Reimagining Kinship in Transnational Stories of Reincarnation

• In Event: To Heal and Care Amidst State Violence: Theorizing Kinship from Alternate Spaces

Abstract

In this paper I will examine the tensions between “imagined” versus “real” notions of kinship as made legible in the reincarnation stories of reincarnated Druze communities. The Druze are an ethnoreligious Arab community indigenous to the Levantine region of South West Asia, North Africa, or what has been historically called “the Middle East.” Particularly known for their insular and guarded nature, propagated by their relative small global population size as well their fundamental religious tenet that one cannot convert and must be born into the faith, scholarship on the Druze has frequently situated Druze communities within Orientalist, colonialist, and masculinist discourses. Within these limited and problematic knowledges lies one of the most widely-known and convictions of the Druze, namely, their widely-held and transnational ethnoreligious belief in reincarnation. Resituating academic discourses on Druze reincarnation from spaces of history and exposition, this talk takes the phenomenon of Druze reincarnation as a starting point for an analysis of Druze cultures of care and connection. Here, I will thus explore how the Druze belief in reincarnation allows Druze communities around the world to (re)imagine and forge unique forms of kinship with one another across time and space. My theorization of these “imagined” kinships will be grounded in stories I have curated in my research of living Druze peoples who have developed intimate relationships, across time and space, with those they remember and are remembered as part of the “past life family.”

Author

• Natalie G El-Eid, Georgetown University