The late Saba Mahmood’s 2004 The Politics of Piety is a brilliant example of how to do philosophical ethnography. The book’s one flaw is its dense prose style, but even that may have been necessary in order to persuade its target audience: 2000s-era postmodern feminists, who tended to take six-syllable words as a sign of profundity. And while the typical vocabulary has changed significantly in the decades since she wrote it – from “resistance” and “agency” to “privilege” and “marginalization” – the kinds of views she is critiquing remain very widespread, and her critique has lost none of its power.
Mahmood is studying the da’wah piety movement among Egyptian Muslim women, including practices like wearing the veil. Other feminist scholars had studied such women before. But those scholars had insisted in defining their informants’ actions in the scholars’ terms rather than the informants’:
Some of these studies offer functionalist explanations, citing a variety of reasons why women take on the veil voluntarily (for example, the veil makes it easy for women to avoid sexual harassment on public transportation, lowers the cost of attire for working women, and so on). Other studies identify the veil as a symbol of resistance to the commodification of women’s bodies in the media, and more generally to the hegemony of Western values. While these studies have made important contributions, it is surprising that their authors have paid so little attention to Islamic virtues of female modesty or piety, especially given that many of the women who have taken up the veil frame their decision precisely in these terms. Instead, analysts often explain the motivations of veiled women in terms of standard models of sociological causality (such as social protest, economic necessity, anomie, or utilitarian strategy), while terms like morality, divinity, and virtue are accorded the status of the phantom imaginings of the hegemonized. (16)
A young Muslim woman praying in mosque with Qur’an (Adobe stock image).
As philosophers, at least, we could reasonably argue that women are wrong to wear the veil in the name of morality and divinity. But I agree with Mahmood that we do a disservice as anthropologists when we avoid portraying them as interested in morality and divinity, and instead portray them as engaged in acts of resistance – because resistance is something we’re more interested in.
We WEIRD peoplelove to define everyone’s lives in terms of political power relationships – oppression, resistance, privilege. Postcolonialist scholars loved doing that in Mahmood’s day, and two decades later that paradigm has become accepted in the popular culture and throughout our institutions (as when the US National Public Radio describes diversity and racial equity as its internal “North Star”). What we rarely seem to do is consider whether this paradigm is shared by the people it’s supposed to help. It usually turns out that it isn’t – even in our own countries. (Most US Latinos think that illegal migration from Mexico is a major problem or even a crisis; unlike the white liberal Americans who support cutting police funding, black Americans want more police in their neighbourhoods.) They have other things to worry about, as Mahmood recognizes of her own informants:
it is important to point out that to analyze people’s actions in terms of realized or frustrated attempts at social transformation is necessarily to reduce the heterogeneity of life to the rather flat narrative of succumbing to or resisting relations of domination. Just as our own lives don’t fit neatly into such a paradigm, neither should we apply such a reduction to the lives of women like Nadia and Sana, or to movements of moral reform such as the one discussed here. (174)
In this light, compare Mahmood’s work to the far inferior work of Joseph Cheah. Like Mahmood, Cheah was interviewing a group typically considered marginalized: poor Burmese immigrants to California. Also like her, he finds that they do not think of their lives in terms of marginalization and resistance. But where Mahmood takes this as a reason to probe deeper and explore the ways in which they do understand their lives, Cheah takes it as an occasion to tell them they’re wrong! He confidently proclaims that his informants’ view is “the neoconservative stereotype of Asian Americans as the model minority”, “none other than internalization of the prevailing ideology of white supremacy”. We hear more about Cheah’s own self-righteous judgements of the immigrants than we hear of the immigrants’ own voices themselves. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a better example of how not to do anthropology.
Mahmood, by contrast, shows a genuine curiosity toward her informants, letting them speak with an independent voice. She admits there was a “repugnance that often swelled up inside me against the mosque movement, especially those that seemed to circumscribe women’s subordinate status within Egyptian society” – and yet, admirably, she took a deep breath and continued to listen further, recognizing that the women might yet have something to teach us:
Critique, I believe, is most powerful when it leaves open the possibility that we might also be remade in the process of engaging another’s worldview, that we might come to learn things that we did not already know before we undertook the engagement. This requires that we occasionally turn the critical gaze upon ourselves, to leave open the possibility that we may be remade through an encounter with the other. (16-17)
Mahmood, that is, rightly sees the appeal of the unappealing. I’ve argued for a long time that the philosophical ideas we learn the most from will seem repugnant to us at first, and we really learn by persevering. Mahmood works to makes the same move in ethnography: let us try to see others as they see themselves, even if we don’t like what we see, and maybe we will learn more about ourselves in the process.
