Discursive Tradition Research Articles

Against Contextualization: An Ethics of Encounter

Against Contextualization: An Ethics of Encounter

Arab Psyche, Indian Dream, and the Ethics of Psychoanalysis

Arab Psyche, Indian Dream, and the Ethics of Psychoanalysis

Modernity from Elsewhere: Psychoanalysis, Ethnography, and Speculative Horizons of Self-Assertion

Modernity from Elsewhere: Psychoanalysis, Ethnography, and Speculative Horizons of Self-Assertion

Tafsir Studies and the Conundrum of Normativity

Abstract Tafsir studies, due to its focus on reception history and tradition rather than on the origins of Islam, may be a locus of fruitful cooperation between the new field of Islamic theology and ‘regular’ Islamic studies that transcends the problematic dichotomy of insider/outsider perspectives. Redefining normativity as negotiating the future of Islam’s discursive tradition, arguably a shared concern of Islamic theologians and Islamicists, although their motivations differ, may be a way to further neutralise the conundrum of normativity in Islamic studies. I argue that ‘historically and sociologically informed normativity’ is the way forward for Islamic theology, and will make the field relevant beyond its own disciplinary boundaries.

Political Practices of Ukrainian Muslims: Between the Apolitical and the Radical

The article examines the political practices of Ukrainian Muslims. It covers three main streams of political behavior: a) predominantly apolitical Islam of Muslim organizations connected with the transnational Sufi movement Al-Ahbash, b) political activism of Muslim organizations connected with the global Muslim Brotherhood network, c) radical (jihadist) practices of a small part of Muslims represented by immigrants from the North Caucasus and Crimea. The article employs Kasper Mathiesen's concept of "traditional Islam" which is based on Talal Asad's anthropological approach to Islam as a discursive tradition. This paper also uses the approach of Barbara Rieffer who explores the relationship between national and religious aspects through the following categories: secular or antireligious nationalism (with no influence of religion), instrumental pious nationalism (which uses religion as an amplification source), and religious nationalism (primarily based on religious identity and rhetoric). In this paper, I conclude that the apolitical Islam of most Ukrainian Muslims can be described through the concept of "traditional Islam," characterized by political conformism and the recognition of Sufism as an integral part of Islamic orthodoxy. The political activism of those Ukrainian Muslims who gravitate towards the Muslim Brotherhood can be described within the framework of B. Rieffer's concept as "instrumental pious nationalism." The militarization of society stemming from the long-term military conflict in eastern Ukraine has led to two main development directions of Islamic political activism in Ukraine: the strengthening of nationalist political discourse and radical political practices.

The Elusive Ummah: Between the Political, Sectarianism, and Authority

The thrust of this article provides an exposition of considering Islam not simply as a constricted theoretical and discursive tradition, but as a broad historical phenomenon that is shaped by the ummah (the global heterogeneous Muslim community) which in turn is influenced by the manner in which Islam was understood by the those from the ummah who have come before. Accordingly, the article argues for Islamic inclusivity in such a way that it translates into freedom from sectarian ideological provincialism and the ability to be free to enter and remain within Islam as a Muslim on terms that may not necessarily be considered as sufficient by other Muslims. In this sense, it is both liberation from dominant orthodoxies and the existence of freedom which allows groups and individuals to debate together and participate with each other in determining the affairs of Islam and what it means to be Muslim.

The sonic performance of Islamic congregational prayer: Ṣalāh in mainstream Egyptian practice1

Studies of Islamic ritual have focused on the marginal, mystical, sectarian or syncretic. Studies of Islamic ‘music’ have focused on Qurʾanic recitation, the call to prayer and Sufi music. Surprisingly little attention has been paid to sonic aspects of Islam’s basic daily prayer rite, congregational ṣalāh. While ṣalāh’s textual aspects are constrained by discursive specifications, its sound – including timbre, pitch, modality and melody – is relatively free, adapting to the manifold historical, cultural and ritual contexts of the global Muslim community, and enabling prayer to develop greater emotional power. A careful study of the sound of ṣalāh is crucial to understanding the inner meaning and experience of prayer, as well as Islam’s remarkable ability to globalize while remaining deeply affective through an intimate relation to the local soundscape. This article aims to lay the groundwork for the phenomenological and comparative study of ṣalāh, by presenting mainstream Egyptian congregational prayer in detail, demonstrating how it is framed by discursive traditions, while highlighting those ‘unspoken’ sonic aspects which display the greatest contextual variation, and which will underlie future comparative study of meaning and practice.

