Anthropological Theory

This article asks what is achieved in Muslim piety movements in Cairo by reciting, listening to and discussing the Quran, by sermonizing, and by mutual moral exhortation and admonishment. I argue that what is at stake for Egyptian pietists is not only self-formation (the Foucauldian perspective privileged by Mahmood 2005), but also the achievement of a non-secular sociality. For participants in the movement, virtue is constituted primarily through social exchange and interaction (mu‘aamalaat) rather than simply through worship (‘ibaadaat) or ritual practices that discipline the self. This suggests the need to go beyond Foucauldian conceptions of ethics as self-formation. In order to understand the sociality of the contemporary piety movements in Egypt analysed by Mahmood (2005) and Hirschkind (2006), I propose a metaphor borrowed from economic anthropology: the ‘gift economy’. I characterize contemporary Egyptian piety movements as gift economies by reference to the circulation of words rather than material goods. The advantages of the ‘words as gifts’ metaphor are threefold. First, it emphasizes the way in which virtue, for Egyptian pietists, is constituted through transaction and exchange rather than through individual worship. Second, it directs attention to the ideology of language in Egyptian piety movements, whereby ethical communities form around and through the efficacy of the Quran and language that recalls the example of Prophet Muhammad. Third, it reflects the way in which urban piety movements in Egypt constitute themselves in conscious opposition to a notion of secularism (‘almana) which is associated with a commodity economy of goods, words and images experienced as morally and socially corrosive.

This essay is an examination of the implications of the largely uncritical taking up of the ascendant Agambenian paradigm in recent scholarship. Following Arendt, it is argued that the most important reason for the success of the polemical redefinition of political community as subjecthood by those who elaborated the project of political modernity (esp. Bodin and Hobbes) has been its success at getting its opponents (e.g. Locke, Bentham, Austin, Rousseau, Weber, Benjamin, Foucault, Derrida, and Agamben) to accept this definition of sovereignty as both an empirical reality and as the critical object against and through which future politics must be defined. As a result, the project of naming the sovereign — however rhetorically satisfying — has never failed to be deeply disabling for both scholarship and politics, as scholars accept its radical modern naturalization, rationalization, and unification of power as the basic concept of political organization and as the possibilities of political life come to be defined by the impossible task of deriving freedom from the concept of sovereignty. The most important recent example of this is Agamben’s work which, because it is based on Benjamin’s early writings in which this modern imbrication of sovereignty and political life is viewed as complete and irreversible, requires — if we are to get out of sovereignty — nothing less than that we reject every possibility of future political community and make a complete ontological break from political forms. This, it is argued here, is much too much to ask of either scholarship or of our political present.

This article argues that moderate Islamic spiritual training programs in contemporary Indonesia entail ‘governing through affect’. This formulation captures the embodied dispositions and ritual forms through which affect is mobilized to serve as a modality of government. Based on over two years of ethnographic research in Indonesia, most of which took place at Krakatau Steel in western Java, I examine the affective incitements that took place in ritual settings dedicated toward corporate productivity and self-improvement. The article argues that this process of subjectification took place in three stages. First, what participants referred to as ‘opening the heart’, which involved making participants receptive to the message of work as worship through recourse to affective enactments in Islamic history and discourse. Second, the circulation of tears, which refers to deep collective weeping which simultaneously represented and physically enacted the adoption of a new subjectivity. Finally, ‘managing the heart’ — the ultimate goal of spiritual training — was a form of self-management in which one exercised ‘built-in control’ and acted in ways that were deemed simultaneously conducive to corporate competitiveness and other-worldly salvation. I conclude that affect constitutes the virtuality of ritual insofar as it is the medium through which spiritual reform enters into the vital processes of human life.

High-technology work fuels a dynamic global exchange from technopoles throughout the world, but especially between East and South Asia and the northern Californian region of Silicon Valley. This migration drives an expanded number of ancestral identities. Professional and activity-based identities flourish as Silicon Valley’s strong narrative of meritocracy loosens the grip of birth ascription on the creation of identities. These achieved identities proliferate as people experiment on their own sense of self. Traditional conceptual tools related to immigration, and even such contemporary approaches as Appadurai’s ethnoscapes, do not adequately illuminate the ethnographic data on Silicon Valley workers, families, and especially youth. The concept of deep diversity, first posed by philosopher Charles Taylor and reified by anthropologist Clifford Geertz, reinterprets the interactions of traditional ethnic identity categories, providing a powerful framework with which to think.

This article offers an anthropological outline of immanent critique in Islamic traditions. In addressing the question — what is immanent critique? — it dwells on the interrelationships amongst the Enlightenment’s notion of reason, critique, and Islam. My main contention is that to construe the Western notion of critique derived from Enlightenment’s specific conceptualization of reason as critique per se is misleading for there are non-Enlightenment modes of critique such as the Islamic one this article proposes for further discussion. I also discuss the objectification of culture, social distance and a new sense of temporality as significant factors facilitating the condition for critique to become particularly salient under modernity. Based largely on ethnographic-historical materials from South Asia, I argue why immanent critique is a useful analytical tool to understand the dynamics of Muslim cultures and societies in their diverse milieus.