THE SOCIAL LIVES OF MARTYRS Martyrdom is imbricated within a complex relationship between politics, death, memory, and the religious and social boundaries of communities. A generative force, martyrdom and martyrs have social lives that refuse, and indeed, defy neat boundaries between the living and the dead. The two essays that inaugurate this issue turn to these generative and social (after)lives to theorize martyrdom beyond static and temporally orderly modes of commemoration.

In “Portrait of a Martyr as a Young Man: Social Lives of Photographs in Revolutionary Egypt,” Lucie Ryzova turns to photographs of young men and women who were killed by regime forces during the Arab Spring in Egypt (2011–2013), a period of two and a half years of revolutionary process that represented a liminal period between an old world order and before a new “normal” crystallized in Egypt, and indeed elsewhere in the region. Emphasizing processes of “creative remediation,” the movement of photographs across online and offline domains and multiple media, Ryzova’s essay emphasizes the social and political work of these photographs during the revolutionary process. This work, as she vividly and powerfully demonstrates, both unsettles notion of genre—in these practices of remediation photographs transform into other expressive forms like stencils and graffiti—and blurs the boundaries between referent and representation. As she notes, “photographs were not understood as mere representations but as the thing itself.” In opposition to transforming into objects of commemoration, these photographs of martyrs were often more “alive” than the living. This liminality, like the liminality of the revolutionary process itself, was a refusal to accept death and thus closure (which in the context of the revolution meant failure). Instead, the “un-dead” photographs of martyrs are a reminder of the unfinished nature of the revolutionary project.

Similarly pushing back at the neat boundary between the living and the dead, Marlene Schäfers and Maria Kastrinou put forth an idea of “insurgent immortality” through a comparison across two ethnographic locations, Kurdish communities in Turkey and the European diaspora and Syrian Druze communities in Israeli-occupied Golan Heights (Jawlani). In “Martyrs, Dreams, and Past Lives: Insurgent Immortality and the Expansive Logic of Debt,” the authors argue that martyrs are a generative force animating the social relations of stateless communities. If sovereignty in its classic sense is the power of decision over life and death, the stubborn desire of martyrs to persist beyond biological death is a claim of counter-sovereignty for stateless communities living under occupations and with shared histories of disenfranchisement. Bringing anthropological scholarship on debt and obligation in conversation with foundational anthropological theorizations of liminality and relations with the dead, the authors emphasize how insurgent immortality harnesses debt as a productive force “fostering forms of vitality that directly counter the politics of territorialization, capture, and enclosure through which colonial states operate.”

SPIRIT MOVEMENTS A recognition that religious, social, and political movements seldom emerge or reside within geographically bounded spaces has animated a rich interdisciplinary scholarship on transnationalism, transregionalism and global circulations. Religious ideas, practices, and politics are restless and move across wide geographies and the directionalities of these movements as well as their consequences are often open-ended and surprising. Working across different temporal and geographical spaces, the three essays in this rubric are a multidisciplinary exploration of the transnational movement of ideas.

Antonio Cazorla-Sánchez and Sofia Rodriguez-López highlight how the violent conflict between the post-revolutionary Mexican government of President Plutarco Elías Calles and the country’s Catholic population, including well-organized Catholic militant groups, in what came to be known as the Cristero War (1926–1929 with a less intense phase lasting from 1932–1938) became a political laboratory and provided blueprints for resistance later exercised in Spain. “One Cross, Two Continents: How Catholic Women’s Resistance in Mexico Inspired Their Spanish Counterparts (1926–1936)” traces the trans-Atlantic journey of the Cristero War from Mexico to Spain. The authors reveal how news about the conflict and specifically the role of Mexican Catholic women inspired similar action in Spain. Working across multiple archives in Mexico and Spain the authors emphasize how the actions of Catholic women organizing in Mexico created a political voice, including a justification for, and participation in, political violence. This political imaginary and voice resonated across the Atlantic where Catholic women in Spain drew on similar anxieties and used the same justifications for political violence, thus carrying “the same cross against who they considered to be the same enemies.”

Turning to the late twentieth century, though continuing a shared focus of Catholic activism on both sides of the Atlantic, “Brokering Right-to-Life: Poland and the Transnational Entanglements of Catholic Pro-Life Activism, from Santiago to Washington to Gdańsk, 1970s–1990s” tells a multi-directional and multi-vectoral tale of pro-life exchanges between Poland and two American countries: the United States and Chile. Piotr H. Kosicki and Sylwia Kuźma-Markowska bring to the fore the importance of the period from the 1970s to the 1990s as a significant moment for transnational activism, especially the critical role of Poland in creating a pro-life transnationalism where the idea of a “right to life” became a rallying cry for Catholic Far Right thinkers and politicians. Emphasizing the multiplicity of actors, mobilities and interactions, the essay brings together studies of intellectual history and social movements to showcase the importance of non-progressive social activism in shaping political visions and imaginaries on both sides of the Atlantic. Importantly, this piece also emphasizes how pro-life transnationalism has deeply shaped social and political mobilization in the twenty-first century.

