Secular Atmosphere

Abstract What does secularity feel like when blown through the air rather than designated by state secularism? How does dust-wind unsettle the distinction between religion and politics? This article places dust-wind at the centre of an ethnographic engagement with material effects and affective resonances that shape the problem-space of secularism in Iran. In the past decade, the eruption of dust-winds across the Iran-Iraq borderlands has drastically impacted people’s relations with their environment: in religious discourse, dust undergirds various modes of veneration and commemoration among the Shi’i inhabitants. However, when risen in the air it intrudes breathing and invokes transgressive interpretations. I analyse material secularity through the phenomenon of bad air and the distinction between the religious ‘respiratory sacrifice’ and the secular ‘right to breathe’. While ‘respiratory sacrifice’ connotes dust as a reliquary of martyrs, the ‘right to breathe’ concerns dust-winds and necessary repairs. I draw on two notions of ‘atmosphere’, one spiritual and orchestrated, the other, meteorologically hazardous bad air. Together they make up contesting atmospheric collectives that unsettle formal religious scripts. I argue that atmospheric collectives recalibrate environmental protests while dilating dust to produce a secular materiality.