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.
[click] The theoretical perspective for my thesis is a practice approach to identity. I combined the practice theories of Sherry Ortner and William Sewell with a bricolage of established identity theories, including symbolic interactionism, constructionism and discursive theories, and more contemporary works such as Holland’s Agency and Identity and Ewing’s Fractured Self.
[click] Classic understandings of identity in Anthropology focused on identity as an essential meaning of a person or group. However, as anthropology has grown though feminist, post-colonialist and postmodern critiques, this static and essentialist concept no longer fits the current direction of Anthropological research or reflects contemporary ethnographic observations.
[click] Practice theory provides a framework for examining identity as a combination of knowledge and action mediated by power, culture and personal and local — projects and desires. The following is a portion of the interaction that I used in my thesis to explain my perspective.
[click] Adiba and I had just met and she asked me, “Why do you want to study Muslims?” [click] My project or goal was to gain a rapport with Adiba so that she would agree to work with me. So, I gathered resources from our context to create a representation that I thought would help me achieve that goal. [click] From the local context, I used the knowledge that most people in the community saw Michigan and its inhabitants as particularly sympathetic and knowledgeable about Islam. [click] From my self knowledge, I used the knowledge that I was from Michigan. [click] From my knowledge of Adiba, I used our similarities to find ways that we could easily relate, such as humor. [click] There were also resources available to me that I did not use as I didn’t believe that they would help me accomplish my goal, such as my childhood interest in alien involvement in the ancient Middle East as the beginning of my interest in the Middle Eastern religion. [click] From the national discourses, I used the tragedy of 9/11… [click] …in conjunction with my knowledge of Adiba being part of a community that had suffered from the backlash after 9/11 to cement my sympathetic relationship to her. [click] I said, “Well, I grew up in Michigan and I don’t know if you know but there is a rather large population of Muslims there. (LAUGH.) After 9/11 I was heartbroken to see the culture I had grown up admiring being publically denounced by such a large part of the country.” [click] I had created a representation of myself as a sympathetic insider to Adiba’s culture.
[click] However, Adiba also had a project of her own. She wanted to understand my agenda so that she could decide on how to deal with me. [click] She had knowledge of herself as one who is exceptionally familiar with the conversion process. [click] From the local discourses, she used the popular idea that anyone who was sufficiently informed about Islam would be powerless to resist conversion. [click] From her knowledge of me, she knew that I claimed to be well informed and… [click] …I did not appear to be a Muslim. [click] So she said, “But you have never converted?” [click] Her feedback on my representation was that it was dubious as it seemed to contradict her knowledge of me and the categories I was claiming. [click] During the rest of our interaction, I addressed her concerns and we both settled on representations of each other that would define most of our relationship.
[click] One problem with early identity theory is in dealing with change and multiplicity. Through practice, change is held in the creativity and ingenuity of actors and is made possible through the multiplicity of resources for creating meanings and power. The possibility of multiplicity within individuals also creates the flexibility for individuals and groups to navigate difficult and often rigid landscapes without losing one’s self.
[click] Yusraa’s narrative represented a strategy for coping with the changes in one’s environment. Yusraa created internal representations to change her self knowledge and the knowledge she held about the identities of those around her. [click] Yusraa immigrated to the United States in the 1970s after she got married. Yusraa thought of herself as a very social person. Her new life in the United States however, found her living in a one bedroom apartment with reclusive neighbors and no friends or family living in the states. Her husband, a doctor, worked long hours and spent much of his time socializing with his male colleagues. [click] Like many of the immigrants I worked with, Yusraa believed that Americans were isolationists and unsocial, while she viewed people from her home country as social and family oriented. For this reason, she initially resisted changing her knowledge of herself to incorporate an “American” identity.
