Troubled dead bodies: Anthropological reflections on some North African simultopic and heterotopic Sufi saints

Abstract

The talk aims at discussing North African Muslim local understandings of the saint´s body by exploring discourses on Moroccan and Algerian Sufi saints whose bodies are said to be buried in two or more locations. Based on ethnographically -driven examples, we will discuss the most salient aspects of these thoroughly troubled dead bodies. Interestingly, what we have defined as Sufi simultopies (McGrath, 2002) and heterotopies (Foucault, 1967) comprise very different processes and phenomena, some of them strongly related with the political and biosocial becomings of the baraka. It is likewise interesting to observe how discourses on bilocated bodies are contested by present-day corporeal conceptions.