Author: Chelsea Mak

This week’s readings each address and explore the analytical tools necessarily to adequately account for the formation of religious subjectivity and “modes of agency” (Mahmood 2005, 17). Saba Mahmood’s Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival of the Feminist Subject, complimented by her 2001 essay, “Rehearsed Spontaneity and the Conventionality of Ritual: Disciplines of ‘Ṣalāt,’” emerges out of the author’s fieldwork among the women of the mosque movement in Cairo, Egypt. Her dual interests—the analysis of the concepts of the self, moral agency, and politics that under gird the movement and the scrutiny of normative assumptions regarding the self and agency in secular liberal politics and feminist theory—provide Mahmood with a rich starting place from which to develop a nuanced analytical framework for approaching the study of agency within particular ‘discursive traditions.’ Mahmood’s subsequent analysis of the women’s mosque movement, based on her careful attention to the socio-historically located internal logic of the movement itself, emphasizes the cultivation of religious subjects through embodied, habituated activity. In response, Amira Mittermaier’s essay, “Dreams from Elsewhere: Muslim Subjectivities Beyond the Trope of Self-cultivation,” also emerging from ethnographic work in Egypt (this time among a Sufi community) expands Mahmood’s study by arguing that, while valuable, the paradigm of self-cultivation in the study of Islam is insufficient in so far as it fails to adequately account for an “ethics of passion,” wherein the religious subject is understood as also being acted upon by the multiple Others—including the Divine, those who are visible (family, religious, and social networks), and the invisible (for example, angels or the dead)—who constitute the subject’s relational community (Mittermaier, 260). Both authors contribute to our unfolding classroom conversation in significant ways, particularly on topics such as the ethnography of religion beyond the mosque (synagogue, church, temple, etc.); the significance of ritual beyond symbolic meaning-making; accounting for the Divine agent in ethnographic study; and politics and the ethnographic project.

Mahmood introduces her work with an insightful and transparent assessment of her own motivations and aspirations in taking up the topic of feminist subjectivity as it relates to and is/is not manifest in the Islamic Revival. She writes of her dissatisfaction with the ability of “progressive leftist” politics to account for and comprehend the “aspirations of so many around the Muslim world” and her questioning of the “. . . conviction, however well-intentioned, that other forms of human flourishing and life worlds are necessarily inferior to the solutions we have devised under the banner of ‘secular-left’ politics” (Mahmood 2005, xxiii). As a result, Mahmood explicitly denies her own political and theoretical commitments as an appropriate analytical framework for her project—indeed, much of her work may be read as a deconstruction of her own theoretical commitments—and, instead, seeks out tools that allow her to more adequately account for the life-worlds of the women she studied over a two year period in Cairo.

It comes as no surprise, then, that the opening chapter of Politics and Piety situates Mahmood’s work within an ongoing conversation among feminist theorists addressing the question of how “issues of historical and cultural specificity inform both the analytics and politics of the feminist project” (Mahmood 2005, 1). This question is of particular import in Mahmood’s own work, given the ways in which the women’s mosque movement challenges liberal feminist concepts of agency as grounded in “the political and moral autonomy of the subject” (Mahmood 2005, 7); as premised on a universal desire for freedom, especially freedom from male domination (Mahmood 2005, 10); and as functional within a binary of resistance and subordination. Paradoxically, at least within the liberal feminist framework, the women’s mosque movement both develops as a result of female actors operating in a field and mode previously dominated by men and upholds traditional, patriarchal norms for the formation of women as religious subjects. Given this apparent contradiction, Mahmood argues, instead, for a socially and historically embedded understanding of agency. She writes, “. . . the meaning and sense of agency cannot be fixed in advance, but must emerge through an analysis of the particular concepts that enable specific modes of being, responsibility, and effectivity” (Mahmood 2005, 14–15). Consequently, Mahmood’s study of self and agency in the women’s mosque movement attends closely to social norms as the “necessary ground through which the subject is realized and comes to enact her agency” (Mahmood 2005, 19), especially as these norms both constitute and are constituted by the subject. Turning to Aristotle, as mediated through Foucault, Mahmood further develops the type of theoretical frame necessary to account for the pedagogies of self-cultivation she witnessed in the women’s mosque movement. In particular, Mahmood argues that an understanding of the formation of the ethical subject through embodied, behavioural practices best fits the emphasis in the women’s mosque movement on the cultivation of pious selves—an emphasis that places particular importance on “. . . outward markers of religiosity—ritual practices, styles of comporting oneself, dress, and so on” (Mahmood 2005, 31).