Sustainability and Halal: Procedure, Profit and Ethical Practice

Halal certification is a technological and technocratic transformation that facilitates increasingly complex food production and global supply chain management. However, the discourse and materiality of global trade and the growth of consumers for which halal certification is in demand have been the target of ethical criticism that puts forward the vulnerabilities of human, non-human, and environmental relations. This paper proceeds through some steps to elucidate questions of halal ethics in practice, halal certification, and Muslim trade and exchange networks. The research method uses a descriptive qualitative approach, using library sources. The results of the analysis and discussion show that the halal discursive tradition that centralizes intra-Muslim networking, trade, and exchange, is significant to consider the ethical stakes of halal certification for marginalized and precarious Muslim populations around the world. Drawing on ethnographic insights on the meat market in Mumbai, I argue that exclusive political intimacy and economic growth mean halal certification can play a part in the marginalization of the Muslim workforce and trade in the city. Therefore, the question of sustainability and halalness must consider the new formation of halal's ethical requirements to bridge the gap between the ethics of trade and intra-Muslim exchange and global trade conditions.

Feminist pedagogy through the small fieldnote

AbstractThis collectively written essay reflects collaborations between three graduate students and their dissertation advisor. We turn to inspirations like Zora Neale Hurston to make our fieldnotes central to collective writing, thinking and translation across language and discursive traditions. We use small fieldnote in a subversive sense to illustrate a feminist mode of this pedagogical exercise and to refuse foreclosure of our analysis. We push back against the burden of working with complete pieces of writing, and the anthropological commitment to the thickness of description. Anthropological pedagogy conventionally attributes to thick description and completeness, not just scholarly superiority but also a moral one. Using a feminist pedagogical approach that centers the small as possibility troubles presumptions of conventional anthropological pedagogy. Instead, we picked notes from one or two ethnographic encounters or a single day of fieldwork to experiment collectively with where they could lead us. The essay that has resulted from this collective feminist classroom is what we see as a feminist‐dividual piece of pedagogy and writing. We anticipate that it will provide others a hopeful way to begin and sustain intellectual collaborations and writing across scholarly generations by celebrating the potential of small, incomplete, and otherwise uncelebrated pieces of writing.

Feeling out alternatives within secularity

ABSTRACT This essay reassembles the fragments of secularity offered in the thematic issue ‘Anthropology Within and Without the Secular Condition.’ Understanding what secularism often affirms, such as a materialist ontology and an empiricist epistemology, makes it easier to recognize the vast diversity within the secular discursive tradition. Exploring this internal diversity is important for giving a better account of the secular condition and for finding alternatives to the most common ways of being secular, which have become worthy objects of critique. This essay then looks more closely at two aspects of the secular that are usually overlooked: a poetic language ideology and the locus of explanatory satisfaction. A better understanding of what it means to be secular, in all its variety, will help scholars better control for the ways in which secular discourse shapes their feelings and the knowledge they desire to produce.

Análisis discursivo de las cédulas de los expósitos del Hospicio de Oviedo (1752‒1782)

Abstract The Oviedo Hospital was the main charity in charge of caring for foundlings in Asturias (Spain) between the 18th and the 20th century. Sometimes these children carried an identity card or document with them containing several pieces of information, such as their name or the confirmation of baptism. These were copied into the hospital register books (‘Foundling Records’). The identity cards are characterized by the repetition of a basic informative scheme and certain linguistic elements located in the area of ‘language of immediacy’. Taking this into account, the aim of this paper is to examine from the perspective of discourse analysis a corpus composed of 1.117 identity cards collected between 1752 and 1782 to determine if these documents are able to constitute by themselves a specific discursive tradition.

