Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (44 page)

conventional behavior and pragmatic activity

Anthropological literature on ritual is a productive site to which one can tum to bring out the peculiarity of Mona's understanding of ritual prayer; it is a

9
This tradition differs from other traditions of moral discipline within Islam such as the Sufi and Shti traditions.

10
This economy of action and desire reverses the Enlightenment model in which desires (sometimes along with volition) were considered to be the necessary antecedents to action. Susan James has traced the complex history of the changing status of passions and volition in theories of action within Western philosophical thought (1 997). She argues that, following Descartes, the understanding of appetites and passions became more narrow, so that desire came to be regarded as the primary passion leading to action. Locke is interesting in this respect because, in contrast to Hobbes, he reintroduces the Scholastic understanding of volition as a mediating force against passions, but retains, nonetheless, the Hobbesian view that actions are explained by beliefs and desires (James 1 997, 268-94).

site, moreover, that maps some familiar ways of thinking about the relation.. ship between ritual behavior and pragmatic action,
11
and between conven.. tional behavior12 and spontaneous actions. To begin with, note that Mona's understanding of ritual prayer posits an ineluctable relationship between rule.. governed or socially prescribed action and routine conduct. In Mona's formu.. lation, ritual prayer is conjoined and interdependent with the pragmatic ac.. tions of daily life, actions that must be monitored and honed as conditions necessary for the felicitous performance of the ritual itself. This conjoining of ritual action with pragmatic activity problematizes a key distinction at the center of anthropological theories of ritual: the distinction between formal or conventional behavior, and routine, informal, or mundane activity. Even among those anthropologists who disagree about whether ritual action is a
type
of human behavior (e.g. , Bloch 1975 ; Douglas 1973 ; Turner 1969) or an
aspect
of all kinds of human action (e.g. , Leach 1964; Moore and Myerhoff 197 7), there seems to be consensus that ritual activity is conventional and so.. cially prescribed, setting it apart from mundane activities ( Bell 1992, 70-74 ). Malinowski, for example, acknowledged the instrumental aspects of certain rituals, but then made this the basis for a distinction between "magical" and "religious" rites, wherein it was the former and not the latter that had an in.. strumental and pragmatic quality (Malinowski 1922 ).
13
Later anthropologists such as Victor Turner and Stanley Tambiah, even though they propose con.. trastive theories of ritual, tend to share this conception of ritual as distinct from pragmatic activity. Thus Tun1er's statement that ritual is "prescribed for.. mal behavior for occasions not given over to technological routine" ( 1976,

504) is in keeping with Tambiah's view that "if we postulate a continuum of behavior, with intentional behavior at one pole and conventional behavior at

11
Within anthropological discussions of ritual, the terms "pragmatic" and "technical" are fre� quently used interchangeably and should not be confused with the Aristotelian distinction be� tween
praxis
(practical action) and
techne
(skill or craft). For Aristotle,
praxis
referred to a type of

action defi in terms of goods and standards intern to the action itself, and
techne
referred to

actions instrumentally applied to achieve a goal not internal to the actions themselves. Anthro� pologists of ritual, in contrast, use both terms-"pragmatic action" and "technical action"-to re� fer to routine mundane activities that one performs during the course of the day but which have no symbolic value associated with them.

12
The term "conventional" is sometimes used to refer to ordinary or standard ways of doing things, and at other times to indicate behavior that is constrained by custom or social rules. I have used "conventional" in the latter sense, sometimes alternating it with phrases like "rule�govemed and socially prescribed behavior."

1 3
Later, with the decline of structural functionalism, anthropologists increasingly interpreted ritual as an expressive and communicative act, the meaning of which was to be deciphered by the analyst (see, for example, Cliff Geertz, Edmund Leach, and Stanley Tambiah) . For a critical examination of this genealogy, see T. Asad 1993 , 55-82; and Bell 1992, 182-96.

the other, we shall have to locate formalized ritual near the latter pole" {1985 , 134).14

As is evident from Mona's discussion with the young woman, the mosque movement's understanding of ritual prayer stands in contrast to this view: ac.. cording to participants in the mosque movement, ritualized behavior is one among a continuum of practices that serve as the necessary means to the real.. ization of a pious self, and that are regarded as the critical instruments in a teleological program of self..formation. One might say that for women like Mona, ritual performances are understood to be disciplinary practices through which pious dispositions are formed, rather than symbolic acts that have no relationship to pragmatic or utilitarian activity.15 This understanding is well captured in a comment
I
often heard in the mosque circles: that an act of prayer performed for its own sake, without adequate regard for how it con.. tributes to the realization of piety, is "lost power" (
quwwa mafquda .

spontaneity and theatricality

Mona's discussion of ritual prayer also problematizes another polarity within anthropological discussions of ritual and conventional behavior: the polarity between the spontaneous expression of emotion and its theatrical perfor.. mance ( see Bloch 1975; Evans..Pritchard 1 965 ; Obeyesekere 1981; Radcliff ..

Brown 1964; Tambiah 1 985 ; Turn 1 969). Drawing on depth psychology, Victor Turn for example, has argued that ritual action is a means of, and space . for, channeling and divesting the antisocial qualities of powerful emo.. tions.16 Following this line of thought, other anthropologists have suggested that ritual is a space of "conventional" and not "genuine" ( that is, personal or individual) emotions ( Bloch 1975; Kapferer 1979; Tambiah 1 985 ) .17 Ritual, in these views, is either understood to
be
the space where individual psychic

14
Bloch expresses a similar view when he argues, "The reason why the formalized code is un.. suitable for practical day.-to.- maneuvering is because formalization creates an uncharted dis.. tance between specifi things or situations and the communication" ( 1974, 65 ).

15
See T. Asad 1993 for a discussion of this understanding of ritual action and how it came to be marginalized within anthropological theories of ritual.