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.