DGV-Tagung 2007 - Deutsche Gesellschaft für Völkerkunde

Workshops: Ankündigungen und calls for papers01 call for papersPiety, Responsibility, Subjectivity: Rethinking/ Reconfiguring the Moral Economyof Gender Relations in Muslim SocietiesDorothea Schulz; Indiana UniversityMarloes Janson; Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlindeschulz@indiana.eduThe workshop seeks to render problematiccertain analytical categories and conceptsthat have dominated anthropological investigationsof the nexus of Islam, gender andthe state, and that continue to be prominentin studies of the new public presenceof Islam in numerous postcolonial settings.To that effect, the workshop addresses froma comparative angle the interrelation betweencurrent trends towards moral renewalin Muslim societies of sub-Saharan Africa,the Middle East and South Asia on the oneside, and transformations of gender relationson the other. It situates these changes in thecontext of contemporary postcolonial nation-statepolitics. Recent reconfigurations inthe relationship between the state and societyin these regions of the Muslim world,along with processes such as the wideningof access to religious education, the introductionof new media and the new currencyof a global legalistic discourse, have fundamentallyaltered the basis of conventionalunderstandings of gender-specific spheresof action. The claims and concerns formulatedby supporters of „revivalist“ or „reformist“movements can be seen as engagementswith these developments, in forms that areinspired by regionally specific traditions,practices, and understandings of religiosity.Many of these Islamic movements place aspecial emphasis on personal piety and individualresponsibility in moral reform, ratherthan centring their efforts on challengingstate institutions and political elites. Protagonistsof these movements, women andmen, often understand their endeavour as areturn to the original teachings of Islam andto traditional gender roles. Yet, perhaps themost far-reaching effect of their interventionsis that they redefine, or temporarily invert,prevailing divisions between male andfemale spheres of moral practice and publicaction.The workshop seeks to address these reconfigurationsby bringing together scholarsworking on Islamic reform and genderin Africa, the Middle East and South Asia.Rather than reasserting the common dividebetween the three regions, it will emphasizecommon themes as well as long-standingtranslocal ties and influences that connectthese areas. Contributions to the workshopshould explore various dimensions of thechanges in gender-specific domains of religiouspractice and subjectivity, such as theredrawing of conventional lines betweenpublic and personal matters and realms ofaction, changing understandings of femaleand male responsibility and of proper ritualobservance, and a move towards the publicenactment of a particular bodily aestheticand an Islamic ethical disposition.Invited speaker: Saba Mahmood; University of California, Berkeley12 DGV-Tagung 2007