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? What is politically and socially at
stake in the telling and retelling of miracle tales? 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.
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
Imaginary."
