Grounds of becoming: fakirs among the dead in Sehwan Sharif, Pakistan

Abstract

This ethnographic portrait of a graveyard in Sehwan Sharif, Pakistan, illustrates the spatial and intercorporeal ways in which fakir becoming resists autonomous conceptions of the self. It explores how fakir perception of and participation in richly structured environments involves a masterful engagement with manifold beings, places and temporalities; is characterised by gendered struggles over corporeality and place; and intervenes in local and historical structures of authority and charisma. Being active and acted upon in complexly emplaced ways, fakir lives target the transcendent and so doing complicate the modernist separation of the inner self with the outer world, reveal affective continuities across realms of zahir and batin, and make room for spatial and intercorporeal labour in religious careers. The discussion on fakir becoming points to the broader notions of charismatic spatiality that dialogically tie sites of the living and the dead, interweave realms of dreams with those of waking life, and helps redirect analytical attention away from religiously-bounded individuals to religiously-dynamic life-worlds.