Aamer Ibraheem

Ibraheem works at the intersection of the anthropology of history, temporality, religion, and subjectivity. His project traces the contradictory and often brutal experience of the self under a political condition marked by an excess of state sovereignty. This ethnography 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.

To understand the working of this political multiplicity and to apprehend how ordinary people live and imagine themselves within its fabrics, this project explores the powerful and locally 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, caring for one’s own reincarnation—in terms of tracing who one has been and who one is today—gains particular prominence in that it becomes as much the work of ordinary Druze subjects as it is the interest of the state. The intense effect of competing state powers, as this ethnography shows, has a hold not only on one’s life but also on one’s soul, revealing the intimate dynamics between the theistic reasoning that powers a specific community and the psychic life of power characterizing the modern state.