Having detailed her analytical frame, Mahmood then turns to its demonstration by, first, situating the women’s mosque movement historically (chs. 2) and, second, through the ethnography proper (chs. 3–5), which focuses on the use of Islamic pedagogical materials, ritual practices, and paradoxes of subjectivity among the women who attend lessons at the mosques. While space prohibits a detailed exploration of each of these chapters, a brief example may offer an illustration of how Mahmood’s analytics provide explanatory power for the practices and goals of the mosque movement: the cultivation of religious desire through the ritual practice of Ṣalāt.

Mahmood argues that, because the women of the mosque movement understood piety as a state of “’being close to God:’ a manner of being and acting that suffused all of one’s acts, both religious and worldly in character” (Mahmood 2005, 122; see also, Mahmood 2001, 830), the observance of Ṣalāt operated as more than a ritual obligation, but as a site of self-formation. Hence, “ritual (i.e., conventional, formal action) is understood as the space par excellence of making their desires act spontaneously in accord with pious Islamic conventions” (Mahmood 2001, 833)—a process illustrated by Mona’s admonition to a young, Muslim woman concerning the interrelated nature of mundane daily behaviour, or “pragmatic action” (Mahmood 2001, 833), and the ritualized practice of Ṣalāt (Mahmood 2005, 124–126). What is significant is the way that the women conceive of the formation of religious subjects as an intentional activity (i.e., an act requiring and demonstrating agency), the goal of which might be realized through the habituation of bodily practices (such as ritual prayer) and mundane, pragmatic action (such as choosing not to engage a quarrel with one’s sibling). A similar such practice, as noted by Mahmood, is the wearing of the veil, viewed as both an act of submission and as a means of cultivating the feminine and valued quality of shyness (2005, 158). Veiling, then, demonstrates “. . . the role the body plays in the making of the self, one in which the outward behavior of the body constitutes both the potentiality and the means through which interiority is realized” (Mahmood 2005, 159). Such activity, rooted as it is in the teaching of the Quran, the ḥadīth, and Islamic pedagogical materials, demonstrates that attending “carefully to the specific logic of the discourse of piety” reveals a “logic that inheres not in the intentionality of the actors [contra liberal feminist theory], but in the relationships that are articulated between worlds, concepts, and practices that constitute a particular discursive tradition” (Mahmood 2005, 17).

Mittermaier’s essay complements Mahmood’s focus on self-cultivation by nuancing the analysis of agency and the religious subject, arguing that habituation as a model “offers us little for engaging with a different axis of religiosity, one that valorizes being acted upon, one most vividly expressed in stories of dreams, visions, apparitions, spirit possession, prophecy, revelation, the miraculous, and, more broadly, stories that involve elements of surprise and awe” (Mittermaier, 250). Mittermaier explores the notion of being ‘acted upon’ as an important aspect of religious subjectivity through her ethnographic work among a Sufi community in Egypt that focuses on encounter with the Prophet and the divine vis-à-vis dreams. A serious consideration of the role of dreams in the life-worlds of community members highlights the importance of taking into account the ways in which “the otherworldly” is understood to act upon and constitute the religious subject, an aspect of religious experience that may be lost if the researchers focus centres primarily upon pedagogies of self-cultivation (Mittermaier, 249). Indeed, Mittermaier highlights an aspect of Mahmood’s analysis that is conspicuously missing, that is, careful attention to the role assigned to the Divine in the formation of human subjects. This is especially intriguing, given that Mahmood notes early in her work that the women’s mosque movement is located within “a discursive tradition that regards subordination to a transcendent will . . . as its coveted goal” (2005, 2–3). However, as Mittermaier notes, Mahmood’s focus on habituation limits her analysis to “. . . one direction—that extending from the [subject]—but it has little to say about the other direction, the being acted upon” (253). Mittermaier’s work, as a result, helpfully expands Mahmood’s project of attending to the internal logic of a discursive tradition for explorations of self and agency by highlighting the necessity of including those Others, such as the Divine or the dead (i.e., those who are considered agents by those studied), in the relational network that forms the nexus in which religious subjects are formed and come to act.

