Arguing Sainthood: Modernity, Psychoanalysis, and Islam

Abstract

Arguing Sainthood: Modernity, Psychoanalysis, and Islam. KATHERINE PRATT EWING. Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1997; 312 pp. Reviewed by ANTONIUS C.G.M. ROBBEN Utrecht University Arguing sainthood: Modernity, psychoanalysis, and Islam is an intriguing ethnography based on two years of fieldwork among Sufi teachers, religious mendicants, and middle-class Pakistani in the city of Lahore. Katherine Pratt Ewing draws creatively on the work of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan to understand Sufi religious meanings and practices. She shares Lacan's concern for the formative force of language and his attention to the decentered subject, an attention which resonates well with the emphasis in Sufism on the obliteration of the autonomous self in its spiritual fusion with God. As a trained analyst, Ewing also interprets her countertransferential reactions to her informants and uses these intimate experiences as a font of ethnographic insight. Arguing sainthood consists of three main ethnographic parts, and an introductory chapter that provides a sustained conceptual critique of terms such as hegemony, resistance, modernity, consciousness, and subjectivity. In Part I Ewing describes the changing historical position of the Sufi saint (pir), a spiritual guide, healer, and object of devotion. She argues that Orientalist scholars, British colonial administrators, and the postcolonial Pakistani elite viewed the Sufi holy men from a modernity-tradition perspective, and she demonstrates how the State persistently tried to dislocate the Sufi saints from their niche in Pakistani society. In Part II she examines the extent to which the tradition-modernity discourse has affected the daily experiences, practices, dreams, and narratives of middle-class people in Lahore. In Part III she analyzes the relation between ideology and fantasy through a discussion of Sufi mendicants as subaltern adversaries of the reigning social and political order. Orientalist scholars romanticized the Sufi holy men as reservoirs of Eastern spirituality and wisdom, while colonial administrators dismissed them either as a landed hereditary elite who competed with the British for positions of power or as wandering, drugusing ascetics who undermined the colonial order. The Pakistani government employed the same tradition-modernity dichotomy to denounce the Sufi saints as obstacles to modernization. Sufi saints are masters at negotiating the various ideologies that compete for hegemony in modem-day Pakistan. They adapt their discourse to the social position of their followers and navigate skillfully among national political sensitivities. They are conscious of being objects of devotion for some and denounced as frauds by others. So, they divulge their magical powers before common people, but utter the reformist Muslim line before educated followers while presenting themselves as the embodiments of an uncolonized tradition. The current anthropological understanding of postcolonial society has been skewed by the writings of expatriate scholars who over-emphasized the destruction of local culture by Western modernity and exalted outcrops of traditional culture as subaltern resistance. The postcolonial subject became either a prisoner of Western thought or an autonomous individual anchored in an authentic traditional culture. In this way ordinary people have become subtly reappropriated by an Enlightenment belief in the free, autonomous subject. Ewing debunks once and for all the facile tradition-modernity dichotomy that has guided many interpretations of postcolonial society, and adopts Lacan's notion of the decentered subject to sidestep the fruitless debate about whether individuals are autonomous agents or dependent actors. …