Papers by Dorothea Schulz
transcript Verlag eBooks, May 2, 2012
This volume envisions social practices surrounding mosques, shrines and public spaces in urban co... more This volume envisions social practices surrounding mosques, shrines and public spaces in urban contexts as a window on the diverse ways in which Muslims in different regional and historical settings imagine, experience, and inhabit places and spaces as »sacred«. Unlike most studies on Muslim communities, this volume focuses on cultural, material and sensuous practices and urban everyday experience. Drawing on a range of analytical perspectives, the contributions examine spatial practices in Muslim societies from an interdisciplinary perspective, an approach which has been widely neglected both in Islamic studies and social sciences.
Journal of Religion in Africa, Feb 27, 2016
At a time when born-again Christianity and reformist Islam are among the fastest-growing religiou... more At a time when born-again Christianity and reformist Islam are among the fastest-growing religious traditions in present-day Africa, more attention needs to be paid to religion as a crucial factor in the dynamic process of constructing, challenging, and transforming gendered identities. So far few studies have addressed issues of gender beyond the all-too-popular focus on Christian and Muslim women who "resist" the dominant patriarchal order, or, for that matter who "liberate" themselves from the yoke of "conservative" gender ideologies articulated by Christian and Muslim communities in sub-Saharan Africa. This special issue seeks to make up for the biased representations of the interplay between constructions of gender identities and religious practices and understandings that have been generated by conventional research preoccupations, agendas, and concepts. Specifically, the contributions bring together three lines of exploration that Africanist research has tended to treat separately. These are firstly, the study of gender; secondly, masculinity studies; and thirdly, the study of religious reformist trends that over the last decades have shaped discourses within Christian and Muslim communities, and also at the interface between Christianity and Islam. i As Miescher, Manuh and Cole argue in their pioneering volume Africa after Gender?, gender has become one of the most dynamic areas of Africanist research today (2007: 2). Replacing women"s studies and feminist approaches, the study of gender and gender relations gained popularity in the 1980s, emphasizing the difference between biological sex and culturally constructed notions of masculinity and femininity (see Cornwall 2005; Ouzgane and Morrell 2005). Nevertheless, within African Studies gender has for a long time been equated with women. We fell in a similar pitfall during our workshop Reconfiguring Gender Relations in Muslim Africa, which we organized at the International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World (ISIM), in Leiden, the Netherlands, in 2006. ii This collection of essays is the result of the workshop Religion and Masculinities in Africa that we organized at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, in September 2014, with the purpose of moving
Indiana University Press eBooks, 2011
Journal of Religion in Africa, Nov 9, 2016
This book connects discourses on value, gender, and textile wealth and demonstrates how they rela... more This book connects discourses on value, gender, and textile wealth and demonstrates how they relate to notions of nationhood and home. There are now at least as many Tongans in the diaspora as there are in Tonga itself, and family ties form an ethnoscape marked by "Tongan" practices of gift giving. Ping-Ann Addo's multisited research in Tonga and with Tongan families in New Zealand and the United States discusses the ways in which Tongan commoner women, especially second-generation migrants, lead Tonga's modernity as a multiterritorial nation, creating and exchanging gifts and investing in the "creative possibilities in this tension between movement and dwelling" (p. 30). This approach opens a microscopic perspective on the options and strategies of Tongan women and textile wealth, called koloa. A table (pp. 34-35) is useful for keeping track of the different types of koloa (bark cloth, plaited, old, shiny, large, sewn, embroidered, crocheted, decorated, repaired, etc). In brief, the love and care, the work and sacrifice, of a woman coalesces in the textile when it is created, infused with her thoughts and emotions, her mana (spiritual efficacy or potency) and skills, showing what it means to be a good, loving Tongan mother. By making and exchanging koloa, Addo convincingly argues that Tongan women "keep people, place, and values connected through time and over space-in a continually renewed sense of being at home" (p. 198). This is how Tongan women create a multiterritorial social universe, "simultaneously characterized by movement and dwelling-routedness and rootedness, in the words of James Clifford (1997)" (p. 18). In chapter 1, Addo discusses the textile genre of koloa, focusing on the accepted variations, innovations, stylistic continuity, and creativity of, and within, the various categories. Chapter 2 describes the creative group work involved in making bark cloth sheets (ngatu) from various materials, including synthetic fiber. While commoner women "are marginalized within the twin patriarchies of
