WHO I AM/AM NOT: IDENTITY AND PRACTICE AMONG MUSLIM WOMEN IN LOUISIANA
Here it is, the final draft of my thesis. Enjoy!
Thesis Defense = Done
I defended my thesis yesterday and I passed! Hurray! Now I just need to go through one last time to check for grammar and style errors and I am done.
Below is my defense presentation. Enjoy!
Transcript
[click] In 2008, I worked with an Islamic center in Louisiana to investigate the ways that Muslim women were navigating the complex social landscapes of post-9/11 life. While I worked in the field and wrote my thesis, there were sixty-five million statements made about Muslim women on the internet and nearly twenty thousand scholarly statements in books and peer-reviewed journals. My small niche in this discourse is to demonstrate how a small group of Muslim women live each day without being overcome by the robust discourses defining who they are and who they are not. I have attempted to show through anthropological literature and a series of narratives and analyses, how these women interact with a social world where their identities are constantly debated and what this means for the anthropology of identity and practice. Read more…
OK, A Complete Thesis Draft
Access a complete draft of my thesis
WHO I AM / AM NOT:
IDENTITY AND PRACTICE AMONG
MUSLIM AMERICAN WOMEN IN LOUISIANA
by Angela Kristin VandenBroek
Coming to the End
** UPDATE: Newer version available. ***
As I am winding down and coming to an end of my thesis, there will be some temporary reconstruction of this site. The most recent posts are now the chapters of my thesis. Some of these chapters are password protected. For those of you that should have access, you know who you are, email me if you don’t remember the password.
I hope you enjoy!
WHO I AM / AM NOT: IDENTITY AS PRACTICE
AMONG A GROUP OF MUSLIM AMERICAN
WOMEN IN LOUISIANA
by
Angela Kristin VandenBroek
Chapter II / Methodology
Scope and Methods of Collection
With this thesis, I do not claim to make generalized conclusions about Muslim American women, or even the more focused category of the Muslim American Women of Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Instead, this project is aimed to provide a thick description of a particular practice, the practice of living the feminine American Muslim identity. I choose this method over others, such as a large-sample survey asking for identity terms, for its ability to provide richer information on the motives and the history of the women, which I believe has led to a more thorough understanding of the behaviors I observed. Schiff (2003:285) explained in a similar study in methodology with Israeli-Arabs, “In considering whole lives, we retain a concept of the person as the subject matter throughout our analysis in order to interpret how persons manage collective identity… The result is a complex interpretation of lives rather than the percentage of people who give themselves one-, two-, or three-word labels.” Rather than addressing questions of how all Muslim American women behave, I instead am able to analyze themes in the women’s responses and behaviors as well as the differences caused by varying life histories and other identity categories they define themselves with. Allaine Cerwonka (Cerwonka and Malkki 2007:74), while describing her experiences doing field work in Australia commented that, “With time, I came to see that instead of being able to make such broad claims, ethnographic research done in very particular and deliberately choosen field sites does enable one to take a concept or phenomenon and understand it in deep, rich ways.” Read more…
Chapter III / Identity Theory
The Trouble with Identity Theory
“The concept of identity has become ubiquitous within the social and behavioral sciences in recent years, cutting across disciplines from psychoanalysis and psychology to political science and sociology. Each of these disciplines, however, has one or more conceptualizations of ‘identity’ that make a common discourse difficult.” (Burke 2003:1)
“There has been a veritable discursive explosion in recent years around the concept of ‘identity’, at the same moment as it has been subjected to a searching critique. How is this paradoxical development to be explained? And where does it leave us with respect to the concept? The deconstruction has been conducted within a variety of disciplinary areas, all of them, in one way or another critical of the notion of an integral, originary and unified identity. … What, then is the need for a further debate about ‘identity’? Who needs it? (Hall and Du Gay 1996:1)
As a first year masters student, I naïvely choose identity as the theoretical subject of my thesis research. I had a simplistic understanding of identity, which was more aligned with a Merriam-Webster dictionary than with any theory in anthropology. That understanding was shattered by the bulk of anthropological debate and critique on the subject. The more I read about identity the less I felt I knew about the concept. I abandoned the effort concept and settled on agency theory instead and was content with my choice until I began my field work. I was looking for women asserting their wills to accomplish goals of resistance against the power of American media and racism. This was what I found; however, it was far more complex and nuanced then I had expected, yet it was indeed present in their actions and lives. That agency, however, was inseparable from identity. Each agentive action was involved in the creation, maintenance, or destruction of an identity meaning or category. Who am I? Who are you? What does it mean to be who I am? How do our identities relate? While at first terrified of the idea, I became immensely interested in the process of identity. The context of the field gave context to the theories and critiques I had previously read and understanding quickly followed. However, this did not solve the problem of processing the “discursive explosion” or the impossibility of finding a “common discourse”. Read more…
Protected: Chapter IV / Agency and Practice Theory
Chapter V / A Practice Theory of Identity
An Explanation and Argument
For the analysis of my fieldwork, I have explored and examined identity through the lens of practice theory. To do this, I have transformed my view of identity from the classic sense of essential meaning to a complex social practice. This argument is a different from the arguments presented in chapter four in that I have placed a particular emphasis on the analysis of the process of identity rather than on the meanings that are created through it. I have taken this perspective for this project for two general reasons. First, meaning is fleeting and is highly dependent on context which in many instances can change drastically from moment to moment. What, then, is to be learned from documenting and preserving these capricious meanings? Read more…
