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An uncanny experience occurs, Freud argues in his 1919 essay ‘Das Unheimliche,’ ‘when primitive beliefs which have been surmounted seem once more to be confirmed’ (Freud, 1919, p. 248). Anthropologist Alireza Doostdar, in his very imaginative and equally well-articulated book, The Iranian Metaphysicals: Explorations in Science, Islam, and the Uncanny, sets himself the task of engaging with the ways and conditions in which such repressed ‘primitive beliefs’ and the uncanny (unheimlich) experiences they generate might serve as possible gateways for entering into other forms of rationality. By doing so, Doostdar points to the power of the uncanny to challenge our modern (post-Enlightenment) reasoning, unshackling the concept from its basic definition, and morphing it into a potential imaginal path to penetrate the elusive zones of interaction in which the so-called incompatible theological and scientific rationalities constantly intersect and reconfigure each other.
The Iranian Metaphysicals consists of three main parts. The first part, which contains ten short chapters, deals with the figure of the rammal, the practitioner of raml, the divinatory science of geomancy, and also in most cases a dabbler in any kind of metaphysical endeavor, including, but not limited to, fortune-telling, sorcery, ‘traditional’ healing, and exorcism. Tracing the partial success of late nineteenth-century scientific rationalization and the sanitary social policies of the Iranian biopolitical state in suppressing the rammal, and the different ways that the rammal's resilient craft is perceived today by contemporary Iranians (a perception that includes, and most of the time combines, ridicule, awe, fear, and amusement), Doostdar sheds light on the ways and conditions in which the rammal and his or her practice ‘can become a site for an uncanny return of a repressed “irrational”, wreaking havoc on the boundaries between true and false, reasonable and superstitious, genuine power and imposture’