‘This is a gathering of lovers’: Islamic self-help and affective pedagogies in contemporary Singapore

In Singapore, the proliferation of Islamic classes drawing from self-help rhetoric, popular culture, the Qur'an, and Hadith allude to the increased appeal of affective pedagogies to Muslim youth. Taught by Singaporean Al-Azhar University graduates, the classes predominantly attracted university-educated, minoritized Malay Muslim women. Through the use of affective pedagogies, the teachers reframed Islamic piety to foreground three forms of love: self, divine, and romantic. Extending scholarship on racialized affect, this article interrogates the ways in which the teachers’ affective pedagogies mediated young women's anxieties within a neoliberalizing context, and the latter's negotiations of their newly acquired religious knowledge as they contended with quotidian precarities. While anthropology's foregrounding of lived materialities complicates some of the theoretical presuppositions of affect theory, the latter expands our understanding of piety projects as not merely concerned with ethical self-discipline, but entangled with broader racialization processes – especially for minoritized subjects whose capacity to transform becomes constitutive of a will to improve. By placing anthropological theory on Islamic piety in a dialogical tension with affect theory, I highlight the forms of affective religious sentiments that circulate through difference and negation, and are integral to particular sites of minoritized Muslim subject formation.     

Revisiting Furnivall's ‘plural society’: Colonial Java as a mestizo society?

J. S. Furnivall's characterization of Java in the last half‐century of colonial rule as a ‘plural society’ has largely been taken for granted by most scholars who have supported or opposed the applicability of the concept in a Caribbean or African context. In the ‘plural society’ of colonial Java, according to Furnivall, Europeans, Chinese and natives each held by their own religion, their own culture and language, meeting as individuals only in the market place. This article re‐examines the case of colonial Java, which first prompted Furnivall to use the concept, paying particular attention to the Chinese. It argues that at the time he invented the term, he exaggerated the ‘pluralistic’ features of colonial society, and that, when applied to the situation at the turn of the century, the concept was quite misleading. Rather, it is suggested, colonial society in the urban centres of Java at that time might in many respects just as well be characterized as a ‘mestizo society’.     

Magico‐spiritual power,female sexuality and ritual sex in Muslim Java: Unveiling the kesekten of magical women

This article argues that in practice, concepts of magico‐spiritual power (Javanese: kesekten; Indonesian: kesaktian) are linked with sexuality, particularly female sexuality, in some segments of contemporary Central and East Javanese Muslim society. Few scholars have turned attention to the interconnectedness of these seemingly contradictory topics. Feminist studies tend to focus on the ways in which women locate themselves within and critique Sharia‐based discursive and social orders, without considering the roles that magico‐spiritual power and associated practices play in these Islamic systems or in Islam in a more general sense. Similarly, male scholarship that considers the cultural relevance of Islam and magic rarely refers to gendered and sexual dimensions as praxis from a feminist perspective. By drawing on examples of ‘magical women’ including the Javanese spirit queen of the southern ocean Gusti Kanjeng Ratu Kidul, the historical Hindu figure Ken Dedes, and contemporary ritual sex practices at a Muslim saint's grave, we show how women, female spiritual beings and female sexuality, and sexuality in general, can be considered sources of magico‐spiritual power in Muslim Java. Our arguments conclude that in Javanese Islam, transgression of Sharia sexual norms can be both a sign and a source of magico‐spiritual power.     

BRAIN DEATH IN ISLAMIC ETHICO‐LEGAL DELIBERATION: CHALLENGES FOR APPLIED ISLAMIC BIOETHICS

Since the 1980s, Islamic scholars and medical experts have used the tools of Islamic law to formulate ethico‐legal opinions on brain death. These assessments have varied in their determinations and remain controversial. Some juridical councils such as the Organization of Islamic Conferences' Islamic Fiqh Academy (OIC‐IFA) equate brain death with cardiopulmonary death, while others such as the Islamic Organization of Medical Sciences (IOMS) analogize brain death to an intermediate state between life and death. Still other councils have repudiated the notion entirely. Similarly, the ethico‐legal assessments are not uniform in their acceptance of brain‐stem or whole‐brain criteria for death, and consequently their conceptualizations of, brain death. Within the medical literature, and in the statements of Muslim medical professional societies, brain death has been viewed as sanctioned by Islamic law with experts citing the aforementioned rulings. Furthermore, health policies around organ transplantation and end‐of‐life care within the Muslim world have been crafted with consideration of these representative religious determinations made by transnational, legally‐inclusive, and multidisciplinary councils. The determinations of these councils also have bearing upon Muslim clinicians and patients who encounter the challenges of brain death at the bedside. For those searching for ‘Islamically‐sanctioned’ responses that can inform their practice, both the OIC‐IFA and IOMS verdicts have palpable gaps in their assessments and remain clinically ambiguous. In this paper we analyze these verdicts from the perspective of applied Islamic bioethics and raise several questions that, if answered by future juridical councils, will better meet the needs of clinicians and bioethicists.     