Finally, Arthur Shiwa Zárate takes us back in time to the mid-twentieth century and to Egypt’s Spiritualist movement. “Cosmopolitan Spirits: Islam and the Experimental Cosmologies of Egypt’s Spiritualist Movement, 1947–1960” focuses on the Arab world’s first and perhaps only Arabic periodical on Spiritualism, ‘Alam al-Ruh (The World of the Sprit) (1947–1960) to tell a story of Spiritualism’s global history and its encounters with Islam in Egypt. Through an examination of the journal and attempts by Spiritualists to promote and legitimize “spirit healing,” Zárate emphasizes a different story of the encounter between modern science and Islam. Instead of representing an epistemological rupture, Egyptian Spiritualism saw this practice as simultaneously promising a more scientific approach to religion and at the same time “a salve for the souls of Egyptians who succumbed to an ill-informed scientific materialism that denied the agencies of spiritual powers.” Instead, Egyptian Spiritualism as a cosmopolitan and mobile project was central to developing an experimental cosmology to “scientize religion and spiritualize science.”

COUNTERREVOLUTIONARY KNOWLEDGE If revolutions and insurgencies are often global projects that draw on repertoire and meaning from multiple geographies and influences, counterinsurgencies have similar global appetites. Counterrevolutionary warfare is perhaps brutal and effective in part due to its ability to marshal histories and expertise from a wider geography of colonial and postcolonial wars. The two essays under this rubric contribute to understandings of counterrevolutions (and specifically the French colonial experience) by locating counterinsurgent and counterrevolutionary practices within longer histories and wider geographies.

Continuing a theme of transnational mobility, Marcel Berni’s “Circulating Violence: Guerre contre-révolutionnaire as the Intellectual Foundation of Modern Torture” emphasizes counterrevolutionary warfare as a military-intellectual enterprise dealing with real and imagined subversive enemies. Tracing a global history of the development of the doctrine of counterrevolutionary warfare from colonial Indochina to Algeria, Argentina, and finally to the global war on terror, Berni emphasizes that counterrevolutionary warfare succeeded in part by creating a form of torture that left no trace. Torture, far from a violation of the norms of counterrevolutionary warfare, was and is central to the enterprise.

In “Paris 1958–2015: Terrorism, Reparation, and the Work of Decolonization,” Hélène Quiniou traces a fascinating colonial continuity within French regimes of compensation for terrorism. While the history of compensation and reparation for victims of violence is often understood as emerging in the aftermath of the Holocaust, Quiniou’s essay uncovers the wars of decolonization as key historical junctures when the French state created, amended, and rewrote reparation statutes, often based on advocacy by victims. Working backwards from the aftermath of the “Paris attacks” in 2015 to bombing campaigns carried out by Hezbollah in the 1980s and finally the Algerian War on Independence, the paper is a history of the present that locates compensation and reparation within a toolkit of counterinsurgency warfare and not just as a form of humanitarian accounting for loss and trauma.

ARCHIVES OF BEREAVEMENT Where and how does one grieve? Grief is often mapped onto landscapes: cemeteries, graves, and memorials are physical sites that remind us of what and who is lost. Grief is also embodied, at times invisible and silent, in other moments visible, loud and ferocious. Moving across these scales of landscapes and bodies, the final two articles in this issue turn to radically distinct temporal and geographical locations to emphasize how loss itself emerges as an archive to tell tales of the living.

In “The Archive of Displacement: Vernacular History and Urban Cemeteries in Oran, Algeria,” Stephanie V. Love foregrounds urban cemeteries as archival nodes that bring together the living and the dead in a semiotic relationship. Here, the material deposits of everyday urban life constitute a vernacular archive, one that allows for an alternative telling of Algeria’s past, embodied in the deep and yet unhealed wounds of settler colonialism and postcolonial state violence. Bringing together a host of everyday objects like graves, trees, translations, refuse and the marginalized populations that co-inhabit these spaces, Love’s article is an important exploration of vernacular archives as indexing the overlooked, the forgotten, and a recognition that polities are always dying. Death is the past but also absent futures, roads not taken and the disappeared who refuse to remain invisible.

Oren Falk turns to archives and archetypes in the “The Widowers’ Two Plights: Towards a Cultural History of Bereaved Husbands.” Focusing on the absence presence of widowers in medieval Icelandic sagas, Falk reads for traces and hints of how and where widowers appear in these sagas and the consequences for a broader gendered history of grief and grieving. Icelandic sagas, as he highlights, are rife with two dominant archetypes of the bereaved husband: the widower on the warpath and the widower on the bridal path. Both archetypes draw attention to the cultural scripts of proper masculine conduct and constructions of masculinity more broadly while offering an example of a history of emotion and affect that links private emotion turmoil to public socio-political disruptions.