from the series The Inheritance, 2000 (source). 

In her description of the series, Ameri writes: “Some years ago, my mother inherited a document containing a series of photographs of women taken in late 19th century Iran. These tiny portraits [postage stamp-sized] had been carelessly cut and pasted next to each other and reproduced as a sort of oversized carte-de-visite with multiple images. The only reference to the identity of these women is the handwritten inscription of their names on the corner of each portrait. To understand the significance of this document, I began a search through books, archives and libraries. At the end, I discovered that conventional research could not reveal much about the identity of these women or the circumstances of their lives. I understood that no source of information exists outside of the images themselves. This is where my project started. I spent years trying to take apart the information these women left behind in posing for the camera mostly unveiled at a time when women were not permitted to appear without being covered. I researched the beginning of photography in 19th century Iran. I studied other visual records from the same period. Searching through scattered documents, collecting bits and pieces of evidence, I developed a new space where these women could exist, a fictional space made with borrowed and appropriated objects and documents to construct an unrecorded history. This is my attempt to retell their lives of which there are no records.”*

This is the title of a paper I wrote on my research for a symposium at my university. Later this month, I’m supposed to give a talk and do a poster presentation on my project; at this point, they both seem like they are going to be disasters. On the positive side, I can now tell you everything you never wanted to know about Fc gamma receptors.

 Haiku, translated from English to Persian by the poet Ahmad Shamloo and E. Pashayi, a translator of Zen and Buddhist texts, was apparently the first official introduction* of Japanese poetry to the Iranian public, in the mid-1980s. The translations are based on parts of Haiku and History of Haiku by R.H. Blythe. 

* Although Sohrab Sepehri had translated a few haiku into Persian and adopted a “haiku-like style” in his own poetry a few decades prior to the publication of this translation, there had not been any actual publications on the subject, at least according to Massih Talebian, who has written about contemporary Persian haiku here.

Detail from “The Day of Judgement,” picturing “five incorporeal beings” with nimbuses [possibly jinn?];  folio 10b from a Falnameh (Book of Divination), c. 1610-1630, probably Golconda, India; MSS 979 in the Khalili collection; in Earthly beauty, Heavenly art by Pitrovsky and Vrieze

In Strange Harvest, Lesley Sharp writes about the “greening of the body,” the depersonalization of organ donors, and the commodification of the body in the organ transplant trade. The idea of body commodification can be extended to cell culture — immortal cell lines are established from primary cells derived from patients’ tissue samples, grown and passaged a few (or more) times, and deposited at places like the ATCC, where a single vial of cells can cost several hundred dollars. In a way, depersonalization is also at play — for a given cell line, the ATCC will tell us the age, gender, and tissue of the individual from whom the cells were derived, as well as information about disease (usually cancer). When you’re maintaining the cells in a lab setting, it’s easy to forget that they came from a real person who had hobbies and interests, beliefs and opinions, and who actually lived (or may still live to this day) and had their own history in the not so distant past.

Currently reading Lesley Sharp’s Strange Harvest, on the anthropology of organ transplants, to be followed by Twice Dead by Margaret Lock, on the phenomenon of brain death.

In the introduction to Strange Harvest, Sharp writes: “Through ethnographic investigation, Strange Harvest strives to decipher the problematic status of organ transplantation in this country [the United States]. As an anthropologist I approach transplantation as an exotic branch of medical culture, with its own particular ethos that guides the behavior, thinking, and embodied practices of involved professional and lay parties […] My purpose is to identify and rethink much of what is taken for granted about organ transplants in the United States. In turn, I seek to uncover essential elements of an intriguing medical realm that remain unseen or unspoken, either because they seem far too mundane to warrant consideration or because professional policy imposes taboos that ultimately obscure such key elements from plain sight.” 

i’m fixated on ritual, on tradition; the way the sacred intersects with the mundane. the way the mundane is, in its own way, sacred. there is remembrance of god in every rote action, if you look at it in the right light. 

it’s almost spring. we’re going to color eggs, buy maahi-ye ghermez, tie ribbons around the lentil sprouts that my mother grew by the grace of god and the sun. the turning of the year, around days filled with the smell of jasmines and tulips opening their petals towards the kaaba that is the sun, reminds me to find god in everything, for we are told that what is with god will endure (qur’an 16:96, excerpted).