Techniques of the senses: 19th-century media and Shiism in Iran

Abstract

This dissertation investigates the ways the religious sphere and the modern technical milieu in Iran co-evolved during the nineteenth century. The thesis argues that a novel sensory culture began to form as the Shiite religion in Iran encountered modern technical media and their associated discourses. Implicit in this argument, the premise that media techniques impress religious sensibilities on the body through disciplining and recalibrating the sensorium is also examined. In what ways did media techniques and the Shiite religion in Iran interrelate? How did this interrelatedness affect the understandings of and experiences with the senses? What can be said about the sensorium that formed in between the religious and the technical spheres in nineteenth-century Iran? To respond, I study the historical changes in the religious attitudes towards modern techniques and logics in the case at hand and outline a techno-religious sensorial culture in Iran. Taking the five senses as the units of analysis, this study shows how this emerging senso-reality was embedded within the changing media-religious ecology in the period, realised through the rapid introduction and popularisation of modern media and its techniques into a highly religious Iranian society.