The ethnographic work of both Mahmood and Mittermaier provides a fruitful ground for expanding and continuing several conversations that have been engaged in our classroom experiences thus far. First, Mahmood’s analysis of ritual as a place of self-formation recalls one of our early readings, Seeman’s article, “Otherwise than Meaning,” which explored the place of ritual in suffering. Seeman’s article, and Mahmood’s work, both suggest that the study of ritual must be expanded beyond analyses of symbolic meaning-making. How does Mahmood’s analysis add to the study of ritual as an aspect of religious experience and in what ways is her accounting adequate/inadequate? Second, in light of class discussions over the past few weeks, it becomes obvious in reading Mahmood that all of her examples and stories emerge from within the walls of the mosque. How might Mahmood’s conclusions have differed had she balanced her time within the mosque with a broader account of her subjects’ life-worlds both within their place of worship and in their daily lives? (Notably, even Mahmood’s examples regarding participants’ marriages are told to her in conversations at the mosque). Third, Mahmood and Mittermaier each account for the Divine agent in different ways, what are the benefits of each model? How might Mittermaier’s model, in which the divine Other is accepted as real in so much as this Other is real for the participants, compare with Luhrmann’s study on prayer—especially, given their common study of what may be explained as psychological phenomenon? And, finally, given that Mahmood’s project has dual goals (that of ethnographic accounting of self and agency in the women’s mosque movement, coupled with a sustained argument with and against the concepts and assumptions of liberal-secular politics and feminist theory, one that challenges political interventionist policy), we might also explore the relationship between politics and the ethnographic project.

Precis: Seeman, One People, One Blood and “Coffee and the Moral Order”

Chelsea Mak

Both One People, One Blood: Ethiopian-Israelis and the Return to Judaism (Seeman, 2009) and “Coffee and the Moral Order: Ethiopian Jews and Pentecostals Against Culture” (Seeman, 2015) enter our classroom conversation self-consciously. Seeman locates his own work within what he calls the “broad ‘phenomenological’ or ‘experience-near’ school of anthropological writing” (2009, 3), drawing on works such as Unni Wikan’s Managing Turbulent Hearts, and contributing both methodological and analytical insights to our discussion of the ethnography of religious experience. Specifically, Seeman’s self-aware exploration of the position of the ethnographer in relation to the subject enlarges our understanding of several key questions, namely, what is at stake for those whose lives, religions, and cultures are studied; what is the nature of a “experience-near” (Kleinman and Kleinman, 277; Seeman 2009, 3) anthropological method, including how it might both expand and limit what can be said with academic certainty; and how the particularity of individual experience is both shaped by and shapes religious and cultural forms or, how might the anthropologist develop an “analytic frame better attuned to the shifting registers of freedom and constraint in the experience of everyday life” (Seeman 2015, 743).

