Amer Ibrahim

AMER IBRAHIM, then a graduate student at Columbia University, New York, New York, was awarded a grant in April 2022 to aid research on “States of Multiplicity: Endurance and the Politics of Reincarnation in the Golan Heights,” supervised by Dr. Nadia Abu El-Haj. How does life take shape when it is governed by more than one sovereign state? This dissertation project is an archival and ethnographic research of the contradictory and often brutal experience of the self under a political condition marked by the excess of state sovereignty. It is an ethnography that enters the inner worlds of those living under military occupation in the Golan Heights, a population of over twenty-five-thousand Druze whose history continues to be interpellated by the authoritarian Syrian state, and whose morphing present is saturated with Israeli settler colonial rule and logic. At the heart of this sovereign conjuncture stands the powerful and pervasive figure of the reincarnated subject: Druze men and women who recall their vivid past-life memories, but whose memories belong to histories that contradict and often trouble the present in the here and now. In the fervent political climate of the Golan Heights, reincarnation gains particular prominence in that it becomes as much the work of ordinary Druze subjects as it is the interest of the state. In this dissertation, Ibrahim works at the intersection of the anthropology of history, religion, and subjectivity to examine the ways in which orders of belief come into dynamic tension with orders of rule.