Discursive Tradition Research Articles

Boundary obsessions

Boundaries in contemporary art practice and education contexts are often conceived as distinctions between disciplines, inscribed through material conventions and discursive traditions. In art, a field that continually touts trans-disciplinarity and post-medium approaches, it is considered productive to occupy multiple disciplinary positions and effectively enlarge or re-draw the territory of possible creative action. This obsession with disciplinary limits reveals a language of spatial metaphors (fields, frontiers and domains) and breaching actions (breaking boundaries, expansion). In this article we highlight how the language of disciplinarity today is spatialized, and premised on notions of imperialist territoriality which are at odds with efforts to decolonize art. We speculate on other ways to approach disciplinarity without theorizing boundaries and their rupture, and re-consider discipline through: ecologies of teaching and learning, an imaginative burrowing under the surface, and working with discipline as an agential material.

For a discursive-linguistic approach to junction: analysis of linking mechanisms in narrative and argumentative discursive traditions

For a discursive-linguistic approach to junction: analysis of linking mechanisms in narrative and argumentative discursive traditions

Islamic Piety, Corporeality and Agency: Young Mappila Women’s Dissensus Over the Notion of Ideal <i>Muslimah</i> in Malabar

Occupied with the discourse of legal reformation of the Muslim community since the Shah Bano controversy in 1978, statist narratives of liberating Muslim women from Muslim patriarchy are conspicuous in India. However, Muslim leaders propose internal reforms and expect women to be good mothers. This article analyses the role of traditional <i>ulema</i> in Kerala in shaping the corporeal notions of pious Mappila women. The study also analyses the contestations and multiple discourses among pious young Mappila women toward the <i>ulema</i>’s preaching. The findings of this study are framed through the concept of piety and the embodiment of ethical self by Saba Mahmood and Talal Asad’s notion of Islam as a discursive tradition. Semi-structured interviews, participant observation, digital ethnography with a sample of thirty respondents and secondary sources are the methods used. While the conception of an ethical self and piety among the pious elder Mappila women hinges on the respectful compliance of <i>ulema</i>’s preaching of the qualities of a ‘good <i>Muslimah</i>’, the pious young Mappila women focus on the deliberative aspects of discourses around ‘the good <i>Muslimah</i>’. This has opened up the possibilities of contestation, argumentation, and cross-checking references from the Islamic tradition to pursue a dignified and pious living.

An Examination of Talal Asad's Thought in Anthropological Studies on the Islamic Community of the Sasak Tribe of Lombok

The island of Lombok is inhabited by the Sasak tribe with the majority of the people being Muslim. This island is located in the small Sunda range in the central region of Indonesia. The Sasak tribe as the original inhabitants of the island of Lombok, which is also nicknamed the island of a thousand mosques, has a variety of unique religious traditions and rituals that we can only find on the island of Lombok. so many traditions in Lombok itself are still closely related to Islam. As well as the maulidan tradition, Lebaran ketupat, and several other traditions. Discussions related to Islamic tradition have been studied by many figures in the world, one of which is Talal Asad. It should also be noted that Talal Asad has criticized the textualization of social life, his work has shifted analysis through behavioral interpretation and towards an investigation into the relationship of practice with what he calls "discursive tradition." Asad introduced this concept in his intervention into Islamic anthropology but also linked it to several fields (anthropology, religious studies, postcolonial studies, critical theory) concerned with ethics and religion in modernity. Through this article, the author would like to invite readers to jointly understand the context of Islamic anthropology based on customs, traditions, and the writings of figures such as Talal Asad. This article is expected to be able to provide education to the public regarding Islam on the island of Lombok, then the history of Islam on the island of Lombok, customs, traditions, and its review based on Talal Asad's anthropology.