Two Sides of the Same Coin: Modernity and Tradition in Islamic Education in Indonesia

This article explores one way in which the Classical Islamic community in Java, Indonesia, seeks to negotiate modernization and globalization through the interface of an Islamic boarding school (pesantren) and higher education. This negotiation requires imagining and (reinventing both modernity and tradition. By examining how the leadership of a particular pesantren for university students engages these processes in their curricular goals and practices, this article expands theoretical considerations of education in translocal processes such as Islamization and globalization.     

Domesticating Islam: exploring academic knowledge production on Islam and Muslims in European societies

The attacks on the Twin Towers in New York in September 2001 and subsequent events not only ignited a ‘war on terror’, but also marked a crucial change in the policies on integration of migrants of Islamic background in Europe. Most countries departed from integration policies based on some sort of recognition of cultural diversity and emphasized national culture as the only legitimate format for citizenship. The result is a strengthening of a frame of governance with the aim to regulate Islamic practices and to mould outlooks, institutional settings and legal arrangements into the nation-state format. This has been referred to as the ‘domestication of Islam’. One of the consequences is the narrowing down of research agendas and academic knowledge production. In this article I explore this process and address important fields of study that tend to be neglected in the study of Islam in Europe.     

Can women in labor give informed consent to epidural analgesia?

There are reasons to believe that decision‐making capacity (mental competence) of women in labor may be compromised in relation to giving informed consent to epidural analgesia. Not only severe labor pain, but also stress, anxiety, and premedication of analgesics such as opioids, may influence women’s decisional capacity. Decision‐making capacity is a complex construct involving cognitive and emotional components which cannot be reduced to ‘understanding’ alone. A systematic literature search identified a total of 20 empirical studies focused on women’s decision‐making about epidural analgesia for labor pain. Our review of these studies suggests that empirical evidence to date is insufficient to determine whether women undergoing labor are capable of consenting to epidural analgesia. Given such uncertainties, sufficient information about pain management should be provided as part of prenatal education and the consent process must be carefully conducted to enhance women’s autonomy. To fill in the significant gap in clinical knowledge about laboring women’s decision‐making capacity, well‐designed prospective and retrospective studies may be required.     

How Are Local People Driving and Affected by Forest Cover Change? Opportunities for Local Participation in REDD+ Measurement,Reporting and Verification

Deforestation and forest degradation are complex and dynamic processes that vary from place to place. They are driven by multiple causes. Local communities are, to some extent, driving and also affected by some of these processes. Can their knowledge aid and add to place-specific assessment and monitoring of Deforestation and forest Degradation (DD) drivers? Our research was conducted in seven villages across three provinces of Indonesia (Papua, West Kalimantan and Central Java). Household surveys and focus group discussions were used to investigate how local community knowledge of DD drivers contributes to place-specific assessment and monitoring of DD drivers. We analyzed the link between drivers and local livelihoods to see how attempts to address deforestation and forest degradation might affect local communities and how this link might influence their participation in climate change mitigation measures such as Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) and Measuring, Reporting and Verifying (MRV) activities. We found that local knowledge is fundamental to capturing the variety of drivers particularly in countries like Indonesia where forest and socio-economic conditions are diverse. Better understanding of drivers and their importance for local livelihoods will not only contribute to a more locally appropriate design of REDD+ and monitoring systems but will also foster local participation.     

Shown but not Shared,Presented but not Proffered: Redefining Ritual Identity among Warlpiri Ritual Performers, 1990–2000

Little has been written on the construction and projection of indigenous social identity in public (‘non‐restricted’) ritual among Aboriginal Australians. Elsewhere, I have analysed nearly half a century of such public rituals (1946–1990) among the Warlpiri of Yuendumu in Central Australia, concentrating on the shifting forces of gender and kinship. This paper focuses on the key moments motivating senior Warlpiri women, since the 1990s, to reconfigure their ritual participation and roles in inter‐indigenous ceremonial events. I analyse how these women participate in inter‐Aboriginal performances, exhibiting the iconic and sensory virtues of the Dreaming and weaving new forms of political identity, shaped by the pressures of neo‐colonialism, with female ambassadors of other Aboriginal groups. I argue that in this performative process women are reconfiguring the meanings of Aboriginalities and rearticulating their connectedness to one another, a connectedness rooted in their beliefs and responsibilities towards the Dreaming.     