[click] However, over time she became desperate for interaction and began calling numbers from the phonebook where the names sounded Arabic. She eventually reached a woman who would speak with her. The friendship that blossomed from this phone call helped her accept that the social part of her life could take place in contexts outside of her home, rather than the in home social context she was used to in the Middle East. [click] This small change inspired her to leave her home to seek out social engagements through hobby groups. With the success of these outings, she began to accept that being American did not mean being anti-social, allowing her to begin to accept the representation of herself as American. [click] However, her limited resources for transportation still isolated her from much of the interaction she desired. To cement her acceptance of this new type of social identity, she procured a bike as a means to freely interact with her community. She had never owned a bike prior to this and being a bicyclist held meaning for her beyond just a woman who rides a bike. It was a crucial part of her understanding of herself as an American. Without it, she was still an immigrant who lacked the resources to meet her desire to be herself. [click] Thus, when her husband represented her bicycling identity as anti-Muslim and poor womanly behavior, she fought valiantly to protect this portion of her identity and rejected his representation of her. Their inability to agree upon a representation of Yusraa in facted ended their marriage. Today, nearly thirty years later, Yusraa still rides her bike as her primary form of transportation. Her identity as a bicyclist has grown to incorporate more meanings including health and wellbeing. She has also refused to purchase a car as she feels that the isolation of the vehicle constrains her social sensibility.
[click] Power in the practice of identity is the ability to create salience for a representation or an identity meaning beyond the interaction it was created for or enough salience to overcome competing representations. Hegemony in the practice of identity is then the total salience of a representation where the representation masquerades as natural.
[click] Jamilah was one of the only black women who attended the masjid. She was the only black non-convert. In my thesis, I used a narrative from my first interview with Jamilah where she described her struggle with her racial identity in the United States. To further illustrate the hegemony of the “black” identity, I want to share a couple other examples of identity interactions that I was present for with Jamilah.
[click] During a Ramadan outreach event that was advertised in the local paper and on the internet (meaning that the event’s attendants generally did not know each other, unlike the sponsored group events), Jamilah was approached by an African American guest. The woman was wearing a large blue hat and a long dress with three-quarter sleeves, typical Sunday dress for many of the African American churches in town. Her hair was tightly pinned under her hat. Jamilah was dressed as she usually was in a simple long sleeved dress, slightly more fitted than an abaya, with a loosely pinned hijab covering most of her hair. [click] The Christian woman told Jamilah that she had been worried about dressing appropriately for the event. She then told Jamilah that Jamilah’s dress and head covering was quite respectful of the Muslim community and that had she had a scarf she would have covered her hair too. [click] Jamilah, kindly corrected her and told her that she was a Muslim and not a guest, which was why she had her hair covered. [click] The Christian woman looked scandalized and gasped and then exclaimed, “But honey you’re black!” [click] Jamilah who is often confronted with confusion about her Muslim and Black identities simply chuckled. [click] The Christian woman then asked if Jamilah practiced “Black Islam”, implying that Jamilah’s blackness should cause her to be a “special” kind of Muslim. [click] Jamilah explained that she was born in a Muslim majority country in Africa and that she did follow the Nation of Islam. Despite Jamilah’s presence in the masjid and her traditional Muslim attire and her physical position among the other Muslim women in the room, the representation of her as Black was more salient than her Muslim representation. Throughout my fieldwork, Jamilah was frequently mistaken for non-Muslim or as a member of the Nation of Islam because of the amount of melanin in her skin. She used her wardrobe and her speech to represent herself as Muslim and frequently and explicitly described herself as African and not Black. However, the hegemonic power behind racial representations negated her representations even among her friends and fellow Muslims.
[click] I came to realize over the course of my relationship with Jamilah that while she fiercely resisted representing herself as a black African American, the power of the black representation forced her to incorporate blackness into herself knowledge.
[click] While vast power and hegemony played a large role in the lives of my informants, their everyday lives were imbued more with their agency as they attempted to meet goals, complete projects and meet their desires with intentional action. [click] Akilah is a passionate convert, who faced a great deal of adversity when she chose Islam over her Southern Baptist upbringing. Like most of the convert women, Akilah felt that she was fighting two battles in managing her identity as a Muslim woman. On one front were the popular post-9/11 discourses that deemed her an ignorant and oppressed woman. On another front she faced a barrage of “cultural” practices masquerading as “true” Islam.
