Mary Elaine Hegland

Mary Elaine Hegland is a professor in Santa Clara University in the field of Anthropology. Her field work has been in the Middle East and South Asia: Iran, Turkey, Pakistan, Tajikistan, and Afghanistan.

Mary Elaine Hegland

Biography

She has worked among Iranian Americans in the Bay Area of California and involves students in research projects among people of Iranian and other Middle Eastern backgrounds in the Santa Clara area. Dr. Hegland’s publications deal with the Iranian Revolution of 1978-1979; women and gender in religion and politics in Iran; change and continuity in an Iranian village; and women and gender in Shia Muslim rituals in Pakistan. Currently, Dr. Hegland is conducting research about aging and the elderly in Iran and among Iranian Americans in California’s San Francisco Bay Area. She also plans to study women and gender and family hierarchy and dynamics as related to aging and the elderly in Tajikistan.

Selected Research and Publications

Book

• Days of Revolution
• Religious Resurgence

• "A mixed blessing-Majles: Shi`a women`s rituals in N.W. Pakistan and the politics of religion, ethnicity and gender", Mixed Blessings: Religious fundamentalism and Gender Cross-Culturally, Edited by Judy Brink and Joan Mencher, New York, Routledge, 1995

Article

• «Flagellation and Fundamentalism: (Trans)forming Meaning, Identity, and Gender through Pakistani Women's Rituals of Mourning», American Ethnologist, Vol. 25, No. 2, 1998, 240-266 p.
• “Popular piety during Muharram: Shî`ah muslim women and life cycle identity in Peshawar, Pakistan”, The Bulletin of the Henry Martyn Institute of Islamic Studies, Vol. 17i, 1998, 76-88 p.
• "Religious Ritual and Political Struggle in an Iranian Village,” MERIP Reports, Vol. 12, No. 1, January 1982, 10-17, 23 p.
• “Ritual and revolution in Iran”, Culture and Political Change, Edited by M. J. Aronoff, New Brunswick, NJ, Transaction Books, 1983, 75-100 p.
• "Two images of Husain: accommodation and revolution in an Iranian village", Religion and Politics in Iran: Shi`ism from Quietism to Revolution, Edited by Nikkie R. Keddie, New York, Conn., Yale University Press, 1983, 218-235 p.
• “The Power Paradox in Muslim Women’s Majales: North-West Pakistani Mourning Rituals as Sites of Contestation over Religious Politics, Ethnicity, and Gender,” SIGNS, Vol. 23, No 2, Winter 1998, 391-428 p.

Contributions to Edited Volumes

• “Women of Karbala moving to America: Shi`i rituals in Iran, Pakistan and California”, The women of Karbala: ritual performance and symbolic discourses in modern Shi'i Islam, edited by Kamran Scot Aghaie, Austin, University of Texas press, 2005, 199-227 p.
• "Shi`a women of NW Pakistan and agency through practice: ritual, resistance, resilience", PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, Vol. 18, No. 2, 1995, 1-14 p.

Source

• Santa Clara University