Keep It Halal! A Smartphone Ethnography of Muslim Dating

Abstract This article reveals how Muslim religious identity is impacted by Muslim dating apps. The development of Muslim dating apps within the last decade has led to Muslims seeking partners beyond their physical and social locality. The following research takes inner-Muslim discursive traditions into account in order to examine how Muslim males articulate and negotiate their Islamic identity in the process of partner selection. The research’s methodological approach draws from digital ethnography, with the smartphone as the primary field site. The smartphone ethnography on the app of Muzmatch will demonstrate that users are physically embedded in doctrinally heterogenous contexts. Yet, the religious framework of the app promotes a “doctrinal homogeneity” that finds expression via the discursive articulations of the app users. It will be shown that users are being shaped by the app as they incorporate the religious framework provided by it.

Bilingual Heaven: Was There a Distinct Persianate Islam in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire?

Abstract What is the language of heaven? Is Arabic the only language allowed in the eternal world of the virtuous, or will Muslims continue to speak their native languages in the other world? While learned scholars debated the language of heaven since the early days of Islam, the question gained renewed vigor in seventeenth century Istanbul against the background of a puritan reform movement which criticized the usage of Persian and the Persianate canon as sacred text. In response, Mevlevī authors argued for the discursive authority of the Persianate mystical canon in Islamic tradition (sunna). Focusing on this debate, this article argues that early modern Ottoman authors recognized non-legal discourses as integral and constitutive parts of the Islamic tradition. By adopting the imagery of bilingual heaven, they conceptualized Islamic tradition as a diverse discursive tradition. Alongside diversity, another important feature of Persianate Islam was a positive propensity towards innovations.

Ali Anooshahr, Turkestan and the Rise of Eurasian Empires: A Study of Politics and In- vented Traditions,

Ali Anooshahr’s Turkestan and the Rise of Eurasian Empires: A Study of Pol- itics and Invented Traditions explores how the late medieval and early modern Persianate historians dealt with the Turco-Mongol lineages of the founders of the Ottoman, Safavid, Mughal, Mongol, and Shibanid empires. As Anooshahr claims, the legacy of Turco-Mongol heritage was mostly linked with negative associa- tions of “barbarity,” “plundering,” “violence,” and “paganism,” in the Persianate discursive traditions. Therefore, what the Persianate historians attempted to do is either to distance their patrons from such negative legacies, or to redefine their legacies in subtle ways in accordance with imperial needs. These attempts were part of the imperial response to the internal or inter-imperial legitimacy chal- lenges throughout sixteenth-century Eurasia. By studying five Eurasian empires together in comparative approaches, Anooshahr shows how these attempts shared similarities, even though “the particularities and context of each ‘state’ and their ‘ideologues’ were unique” (5).