[click] Akilah is an exceptionally meticulous woman. When she began to consider conversion she spent months pouring over her Bible and a copy of the Quran. On my first visit to her home she showed me the forty-odd notebooks that she had filled with comparative notes. She converted because as she said, “She compared every piece of the Bible to the Quran, most of the time things were the same and when they weren’t she agreed more with the Quran.” [click] With her meticulous nature and the competing representations of Muslim women, Akilah liked to clearly outline what Islam was and what it meant to be a Muslim. She was very decisive in her representations. In the example I used in my thesis, Akilah used this decisiveness to create a solid representation of her friend as a bride, wife and Muslim that suited her project of clarifying feminine Muslim Identity. Akilah approached much of the interactions in her life this way.
[click] In 2003, a close Muslim friend of Akilah’s had gotten cancer. When her friend began staying in the hospital she faced trouble with the general ignorance of the hospital staff. Akilah met with the director of the hospital and organized a group of women from the masjid to hold yearly seminars with the hospital staff on how to work with female Muslim patients. In 2008, I was able to accompany her to that year’s seminar.
[click] Akilah began by explaining “Who is this Muslim Woman?” with a list of three things that Muslim women are and are not. She first created a representation of what Akilah thought were the most common assumptions that the doctors, nurses and hospital staff had about Muslim women. She used her experiences (and the experiences of her peers) of being represented by this group as resources for this representation.
[click] Then she created a complimentary representation that she called the “truth”. This representation of Muslim women as conscious of their modesty, being family oriented and educated English speakers is not the entirety of what Akilah thought it meant to be a Muslim woman. The representation was being used as a tool to accomplish her goal of changing the treatment of Muslim women in the hospital. The representation of a woman fearful of her modesty wishes not being respected in the context of an American hospital with non-Muslim explained the employee’s observations of apprehension with something that would seem more rational to them than the popular notion that Muslim women fear medicine and doctors.
[click] Akilah had seven slides with these side by side representations. Her presentation was well received by the hospital employees present and the women I spoke to who had been to the hospital unanimously agreed that they were treated better and their identities were less contested by hospital staff since Akilah had begun these training sessions.
[click] By creating two sets of representations one that fit the misconceptions of her audience and one that used the structure of the first but with “true” meanings associated with each category she made her representations easier to understand and accept as she did not completely dismiss the thoughts and observations of the staff. She merely adjusted their representation. This could be heard in the murmurings and discussion of the staff during and after the presentation, such as “Oh that explains (X behavior).” and “I never thought about that that way.”
[click] Through my thesis, I have attempted to demonstrate that identity when viewed as a practice involving power and knowledge is a useful and insightful analytical tool. This perspective has allowed me to draw out the complexities of the lived experiences of my informants. I began the project believing that I would find heroic women to whom I could offer a media for their voices. However, through my fieldwork and analysis I found that the philosophy of being an American Muslim woman is not about saying that Islam is good or bad. It is about how collectively American Muslim women represent Islam in their communities, locally, nationally and globally as well as to their selves. My informants were aware that they could not combat the representations of Muslims as others and terrorists and Muslim women as oppressed and ignorant with speech alone. They knew that they needed to gather resources to help them engage the American public with the meanings of Islam that they held in their self knowledge, in order to give power to representations of themselves as Muslim, American and good. The difficulty comes in the struggle to metaphorically speak louder than those with established narratives in public discourse. The representations of Muslims as others is supported by abundant resources both in the access to mass media and connections to popular core religious beliefs. Further, terrorists, who with bombs and guns are able to commandeer the public’s attention, give fuel to those who distort representations of Islam to help them accomplish political goals.
[click] Throughout my fieldwork, I observed women who led complex lives of thickly woven representations of themselves amid strong negative representations from national and local discourses. While I often felt overwhelmed by the stares and the questions from strangers, which were not always friendly, my informants gracefully handled each situation and in the few instances where they became angry or frustrated, they remained strong in their self knowledge. They did not waver or cower before powerful representations of themselves as oppressed, backward, ignorant or un-American. In this observation, I see hope for a future where these women and their sisters in faith are able to amass enough power to create a globally salient representation of themselves as they are.
