The proposed panel seeks to develop anthropological tools and strategies for interrogating the fluidity and heterogeneity of subjectivity and subject-making in the Middle Eastern/North African region by taking count of specific discursive, corporeal, and material conditions within various ethnographic settings. Given the vast diversity in social, economic and historical settings in the area, the papers proposed in this panel situate their analysis of subjectivity within culturally specific settings in, Egypt; Iran; Morroco; Palestine and Turkey.
Our aim is to produce theoretical and methodological approaches that can enable analysis of subject production within discourses of modernity, religion, secularism, nationalism and neo-liberalism. More specifically, the proposed papers in this panel will examine the discursive language of state formation; debunk the binary constructs of religion and secularism while affording particular attention to the impact of modernizing discourses of secularism on subjectivity; problematize material and corporeal consumption and interrogate the binary constructs of authenticity and consistency in subjectivity.
The anthropology of MENA has to all intents and purposes, reflected the development of western knowledge and intellectual thought. This is particularly true of analysis of the individual where the shifting anthropological lens has transitioned from thinking about the individual in MENA cultures principally as a "pre-modern" self, in terms of perceived visceral kinship systems that define relationships and produce normative selves whose analysis necessitated tracing family genealogies and tribal norms. As western modern thought increasingly underscored the centrality of the individual however, notions of the agential individual, independent and freed became an anthropological mantra. Yet, with the advent of post-modernity, postcolonialism, neoliberalism and globalization, anthropological studies of the Middle East and North Africa have yielded few critiques of the subject that enable a reading of selves intertwined within local and wider global cultural and socioeconomic processes. This panel attempts to undertake the task of exploring these new emerging conceptual approaches in thinking about subjectivity by focusing on the conditions of subject production and the ways by which secularism, the neoliberal market, processes of state formation, normative notions of religion, sexuality and the poetics of modernity constitute subjects who act within the constraints and possibilities that subject them in a temporal, inconsistent and largely interconnected world. We seek to underscore the fluidity, heterogeneity and inconsistency of the subject, within problematized notions of desire, gender, class, ethnicity, religion.
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Dr. Sherine Hafez
This proposed paper questions the implicit normative notion of a bounded "religious subjectivity" in studies of Islamic movements in the Middle Eastern region by arguing for an anthropological approach that takes account of the inconsistency of subject production and the heterogeneity of (post) modern subjectivity. Focusing on women who engage in Islamic movements in Egypt, my analysis of their subjectivities trouble the binaries of religion/secularism, tradition/modernity, submission/emancipation and their impact on the literature and analytical categories which to a large degree still influence the field of Islamic movements and women’s studies in the region.
The findings of this ethnographic study, underscores the inaccuracy of distilling a consistently pious subjectivity. This is precisely because the socio-political engagements and historical transformations in which actors are embedded are far too varied and complex that uniform, stable and homogenous subjects produced by consistent religious practice seem all the more, unconvincing. The research identifies the ways by which women activists define the religious, the secular and political. It highlights their methods of social change and researches their goals and objectives, how do they reflect religious and secular ideals? How is religion embodied in their notion of piety and secularism and in their engagements with politics?
Based on data collected from fieldwork in Egypt, my findings suggest that Islamic women are not caught between two polarizing forces; a modernizing state and an Islamic return to tradition. Rather, people's identities and experiences are mediated in the processes of mutual production that characterize the embedded relationship of secularism and religion in Egyptian history. By considering the inseparability of piety and secularism, this paper demonstrates how desires and subjects are formed and transformed in women’s Islamic movements. It explores the range of desires and subjectivities of Islamic activists that call into question, liberal modernist assumptions about bounded individuality, stability of selfhood and their underlying normative view that creates, then binarizes a secular vs. a religious subject. Desiring modern subjects lie at the nexus of ambivalence, contradiction and heterogeneity of often porous discourses of modernity that can never be truly captured as a single subject position in which the self undergoes a consistent and uniform journey of self-fashioning. By foregrounding the heterogeneity of desire, my intention is to invite a consideration of multiplicities to the discussion of how subjects are produced in women’s Islamic movements.
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Prof. Katherine P. Ewing
Many young Muslims find themselves torn by the conflicting demands of their own life styles, family expectations, and their understandings of what is permissible within Islam. Many handle these conflicts by compartmentalizing their lives and keeping secrets. Sexuality is an arena where such conflicts often play out most secretly or dramatically, as in the situation of the young woman who feels constrained by the expectation that she not threaten her family’s honor through her sexual activity. Other youth from Muslim families articulate fundamental incompatibilities in being “gay” or “queer” and Muslim, or in being queer and maintaining the honor of their family by marrying. Based on field research among young people in Turkey, Pakistan, and India, I explore how the unlivable subject positions that these people often find themselves in are exacerbated by a collision of misrecognized and politically polarized notions of authenticity and consistency. I argue that these politically powerful but often implicit understandings of authenticity and consistency underlie modern discourse of the rights-bearing subject. One component of this discourse is the pathologization of the secret. This discourse has shaped not only European and American secular perceptions of Muslims but also Islamic articulations of the good Muslim, so that other ways of being Muslim and other ways of being modern have been marginalized and abjected as being inauthentic or traditional. Working with young people who are caught in political, interpersonal, and intrapsychic conflicts over sexuality, my interpretive strategy is to juxtapose evidence for how they manage their secrets with their articulations of concern over consistency and authenticity in their reflections on themselves, their sexualities, and their identities.
