Signs of truth: enchantment, modernity and the dreams of peasant women

Autor: Michael Gilsenan
Rok vydání: 2000
Předmět:
Zdroj: Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. 6:597-615
ISSN: 1467-9655
1359-0987
DOI: 10.1111/1467-9655.00035
Popis: This lecture is in three sections. The first discusses the role of classificatory practices distinguishing magic from religion in social life and in narratives of modernity. Concepts of enchantment have been reintroduced into theories of modernity as the Weberian notion of 'ridding the world of magic' has been questioned. The second part sketches some of the characteristic tensions in the Qur'an concerning the signs of truth in the Islamic community. The final section reflects on modern Egyptian denunciations and defences of the dreams of peasant women, dreams that are claimed as direct experiential proofs of the sacred.These dreams command visits to the shrines that are centres for mass ritual, social, and economic activity and whose powers are resistant to regulation by worldly authorities. Such dreams, and the denunciations of them by those self-perceived as religiously orthodox and modern, are part of continuing contests over state and patriarchal authority, citizenship, and exchange with the divine. In the first part of this Myers lecture I want to discuss two closely related topics: the place of the religion-magic coupling in narratives of modernity, and the significance of conceptions of the disenchantment, and reenchantment, of the world. I shall then offer some reflections on the problematic nature of Islamic signs of truth in theory and practice. In the final section, I shall turn to the practices of saints' days and the disordering power of'the dreams of peasant women' in modern Egypt.The context of the denunciations of such dreams and deploring of what are held to be shameful mass spectacles of pilgrimage days is established in attempts by different authorities and institutions to produce and discipline the citizen, in part by eliminating 'the magical' and what is taken to be the self-evidently pre-modern. There is a broader set of anthropological questions to be addressed concerned with the use or abuse of conceptions of religion, culture, and power. In the social sciences, even if the category of 'religion' is constantly in question, the kinds of phenomena which traditionally tended to be grouped within it have re-emerged from what had been a kind of theoretical and empirical marginality. That modernity entailed 'ridding the world of magic', with all that the Weberian phrase implied, has ceased to be plausible, at least in its standard interpretations. Derrida (1996), to take one recent example, has meditated on the 'return of religion' (which of course implies its departure), unfortunately but predictably with a particular eye on Islamic integrisme and violence. * Henry Myers Lecture, 1999
Databáze: OpenAIRE
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