Previous articleNext article FreeBook SymposiumThe work of uncertainty Relational aesthetics in contemporary Iran Osanloo, Arzoo. 2020. Forgiveness work: Mercy, law, and victims’ rights in Iran. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Setrag ManoukianSetrag ManoukianMcGill University Search for more articles by this author Full TextPDF Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreForgiveness work by Arzoo Osanloo is an outstanding book that renews and reshapes the anthropological study of Iran, opening up new conceptual trajectories across different anthropological domains. It will take time and more in-depth analyses to come to terms with the full scope of the book. What follows is just a preliminary and partial recognition of its great relevance.The narrative structure of Forgiveness work parallels its argumentation. The division of the book in two parts instantiates Osanloo’s argument that in contemporary Iran Islamic law is “a process of becoming” (p. 148). Part One of the book, “Crimtorts,” a term Osanloo takes from Thomas Koenig and Michael Rustad (1998), discusses how the work of forgiveness is first defined by the Iranian state’s juridical framework and made operative via the legal procedures for intentional murder. The second part, “Lifeworlds,” discusses the “social field,” produced by the state but itself “unregulated,” where different agents work to make the victim’s family agree to forbearance, foregoing their right to retribution, and sometimes going as far as actually forgiving, letting go of their resentment against the perpetrator. In addition, from beginning to end, Forgiveness work’s narrative conveys a double temporal movement that binds the two parts of the book together. One movement follows the temporal arc of the adjudication of murder cases from the trials to the decision of the victim’s family to either forbear or execute the perpetrator. A second movement describes how discourses and practices around forbearance are gaining ever-increasing momentum in Iran, pointing towards a transformation of the approach and sensibility towards the death penalty and therefore implicitly towards a valorization of life. Taken together these two movements demonstrate how the partition between Crimtorts and Lifeworlds is a disjunctive conjunction. Legislative operations and those of the social field they constitute, while separate, are interdependent and mutually constituted: regulation and unregulation, though opposite, depend on each other. To understand some of the effects of this disjunctive conjunction and to begin to consider how Forgiveness work contributes to a renewed anthropological understanding of Iran, it is useful to reflect on two complementary modalities the book addresses: the uncertainty that shapes the process of forgiveness and the work that steers it.UncertaintyA state of uncertainty dominates every page of the book and characterizes every step of the forbearance process. With remarkable precision Osanloo details the innumerable unknowns posed by the process itself, and also the unpredictable events, actions, reactions, and, above all, the fluctuating affective states that create a constant state of uncertainty. Scenarios change at any moment and situations repeatedly turn upside down, creating a suspenseful atmosphere up to the very last moment before the planned execution: life or death?Life is by definition uncertain. In most of the cases discussed in the book, the murder for which forbearance is sought was often the consequence of an encounter that did not necessarily have to end with the death of one of the participants: fights between friends, disputes between married couples, quarrels with in-laws that took a course of their own. Forgiveness work offers a unique and complex account of the uncertainties of these interactions in contemporary Iran (besides providing an amazing portrayal of family relations and presenting a remarkable ethnography of the relevance of knives).However, Osanloo shows that the uncertainty built into the process of forbearance in the Iranian justice system is not simply a given condition of life but is constituted by the process itself. Uncertainty is at once the obstacle and the enabler of the work of forgiveness. The undetermined outcome of the judiciary process opens the way for the work of forgiveness while its chances of success might in turn be increased or destroyed by the uncertainties that are generated along the way. Uncertainty is the specific modality through which the disjunctive conjunction between Crimtorts and Lifeworlds is effected and through which it finds its limit.Such analysis suggests at least two additional considerations. First, the perceived uncertainty that in Iran led to calls for the systematization of the law of the state at the time of the Constitutional Revolution of 1906, rather than being resolved by the ensuing process of juridical codification, has been reinscribed into it, becoming its condition of possibility. Eurocentric views might suggest that the continuing uncertainty is caused by incomplete or distorted codification. But it can be argued that the Iranian case, besides yet again demonstrating that rules produce uncertainty rather than eliminating it, suggests that the production of uncertainty is an effective technique of government. By withdrawing the final judgment from the state, this technique partially suspends the state’s sovereignty and therefore keeps the tension between instituting and instituted power alive, offering the counterpoint needed for this link to be constantly renewed.Second, as Osanloo notes following Khosravi (2017)—but Najmabadi (2014) and Hashemi (2020) are also relevant—in contemporary Iran being uncertain (bi-taklif, literally “without a task, without a mandate”) has become itself a form of life. This is confirmed by the current pandemic, which shows how the intersection of biopolitics and capitalism has produced uncertainty as the new regime of humanity in the entire world, made even more acute in Iran by the American economic sanctions that have made the value of the currency, and therefore everyday life, completely uncertain.In Iran in the last few years one hears time and again the comment: “this is not life we are living. We are just surviving.” Read in parallel with Forgiveness work these statements about survival seem to suggest a condition of vulnerability between life and death, an existential zone of uncertainty that cannot be forgone and where no closure or redemption is possible. Uncertainty is overtaking forgiveness for oneself and others. And yet, the book seems to suggest, faced with uncertainty, few Iranians take “no” for an answer and continue to work to achieve some form of affective aperture or closure.WorkThe counterpoint to juridical and existential uncertainty is the notion of “work” central to the book’s analysis. Osanloo uses the term “work” primarily to describe the practices of the actors who work on behalf of forgiveness, however the term might be extended to her analysis of legislature and its implementation, not only because forbearance with all its contradictions is also the state’s aim, given its ethical mandate rooted in Islam, but also because forbearance, as she explains and the state claims, is necessary for the public interest. While the state establishes its authority and