Saleem Al-Bahloly, Graduate Student

Sociocultural Anthropology

Research

I reconsider the structural-symbolic as a primal means of intelligibility that is formal, empty, and opaque. The structural-symbolic is a labor, and my project examines this labor of intelligibility - a labor done in proximity to death, at the threshold of chaos, at the point of fitna - through a historical ethnography of the practice of art in Baghdad in the 1940s and 1950s. I particularly investigate the realist turn this practice takes and how this turn disposes art to thinking through some of the questions that constitute the philosophic-epistemological ground of Ba'athist socialism in Iraq. The ambition is to produce a historical ethnography of modernity as a problem not of progress but of ruins.