Soundscapes of Uyghur Islam by Rachel Harris

Reviewed by: Soundscapes of Uyghur Islam by Rachel Harris Eric Schluesselschluessel@gwu.edu Rachel Harris. Soundscapes of Uyghur Islam. Framing the Global Series. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020. 249 pp. $85.00 (cloth), $35.00 (cloth). The field of contemporary Uyghur studies was once preoccupied with nationalism and ethnic conflict as studied through the written word and short-term "guerrilla ethnography" in secular, urban, and male-gendered milieus. Rachel Harris's pathbreaking new book marks the successful inversion of that paradigm through an intimate study of sounded practices of Islam rooted in many years of fieldwork among rural Uyghur women. "Sounded" here refers to those ephemeral and embodied ways of making and experiencing sound, including but certainly not limited to music. The book's theoretical and methodological interventions thus illuminate vital yet neglected aspects of the human experience and have broad consequences for scholarship on Uyghur life. Anyone moving through a city or village in China will notice how all kinds of noise and music seem to contest for space and attention. In Xinjiang, that awareness is heightened by the interplay of varieties of sound, rhythm, music, and speech coded as either "Chinese" or "Uyghur"—or "secular/national" or "Islamic"—and many shades in between. Harris characterizes this politics of sound as "soundscape," the ongoing renegotiation of the boundaries of community through a complex field of sounding and listening that in turn shapes the rules of interaction (20). The soundscape of Uyghur Islam is a "'discursive tradition'…through which local actors attempt to define what constitutes true Islam and a good Muslim within relationships of power" (24), but also a "palimpsest" textured by erasure and reinscription (216). This seemingly abstract concept is intimately related to acts of repetition and to the (Uyghur, female) body as a "prime locus for imposing new regimes of knowledge and being" (213, 215). Attending to "sounded expressive practices" decenters the emphasis on physical appearance and dress that is common in the highly polarized political and media discourse surrounding Xinjiang (15). One of Soundscapes' most compelling features is its historicization of sounded practices as ways of negotiating community and space in response to shifting sociopolitical relationships that are otherwise difficult to perceive. Harris begins at the most intimate level, through a thick description of women's Sufi rituals. She convincingly analyzes these rituals' production of powerful feelings of community through rhythm, movement, and voice. While Soundscapes ranges far and wide across borders, and while the book presents a gradually broader scope, rhythm and the body remain at its core. How, Harris asks, do embodied practices of negotiating community encounter new sociopolitical and textual circumstances? Harris then demonstrates the importance of transregional connections by showing how women's Sufi groups have encountered different versions of a core Sufi text, which itself has circulated between written and spoken forms. She shows how those intimate sounds changed in interaction with transnational Islamic networks, as woman Qur'an reciters adopted recitation styles that index traditions across the theological spectrum. Soundscapes reminds us not to reduce Islam to doctrine: reciters refigure and reinterpret sounds, which gain new meanings in practice. Harris then turns to the stranger paths of circulation and analyzes the affective impact of social media and of audiovisual media of unknown origin. We see how a decontextualized sign such as a recorded recitation or a shocking video travels like a rumor, shaping discourses as it is shaped by them. [End Page E-30] Soundscapes then considers the contestation between the sounded and embodied practices of Uyghur Islam and those of the Chinese Communist Party. These aspects of piety, Harris argues, are also a technology of the state, as Ban Wang has characterized them: practices of embodiment, intended to create and enforce group feeling, that possess a specific lineage in Maoism (208).1 That lineage becomes clear through oral histories from rural Uyghur women that are presented throughout the text, including in a pair of lengthier "interludes." China scholars will recognize parallels with the study conducted by Gail Hershatter and Gao Xiaoxian (高小贤) of women's lives in rural Shaanxi,2 both in the approach to fieldwork and in the book's presentation of autobiographical narratives. Indeed, Harris's...

People of the Book: Empire and Social Science in the Islamic Commonwealth Period

Social science is often described as a product of nineteenth-century Europe and as a handmaiden to its imperial and colonial projects. However, centuries prior to the Western social science enterprise, Islamic imperial scholars developed their own “science of society.” This essay provides an overview of the historical and cultural milieu in which “Islamic” social science was born and then charts its development over time through case studies of four seminal scholars—al-Razi, al-Farabi, al-Biruni, and Ibn Khaldun—who played pivotal roles in establishing fields that could be roughly translated as psychology, political science, anthropology, and sociology. The axioms undergirding Islamic social science are subsequently explored, with particular emphasis paid to the relations between said axioms and the discursive tradition, “Islam.” The essay concludes with an exploration of how looking to social science enterprises beyond the “modern” West can clarify the purported relationships between social science and empire.

Treinta años de estudios sobre sintaxis histórica de la lengua española en la Edad Media y el Renacimiento: enfoques y propuestas

In this paper we review the studies and lines of research in historical syntax of Spanish referring to the medieval and Renaissance period during the last 30 years. We particularly highlight the figure of Rafael Lapesa, the great promoter of historical syntax studies in the last decades of the last century, the work of Concepción Company, director of the first great historical syntax of Spanish and the works collected in the proceedings of the international congresses on the history of the Spanish language, which are a clear testimony to the development of different interests in the field of Spanish history in recent years. We emphasize the importance of the arrival of online corpus, which has meant a methodological renovation in historical studies, and we point out some fruitful lines of research in recent decades, such as research on grammaticalization processes or on discursive traditions in relation to historical syntax. The syntax-pragmatic and syntax-discourse interface also shows promising development paths.

