This article explores the ethics of the current "War on Terrorism, asking whether anthropology, the discipline devoted to understanding and dealing with cultural difference, can provide us with critical purchase on the justifications made for American intervention in Afghanistan in terms of liberating, or saving, Afghan women. I look first at the dangers of reifying culture, apparent in the tendencies to plaster neat cultural icons like the Muslim woman over messy historical and political dynamics. Then, calling attention to the resonances of contemporary discourses on equality, freedom, and rights with earlier colonial and missionary rhetoric on Muslim women, I argue that we need to develop, instead, a serious appreciation of differences among women in the world—as products of different histories, expressions of different circumstances, and manifestations of differently structured desires. Further, I argue that rather than seeking to "save" others (with the superiority it implies and the violences it would entail) we might better think in terms of (1) working with them in situations that we recognize as always subject to historical transformation and (2) considering our own larger responsibilities to address the forms of global injustice that are powerful shapers of the worlds in which they find themselves. I develop many of these arguments about the limits of "cultural relativism" through a consideration of the burqa and the many meanings of veiling in the Muslim world. [Keywords: cultural relativism, Muslim women, Afghanistan war, freedom, global injustice, colonialism]

/pdf/do-muslim-women-really-need-saving-anthropological-1lfjpy3mje.pdf

Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and Its Others

Resistance has become in recent years a popular focus for work in the human sciences. Despite the theoretical sophistication of many anthropological and historical studies of everyday resistance, there remains a tendency to romanticize it. I argue instead that resistance should be used as a diagnostic of power, and I show what the forms of Awlad ‘Ali Bedouin women's resistance can reveal about the historically changing relations of power in which they are enmeshed as they become increasingly incorporated into the Egyptian state and economy. [resistance, power, Bedouins, women, the state, Egypt]

the romance of resistance: tracing transformations of power through Bedouin women

In the last two decades one of the key questions that has occupied many feminist theorists is how should issues of historical and cultural specificity inform both the analytics and politics of any feminist project. Although this questioning has resulted in serious attempts at integrating issues of sexual, racial, class, and national difference within feminist theory, questions of religious difference have remained relatively unexplored in this scholarship. The vexed relationship between feminism and religious traditions is perhaps most manifest in discussions on Islam. This is due in part to the historically contentious relationship that Islamic societies have had with what has come to be called "the West," but in part to the challenges contemporary Islamic movements pose to secular-liberal politics of which feminism has been an integral (if critical) part. In particular, women's active support for a movement that seems to be inimical to their own interests and agendas, at a historical moment when more emancipatory possibilities would appear to be available to women, raises fresh dilemmas for feminists.' In this essay, I will probe some of the conceptual challenges that women's participation in the Islamic movement poses to feminist theorists and gender analysts through an ethnographic account of an urban women's mosque movement that is part of the larger Islamic revival in Cairo, Egypt. In this movement women from a variety of socioeconomic backgrounds provide lessons to each other that focus on the teaching and studying of Islamic scriptures, social practices, and forms of bodily comportment considered germane to the cultivation of the ideal virtuous self.2 Even though Egyptian Muslim women have always had some measure of informal training in piety, the mosque movement represents an unprecedented engagement with scholarly materials and theological reasoning that had to date been the purview of learned men. Movements such as this one, if they do not provoke a yawning boredom among secular intellectuals, certainly conjure up a whole host of uneasy associations such as fundamentalism, the subjugation of women, social conservatism, reactionary atavism,

https://org.uib.no/smi/seminars/newsletter/Pensum/Mahmood,%20Saba.pdf

Feminist Theory, Embodiment, and the Docile Agent: Some Reflections on the Egyptian Islamic Revival

Although stigma is prevalent in everyday life, consumer researchers’ interest on the topic remains scant and focuses mostly on stigma management. We move beyond individual coping strategies and examine the processes of stigmatization and destigmatization. Through an ethnographic study of fashion consumption practices of urban Turkish covered women, we explore how veiling, a deviant practice stigmatized in the secular and urban mind-set, first became an attractive choice for some middle-class women and then transformed into a fashionable and ordinary clothing practice for many. We map out the global multi-actored work that underlies the emergence of veiling as an attractive choice and explicate its gradual routinization and destigmatization. We discuss the findings in terms of their implications for understandings of choice and free will, the formative role of fashion in the evolution of a new habitus and social class, and the relationship between the market and religion.

/pdf/veiling-in-style-how-does-a-stigmatized-practice-become-2p2e2pdk9j.pdf

Veiling in Style: How Does a Stigmatized Practice Become Fashionable?

