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September 15, 2020
IOTA Forum: Sarah Riccardi-Swartz reviews The Political Lives of Saints: Christian-Muslim Mediation in Egypt, by Angie Heo
Orthodox Christianity, in its various global formations, has two features that are rarely brought together in thoughtful, intersectional consideration: saints as transtemporal mediators and how socio-political encounters, forces, and institutions both contour and are shaped by religious material practices. In The Political Lives of Saints: Christian‐Muslim Mediation in Egypt, anthropologist Angie Heo draws on thirty-four months of fieldwork with Coptic Christian and Muslim communities in Egypt. Her research, which was spread over a nine-year span, explores the political dimensions of saints and their sensorial and material power in shaping religious and national identity among Copts and Muslims.
Heo’s rich ethnographic data, combined with her use of theoretical ideas from the anthropology of media, material studies, and political science, offers readers a critical exploration of the different registers of mediation that take place during the processes of saintly veneration. In doing so, she calls our attention to this transtemporal domain as a site through which the differences, unity, exclusion, and belonging of worldmaking are expressed during crucial political moments in Egypt’s history, including the Mubarak era, the revolution of 2011, and various ISIS terrorist attacks in the latter half of the 2010s...
Read Sarah Riccardi-Swartz's full review here.
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