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Dr. Arzoo Osanloo
The study of subjectivity and subject-making in post-revolutionary Iran requires some consideration of the contingency of state formation just after the revolution in 1979 and continuing for thirty years to the present, now defined by state actors’ severe responses to generally peaceful but massive public protests against the legitimacy of the 2009 presidential elections in the summer and fall of that year.
Throughout the Iranian revolution, the Iran-Iraq war, and the post-revolutionary state’s domestic and foreign relations, one discourse has framed the Islamic republic’s broader discursive modes and that is anti-imperialism. The revolutionary aim of improving society through the rehabilitation of women, moreover, was part of the anti-imperialist tenor of the revolution, and thus situated women’s roles and status as central to post-revolutionary state-building processes. While this agenda unified many revolutionaries and eventual leaders, it nonetheless engendered subsequent compromises that have resulted in strategic shifts in the language of the revolution, citizens’ claims for equity and redress, especially women, and even formations of the state.
In the ensuing years, the state’s blended Islamic and republican institutions produced a new form of rights talk, one seemingly re-legitimated in the post-revolutionary era. The reform period, in particular (1997 – 2005), motivated a vocal women’s movement to seek redress for grievances in the form of rights. Over the years, however, activists’ emphasis on rights has been plagued by setbacks and a backlash culminating in the 2009 clashes with state forces.
This paper will explore the shifting terrain of rights and the formation of subjectivities, particularly among women and activists in the post-revolutionary period. Finally, with a focus on activism on behalf of vulnerable members of society, this paper will explore the stakes of representing claims of redress in terms of rights for the post-revolutionary Iranian state and how activists reclaim a space for protest in an increasingly authoritarian era.
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Dr. Khaled Furani
Palestinian Subjectivities in Anthropology
This paper, based on an essay written for the Annual Review of Anthropology, identifies four different kinds of Palestinian subjectivity, which have been generated in proto-ethnographic and ethnographic writing about Palestine since late 19th Century: biblical, Oriental, absent, and post-structural. I argue that these subjectivities have been enabled by various modalities of anthropological engagement with Palestine, which offer an opportunity to explore affinities between the politico-epistemic language of national sovereignty in the West and the constitution of particular subjectivities in a Western form of knowledge, anthropology. Focusing on the epistemic and political dynamics in which the recent admissibility of Palestine into anthropology is embedded, especially after Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, I discuss how “the crisis in representation” has a vocabulary that enables the study of colonized and national Palestinian subjectivities within anthropology’s purview. I conclude by considering the possibilities of Palestinian subjectivities that are yet to emerge, whose dissonance with secular reason and power could reinvigorate the critical abilities of post-colonial language and the anthropology that it engenders.
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Dr. Banu Gokariksel
Co-Authors: Anna Secor
In the last decade ‘veiling-fashion’ – a diversity of trendy styles marketed as women’s Islamic dress— has been on the rise in Turkey, as well as globally. In the Turkish context, the debates about veiling-fashion have proliferated along the fault line of Islamism and secularism and placed veiled women at the very center of fiercely contested ideas about capitalist consumerism, Islam, and ethics. This paper turns to the fashionably veiled women and analyzes how they form themselves as pious subjects in the midst of these controversies.
Our discussion is based on the focus group interviews we conducted in two cities in Turkey, the metropolitan center of Istanbul and the conservative provincial city of Konya, in 2009. Our focus group interviews with consumers of veiling-fashion in Istanbul and Konya show that women see veiling-fashion as morally ambivalent and they manage the tension between veiling and fashion through various bodily spatial practices. Their discussions focus on the concept of nefis, literally meaning breath, self, or soul. Women describe nefis as the pesky force that pulls them to fashion, the display of beauty, and material pleasures. Nefis disrupts the Islamic ideal of harmony between dress, conduct, and faith, leaving women with the ethical problem of suturing this rupture.
While women encounter veiling-fashion as ethically problematic, they also describe how they enlist it selectively in the management of their nefis. Through veiling-fashion, they satisfy their nefis and cultivate the bodily habits and dispositions that help develop the ethical capacities to reign in unruly desires. This paper takes us from the intimate spaces of the body and home to city streets, the beach, and even bars to show how women’s everyday dress practices participate in the production of pious bodies and subjects. This analysis contributes to feminist geographical approaches to subjectivity through its examination of embodied practices of piety, consumption, and gender.