Payments between families at the time of marriage existed during the history of most developed countries and are currently pervasive in many areas of the developing world. These payments can be substantial enough to affect the welfare of women and a society's distribution of wealth. Recent estimates document transfers per marriage amounting to six times the annual household income in South Asia (Rao, 1993), and four times in sub-Saharan Africa (Dekker and Hoogeveen, 2002). This paper first establishes some basic facts about the prevalence and magnitude of marriage payments. It then discusses how such patterns vary across countries depending upon economic conditions, societal structures, institutions, and family characteristics. Such payments have also evolved within societies over time. For example, in some periods such payments have risen sharply. In some cases, payments have shifted from the grooms' sides to the brides', and vice versa. Also, property rights over such payments have sometimes shifted between marrying partners and parental generations. Economists, who have only recently begun to work on the topic, have focused on explaining these facts. The second part of the paper addresses this economic literature. Though considerable insight into many of the facts has been gained, many of the existing economic explanations are weakly convincing, and many puzzles remain. One crucial difficulty is that solid data in this field have been extremely rare. The descriptions of marriage payments in this paper are synthesized from a patchwork of studies across periods, places, and even epochs, and there are doubtless numerous cases which remain undocumented. Thus, the paper

/pdf/the-economics-of-dowry-and-brideprice-45qmm2n0te.pdf

The Economics of Dowry and Brideprice

Part 1 Veiling in perspective: veiling in perspective veil in comparative tradition harem - fact and fantasy ideological roots and ethnocentrism - orientalism and Christianism. Part 2 The anthropology of dress: dress in theory and ethnography dress as framework LIBAS - Arab dress sacred privacy veil in social space veil of masculinity the veil becomes a movement Al-Ziyy Al Islami- (the Islamic dress) the sacred in the veil - Hijab. Part 3 The resistance of the veil: the resistance of the veil contexts of resistance veiling and feminism.

Veil: Modesty, Privacy and Resistance

Prelude Introduction Part One: Issues, Ancestry, and Genealogy Chapter 1: History, Euro-Americanization, & New Directions Chapter 2: For God's Sake, Margaret Part Two: Ethnographic Film Chapter 3: Filming Others Chapter 4: Filming Selves Part Three: Research Film Chapter 5: Discovery Part Four: Visual Ethnography Chapter 6: From Doing Cinema to Doing Anthropology Chapter 7: Parameters for Visual Ethnography Conclusion References Visuals Cited

Visual Anthropology: Essential Method and Theory

An examination of the contemporary Islamic Movement in Egypt shows it to represent a creative alternative to institutional Islam. Alternative Islam serves to bind Egyptian youth on university campuses as Muslim brothers and sisters in one community. Its two fundamental features-egalitarianism and sexual segregation-are analyzed in the context of the cultural correlates of Infitah and the social correlates of development. Within this community a new Egyptian woman is emerging-educated, professional, nonelitist, and veiled. The veil is part of an assertive movement with a powerful message symbolizing the beginning of a synthesis between modernity and authenticity. One recent phenomenon incomprehensible to many observers of the Egyptian scene today is the visible presence of a new Egyptian woman: the young urban college student on her way to or from the university campus-carrying her books, wearing eye glasses, alone or in the chatting company of other college women, and completely "veiled"-face and body. Confused at the thought of a future "veiled" doctor, engineer or pharmacist, such observers, in particular those of the modernist tradition, do not tire of speculation. Is it identity crisis, misguided leisure, a fad, youth protest, ideological vacuum, individual psychic disturbance, life-crisis, social dislocation, or something else? They often resort to some oversimplified theory of causation and try to explain the phenomenon away. Also bewildering to many is the apparent contradiction of being modern, college-educated and career-oriented yet also being "veiled" and apparently fundamentalist and backward. There is irony here, also, if one recalls the many social and cultural obstacles confronting Egyptian feminists until Huda Sha'rawi's dramatic act of public deveiling in 1923. Many saw this as a major Egyptian feminist achievement, marking the end of veiling-until women resumed veiling after the 1973 Ramadan War (known locally as al-'Ubur, the crossing). The new Egyptian woman as yet represents a relatively small although rapidly increasing segment of women college students, and among Egyptian women; however, as a collectivity, she has a qualitatively strong, dominant presence and represents a social entity with a definite cultural message.

Veiling infitah with muslim ethic: egypt's contemporary islamic movement*

A revised consideration of bride-price and dowry is presented. Marriage payments are viewed as status symbols and mechanisms of fluidity relating to stratification systems. An inability to carry out exchange "in kind" (i.e., bride for bride) appears in cases of marriage between groups of different status and is shaped by cultural principles of stratification. The phenomena of hypergamy, hypogamy, and isogamy, along with different exchange currencies such as money, prestige, services, and patronage, stress the importance of the cultural component. All are solutions to the same structural problem. The solution characteristic of Arab Muslim society stems from the symbolic linking of the ruling hierarchy with the roles of the sexes; the male roles are the preserve of the elite, while the symbol of subjection to authority means effemination. Hypergamy implies that daughters, as representatives of lower strata, move upward. Elite groups are distinguished by the ability to do away with any payments, viz., to pro...

Bride-Price Reconsidered [and Comments]

Part One: SPATIALITY AND TEMPORALITY 1. Conceptual Overview 2. The Anthropology Of Time And Space Part Two: COSMOS AND CALENDAR 3. Order and Creative Beginning 4. Science, Religion and Business of Temporality Part Three: ARABO-ISLAMIC ECOLOGY OF RHYTHM 5. Marking Time, Carving Space 6. Khususiyya, Qudsiyya, Jama'iyya: A Theory of Arabo-Islamic Rhythm Conclusion

By Noon Prayer: The Rhythm of Islam

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