legitimacy via punishment, it has increasingly cultivated a space for the implementation of forbearance, though leaving it “unchartered” precisely to favor its implementation by actors who work relatively outside its purview. Forbearance “works” for the state as well.Osanloo uses the term “work” to underline process, a working out of relations. She also uses it to underline conscious efforts oriented at purposeful action. However, given its relevance in relation to affects, one can speculate that “work” in the pages of the book also retains an implicit allusion to unconscious dimensions as well, and therefore to the work of the psyche and, more generally, to other forces beyond individual will. Osanloo is adamant that work does not simplistically operate just thanks to the singular actions of people or institutions but rather is predicated on the ways in which these actions oriented at forgiveness relate to complex patterns that provide actions with the conditions of both intelligibility and operability. These patterns “work” in the sense that they produce relational effects: they bring people and things together or set them apart, they generate connective and disjunctive links.Osanloo argues that these underlying patterns that structure the efficacy of forgiveness work are the result of the differential sedimentation of a variety of discourses (conceptions of honor and shame, Islamic and Western legal traditions, kinship, but also psychology, sociology, human rights, humanitarianism) and instructional methods (Sufi therapeutics, ritual, literature, theater) that have shaped Iran since the end of the nineteenth century and in many cases for much longer. She also carefully details how these patterns operate differently in different contexts and on different subjects (especially in terms of class reproduction, an illuminating undercurrent of the analysis). There is however a remarkable consistency about the work of these patterns, not only because they cut across institutions and individuals but because, despite their variety, they seem to be defined by the actions and reactions through which they are shaped.To analyze these patterns, Forgiveness works interweaves two analytical frameworks. First, to discuss the relationship between perpetrator and victim, Osanloo, via Butler, draws on Nietzsche to see these as subject positions that can be understood in terms of a debtor/creditor relation, to which she adds a third position, that of the mediators, the actors of forgiveness work. This framing of the pattern of forgiveness work is crucial in taking into account the constitutive differential force that structures these positions and allows for a “transvaluation” of the relative positions, to the extent that the victims, who have suffered harm and are therefore weaker, become the powerful ones because something is due to them and, as creditors, they could claim it. Victims turn into potential perpetrators who acquire force in not exercising their right. This patterning, which resonates with Shi’i ritual traditions, is central to Iran’s retributive justice system, but can also be seen as both one of the foundational discourses of the Islamic Republic (empowering the dispossessed) and its potential short circuit: creditors could claim their due from the state. Except that, in a move that does not quite fit Nietzsche’s picture, despite having the monopoly of violence, the Iranian state does not claim for itself entire sovereignty in all matters, therefore refusing to occupy the subject position that would be reserved for it. One might therefore read the pattern of forgiveness work as a process of de-subjectivation, a way to make these positions temporary, relative, and open to different, more unstable, but also dynamic configurations in which transvaluations are always at play.Second, Osanloo draws on the interactionist tradition, retooling to great effect one of the most interesting and perhaps too neglected lines of interpretation in the anthropology of Iran. In particular, she relies on the interdisciplinary approach of Mary Bateson, Jerome Clinton, and others (Bateson et al. 1977), who in the late seventies begun to study interpersonal relational patterns among Iranians, and on the research of linguistic anthropologist William Beeman (1986), who developed their analysis into a systematic account of interactional styles.1Forgiveness work through this approach shows how these patterns, rather than models, are relations of transformation, demonstrating Gregory Bateson’s argument that patterns are ever-changing “patterns that connect … a dance of moving parts” (Bateson 2002: 12). The “dance” of the different actors around the family of the victim and the shifting reactions of the latter are not scripted, so much so that the same initiative in similar circumstances might generate opposite outcomes. In this sense, even if these embodied affective (but at times also highly reflexive) patterns of forgiveness are oriented towards an ultimate end that transcends them, they cannot be described as “ethical” patterns. Instead, following Bateson, they are “aesthetic” patterns, effective only to the extent that they are devoid of a perceived utilitarian and therefore ulterior aim beyond their own realization. This is the reason why, while it might draw on some of the practices of Muslim pious self-cultivation and on human rights or humanist discourses, the work of forgiveness runs counter to all of these practices and ideas. The work of forgiveness does not operate in the name of a transcendental principle but is effective insofar as it is immanent: only by letting go of any pretense that certain means lead to certain ends can forgiveness be achieved. And when forgiveness is achieved, uncertainty meets the work of forgiveness. 2Notes1. For an interactional approach to uncertainty, see the themed articles in Hau edited by Berthomé, Bonhomme, and Delaplace 2012.2. But this would be the unity of love, not justice: “Thus, it is obvious that the need for Justice (which is the most perfect of human virtues) in preserving the order of the species, arises from the loss of Love; for if Love were to accrue between individuals, there would be no necessity for equity and impartiality. Etymologically, the word ‘equity’ derives from ‘equal share,’ i.e., the dispenser of equity divides the disputed object equally with his colleague; but division into halves is one of the consequences of multiplicity, whereas Love is one of the causes of union. In these regards, the virtue of Love over Justice is obvious” (Tusi 2011: 196).ReferencesBateson, Gregory. 2002. Mind and nature: A necessary unity. Cresskill, N.J.: Hampton Press.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarBateson, M. C., J. W. Clinton, J. B. M. Kassarjian, H. Safavi, and M. 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He is the author of essays on Iran’s society and culture, and of City of knowledge in twentieth century Iran: Shiraz, history, poetry (Routledge, 2012).Setrag Manoukian[email protected] Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory Volume 11, Number 2Autumn 2021 Published on behalf of the Society for Ethnographic Theory Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/716420 © 2021 The Society for Ethnographic Theory. All rights reserved. Crossref reports no articles citing this article.