Sonic Icons

A vivid, artfully crafted, and deeply hopeful account of one community’s struggle to rediscover and reinvent itself after a century of genocidal loss, dispossession, and displacement

To the extent that Middle Eastern Christians register in Euro-American political imaginaries, they are usually invoked to justify Western military intervention into countries like Iraq or Syria, or as an exemption to anti-Islamic immigration policies because of an assumption that their Christianity makes them easily assimilable in the so-called “Judeo-Christian” West.

Using the tools of multisensory ethnography, Sonic Icons uncovers how these views work against the very communities they are meant to benefit. Through long term fieldwork in the Netherlands among Syriac Orthodox Christians—also known as Assyrians, Aramaeans, and Syriacs—Bakker Kellogg reveals how they intertwine religious practice with political activism to save Syriac Christianity from the twin threats of political violence in the Middle East and cultural assimilation in Europe.

In a historical moment when much of their tradition has been forgotten or destroyed, their story of self-discovery is one of survival and reinvention. By reviving the late antique Syriac liturgical tradition known as the Daughters and Sons of the Covenant, they seek a complex form of recognition for what they understand to be the ethical core of Christian kinship in an ethnic as well as in a religious sense, despite living in societies that do not recognize this unhyphenated form of ethnoreligiosity as a politically legitimate mode of public identity.

Drawing on both theological and linguistic understandings of the icon, Sonic Icons rethinks foundational theoretical accounts of ethnicization, racialization, and secularization by examining how kinship gets made, claimed, and named in the global politics of minority recognition. The icon, as a site of communicative and reproductive power, illuminates how these processes are shaped by religious histories of struggle for sovereignty over the reproductive future.