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- Convenors:
-
Usmon Boron
(University of Toronto)
Morgan Liu (The Ohio State University)
Liliya Karimova (NVCC, Annandale)
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- Theme:
- ANT
- Location:
- State Room, 7th floor
- Sessions:
- Thursday 10 October, -
Time zone: America/New_York
Long Abstract:
The publication of Talal Asad's "The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam" in 1986 facilitated a paradigm shift in the study of Islam. Synthesizing Alasdair MacIntyre's seminal revival of Aristotelian ethics with the works of Marcel Mauss and Michel Foucault, the concept of discursive tradition allowed scholars of Islam to overcome a set of dichotomies that had plagued the field since its very inception: modernity vs tradition, scripturalist vs folk, global vs local, orthodoxy/orthopraxy vs heterodoxy. Today, over thirty years after the publication of Asad's essay, interest in the concept of discursive tradition keeps increasing. A decade ago, Asad's students Saba Mahmood and Charles Hirschkind published groundbreaking ethnographies of Islamic piety in Egypt, impacting thereby scholarly debates well beyond the study of Islam and the Middle East. Currently, anthropologists debate what aspects of Muslim lives the concept of discursive tradition fails to address, with Samuli Schielke, Amira Mittermaier, and Naveeda Khan, among others, providing provocative interventions. The publication of Asad's lengthy sequel to his original essay further reinforces and enriches the ongoing discussion.
Notwithstanding the cross-disciplinary influence of Asad's anthropology of Islam, his ideas have not been used widely in the study of (post-)Soviet Islam. Yet, Morgan Liu's recent (2017) argument about the usefulness of the concept for understanding Central Asian Islam and the recent translation of Asad's essay into Russian are clear signs that work in this direction is likely to progress. This panel aims to facilitate this process by creating space for a critical discussion of Talal Asad's scholarship and its relation to post-Soviet contexts. The panel centers on, but is not limited to, the following overarching questions: How does the concept of discursive tradition relate to dominant theorizations of post-Soviet Islam (e.g. "cultural tradition" (Adeeb Khalid), "collective memory" (Bruce Privratsky), "ideology" (Mathijs Pelkmans), "ethno-national belonging" (Julie McBrien)) ? In what ways can the concept contribute to our understanding of the legacy of Soviet secularism and the ongoing revival of normative conceptions of Islamic piety in the region? How can post-Soviet modes of lived Islam enrich, complicate, or challenge the Asadian paradigm?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 10 October, 2019, -Paper long abstract:
Talal Asad's landmark essay, "The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam" (1986) opened up new avenues for thinking about change and continuity in "Islam." In seeing it as a discursive tradition, Asad conceptualized "Islam" as a never-ending, ever-shifting conversation focused on a set of authorities that most Muslims could agree upon. What happens, though, when that tradition is disrupted, as it was in most of Central Eurasia in the Soviet period? Do Asad's ideas have resonance in such a situation? I will argue that they do, and that they in fact help think about Islam in the Soviet and post-Soviet contexts in a more sophisticated fashion. (As a historian, I am most interested in the transformations of the Soviet period and in their lasting after-effects.) Thinking comparatively about Soviet and post-Soviet Islam in Central Asia allows us to rescue it from essentialization on the hand and from securitization on the other. This paper will have a dual approach: (1) it will discuss the ways in which Asad's scholarship (his 1986 essay, his extensive writings since then, and the work that they have inspired) can help us make better sense of Soviet and post-Soviet Islam, and (2) consider ways in which the Soviet and post-Soviet contexts extend Asad's analysis. This second point will lead us to a consideration of what, if anything, is peculiar to Islam in post-Soviet spaces.
Paper long abstract:
In his quintessential essay on the Idea of an Anthropology of Islam, Asad presents a view of how anthropologists might consider a given phenomenon as Islamic. He argues "A practice is Islamic because it is authorized by the discursive traditions of Islam, and is so taught to Muslims whether by an alim, a khatib, a Sufi shaykh, or an untutored parent." (1986:21, emphasis mine). Read in this light, his idea of discursive tradition seems expansive enough to think with when looking at Islamic practice in Central Asia during the Soviet and post-soviet periods, especially given Asad's emphasis on the social and historical conditions "that enable the production and maintenance of specific discursive traditions, or their transformation and the efforts of practitioners to achieve coherence" (ibid:23). The tension between Islam as discursive tradition and the way Islam in Central Asia has been conceptualized - often as a mode of belonging, including in my own work - largely dissolves. A much thornier question, however, is the centrality of practice in Asad's seminal piece. In this paper I preform a close reading of Asad and outline the fruitful ground he provides for future research into Islam as a discursive tradition in Central Asia. But I also reflect on the centrality of practice in his approach and what consequences this has for thinking about Islam in the region.
Paper long abstract:
This paper complicates and expands Talal Asad's concept of discursive tradition. Anthropologists have long engaged with Asad's work to examine the revivalist modes of Islamic piety in the Middle East and South Asia. As a result, the concept of tradition has come to be associated exclusively Islamic techniques of self-cultivation such as the five daily prayers, veiling, listening to sermons, and reciting the Qur'an, among others. Based on two years of ethnographic research in Kyrgyzstan, the proposed paper shows that although the majority of Kyrgyzstani Muslims grew up without observing Islamic ritual obligations, their religious (or, as some would argue, cultural) habits and sensibilities can be best understood through the concept of tradition.
Paper long abstract:
Talal Asad's important contribution to understanding Islam notwithstanding, approaching Islam as a discursive tradition only in Central Asian and Eurasian societies has its limitations: (1) not all self-identifying Muslims have a deep knowledge of the Qur'an and other theological sources; (2) scholars engaged in studies of Islam in the region should to be familiar with such sources but do not have to make these sources the locus of research; and (3) a focus on power struggle among practitioners attempting to challenge and/or maintain "orthodoxy" (variously defined) is certainly a part of local Muslims' daily life but not the whole of it. Debating Islam is certainly one way of being Muslim in Central Asia and Eurasia. But how do we think about/theorize/understand those Muslims who did not/do not engage in such debates or Muslims who did not/do not believe in God? What do we do with Muslims who venerate natural sites (e.g., trees) or use bioenergy to heal others? While I wholly embrace Asad's focus on particular historical conditions that inform production of discourses about Islam, I offer to approach Islam as a human ecological adaptation to a particular socio-historical context through inbodied experiences (physical/emotional) expressed through a variety of embodied practices. This way, healing with bioenergy, venerating ancestors and natural objects or not believing in God and claiming to be Muslim, become comprehensible in CA, Eurasia and elsewhere. To exemplify this approach, I use ethnographic examples from the Ferghana Valley.