Impossible Emotions: The Ethics of Mourning and Melancholia

This paper looks at mourning and melancholia, and their ethical implications through the work of Sigmund Freud and mostly Jacques Derrida. The attempt here is to read through Derrida’s auto thanatological oeuvre through questions of fidelity, interminability, impossibility and ethics. In our perpetual struggle as scholars dealing with questions of meaning, existence, loss, life and death this paper tries to navigate the discursive traditions of looking at mourning and melancholia and what their radical potential is or can be where the mourning; melancholic; haunted; living subjects bear an impossible task unto the dead.

La specificità tunisina: Egemonia politica e habitus dell’impegno nell’Islam pubblico contemporaneo

L’elaborazione islamica delle idee di democrazia, pluralismo e libertà, condotta dai movimenti islamici tunisini dopo la rivoluzione del 2011, può essere considerata come parte di una tradizione discorsiva (Asad 1986) incentrata sulla “specificità tunisina”. Questa tradizione prevede l’interpretazione delle fonti islamiche classiche e moderne da parte di autorità religiose e secolari, finalizzata a legittimare l’impegno sociale e politico in nome dell’Islam. La specificità tunisina è un discorso che si richiama alle interpretazioni locali delle pratiche islamiche (come il sufismo e il marabuttismo), sull’opera dei pensatori dell’Islam moderno e sui ragionamenti su democrazia e diritti umani, allo scopo di costruire una cornice teorica all’interno della quale approfondire i concetti di moderazione, tolleranza, pluralismo e attività politica a partire da una prospettiva islamica. Questo contributo fa parte di una ricerca etnografica condotta dal 2012 e il 2015 tra gli attivisti del pubblico islamico tunisino. Tale categoria comprende sia gli islamisti (ovvero gli attivisti dei movimenti e partiti impegnati direttamente nell’agone politico) che i du‘at (gli attivisti della società civile e delle associazioni impostate sulla devozione, impegnati a diffondere il messaggio islamico dal basso). L’osservazione delle interrelazioni tra i due gruppi e della condivisione della medesima cornice teorica (la specificità tunisina) e vocabolario (libertà, dignità, diritti umani e così via) fa comprendere come la netta distinzione tra un attivismo islamico di tipo politico ed uno di tipo socioculturale deve essere messa in discussione.

JUNÇÃO E TRADIÇÃO DISCURSIVA NA ESCRITA INFANTIL

Neste artigo, propõe-se uma abordagem descritivo-comparativa do funcionamento dos mecanismos de junção nas tradições discursivas (TDs) relato de experiência e carta de opinião, no modo escrito de enunciação. Com o objetivo de alcançar indícios que apontem a relação sintomática entre mecanismos de junção e TDs, o estudo fundamenta-se no modelo funcionalista de junção (RAIBLE, 2001), conjugado a uma base teórica que entende a escrita como constitutivamente heterogênea (CORRÊA, 2004) e a uma concepção de texto que considera as TDs que o constituem (KABATEK, 2006). Nesse quadro teórico-metodológico, a descrição da escrita infantil é pautada na consideração de aspectos linguísticos e discursivos, que permitem o reconhecimento, por meio do funcionamento dos MJs, de rastros do movimento do sujeito pelo que (re)conhece como fixo e lacunar do texto. Os resultados mostram que a textualização ocorre por meio dessa circulação do sujeito, em intrínseca associação àquilo que imagina ser a (sua) escrita, no processo de atualização da tradição. As especificidades da movimentação indiciada por esses rastros apontam, ao mesmo tempo, para o geral e o particular, a partir do que é fixo e lacunar nas tradições em que se inserem e lançam luz sobre a relação sintaxe-texto-discurso.