Doctoral Dissertation Research: Kinship, Food, and Sociality

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

University of Virginia doctoral student, Rose Wellman, supervised by Dr. Susan McKinnon, will undertake research on the interrelationship between socio-cultural ideas of kinship and family, on the one hand, and socio-cultural ideas of nation, on the other. While social scientists have long pointed to connections between these two critical realms of human social life, Wellman seeks to identify the processes through which the connections are developed and maintained. Her research will focus on kinship and social organization as it is experienced and understood everyday Iranians, with particular attention to household and national rituals, including those surrounding food. The research will be carried out in Qader-Abad, a provincial city in the Fars Province of Iran. This study will build on previous research conducted by scholars of Shi'i Islam and gender that have addressed the significance of inheritable substances such as blood ties through the male line in shaping Iranian ideas and practices relating to kinship and nation. The researcher will investigate two main elements that operate in Iranian social organization: 1) concepts of biological, inheritable substances, and 2) acts of ritual feeding, cooking, and food sharing. In the home, the significance of food for kinship is visible in the emphasis Iranians place on daily and ritual acts of eating together and on food itself as a generative substance. In the context of the nation, the role of food is apparent in the ritual distribution of large amounts of laboriously prepared food for frequent Shi'I Islamic-national rituals and charity events. The researcher will employ multiple ethnographic research methods including: daily participant observation, extensive interviews, the collection of family genealogies and life histories, and analysis of popular media. This research is important because it will provide updated information on contemporary post-Revolutionary Iranian daily life and sociality. This research will contribute to current theorizing of the interrelationship between kinship and nation. Finally, this research will build international research collaborations and support the education of a social scientist.