Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (5 page)

Janice Boddy's work is an eloquent and intelligent example of the anthro- pological tum to an analysis of subaltern gendered agency. Boddy conducted fi ldwork in a village in an Arabic-- peaking region of northern Sudan on a women's
zar
cult-a widely practiced healing cult that uses Islamic idioms and spirit mediums and whose membership is largely female
(1989 ).
Through a rich ethnography of women's cultic practices, Boddy proposes that in a soci- ety where the "offi ial ideology" of Islam is dominated and controlled by men, the zar practice might be understood as a space of subordinate discourse-as "a medium for the cultivation of women's consciousness" ( 1989 , 345). She ar- gues that zar possession serves as "a kind of counter-- process
.
. .
: a feminine response to hegemonic praxis ,
and the privileging of men that this ideo- logically entails, which ultimately escapes neither its categories nor its con- straints"
(
1989, 7;
emphasis added). She concludes by asserting that the women she studied "use perhaps unconsciously, perhaps strategically, what we in the West might prefer to consider
instruments of their oppression
as means to assert their value both collectively, through the ceremonies they organize and stage, and individually, in the context of their marriages, so insisting on their dynamic complementarity with men.
This in itself is a means ofresisting and set.. ting limits to domination
. .
..
" (1 989 , 345 ; emphasis added).

The ethnographic richness of this study notwithstanding, what is most rel- evant for the purposes of my argument is the degree to which the female agent in Boddy's work seems to stand in for a sometimes repressed, sometimes active

11
It is not surprising, therefore, that in addition to seeking to restore agency to the peasantry, Ranajit Guha, one of the founders of the Subaltern Studies Proj ect, also called for historians to treat women as agents, rather than instruments, of various movements (Guha 1996, 12 ).

feminist consciousness, articulated against the hegemonic male cultural norms of Arab Muslim societies.
12
As Boddy's study reveals, even in instances when an explicit
feminist
agency is diffi to locate, there is a tendency among scholars to look for expressions and moments of resistance that may

suggest a challenge to male domination. When women's actions seem to rein.. scribe what appear to be "instruments of their own oppression," the social an.. alyst can point to moments of disruption of, and articulation of points of opposition to, male authority-moments that are located either in the inter.. stices of a woman's consciousness ( often read as a nascent feminist conscious.. ness), or in the objective effects of women's actions, however unintended these may be. Agency, in this form of analysis, is understood as the capacity to realize one's own interests against the weight of custom, tradition, transcen.. dental will, or other obstacles ( whether individual or collective). Thus the humanist desire for autonomy and self..expression constitutes the substrate, the slumbering ember that can- spark to flame in the form of an act of resis.. tance when conditions permit.

Lila Abu..Lughod, one of the leading fi among those scholars who helped reshape the study of gender in the Middle East, has criticized some of the assumptions informing feminist scholarship, including those found in her own previous work (Abu..Lughod 1 990b, 1 993 ). In one of her earlier works, Abu.. Lughod had analyzed women's poetry among the Bedouin tribe of Awlad eAli as a socially legitimate, semipublic practice that was an expression of women's resistance and protest against the strict norms of male domination in which Bedouin women live (Abu.. Lughod 1986 ). Later, in_ a refl ive es.. say on this work, Abu.. Lughod asks the provocative question: how might we recognize instances of women's resistance without "misattributing to them forms of consciousness or politics that are not part of their experience something like a feminist consciousness or feminist politics?" ( Abu..Lughod 1990b, 47). In exploring this question, Abu..Lughod criticizes herself and others for being too preoccupied with "explaining resistance and fi re.. sisters" at the expense of understanding the workings of power ( 1990b, 43). She argues:

In some of my earlier work,
as
in that of others, there is perhaps a tendency to
romanticize resista
to read all forms of resistance as signs ofineff veness of systems of power and of
the resilience and creativity of the human spirit in its refusal to
be
dominated.
By reading resistance in this way, we collapse distinctions between forms of resistance and foreclose certain questions about the workings of power. (1990b,
42;
emphasis added)

12
For a somewhat diff rent approach to women's zar practices in the Sudan, which, nonetheless, utilizes a similar notion of agency, see Hale
1986, 1987.

As a corrective, Abu..Lughod recommends that resistance be used as a "di.. agnostic of power" ( 1990b, 42), to locate the shifts in social relations of power that influence the resisters as well as those who dominate. To illustrate her point, Abu..Lughod gives the example of young Bedouin women who wear sexy lingerie to challenge parental authority and dominant social mores. She suggests that instead of simply reading such acts as moments of opposition to, and escape from, dominant relations of power, they should also be understood as reinscribing altern forms of power that are rooted in practices of capi.. talist consumerism and urban bourgeois values and aesthetics ( 1990b, 50).

Abu..Lughod concludes her provocative essay with the following observation:

My argument . . . has been that we should learn to read in various local and everyday resistances the existence of a range of specifi strategies and structures of power. Attention to
the forms of resistance in particular societies
can help us become critical of partial or reductionist theories of power. The problem has been that those of us who have sensed that there is something admirable about resistance have tended to look to it for hopeful confi of the failure-or partial failure-of systems of oppression. Yet it seems to me that
we respect everyday resistance
not just by arguing for the dignity or heroism of the resisters but by letting their practices teach us about complex interworkings of historically changing structures of power.
(
1990b, 53;
emphasis added)

While Abu..Lughod's attention to understanding resistance as a diagnostic of differential forms of power marks an important analytical step that allows us to move beyond the simple binary of resistance/subordination, she never.. theless implies that the task of identify an act as one of "resistance" is a fairly unproblematic enterprise. She revises her earlier analysis by suggesting that in order to describe the specifi forms that acts of resistance take, they need to be located within fi s of power rather than outside of them. Thus, even though Abu.. Lughod starts her essay by questioning the ascription of a "feminist consciousness" to those for whom this is not a meaningful category ( 1990b, 47), this does not lead her to challenge the use of the term "resis.. tance" to describe a whole range of human actions, including those which may be socially, ethically, or politically indifferent to the goal of opposing hegemonic norms. I believe it is critical that we ask whether it is even possible to identify a universal category of acts-such as those of resistance-outside of the ethical and political conditions within which such acts acquire their particular meaning. Equally important is the question that follows: does the category of resistance impose a teleology of progressive politics on the analyt.. ics of power-a teleology that makes it hard for us to see and understand forms of being and action that are not necessarily encapsulated by the narrative of subversion and reinscription of norms?