El arduo despertar de un cambio lingüístico en la distancia comunicativa: paralelismos y divergencias con textos de la inmediatez en las relativas oblicuas del primer español moderno

Within the framework of historical sociolinguistics, the present study deals with the incidence of the textual axis at the dawn of a change affecting relative obliques in early modern Spanish. To this end, both the diffusion and the conditioning of the new variant (en + art + que), as opposed to the traditional one (en + que), are studied comparatively in two corpora composed of texts close to immediacy (private correspondence) and communicative distance (literary and legal-administrative) from the eighteenth century. The results of the study show, on the one hand, that the expansion of innovative forms was significantly greater in the documents of immediacy than in those of distance. On the other hand, it is found that, despite largely similar internal conditions, some of them exhibit idiosyncratic behaviour revealing a certain disparity in these initial stages of change. All this highlights the need to include textual typology in the study of language variation and change, alongside the usual linguistic and extra-linguistic factors. Keywords: historical sociolinguistics, linguistic variation and change, discursive traditions, prepositional relative clauses, early modern Spanish

Toward decolonizing Muslim geographic epistemologies

In this commentary, I engage with the epistemic direction that Sidaway suggests geographers should take to decolonize Muslim geographies. Instead, I argue that geography will benefit from closing the gap with the anthropology of Islam where similar questions have long been debated following the influential work of Talal Asad and his conceptualization of Islam as a ‘discursive tradition’.

The 1517 Project and World Christianity: Migration and the Uses of Doctrine

This article examines the dynamic relationship between Christian doctrine, migration, and social circumstances, tracing how the uses of Christian doctrines have evolved and interacted with different socio-political conditions from the Protestant Reformation to present-day Christianity in Asia. It delves into pivotal historical moments, such as the Protestant Reformation, symbolized as the “1517 Project,” and the Modernist-Fundamentalist Controversy in the United States, to show that Christian doctrines have shaped and been shaped by cultural and socio-political landscapes. This work particularly contrasts the uses of doctrine in Anglo-European Christendom contexts with post-Christendom situations relating to Asia. The study emphasizes the significant role of migration in spreading Christianity globally and in the development of doctrine, focusing on the Christian faith of Dalits in India and Taiwanese Americans. It calls for a holistic understanding of how Christian doctrine’s universal character interacts with diverse racial and ethnic formations. The article argues for and imagines a more expansive view of the catholicity and contextual embodiment of the Christian discursive tradition for the twenty-first century.

Ahmad Moftizadeh and the Idea of the Islamic Government: A Discursive Tradition Analysis in the Field of Political Islam

This article explores the idea of political Islam as a discursive tradition within the context of Iranian Kurdistan. It challenges the prevailing essentialist and universalist approaches commonly used in the analysis of political Islam, advocating for a more adaptable and comprehensive interpretation. By conceptualizing political Islam as a discursive tradition, this study sheds light on the complex interconnections, configurations, and historical contingencies influencing Islamist discourses and movements. The paper argues that political Islam should be examined in relation to other phenomena and discourses, acknowledging its dynamic nature within specific temporal and spatial contexts. Focusing on an influential yet underexplored Islamist discursive tradition in Iranian Kurdistan during the 1970s and 1980s, the research acknowledges the hybrid nature of Islamist discourses, drawing from diverse traditions to fulfill particular objectives. In particular, it explores the perspectives of Ahmad Moftizadeh, a Sunni Kurdish Islamist and the founder of the Maktab Quran (MQ). This study investigates Moftizadeh’s views on the Islamic government, positioning it within the framework of discursive tradition. It analyzes his core categories and inquiries within Islamist thought, notably emphasizing Moftizadeh’s alignment of the Islamic government with the Islamic tradition of the Shura, highlighting its central role in the Islamist discursive tradition.

