Flowers in Uncertain Times: Waste, Islam, and the Scent of Revolution in Tunisia

ABSTRACT

Flowers have been efficacious political symbols throughout the ages. They have united groups under nationalist banners and given their names to revolutionary movements. However, to view flowers as political symbols alone neglects their materiality and the way that it shapes politics within particular sensory registers. This paper explores how jasmine influenced perception of the Tunisian revolution of 2011 through its olfactory power in the context of a garbage crisis that had enveloped the country. It argues that read within the context of Tunisian Islam, garbage was polluting and dangerous to individuals and the revolution itself. Jasmine on the other hand, could be read as a multi-sensory representation of the Islamic concept of purity that could protect and lend blessings to individuals and the revolution by pleasing the spirits. The scent of flowers in uncertain times was reassuring and shaped how Tunisians perceived the revolution and its aftermath.

KEYWORDS:

• Revolution
• waste
• flowers
• Islam
• Al-Ghayb

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 This article draws on 15 months of ethnographic research conducted between 2012 and 2015 primarily in the capital Tunis during which my research helped uncover a larger environmental health crisis that had festered under Tunisia’s dictators for decades (Darwish 2017). During this period, I conducted participant observation amongst Tunisians affected by the crisis, activists, development practitioners, and government employees. I followed Tunisian environmental activists during their field missions into some of Tunisia’s most environmentally marginalised communities where I conducted semi-structured interview, life-history interviews, and informal conversations. Research presented here is specifically based on participant observation and four interviews with key-interlocutors in the capital Tunis. Interviews lasted from 20–60 min during which I showed images of the waste graffiti and had respondents comment on them directly. Interviews were recorded, transcribed, and translated and data was analysed using focused coding and key-word-in-context analysis.

2 Much has been written about the ontological turn in anthropology in recent years (for a discussion see Holbraad and Pederson 2017). Ontology here denotes a concern with how waste is understood through the existence of other worlds in Islam.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the United States National Science Foundation USA (NSF) under [grant number 1424057].