Sabar: body politics among middle‐aged migrant Pakistani women

This article explores the relationship among suffering, Islamic moral concepts, subjectivity, and agency within a cohort of middle‐aged women who migrated from Pakistan to Britain in the 1960s and 1970s as the wives or daughters of industrial workers. These women were preoccupied with their ageing bodies and complained about the cumulative assaults on their health they had experienced, and which they felt had been neglected by health professionals and family alike. By examining how these women bear chronic illness through a discourse of sabar (patience or silent forbearance), I show how women were able to transform their illness into a selfless and virtuous consequence of shouldering the burdens of kinship. Sabar suggests passive acceptance or fatalism to some observers, but attending to how women situate their illness in a religious and eschatological frame, we see that they actively appropriate rather than passively imbibe the norm of sabar. Moreover, turning from narratives to everyday contexts of friendship, family, and inter‐generational relations, we see that there are tensions between self‐sublimation and self‐assertion in the practice of sabar. It is argued that ethnographic attention to subjectivity and reflexivity are crucial to understanding sabar as an agential capacity.     

Words of the ancestors: disembodied knowledge and secrecy in East Timor

By examining processes of revealing and concealing ancestral ‘words’, this article analyses the connection between East Timorese knowledge practices and status competition. The point of departure is a tension between the assertion by eminent ritual speakers in the Idaté‐speaking village of Funar of the need to discover the most truthful ‘trunk’ knowledge, and the simultaneous and continual concealment of what this ‘trunk’ may consist of. The article explores the discursive practices that sustain the notion that knowledge exists as an immutable essence outside of history, and the difficulty of maintaining this notion given dramatic historical events in East Timor in recent decades. Whereas secrecy and concealment are key strategies of dealing with unrelenting contestations over the ownership and content of ‘trunk’ words, a ritual speaker's attempt to deny the interrelational aspect of knowledge is undermined by the need for others to recognize him as its rightful guardian.     

Laterality: a sideways look at ritual

Much study of ritual has focused on demarcated spaces and times of performance, and the often spectacular features of such collective behaviour provide rich resources for analysis of formal, symbolically dense action. This article shifts attention to dimensions of ritual events that entail zones of ambiguous, diffuse, or limited engagement where the boundaries between participant and non-participant, viewer and viewed, may be unclear. Focusing on visits to the English pilgrimage site of Walsingham, I examine multiple modalities of participation through analysing the relationships among observing, engaging in, and narrating ritual action. In doing so, I develop a lexicon for the study of performances whose ethnographic profile does not stand out in sharp relief. Key terms for my analysis are ‘laterality’ (as opposed to liminality) and ‘penumbra’ (as opposed to centre).     

Earning the model‐minority image: Diverse strategies of economic adaptation by Asian‐American women

Using the 1980 US Population Census data, this article documents the diverse strategies of economic adaptation adopted by a group of working‐age immigrant women: Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, Korean, Indian and Vietnamese. A comparable sample of non‐Hispanic white women serves as the reference group. Striking heterogeneity in the individual and collective resources of these groups, together with differences in labour market opportunities and historical context of immigration, have led to a variety of patterns of labour force participation and methods of income attainment. In order to move beyond the oversimplified image of Asian‐Americans as a model minority in their economic success, the article applies four different theories to the census data ‐ assimilation, dual economy, ethnic‐enclave economy and middleman minority. The article closes with a discussion of theoretical implications and methodological suggestions for future studies concerning labour force position and economic adaptation of minority and immigrant women.     

Sexual Desire,Piety, and Law in a Javanese Pesantren: Interpreting Varieties of Secret Divorce and Polygamy

Very little anthropological research has explored the polygamous worlds of women in Indonesia's traditional Islamic boarding schools known as pesantren. These traditional schools are patriarchal institutions that teach women to be ideal Muslims according to male-defined notions of shari'ah-based piety that construct polygamy as normative. This article challenges dominant discourses on polygamy, which are mostly concerned with public protest and feminist agendas that seek to have the practice banned, and instead reveals an agentive side of women in polygamous marriages. It examines the experiences of a group of pesantren women whose actions transgress state and Islamic laws on marriage and divorce in their endorsement of polygamous union and nikah batin (Sufi spiritual marriage). It builds on feminist arguments that recognise female agency in polygamy by considering the legal ambiguity surrounding secret and informal divorce and polygamous practices initiated by women restricted from obtaining legal divorces for socio-cultural reasons. In doing so, it further considers some aspects of a notion of a woman-centric polygamy that includes polyandry, which women create based on their understanding that Islam acknowledges women's sexual rights in marriage.     