Transformasi Ibadah: Khatmil Qur’an Online di Kalangan Muslimat NU Lampung Timur

This research examines the transformation of worship practices in the digital era, especially in the context of Khatmil Qur'an Online among Muslimat NU Lampung Timur. By applying the concept of Living Qur'an Studies, this research reveals how online Qur'anic Khatmil meetings affect religious experience and social transformation in society. The results highlight that Khatmil Qur'an is not only a religious ritual but also an integral part of religious education, student motivation, and a driver of social integration in rural communities. Using Talal Asad's discursive approach, the analysis shows significant differences between online and offline Khatmil Qur'an practices, with the impact of technology and digital spaces accelerating changes in religious discursive traditions. The research provides a holistic insight into this phenomenon through qualitative research methods involving in-depth interviews and participatory observation studies. The practice of Khatmil Qur'an Online is not just a ritual but also part of an evolving process of religious meaning construction in a non-Arabic society. The success of this practice in embracing technology as a means of worship shows that digital religion is not simply the replacement of traditional ways but rather the integration of technology as an integral part of the religious way of life in the digital era.

The specific visuality of women of the global South in the media of the global North

This paper examines how neoliberal, gendered discourses of globalization position marginalized communities of women in popular culture, focusing on the ways in which the media of the global North produces the specific visuality of women of the global South. The representations of women of the global South, such as factory workers, mail/online-order brides, and domestic workers, point to the globalized mode of feminization of labor and the power asymmetry inherent in globalization. By analyzing the ways in which the female body of the global South embodies commodification, sexualization, and abjection, the paper points out that women’s experiences are marginalized or erased in the neoliberal narrative of globalization. The (re)imagination of women of the global South in the media of the global North testifies to the historical legacy and discursive traditions of the colonial/imperial past and points to the reproduction and dissemination of sexualized and racialized imagery of otherness.

Religion-making in South Asia: An interstitial perspective

The study of ‘Hinduism’ in contemporary academia has generated considerable controversy. Many scholars have argued that the idea of a single ancient religion is difficult to substantiate based on the historical record. A common alternative position is that Hinduism is a colonial construct, without well-defined historical antecedents. This paper contributes to a scholarly middle ground, which provides an empirically based yet still contingent analysis of the evolution of ‘Hinduism’, by drawing on evidence from the Sikh tradition. In doing so, it also draws on approaches which interpret Islam as a discursive tradition, subject to contestable representations, shaped by conditions of knowledge and power, as well as by collective aspirations. Sikh attempts at self-definition included distinguishing their tradition from the two larger, pre-existing traditions of Muslims and Hindus in an explicit and self-conscious manner. In doing so, Sikh leaders recognised ‘Hindu’ as a religious category to some degree, well before the colonial period.

A Thousand and One Laylas: The Politics of Narrative Embedding in Laila Neffa’s Ais

In Montevideo in 1951, the Uruguayan-born Lebanese poet and translator Laila Neffa published the poetry collection Ais. Framed within the semi-historical legendary story of Layla al-ʿAmiriya and Qays ibn al-Mulawwah, two seventh-century Bedouin poets whose forbidden love resulted in madness and death, this was Neffa’s elegiac homage to her brother Ais, who passed away in adolescence. This article reads Ais as a re-appropriation of Jorge Luis Borges’ literary sleight-of-hand, involving mise en abyme, enacted by the Argentine author on the Arabian Nights in his 1949 essay “Magias parciales del Quijote”. I propose that Neffa’s re-appropriative act facilitates a “speaking back to” and an “opening up” of a varied selection of Arab, Arabo-Persian, and Euro- and Spanish-American discursive traditions. These negotiations, translations, and transformations of tradition, I argue, set in motion a recovery of self and others, of Laila and Laylas, in the wake of personal and collective trauma.

