Entangled ethics: Piety and agency in Turkey

Abstract

Anthropologist Saba Mahmood has critiqued the Western, feminist concept of liberal selfhood that assumes individual agency naturally resists constraints on autonomy in the process of self-realization. Based on her study of the women’s mosque movement in Egypt, Mahmood suggests that pious Egyptian women readily submit to disciplinary practices that emphasize feminine modesty, humbleness, and obedience – practices that would appear oppressive to many Western feminist observers but allow the women to cultivate a proper and (for them) desirable Muslim piety. While Mahmood’s critique is welcome, she tends to discuss individual ethical cultivation as occurring within only one normative system or another. This article will instead explore the fact that at any point in time, most individuals, especially those in a complex society like Egypt, operate under multiple normative systems and must engage with several layers of authority – family, religion, community, state – some of which may make contradictory demands on the participants in those systems. In such situations acts of submission to one set of norms may entail resistance to another set, so that acts of submission and resistance become entangled with each other. Drawing on examples from fieldwork conducted in a women’s Koran study group in Turkey, the article will explore these entanglements and discuss how they further complicate theorizing about the nature of individual agency.