Anthropology Southern Africa, Aug 31, 2016
American Ethnologist, Feb 1, 2012
Anthropologists and Christian missionaries have shared a long history. They travel to similar pla... more Anthropologists and Christian missionaries have shared a long history. They travel to similar places and occupy overlapping stages of the colonial enterprise. They share hardy personalities, indefatigable spirits, and, at times, even lodging. Margaret Meade, like many anthropologists before and afterward, boarded with missionaries during her research in Samoa. In my own work in Botswana, I have often found myself within hearing
The Journal of African History, Mar 1, 2009
Journal of Religion in Africa, 2011
The article takes Muslim women's biographic self-constructions as proper believers in urban Mali ... more The article takes Muslim women's biographic self-constructions as proper believers in urban Mali as a window to inquire into the kind of responsibility and moral agency that these women assume and make central to their search for 'closeness to God'. Focusing on the moral agency the women claim for themselves, it is argued, brings insights into their particular conception of collective and personal renewal and, by implication, into the particular religious subjectivity they formulate. Women's accounts of their learning activities highlight the virtues of personal enlightenment and individual self-improvement, thereby revealing how a longer-standing trend toward individuation comes to inform these believers' articulation of eschatological concerns. Moral agency, defined by its capacity to scrutinize and choose between alternative normative viewpoints, assumes a central significance. Illustrating the great variety of motivations that prompt women to join a Muslim women's group, the paper argues that these motivations need to more consistently studied with reference to Muslims' everyday struggle and negotiation than has been often done in ethnographies of Islamic revival.
Cahiers d'Études africaines, 2002
City and society, Apr 1, 2012
Cosmopolitanism has become the new buzzword of the past two decades. Some of its meanings can be ... more Cosmopolitanism has become the new buzzword of the past two decades. Some of its meanings can be traced to the Cynics or the Stoics in Greek antiquity, others to the 18 th century elaboration of the concept by Immanuel Kant. Some authors even posit a new cosmopolitanism linked to the contemporary processes of globalization, deregulation of markets, post-nationalism, migration, and feminism (e.g. Hannerz 2004). Derived from the Greek conjunction of "world" (cosmos) and "city" (polis), cosmopolitanism describes a "citizen of the world," one who is not rootless but embedded in concentric circles of identity and "puts right before country, and universal reason before the symbols of national belonging" (Nussbaum 1994). Cosmopolitanism may denote a certain outlook on the world, a social and cultural condition, a political project, a political subjectivity, an attitude, and finally, a practice or competence (Vertovec and Cohen 2003:8-14). Appiah's influential moral manifesto intertwines two strands in his interpretation of the concept: One is the idea that we have obligations to others, obligations that stretch beyond those to whom we are related by the ties of kith and kind, or even the more formal ties of a shared citizenship. The other is that we take seriously the value not just of human life but of particular human lives, which means taking an interest in the practices and beliefs that lend them significance" (2006:xv). Given the considerable conceptual indeterminacy of the term (Pollock, Bhabha, Breckenridge, and Chakrabarty, 2000:577-578), cosmopolitanism leaves ample room for scholars to attribute to it various advantages. Hannerz (2004) highlights the concept's use for anthropologists as they move back and forth between "the local" and "the global," blurring the initial, problematic contrast between the two. Ho (2002, 2006) goes beyond this binary in demonstrating how debates about cosmopolitan forms of self-understanding are neither local, national, nor global, but recognize how forms of identity arise from wider linkages. Werbner (2008) envisions a new anthropology of cosmopolitanism, grounded ethically in ideas of tolerance, inclusiveness, hospitality, personal autonomy, and emancipation. This challenges some of the articulations of the concept in other disciplines: rejecting the view that cosmopolitanism is only and singularly elitist; suggesting that cosmopolitanism's fundamental values are not necessarily "Western"; insisting that not all postcolonial cosmopolitans are travelers and do not need to reside or move permanently beyond their nations and cultures; and stressing that cosmopolitanism reflects the striving for universal ideals and local multiculturalisms within a particular field of power.
Islamic Divorce in the Twenty-First Century
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Papers by Dorothea Schulz