6 thoughts on “When marginalized people don’t say what we think they should”
Paul D. Van Peltsaid:
IMHO, one must be mindful not to drown in a wet bowl of word salad. IMPs (Interests, Motives and Preferences) deduct or obscure meanings. A proliferation of terms and variants of terms confuses and obfuscates meaning for all but those who either have coined them or adopted a supportive stance. (Please note, there are not many six syllable words in these remarks.) I am not a contextual realist. For any unfamiliar with that term, it refers to someone/group/movement who contends reality—or, truth is whatever he/she/they says or say it is. That assertion may rely on heart-felt belief or core doctrine/gogma. The confounding part of that is it is difficult to know which is which. Those IMPs are nefarious little buggers. Individual judges and multi-justice tribunals are examples of amalgams of IMPs. I am fascinated by the approach adopted by the late Ian Hacking, roughly, a thing illustrates its’ reality through its’ existence. This is hard to refute, unless one splits hairs by talking about hallucination or illusion.
Amod Lelesaid:
I think this is roughly right. Orwell’s insights in “Politics and the English language” remain fresh: when people can’t understand you, it’s easier to hide your views from scrutiny.
Paul D. Van Peltsaid:
And just so…Ken Wilber.
Nathansaid:
The issues described in this post seem to correlate with the criteria of ethnographic quality in Mario Luis Small & Jessica McCrory Calarco’s book Qualitative Literacy: A Guide to Evaluating Ethnographic and Interview Research (University of California Press, 2022): cognitive empathy, heterogeneity, palpability, follow-up, and self-awareness. Specifically, the issues described in this post would indicate some degree of deficiency in cognitive empathy (“cognitive empathy is the degree to which the researcher understands how those interviewed or observed view the world and themselves—from their perspective”), heterogeneity (“heterogeneity, which we define as the degree to which the perceptions, experiences, motivations, and other aspects of the population or context studied are represented as diverse”), and self-awareness (“We define self-awareness, narrowly, as the extent to which the researcher understands the impact of who they are on those interviewed and observed—and thus on the collected data”). As Small & Calarco said about self-awareness:
As we have argued, field-workers do not merely collect but in fact produce the data they later analyze; they co-create, in an important sense, the transcripts and field notes. We have shown throughout this book that field-workers’ decisions affect many aspects of the quality of the data collected. But field-workers matter to the data collected in an even more fundamental sense: who they are—their gender, race, height and weight, level of extraversion, grace or awkwardness, hairstyle, clothing, vocabulary and intonation, class background, religion, fundamental beliefs, sympathy or disdain for others, and ignorance, and every other aspect of their identity—affects how they reach others, what others do and say in front of them, and how they interpret what they have heard or observed. All of these factors shape the data themselves, and researchers differ in how cognizant they are of this fact.
Yeah, I think that’s right. The point of ethnography is to introduce us to people who are very different from ourselves; the subject’s views are more interesting than the ethnographer’s. The ethnographer unavoidably plays a role in what the subjects say, let alone in curating them afterwards, but that role should be to bring out what’s interesting to readers in the subjects’ ideas.
Nathansaid:
Yes, even when the subjects are not “very different” from ourselves, the point of ethnography is learn about how other people make sense of themselves and the world, how they behave, and so on. The self-awareness is necessary because those other people are making sense, behaving, and so on, in the presence of the ethnographer. Small & Calarco argue that accounting for this leads to “dramatically better data and more accurate conclusions about the social world”.
I haven’t read Joseph Cheah’s book, but I just read the introduction now, and it’s very heavy on theoretical exposition. The final paragraph of the introduction says that his purpose is to address “the undertheorization of race in new immigrant Buddhist studies”, which suggests that he’s more interested in theory-building than in ethnography. Only having read the introduction, I’d say he’s doing Asian American critical theory or something like that. There’s no self-reflexive account (in the introduction) of his own role in the theorizing.
In their chapter on empirical hetereogeneity, Small & Calarco discussed how “the researcher must be thoughtful about how to incorporate that heterogeneity when producing simplifying concepts or claims”. Anyone who is especially interested in theory-building needs to be very aware of this problem.
