I am currently a PhD
student at Harvard
University in the joint program
with the Department of
Anthropology and the
Center for Middle
Eastern Studies. My research is on the
encounters that Coptic Orthodox Christians in Egypt have with the
miraculous. What can miracles tell us about the production and
maintenance of religious power? How are miracles, hope, and power
connected? And what role does materiality play in this? These are
some of the questions that motivate my research. I have also been
considering how a notion of "mystery" might be employed in thinking
about Coptic encounters with the miraculous. As miracles become
commonplace among contemporary Copts, how do they maintain their
magic? "Mystery," I propose, is that strange, paradoxical
expression of a lived experience that is simultaneously grounded in
a material world and a spiritual one, in knowing as well as feeling
and intuition. It is that place of tension between felt experience
and episteme. I hope that further research will help illuminate
"mystery" as a category of the kinds of paradoxical experiences so
common among people of many religions. Materiality is another key
component through which to think about and examine the miraculous,
as most miracles among Copts are made manifest through objects such
as the icons and bones of saints, sand, and oil. Material objects,
as vehicles of the miraculous, serve to bridge a world of
immediately tangible and tactile things with a world of spirits,
and it seems to me that this is a component of religious life that
should not be neglected. I have been particularly concerned to
understand material objects, not as vehicles of meaning that
therefore necessitate interpretation, but as aspects of social life
regardless of meaning. That they are "open" as Webb Keane has
argued. Finally, I have been exploring how the convergence of
miracles, mystery, and materiality is part of a process of the
production of hope among Copts and what the politics of this
convergence entails.
These days I am in the process of writing my dissertation after
completing fieldwork in Cairo. The tentative title of the
dissertation is "Cultivating Mystery: Miracles and the Coptic Moral
Imaginaire."
