Mayanthi L. Fernando

Rediscovering the “everyday” Muslim: Notes on an anthropological divide

This article critically examines recent calls by anthropologists to focus on what they call “everyday Islam.” We locate this new literature within two tensions central to anthropology: first, its dual commitment to humanity’s heterogeneity and commonality, and second, its dual imperative to account for dominant social structures and individual resistance. We argue that the concept of everyday Islam emphasizes one side of these paradigmatic debates, highlighting the universality of humans and emphasizing opposition to norms. We then take up the distinction this literature makes between everyday Muslims and Salafi Muslims. We suggest that a reinvestment in everyday Islam ends up discounting the validity, reality, and ontology of those framed as Salafi Muslims and invalidates ethnographic inquiry into ultra-orthodox Muslim life. Even as scholarship on everyday Islam attempts to expand the anthropology of Islam, then, it restricts the field instead by demarcating anthropology’s proper object of study in a very narrow way.

Belief and/in the Law

Abstract This article examines how ‘belief’ has emerged as the privileged site of religion in human rights law, rendering some forms of ethical life unintelligible to secular-modern law and politics. I first analyze models of ethical personhood in which actions like veiling or praying do not only signify piety but are also integral to achieving it. I next turn to tracing how the 2004 French ban on headscarves in public schools was seen as a non-violation of religious liberty, examining the particular relationship between interiority and exteriority, mind and body, and belief and practice that underlay arguments for the ban. I then show how these distinctions produce another distinction between conscience and its manifestation, one that is institutionalized in secular legal conventions that make the freedom to believe unalienable but the freedom to manifest that belief alienable. Finally, I examine the paradox of legislating the inviolability of the freedom to believe.

Ethnography and the politics of silence

This article traces a few elements of Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s critique of anthropology, which was, I argue, part of his broader anthropology of the West. The article first considers Trouillot’s analysis of the conditions of possibility for anthropology’s emergence as a field formation, including the asymmetries and silences produced by academic disciplines like anthropology and history. It then attends to Trouillot’s attempts to remake and redeem anthropology from within, focusing in particular on two approaches: distinguishing between one’s object of study and one’s object of observation, and taking seriously the epistemological status of what he called the native voice. Finally, the article fleshes out these two approaches through a consideration of my own work on Islam and secularism in France, discussing persisting ethical, political, and epistemological quandaries that may—despite ethnographers’ best intentions—be constitutive to anthropology’s status as what Trouillot termed the Savage slot.

What is anthropology’s object of study?: A counterresponse to Schielke and Deeb

Counterresponse to Meditations by Samuli Schielke and Lara Deeb on Fadil, Nadia and Mayanthi Fernando 2015. “Rediscovering the ‘everyday’ Muslim: Notes on an anthropological divide.” Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 5(2): 59–88

La question musulmane en France

importantly, this position, according to the author, will certainly minimise the dangers of multiple national discourses and the risks of territorial fragmentation. Based on the biographies of actors and historical research, Temlali’s book not only questions certain myths and facts, but also offers new perspectives on identity politics in Algeria. With this updated context, a new debate about identity and politics can now take place among academics and all those interested in this topic. If the author writes of his own parcours, it is not to showcase his personal experience but rather to illustrate his arguments and, most importantly, to shed more light on the subject. Malika Rahal, who wrote the afterword, explains how the use of biographies in writing about history can deepen one’s understanding of the period in question. This is, in fact, close to the genre of ‘ego-history’ that historian Pierre Nora developed in his edited volume, Essais d’ego-histoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1987). If the main focus of the book remains the analysis of the Berber claim in Algeria during the French colonial period, Temlali also examines other important related issues in Algerian colonial and postcolonial history, most of which have relevance today. Among these pertinent questions: What is the relationship between Kabyle identity, Berber revival and Algerian nationalism? Was there a French colonial policy designed specifically for Kabylia? Is Kabylia homogenous? What was the situation of the Kabyles before French colonisation? Was there a real conflict between Kabyles and Arabs before, during and after the Algerian War of Independence? What was the FLN’s role in the political situation of Kabylia after independence? What was the relationship between the two main Berber-speaking regions of Algeria, namely Kabylia and the Aures? In addition to tackling these questions, Temlali succeeds in refuting several stereotypes and clarifying a multitude of misunderstandings that have ensued from key facts and events in Algerian history, such as the ‘Kabyle myth,’ the Kabyle insurrection of 1871, the Berber crisis of 1949, and the Berber Spring of 1980. All in all, this book contributes to our understanding of its subject and with new findings and clarifications. It is a must-read for students and specialists of North African studies, as well as for those interested in deepening their knowledge of identity and society in Algeria.

What is anthropology’s object of study?

Counterresponse to Meditations by Samuli Schielke and Lara Deeb on Fadil, Nadia and Mayanthi Fernando 2015. “Rediscovering the ‘everyday’ Muslim: Notes on an anthropological divide.” Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 5(2): 59–88

What is anthropology's object of study? A counterresponse to Deeb and Schielke

Counterresponse to Meditations by Samuli Schielke and Lara Deeb on Fadil, Nadia and Mayanthi Fernando 2015. “Rediscovering the ‘everyday’ Muslim: Notes on an anthropological divide.” Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 5(2): 59–88

That Muslim Question: Islam and Secularism in Europe

Davidson, Naomi. 2012. Only Muslim: Embodying Islam in Twentieth-Century France. Ithaca: Cornell Univeristy Press. 320 pages.Laurence, Jonathan. 2012. The Emancipation of Europes Muslims: The Stat...