Small & Calarco said that training in qualitative research methodology is not as widespread as it should be:
For example, while most strong sociology PhD programs require training in quantitative research, the majority do not require courses in qualitative methods, even though their graduates produce many of the major ethnographies and interview studies on contemporary social problems. Furthermore, even surface-level exposure to any qualitative coursework remains all but nonexistent in many of the other social sciences, such as psychology, political science, and economics […]
I wonder how well trained in qualitative research methodology were the people, like Cheah, whom you criticize for their ethnographic sins. Philosophers or theologians, if they’ve specialized in conceptual analysis or high theory, can’t just go into the field without sufficient methodological training and expect to produce high-quality qualitative social research.
IMHO, one must be mindful not to drown in a wet bowl of word salad. IMPs (Interests, Motives and Preferences) deduct or obscure meanings. A proliferation of terms and variants of terms confuses and obfuscates meaning for all but those who either have coined them or adopted a supportive stance. (Please note, there are not many six syllable words in these remarks.) I am not a contextual realist. For any unfamiliar with that term, it refers to someone/group/movement who contends reality—or, truth is whatever he/she/they says or say it is. That assertion may rely on heart-felt belief or core doctrine/gogma. The confounding part of that is it is difficult to know which is which. Those IMPs are nefarious little buggers. Individual judges and multi-justice tribunals are examples of amalgams of IMPs. I am fascinated by the approach adopted by the late Ian Hacking, roughly, a thing illustrates its’ reality through its’ existence. This is hard to refute, unless one splits hairs by talking about hallucination or illusion.
I think this is roughly right. Orwell’s insights in “Politics and the English language” remain fresh: when people can’t understand you, it’s easier to hide your views from scrutiny.
And just so…Ken Wilber.
The issues described in this post seem to correlate with the criteria of ethnographic quality in Mario Luis Small & Jessica McCrory Calarco’s book Qualitative Literacy: A Guide to Evaluating Ethnographic and Interview Research (University of California Press, 2022): cognitive empathy, heterogeneity, palpability, follow-up, and self-awareness. Specifically, the issues described in this post would indicate some degree of deficiency in cognitive empathy (“cognitive empathy is the degree to which the researcher understands how those interviewed or observed view the world and themselves—from their perspective”), heterogeneity (“heterogeneity, which we define as the degree to which the perceptions, experiences, motivations, and other aspects of the population or context studied are represented as diverse”), and self-awareness (“We define self-awareness, narrowly, as the extent to which the researcher understands the impact of who they are on those interviewed and observed—and thus on the collected data”). As Small & Calarco said about self-awareness:
Yeah, I think that’s right. The point of ethnography is to introduce us to people who are very different from ourselves; the subject’s views are more interesting than the ethnographer’s. The ethnographer unavoidably plays a role in what the subjects say, let alone in curating them afterwards, but that role should be to bring out what’s interesting to readers in the subjects’ ideas.
Yes, even when the subjects are not “very different” from ourselves, the point of ethnography is learn about how other people make sense of themselves and the world, how they behave, and so on. The self-awareness is necessary because those other people are making sense, behaving, and so on, in the presence of the ethnographer. Small & Calarco argue that accounting for this leads to “dramatically better data and more accurate conclusions about the social world”.
I haven’t read Joseph Cheah’s book, but I just read the introduction now, and it’s very heavy on theoretical exposition. The final paragraph of the introduction says that his purpose is to address “the undertheorization of race in new immigrant Buddhist studies”, which suggests that he’s more interested in theory-building than in ethnography. Only having read the introduction, I’d say he’s doing Asian American critical theory or something like that. There’s no self-reflexive account (in the introduction) of his own role in the theorizing.
In their chapter on empirical hetereogeneity, Small & Calarco discussed how “the researcher must be thoughtful about how to incorporate that heterogeneity when producing simplifying concepts or claims”. Anyone who is especially interested in theory-building needs to be very aware of this problem.
Small & Calarco said that training in qualitative research methodology is not as widespread as it should be:
I wonder how well trained in qualitative research methodology were the people, like Cheah, whom you criticize for their ethnographic sins. Philosophers or theologians, if they’ve specialized in conceptual analysis or high theory, can’t just go into the field without sufficient methodological training and expect to produce high-quality qualitative social research.