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Religion, Feminism, and the Problem of Agency: Reflections on Eighteenth‐Century Quakerism
Abstract
Dans cet article, l'A s'interesse a la definition de l'autonomie, agency dans la religion chretienne et particulierement la doctrine quaker. L'A analyse les discours religieux sur le sens de l'identite personnelle et de souffrance physique et morale que chacun(e) doit supporter, ainsi que la definition morale et theologique de la dimension spirituelle de la liberte et de l'autorite
... There has long been a perception in social sciences that secular people have the most agency and religious women have the least (Burke 2012;Mack 2003;Mahmood 2005). The notion of false consciousness has been used to describe religious women (Furseth and Repstad 2006, pp. ...
... From a traditional secular liberal point of view, agency is considered an autonomous, conscious, deliberate action (Giddens 1976(Giddens , 1984 and human rights as a universal and ultimate expression of human agency, as it lies in individual autonomy, essential for human freedom or liberty (Gewirth 1982(Gewirth , 1996Griffin 2008;Mahmood 2005). In more recent scholarship, scholars of religion have dug deeper into the essence of agency, recognizing its modality and different forms (Avishai 2008;Burke 2012;Mack 2003;Mahmood 2005), which go beyond the conventional secular understanding. ...
... Mahmood's analysis of what is experienced by pious women daily concluded that religion, no matter how patriarchal, can provide women with agency. Many scholars have followed this more nuanced position towards pious women (Ališauskienė 2021;Ammerman 2007Ammerman , 2013Ammerman , 2016Avishai 2008Avishai , 2010Day 2017;Hawthorne 2011;Knibbe and Kupari 2020;Mack 2003Mack , 2008McGuire 2008McGuire , 2016Ozorak 1996;Orsi 1997Orsi , 2003Woodhead 2002Woodhead , 2003. Through these works, scholars have acknowledged that pious women might have goals other than feminist ones, such as piety, morality, the observance of their religion, care for others, fulfilling relationships, etc., and their agency can exist even in their subordination to patriarchy (Avishai 2008;Mack 2003;Mahmood 2005;Ozorak 1996). ...
This article focuses on the variety of ways pious Muslim women exercise their agency to navigate between religion, gender, and human rights in the dynamic post-Soviet Baltic societies. It shows that these women primarily find agency not in human rights but in Islam as a religion that provides instruction on aspects of life related to human rights. They are empowered as individuals by Islam as the religion of their deliberate choice, which gives them meaning and guidance in life. They also find agency in their roles as wives and mothers as well as in the sisterhood of the Muslim community, while a career serves more as an area of personal autonomy and self-realization. This research is based on the analysis of qualitative data from semi-structured interviews conducted in 2021–2022. Baltic women’s narratives on human rights (and in the case of this research, specifically regarding gender and sexuality) and the role of Islam in their lives contributes to the redefinition of religious and secular concepts within a post-communist context and contributes to the wider scholarly debate on pious Muslim women living in non-Muslim democratic societies.
Como es bien conocido, el Concilio Vaticano II promovió una transformación global del catolicismo, pero el alcance de este cambio en las órdenes y congregaciones femeninas ha sido poco estudiado. Este artículo pretende introducirse en este tema a través del análisis de la trayectoria de la Sociedad del Sagrado Corazón. Esta congregación religiosa, fundada en las postrimerías de la Revolución Francesa, constituyó un modelo exitoso de instituto religioso durante más de un siglo. Sin embargo, el nuevo contexto surgido tras el final de la II Guerra Mundial le obligó a emprender un profundo proceso de renovación impulsado por el decreto conciliar Perfectae Caritatis. A través principalmente de fuentes orales, se analizará la construcción identitaria de la religiosa conciliar, que se caracterizó por una resignificación de los tradicionales votos de castidad, pobreza y obediencia.
Since 2011, female khatna, or the practice of female genital cutting within the Dawoodi Bohra community, has become a big topic of debate in India and globally. The ‘secret’ tradition has been challenged by community activists, tabled in parliament, heard by international courts of law and debated on news channels. In response, a growing number of Bohra women have come to the fore to publicly defend their right to khatna by subverting seemingly Western tropes of autonomy, equality and modernity. Situated in the thick of these polarised exchanges, this article examines the complicated, under-explored relationship between gender and Islam by foregrounding self-narratives of the Bohra women who actively participate within, as opposed to fight against, patriarchal norms to preserve the tradition. I juxtapose their narratives with those of anti- khatna activists to further contextualise and clarify their ‘modern-yet-traditional’ subjectivities. As such, this article combines a postcolonial feminist lens with Eric Hobsbawm’s notion of ‘invention of tradition’, to investigate the multiple ways in which a majority of Bohra women are using the rhetoric of ‘modernity’ in public—by reinventing history, renegotiating patriarchies, reimagining the other and incorporating biomedicine—to preserve and perpetuate this contested tradition.
At the end of a compelling account of his two-year sojourn among snake-handling Christians in southern Appalachia, Dennis Covington, a Georgia-based reporter for the New York Times, describes the night he realized that he could not join the handlers, whom he had come to love and respect, in their faith. I want to borrow this instance of one man’s discovery of radical religious otherness—a discovery that led him to turn away in sorrow and disappointment from his friends—as an opening onto the question of what a renewed emphasis on moral inquiry might mean for the academic study of religion.
Wisdom is such an elusive psychological construct that few people have considered it a viable field, though many are fascinated by the topic. Well-known psychologist Robert J. Sternberg of Yale University, perceiving the growth of interest in wisdom as a field, saw a need to document the progress that has been made in the field since the early '80s and to point the way for future theory and research. The resulting comprehensive and authoritative book, Wisdom: Its Nature, Origins and Development, is a well-rounded collection of psychological views on wisdom. It introduces this concept of wisdom, considers philosophical issues and developmental approaches, and covers as well folk conceptions of the topic. In the final section, Professor Sternberg provides an integration of the fascinating and comprehensive material.
This review describes and critiques some of the many ways agency has been conceptualized in the academy over the past few decades, focusing in particular on practice theorists such as Giddens, Bourdieu, de Certeau, Sahlins, and Ortner. For scholars interested in agency, it demonstrates the importance of looking closely at language and argues that the issues surrounding linguistic form and agency are relevant to anthropologists with widely divergent research agendas. Linguistic anthropologists have made significant contributions to the understanding of agency as it emerges in discourse, and the final sections of this essay describe some of the most promising research in the study of language and gender, literacy practices, and the dialogic construction of meaning and agency.
The notion of agency has become particularly prominent in social‐science writing. This article identifies some of the weaknesses in the ways it has been employed in contemporary anthropology. It criticises the assumptions of self‐empowerment, responsibility, and constructivism that are held to be essential to moral agency in much of that usage. Present‐day conceptions of agency in this literature introduce—whether intentionally or not—a triumphalist vision of history. Drawing on recent neuro‐physiological research, religious history and ethnography, it focuses on pain in order to think about agency in other than triumphalist terms. Triumphalist versions of agency, the article argues, are not only inherently questionable, they also distract our attention away from the need to understand how different traditions articulate the idea of living sanely in a world that is inevitably painful.