Radical Distinction of the Secular and the Problem of Violence in the Context of Contemporary Culture’s Philosophical Comprehension

The theory of secularization has long been at the forefront of the philosophical discourse of the 20th century. The secular perception of social processes could not help but influence their dynamics, the decisions made by people at different levels of social life. What is allowed for a person in the world where religions no longer form the basis of social behavior and the centuries-old foundations of social life are considered canceled? The author seeks to analyze previous attempts to comprehend the problem of violence in modern culture through philosophical theories, which regard radical secularization as one of the key characteristics of modernity. At the same time, the author refers, among other things, to the study of various approaches to the problem of moral relativism, including the perspectives of theistic and atheistic philosophy: on the one hand, represented by Radical Orthodoxy of John Milbank and Alasdair McIntyre; on the other hand, postmodernism (Gilles Deleuze and Jean Baudrillard), post-structuralism (Judith Butler), and Freudo-Marxism (Slavoj Zizek). All the above-mentioned philosophers associate radical secularism with the escalation of violence in society. The study identifies the meeting point of perspectives on the problem of violence in secular society: the absence of collectively shared values rooted in the discursive tradition inevitably generates and maintains moral relativism, the prevalence of which is generally proportional to the growth in the level of violence, including latent violence. The article suggests ways to mitigate the risks of secularization and moral relativism and puts forwards an argument for the importance of tradition and community in shaping moral values. The author also emphasizes the importance of considering the role of religion, particularly Christianity, in addressing this issue.

A History of the Privileges of the Qur'an and Magical Receptions of it: A Concise Review of the Book of Wedha Mantra by Sang Indrajati

The material object of this article is the magical reception of the Qur'an described in the Wedha Mantra by Sang Indrajati. The academic problem proposed is the distance between the Qur'an as an Arabic holy book and the Indonesian people who are far from the Arab country and are not Arabic speakers. This distancing gives rise to the phenomenon of magical reception. As a brief reading, the method used is a textological study by tracing its discursive tradition through hadith literature. The findings in this article are threefold. First, in the hadith literature, the issue of the privileges of the Qur'an still pays attention to the harmony and content of the text. Second, when the Qur'an penetrates the world far from the area of decline, the potential for perception beyond its textual function becomes very significant. The user's attention is precisely on the harmony of the sound aspect and the desired desire. Third, magical worship of the Qur'an is carried out in the interest of fulfilling the psycho-biological needs of the worshipper.

The Sermon as Discursive Frame for the Nazi Past: Preaching about the German History Exhibition Neue Anfänge nach 1945?

Abstract When the history exhibition Neue Anfänge nach 1945? about the transition from National Socialism to democracy toured Lutheran churches in northern Germany in the 2010s, preachers were invited to address it in their Sunday sermons. Like the speeches regularly given by civic dignitaries at German history museums, the sermons drew on democratic traditions of speaking about National Socialism. They also drew on Lutheran discursive traditions: Bible exegesis, homiletics, theology. This article considers how preachers combine a professional knowledge of what should be said about National Socialism with their pastoral role. The German family emerges as a key—but limiting—trope in discussion of the Nazi past in the church setting.

Performing the News: Yorùbá Oral Traditions on the Radio

ABSTRACT The Yorùbá language radio programme Kókó Inú Ìwé Ìròyìn, which translates as “Newspaper Headlines News”, began airing in 1999 and starts broadcasting at 6 am daily on the Lagos local languages radio network Bond FM 92.9. I argue that the news presenters do not use the usual radio journalism conventions, but instead lean towards a performative mode that makes use of various traditional oral devices, including proverbs, puns, extemporisation and fictional exaggeration. In this way, they borrow from other Yorùbá performance traditions, thus creating a news format that reinforces a Yorùbá cultural sphere and which creates a particular aural community. The deployment of Yorùbá figurative texts in the parsing of news stories signals an attempt to localise their journalistic work in a Yorùbá discursive tradition whose mode of verbal communication privileges textual inventiveness and dynamic recapitulations. The radio news show is an example of the changing context and continual reinvention of Yorùbá oral performance in modern society.

Continuity and Change in Islamic Religious Authority

This article aims to elaborate on the debate surrounding continuity and change in Islamic religious authority. The discussion begins by establishing a framework for understanding the analytical definition of authority before delving into the dimensions that experience continuity and change. Arendt defines authority as a relationship, signifying a connection to a specific discursive tradition, knowledge, and history. Additionally, it involves a relationship with others who may recognize, accept, or contest this connection. Building upon Arendt’s definition, the article deconstructs the nature of this relationship, emphasizing three constitutive elements: the notion of a past, the connection to the foundational past, and the ability to convey and enhance that model. This includes the augmentation of the foundational past and the ability to elicit obedience without resorting to coercion. What sets authority apart is its unique capacity to foster obedience through a relationship, free from coercion. To identify the constituents of authority, the article explores the question of continuity and change in a more productive manner by focusing on each of its three constitutive elements.