Seeman’s two works both contribute to studies of Ethiopian Jews, while also departing from previous foci and method because of an emphasis on richly and thoroughly describing what is at stake for this community (Seeman 2009, 6). One People, One Blood tells the story of the “Feres Mura,” a sub-community within the larger group of Ethiopian Jews, who have sought and, with various levels of success, achieved a return to Judaism and integration into Israeli society. The book length ethnography has several significant goals: first, to demonstrate that “interpretations of religious agency lie at the heart of [the “Feres Mura” dilemma]” (Seeman 2009, 2); second, to shift the course of the conversation about Beta Israel and Ethiopian Jews “in a more analytic direction” in order to “drive theoretical reflection about religious  and moral experience in context” (Seeman 2009, ); and, third, to contribute and perhaps influence the public dialogue surrounding the “Feres Mura” dilemma (Seeman 2009, 7). Thus, the book focuses on the experience of the “Feres Mura” in relation to state immigration policy, public health, and Israel’s religious establishment, and concludes that the “return to Judaism was intended as a ritual-bureaucratic system for the transformation of apostates to penitents, nominal Christians into Jews” (Seeman 2009, 205). As such, it was successful, despite the disappointment expressed by some of its administrators and observers, who desired a greater demonstration of “single-minded religious devotion” (Seeman 2009, 205). Seeman’s article, “Coffee and the Moral Order,” published six years later, returns to one of the driving theses of One People, One Blood, namely, the question of religious and moral agency. Thus, in the article, Seeman begins to develop an analytical framework for attending to agency in a subject’s experience of everyday life (Seeman 2015, 743) by exploring the role of buna drinking in the lives of Ethiopian Jews and Pentecostals. He argues that buna serves as “no less than a material medium for disputes about the limits of moral agency, the experience of kin relations that have been broken or restructured, and the eruption of dangerous potencies in the social world” (Seeman 2015, 734). Seeman’s studies are deeply informed by his attention to the question of “what is at stake” for his subjects and thus serve as a fruitful ground for discussions of ethnographic method and analysis.

Kleinman and Kleinman describe the importance of considering what is at stake for the subjects of ethnographic study as a matter of producing anthropological work that is either dehumanizing or humanizing (276-77). They thus argue that “. . . a contextual focus on experience-near categories for ethnography should begin with the defining characteristic of overbearing practical relevance in the processes and forms of experience. . . [which is to say] something is at stake for all of us in the daily round of happenings and transactions” (Kleinman and Kleinman, 277). That this theoretical framework is a driving factor for Seeman’s work with the “Feres Mura” community is strikingly evident, not only in Seeman’s introductory comments, but also in the telling of the story itself—that is, that the story begins with a death and ends with a refurbished grave. Seeman highlights that what is at stake for this community is more than the ability to relocate and settle in a new country, and more than religious conversion, but includes grief and suffering, kinship and belonging, and politics and health. Indeed, such a question, and the gravity it lends to the ethnographic task, led Seeman to give more space to the question of “cultural politics” than is typical in anthropological works and to reflect on the shifting role of the ethnographer as the stakes for the subjects are revealed: “Knowing what is at stake for informants must include the political contexts of their lives, as well as the Heisenberg-like effects of participant observation, which turns the observer into a part of the social scene” (Seeman 2009, 7). In tangible ways, a focus on what is at stake in people’s daily lives shaped the nature of Seeman’s work, influencing what content was most important to include and also the goals of his project, that is, the hope that such a work might also shape public dialogue.

Such questions and concerns are a mark of the “experience-near” approach to ethnographic writing and are essential for understanding Seeman’s project (2009, 3). This approach diverges from the assumptions of anthropologists like Clifford Geertz, who sought a thick description of culture. In contrast, the first obligation of Seeman’s approach is to “the thick and detailed description, not of culture but of what is at stake for people in local settings [see above]—stakes that are patterned in important ways but never wholly defined by cultural considerations” (Seeman 2009, 3). Seeman argues that this approach works to safeguard the anthropological task through “a rigorous theoretical and methodological approach to lived experience” that prevents “significant misunderstandings of the distinctive life-worlds in which human habitation and meaning occur” (2009, 3). That such “significant misunderstandings” are possible was illustrated clearly and profoundly in Wikan’s work on the Balinese (Managing Turbulent Hearts, xv-xxvi). One area where this framework is particularly evident in One People, One Blood is Seeman’s focus on shifting the conversation about the true identity of the “Feres Mura” away from the topic of origins and onto the “here-and-now, where Ethiopian Jews, “Feres Mura,” and Beta Israel Pentecostals . . . all struggle to define themselves—and also struggle just to get by” (Seeman 2009, 61). Similarly, “Coffee and the Moral Order” is structured around thick descriptions of the subjective experience of participation in buna drinking that reveals how one such aspect of culture is not sufficiently explained without attention to the nuances with which subjects and groups experience or disavow its observance. In this case, buna drinking or abstinence is revealed as more than “a mechanism for ensuring peace within families and ensuring solidarity among women” (Seeman 2015, 735), but also as a site wherein individuals and the groups to which they belong may actively engage in cultural negotiation (Seeman 2015, 740). As such, buna drinking/abstinence opens an avenue for the exploration of religious and moral agency.

