Emotions of Felt Memories: Looking for Interplay of Emotions and Histories in Iranian Political Consciousness Since Iran–Iraq War (1980–1988)

Abstract

Emotions and feelings overwhelm mnemonic practices of any collective with traces of violence in its history. The violent history has become the means for the Iranian regime to regulate the nation's political consciousness. The regime formulates the political consciousness by way of politics of memory and enforcing a master narrative drawn from Shi'i history. I trace elicited emotions, within the war veterans’ memoirs, to explain feelings and consciousness in the realm of situated bodies. By way of those emotions, the article outlines an anthropology of emotions that rejects universal codes of emotions and instead proposes following an embodied consciousness through emotions along with histories that evoke them. My argument broadens Sarah Ahmed's idea of history and emotions to arrive at the assemblage of mnemonic practices in post-war Iran and advocate a historically informed anthropology of emotions.