Political Islam as an Incomplete and Contested Category: A Post-Foundationalist Revision

The exploration of the quiddity of political Islam and the diverse range of categories and terms associated with it has emerged as a prominent research agenda within the social and political sciences. The application of these terms to a wide array of heterogeneous phenomena and currents among Muslim populations worldwide, coupled with the utilization of multiple theoretical approaches to define and formulate them within the realm of social studies, has posed significant challenges to their usage. The inherent ambiguity and lack of determinacy surrounding the dominant categories and definitions prevalent in the study of political Islam have led to a decline in their explanatory capacity, giving rise to a host of theoretical, methodological, normative, and political dilemmas and predicaments. This problematic state, compounded by the extensive body of research in the field of political Islam, necessitates an epistemological interrogation into the prevailing categories and definitions within this scholarly domain. Through a critical examination of prevailing definitions within the field, particularly in relation to the idea of foundation, the present article draws on the post-foundationalist approach to propose a distinctive conceptual apparatus for understanding and interpreting the phenomena categorized under political Islam. By juxtaposing the notions of discursive tradition and social configuration, the article endeavors to construct a nuanced understanding of political Islam that not only incorporates and comprehends the singular characteristics of the objects of inquiry but also encompasses varying levels of universality in elucidating the social phenomena observed among Muslims and in the Islamic world.

Phenomenology of Quranic Corporeality and Affect: A Concrete Sense of Being Muslim in the World

It is a matter to ponder that, among the three Abrahamic monotheisms, Islam places the greatest ontotheological distance between the human and the divine. While God is the ground of being Muslim, Islam excludes theophany and prohibits any tangible association between the divine and anything in the material world. God’s mode of manifesting Himself to His creatures has consisted of the most fleeting and discorporate of all means of communication, namely, sound. His words gathered in the Qur’an thus form a non-solid verbal bridge crossing over that unfathomable distance. One could then think that the relationship between the unique Creator and His creatures relies only on the strength of a blind faith founded on a dry, discursive pact. Arguing his “idea of an anthropology of Islam”, Talal Asad did posit that this religion and its culture form “a discursive tradition”. Exclusively focused on the mental modes of knowledge acquisition, this cognitivist verbalist characterization has become a certitude in Islamic studies at large. Yet, it is only a half-truth, for it overlooks the emphatic involvement, in the definition of this tradition of Islam, of the non-linguistic phenomenality of experience that implicates the pre-logical non-cognitive double agency of affect and sensation in the pursuit of divine knowledge. This article expounds this phenomenology of the Qur’an in using an innovative combination of philosophical and literary conceptualities, and in addressing some hermeneutical problems posed by the established Quranic studies.

Varieties of nationalism in the political discourses of Habsburg Austria

AbstractNationalism in the Habsburg Empire is traditionally viewed through an ethnic lens. Despite a growing literature on ‘national indifference’ that studies nationalism in Habsburg central Europe from a constructivist perspective and advances our knowledge concerning variations in national identifications, the nationalism implied in these works remains largely limited to an exclusionary ethnic type. This reductionist view of central European nationalism mirrors the traditional dichotomy of ethnic ‘Eastern’ versus civic ‘Western’ nationalism. In order to avoid this reduction, this article approaches nationalism as a thin‐centred ideology and explores varieties of nationalism in Habsburg Austria during the long 19th century. Although certain ideational paths made ethno‐nationalism appear, retrospectively, as a quasi‐natural feature of central Europe, the findings show that there developed rival discursive traditions of nationalism and competing representations of nation.