Politicizing place perception: a phenomenology of urban activism in Istanbul

Phenomenology intuits that people's perception of the environment is related to their lived activities, emotions, and perspectives, and is in this process also temporally experienced. This article applies these insights to political activism, exploring its conditioning of militants’ sensory experience of the city and showing how militants’ urban knowledge is intimately connected to political practices of organizing, mobilizing, and agitating, each orientated in turn by the pursuit of revolution. Based on fieldwork in Istanbul with ex‐militants and their memories of political action from the years immediately before and after the 1980 military coup, the article applies and extends phenomenological understandings of place perception to explore their changing experiences of the city. This quality of perception as a temporal process is vital for understanding both historical and contemporary features of ex‐militants’ remembering of Istanbul, related as they are to a state project to shape and simplify public knowledge of their activities, and to certain political developments posited by activists themselves as efficacious in transforming the meaning of their past acts. It concludes by illustrating how these two processes come together in the recent institution by ex‐militants of a new museum (12 September Museum of Shame), opened some thirty years after the events it objectivizes.     

Engagement as co‐constructing knowledge: A moral necessity in public health research

Undertaking engagement in public health research is ethically essential. There is a growing emphasis on practicing engagement as the co‐construction of knowledge, which goes beyond other common forms of engagement in health research practice: consulting and informing. Taking such an approach means researchers jointly construct knowledge with research users and beneficiaries; all parties design and conduct research together and share decision‐making power. This article makes the normative argument that such engagement is necessary to achieve the foundational moral aims of public health research—building relations of equality and addressing the health needs of those considered disadvantaged—which reflect the field's underlying commitment to social justice. It next identifies and discusses three ways in which co‐constructing knowledge advances those moral aims: by facilitating self‐determination, supporting individuals’ right to research, and maximizing social knowledge to address cognitive and epistemic injustice. Objections to the arguments presented in the article are then articulated and defended against.     

On the Islamic authority of the Indonesian state: responsibility,suspicion, and acts of compliance

This article examines how the Indonesian state's efforts to style itself as an Islamic authority have influenced the behaviour of its Muslim citizens. I present cases in which Muslims in Indonesia's Riau Islands comply with Islamic state directives in order to transfer responsibility for their actions to the state, showing how such a mode of practice can support Islamic governmentality, bolster nationalism, and constrain civic activism. Interestingly, compliance may occur even when citizens harbour deep misgivings towards a directive, leading me to query whether suspicion is necessarily inimical to authority. I conclude that a pronouncement's Islamic authority hinges on how Muslims relate to their suspicions regarding it, and that, for Riau Islanders, suspicion's urgency has been tempered by cultural models of personhood, individual subjectivity, and the moral murk of post‐Suharto Indonesia.     

Research Integrity in Greater China: Surveying Regulations,Perceptions and Knowledge of Research Integrity from a Hong Kong Perspective

In their 2010 article ‘Research Integrity in China: Problems and Prospects’, Zeng and Resnik challenge others to engage in empirical research on research integrity in China. Here we respond to that call in three ways: first, we provide updates to their analysis of regulations and allegations of scientific misconduct; second, we report on two surveys conducted in Hong Kong that provide empirical backing to describe ways in which problems and prospects that Zeng and Resnik identify are being explored; and third, we continue the discussion started by Zeng and Resnik, pointing to ways in which China's high‐profile participation in international academic research presents concerns about research integrity. According to our research, based upon searches of both English and Chinese language literature and policies, and two surveys conducted in Hong Kong, academic faculty and research post‐graduate students in Hong Kong are aware of and have a positive attitude towards responsible conduct of research. Although Hong Kong is but one small part of China, we present this research as a response to concerns Zeng and Resnik introduce and as a call for a continued conversation.     

Sheikhanzai women: Sisters,mothers and wives

The Sheikhanzai are goat‐and‐sheep‐herding pastoralists who migrate from winter pastures near the Iranian and Soviet borders of Afghanistan to highland summer pastures in the western Hindu Kush. The article sets out to show that among the Sheikhanzai, women's management of economic resources provides a source of power which is frequently unavailable to women in sedentary communities. The domestic work and productive activities of Sheikhanzai women will be examined in the context of their roles as power‐wielders and power‐brokers. Attention is drawn to intra‐societal variation between different categories of women.