W6C2: religious authority and agency in Aceh

Question 1

Violence as world making:

Answer 1

• Assert one group’s claim tot truth and history against rival claims, with all the social and economic consequences this entails
• How to draw boundaries between groups? Us and them, the most extreme way of communicating differences is violence.

Question 2

Triangle of violence:

Answer 2

• perpetrator, victim, audience
• Audience is part of the violence, without audience it is less impactful. Analyses should include that.
• Violence is often meant to be seen: performative quality. For example: 9/11, video tapes of IS killing people
• Violence without an audience will still leave people dead, but it is socially meaningless.

Question 3

Article by Khan:

Answer 3

discussing the life of muslim women in the UK. Argues that women are under attack by ideological culturalism. Important point that race and religion get mixed up

Question 4

Ideological culturalism:

Answer 4

• ‘Culturalism is the idea that society and human affairs are aligned along the axis of culture and that sameness and difference in culture is the defining element of social life. Under ideological culturalism, individuals are perpetually bound to their closed cultural category and can only realize themselves within their own cultural limits. These categories are passed through generations and derived from countries of origin’ (Khan 2022: 502).
• The idea that you can cut up societies into cultures.

Question 5

Three contemporary discourses around veiling as antithetical to Western values (Khan)

Answer 5

• first, far-right misuse of feminist language to further monoculturalism anchored in European secularized Christianity;
• second, feminist scholarship that opposes multiculturalism in defence of gender equality and liberalism more widely;
• third, Muslim-centric national security strategies that seek social cohesion through the ideational discipline of “risky” Muslims’ (Khan 2022: 503)

Question 6

Othering:

Answer 6

• The reductive action of labelling and defining a person as a subaltern native, as someone who belongs to the socially subordinate category of the Other. The practice of Othering excludes persons who do not fit the norm of the social group, which is a version of the Self;
• ‘Over the last decades, there has been a systematic “othering” of Muslims in the European social imaginary. Since 9/11, government policies, media coverage and social debate continually vilify Muslims as the post-immigration group associated with various social ills that are antithetical to the values of secular liberal societies’ (Khan 2022: 501) [opening sentence]
• Also a racial thing, what is a religious thing becomes a racial thing: ‘Autochtony is a type of racialization that imagines a pure, other-less nation’ (Khan 2022: 505).

Question 7

Intersectionality of religion, ethnicity and gender

Answer 7

‘Culturalist nation-building and belonging hails not only culture, faith and race but also gender […] women’s bodies are the symbolic place where human societies write their moral system therefore national belonging requires gendered cultural conformity’ (Khan 2022: 505).

Question 8

The white gaze:

Answer 8

the assumption that the default reader or observer is coming from a perspective of someone who identifies as white, or that people of color sometimes feel need to take into account the white reader or observer’s reaction

‘the white-scripted hijabi subject’ and the ‘white gaze’ ‘making racial and religious discrimination inseparable’

Question 9

Khan is against culturalist/primordialist views:

Answer 9

• ‘To recapitulate, one of my aims is to reject ideological culturalism’s fundamental assertion that individual identities are perpetually bound to their hereditary cultural category. Instead, I shall define identity as a continuing contextually contingent, and often contradictory narrative communication of one’s subjectivity’ (Khan 2022: 507).
• Emphasizes plurality of identities and context dependency

Question 10

Orientalism (Said):

Answer 10

• Focus and image created of muslim is the counter image of their western selves. Because ‘we’ have emancipated women, west is the place of freedom. Said critisized the construction of the orient as mystical and tantalizing and profoundly irrational
• ‘Relentless focus on Muslim gender relations deflects attention from pervasive gender inequality embedded in dominant cultures, functioning to give the impression that “western” women qua non-Muslim women are neither oppressed nor bound by gendered norms. This obfuscation serves to falsely fix emancipation itself to western cultures while patriarchy becomes the exclusive domain of Islam’ (Khan 2022: 511).

Question 11

Religious agency in Khan:

Answer 11

• ‘The young women note their choices are often fluid and conflicting, but that they do not need to meticulously reconcile all the identifications they lay claim to’ (Khan 2022: 512).
• ‘while it would be easy to think that those subject to persistent everyday culturalism are rendered powerless, participants’ overriding responses were prideful resistance through an ethics of self-cultivation geared towards re-narration’ (Khan 2022: 516).

Question 12

Religious agency in a broader perspective:

Answer 12

• ‘In a considerable amount of academic literature, (female) agency tends to be perceived as the resistance of the self-liberating heroic individual pitted against the powers that-be. This has become a dominant view in the West, especially when it concerns women with a Muslim background who resists religious pressure to become secularized and “free” (Meyrasyawati 2022: 2-3).
• Raises the question: who are we as outsiders to decide what is agency, as long as they have the capacity to reflect on their options.

“‘As Mahmood argues, agency is the capacity to realize one’s own interests against constraints. […] These women chose to submit to a strict form of Islamic normativity and called this choice piety. Pertinently Mahmood asks who can deny their choices are not in their own interests? Hence Mahmood proposes agency should be considered not as a synonym for resistance to relations of domination, but as a capacity for reflection, choice and action’ (Meyrasyawati 2022: 3).”
- Capacity to reflect and to make choices, not necessarily to resist.

Question 13

What themes of the course do you recognize in Becoming better Muslims?

Answer 13

• Habitus: repeatedly speaks about daily routines (how does Eri dress)
• Serendipity: finding those places by chance
• Power relations, religion, kinship, inequality, social organisation.
• Using emic terms
• Detailed description of everyday lives
• Getting rapport: finds out things indirectly, joining families/people, spending time smoking. Also transparent about when it failed
• ‘Othering’ -> newcomers and original
• Different forms of authority