Already in Seeman’s earlier work, One People, One Blood, the question of religious and moral agency (and, especially, how the religious and moral agency of another might be determined and evaluated) emerged as a significant theme for analysis. With regard to the “Feres Mura,” this was because, at the very heart of the dilemma, lay questions of authentic kinship and religious conversion for which no “truly objective and unqualified criteria” could be offered (Seeman 2009, 62). Thus, for the “Feres Mura,” the motivation for a return to Judaism has frequently been reduced in public political and religious dialogue to a matter of the truly penitent heart or the utilitarian desire to escape poverty in Ethiopia (Seeman 2009, 92–3). However, a careful analysis, according to Seeman, must include and consider the complexities which attend such a profound and life-altering decision—one which must be tied to “a more situated account of their lives in historical and ethnographic context” (2009, 83) and which reveals the way those who immigrated to Israel were required to navigate “broader and overlapping—yet not identical—fields of social expectation” (Seeman 2009, 108). Such a lived reality as that experienced by the “Feres Mura” draws the complexity of individual decision making and its relation to religion and culture into sharp relief and brings us to the question of freedom—a fundamental issue at the heart of Seeman’s article on buna drinking.

The focused nature of Seeman’s article allows for a close analysis of the Ethiopian practice of buna drinking as a cultural observance either embraced or rejected by Ethiopian Jews and Pentecostals in Israel. Indeed, the negotiation of cultural, religious, and familial identity are evident in the varied responses to buna drinking and its rejection (a decision that may be made because of one’s past experience of the practice as hurtful, the shifting generational values necessitated by employment, or observance of religious commitments requiring denouncing the spiritual aspects of buna drinking). Seeman here argues that the Pentecostal notion of freedom highlights a “more basic tension between the human desire for autonomy as well as stable systems of relatedness” (Seeman 2015, 744) that, while never entirely divorced of its particularity in time, place, and history, may also provide a means to reflect upon the complexities of agency and constraint in socio-cultural and religious contexts. Seeman emphasizes that he does not intend to “deny the power of culture in human affairs but, rather, to insist on its conditionality,” which is to assert that cultures cannot be satisfactorily described as mere semiotic systems, but also as the “differing textures of constraint, freedom, and compulsion that characterize their lived horizons” (Seeman 2015, 745). Such an assertion, then, demonstrates the necessity of an “experience-near” approach to the study of agency, freedom, and constraint.

Given the ethnographic emphasis on illuminating the human condition (Kleinman and Kleinman, 278, 280) and Seeman’s own claim that “the stories we tell ourselves about belonging and kinship are at the very heart of the story [One People, One Blood] aims to tell” (Seeman 2009 12–3), it is prudent to ask to what degree Seeman’s analytical framework succeeds in an adequate account of the “Feres Mura” community, but also to what degree his framework may have explanatory power for ethnographic research in other areas. In other words, how might Seeman’s insights regarding complexity and experience-near descriptions of subject choices assist the ethnographer in other contexts? What are the pitfalls and advantages of an “experience-near” approach to anthropology? Or, specifically, to agency? Seeman himself notes that “the contingency of interpretation . . . has important analytical and ethical implications for the world we study” and that it necessitates caution regarding statements of academic certainty (Seeman 2009, 8 and 208). This implies that a greater awareness on the contingency of the researcher is also necessary for ethnographic work. Indeed, Seeman also highlights several of the challenges and complexities that come with ethnographic research and participant observation—some of which emerged as questions in last week’s forum discussion on Wikan, and Kleinman and Kleinman. For example, Seeman’s work with Ethiopian Pentecostals in Israel was cut short by tensions that emerged because of divergent religious commitments that resulted in a “rupture that no ethnographic methodology could bridge” (2009, 134). Seeman’s experience thus highlights some of the unique research challenges presented by participant observation, namely, how the particularities of the researcher’s person (gender, religion, ethnicity, etc.) and experience (among others, the ability to make friends or the length of the study) impact the results of one’s work. How can such challenges be mitigated to ensure the best possible contribution to the field of ethnography?