Introduction: World Orders, Material Forms and Everyday Lives

Zahra, come here!I'm going to hospital …'.These are the words of Mariam, a thirteenyear-old 'crippled carpet weaver' leaving her 'dark and damp' home in a hill village in Iran.Years of carpet-weaving had left her legs stiff and twisted.Travelling on a lorry and donkey for a day, she reached the Church Missionary Society (CMS) Hospital in Kerman the following morning.Compared to her home, the hospital was 'bright', Mariam noticed.Once in hospital, she 'squatted' in the courtyard of the outpatients' department to receive a 'numbered ticket' while listening to the message of Christianity.The doctor saw her in the afternoon, following which she was brought to one of the hospital's wards, where she changed into the hospital's clothes before being put to bed.On the bed next to her was another girl, who was reading a Bible; she told Mariam, 'when the sun goes off the veranda they will come and move our beds out there.Then we shall be quite close together and I'll read to you and tell you fine stories'.Mariam found the entire experience an 'adventure'.After a few days, she was 'whisked down' a long corridor to the operating theatre, where her legs were straightened.A long period of recovery followed.Afterwards, she returned to her village, 'there to tell others something of Jesus in Whose Name she had been healed'. 1 Mariam's story is fictional.It is also not narrated by a Mariam; rather, it accompanies a children's cut-out model, produced for the CMS in the 1930s (Figure 1). 2 We start with Mariam's story, not to examine its 'truthfulness' or to criticise its rather obvious use of contested, imperial ideas of darkness and dampness, but to highlight the interrelation between the introduction of new world orders and the making and remaking of material forms and everyday lives.