Syeda Rumana Mehdi

Centered on the pilgrimage experiences of Pakistani Shi’i women traveling to Karbala, this project explores how grief for Imam Hussain’s death transforms into hope for a better future. It studies how embodied practices—walking, crying, dreaming—mediate divine and human agency. In this regard, it brings into conversation the anthropology of temporality, distributed agency, and the imaginary. Through fifteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Iraq and Pakistan, this study examines how hope persists beyond pilgrimage, reshaping women’s everyday lives and complicating anthropological distinctions between structure and anti-structure, self and divine, and the boundaries of what is imagined and what is real.