When marginalized folks don’t say what we predict they need to

The late Saba Mahmood’s 2004 The Politics of Piety is an excellent instance of how one can do philosophical ethnography. The guide’s one flaw is its dense prose fashion, however even that will have been needed with a purpose to persuade its audience: 2000s-era postmodern feminists, who tended to take six-syllable phrases as an indication of profundity. And whereas the standard vocabulary has modified considerably within the many years since she wrote it – from “resistance” and “company” to “privilege” and “marginalization” – the sorts of views she is critiquing stay very widespread, and her critique has misplaced none of its energy.

Mahmood is finding out the da’wah piety motion amongst Egyptian Muslim ladies, together with practices like carrying the veil. Different feminist students had studied such ladies earlier than. However these students had insisted in defining their informants’ actions within the students’ phrases slightly than the informants’:

A few of these research supply functionalist explanations, citing quite a lot of the reason why ladies tackle the veil voluntarily (for instance, the veil makes it straightforward for ladies to keep away from sexual harassment on public transportation, lowers the price of apparel for working ladies, and so forth). Different research establish the veil as an emblem of resistance to the commodification of girls’s our bodies within the media, and extra typically to the hegemony of Western values. Whereas these research have made vital contributions, it’s shocking that their authors have paid so little consideration to Islamic virtues of feminine modesty or piety, particularly provided that lots of the ladies who’ve taken up the veil body their resolution exactly in these phrases. As a substitute, analysts usually clarify the motivations of veiled ladies by way of customary fashions of sociological causality (equivalent to social protest, financial necessity, anomie, or utilitarian technique), whereas phrases like morality, divinity, and advantage are accorded the standing of the phantom imaginings of the hegemonized. (16)

As philosophers, at the least, we may fairly argue that ladies are mistaken to put on the veil within the identify of morality and divinity. However I agree with Mahmood that we do a disservice as anthropologists after we keep away from portraying them as concerned with morality and divinity, and as a substitute painting them as engaged in acts of resistance – as a result of resistance is one thing we’re extra concerned with.

We WEIRD folks love to outline everybody’s lives by way of political energy relationships – oppression, resistance, privilege. Postcolonialist students beloved doing that in Mahmood’s day, and twenty years later that paradigm has grow to be accepted within the well-liked tradition and all through our establishments (as when the US Nationwide Public Radio describes variety and racial fairness as its inner “North Star”). What we hardly ever appear to do is take into account whether or not this paradigm is shared by the folks it’s supposed to assist. It often seems that it isn’t – even in our personal nations. (Most US Latinos suppose that unlawful migration from Mexico is a main downside or perhaps a disaster; not like the white liberal People who help chopping police funding, black People need extra police of their neighbourhoods.) They produce other issues to fret about, as Mahmood acknowledges of her personal informants:

it is very important level out that to investigate folks’s actions by way of realized or pissed off makes an attempt at social transformation is essentially to cut back the heterogeneity of life to the slightly flat narrative of succumbing to or resisting relations of domination. Simply as our personal lives don’t match neatly into such a paradigm, neither ought to we apply such a discount to the lives of girls like Nadia and Sana, or to actions of ethical reform such because the one mentioned right here. (174)

On this mild, examine Mahmood’s work to the far inferior work of Joseph Cheah. Like Mahmood, Cheah was interviewing a bunch sometimes thought of marginalized: poor Burmese immigrants to California. Additionally like her, he finds that they don’t consider their lives by way of marginalization and resistance. However the place Mahmood takes this as a motive to probe deeper and discover the methods by which they do perceive their lives, Cheah takes it as an event to inform them they’re mistaken! He confidently proclaims that his informants’ view is “the neoconservative stereotype of Asian People because the mannequin minority”, “none apart from internalization of the prevailing ideology of white supremacy”. We hear extra about Cheah’s personal self-righteous judgements of the immigrants than we hear of the immigrants’ personal voices themselves. I’m unsure I’ve ever seen a greater instance of how to not do anthropology.

Mahmood, in contrast, exhibits a real curiosity towards her informants, letting them converse with an impartial voice. She admits there was a “repugnance that always swelled up inside me in opposition to the mosque motion, particularly people who appeared to circumscribe ladies’s subordinate standing inside Egyptian society” – and but, admirably, she took a deep breath and continued to hear additional, recognizing that the ladies would possibly but have one thing to show us:

Critique, I consider, is strongest when it leaves open the likelihood that we’d even be remade within the strategy of partaking one other’s worldview, that we’d come to be taught issues that we didn’t already know earlier than we undertook the engagement. This requires that we sometimes flip the vital gaze upon ourselves, to depart open the likelihood that we could also be remade via an encounter with the opposite. (16-17)

Mahmood, that’s, rightly sees the attraction of the unappealing. I’ve argued for a very long time that the philosophical concepts we be taught essentially the most from will appear repugnant to us at first, and we actually be taught by persevering. Mahmood works to makes the identical transfer in ethnography: allow us to attempt to see others as they see themselves, even when we don’t like what we see, and possibly we are going to be taught extra about ourselves within the course of.