Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft: Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft, 4.1866

Anthropos, 94.1999

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Strukturtyp:: Zeitschrift

Werks-URN (URL):: https://digi.evifa.de/viewer/resolver?urn=urn:nbn:de:kobv:11-714782

URN:: urn:nbn:de:kobv:11-714782

Persistenter Identifier:: BV041216885

Titel:: Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft

Weitere Titel:: Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft

Erscheinungsort:: Berlin

Verlag:: Dümmler

Erscheinungsjahr:: 1860

Sammlung:: Zeitschriften und Zeitungen > Zeitschriften zur Ethnologie

Wissensgebiet:: Sozial- und Kulturanthropologie > Allgemeines

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Strukturtyp:: Zeitschriftenband

Werks-URN (URL):: https://digi.evifa.de/viewer/resolver?urn=urn:nbn:de:kobv:11-708212

URN:: urn:nbn:de:kobv:11-708212

Persistenter Identifier:: DE-11-001661071

Titel:: Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft, 4.1866

Verlag:: Dümmler

Erscheinungsjahr:: 1866

Signatur:: LA 7999-4

Sammlung:: Zeitschriften und Zeitungen > Zeitschriften zur Ethnologie

Zeitschriftenheft

Strukturtyp:: Zeitschriftenheft

Sammlung:: Zeitschriften und Zeitungen > Zeitschriften zur Ethnologie

Rezensionen 257 Anth r °pos 94.1999 time? Moreover, is tradition, even as an historical “fact,” something untouched by the forces of cultural change and transformation? Could it be that we valorize the Past and tradition because we tend to forget the ongoing struggle life involves in the present and thus also in the past? Who defines tradition and modernity? - The scholar or the community she/he is engaged in studying? The book ends with an autobiographical narrative by someone whose identity is not revealed to us. “Zenji Sitaram” tells us about “how it all began” in Risikesh, when, in 1980, a group of young Austrians sitting around a fire on the shores of the Ganga asked themselves the atost fundamental of all questions: “Who or what am I?” This is a “rite de passage” undertaken about the act °f preparing, protecting, and consuming a pot of sweet r ice pudding. Finally, a Sadhu provides the answer: ‘Anything ... Nothing ... Everything” - a statement that can either be known in a flash of realization or miserably misconceived in the entanglements of everyday life. This book, however, is certainly something that needs to be read both by the general reader and social scientist interested in a fresh and innovative perspective °n India. It is recommended reading for introductory courses on the society and culture of contemporary India. Aditya Malik Ewing, Katherine Pratt: Arguing Sainthood. Mo dernity, Psychoanalysis, and Islam. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997. 312 pp. ISBN 0-8223-2024-X. p rice: £ 16.95 Similarly to the “fragmentary subject” which is her Ce ntral concern, K. Ewing constructs many narratives ln her book. “Arguing Sainthood” is indeed a firsthand a Pproach to the complex figures of the spiritual master T*A) and the antinomian Sufi (qalandar) as well as of ^e various ways in which they are perceived in the P°stcolonial context of Pakistani Panjab. But it offers a Uo a history of religious politics in British India and nkistan, a new and illuminating reading of classical Arabic treatises and Persian poems dealing with Islamic Mysticism, a critical reflexion on Eurocentric cultural ^fthropology and Orientalist discourses, and a sophis- lc ated contribution to the theory of subjectivity, based ° n fascinating insights into psychoanalysis. This polyphony aims at showing how the redefinition . a local culture by colonial and scientific discourses ^experienced at the individual level (269). If the study Cu ses on the plr, it is precisely because, in a process of na fion-building where competing ideologies are played j 1 ln the ordinary citizen’s experience, this character s both the target of much of the ideological conflict the guide to whom individuals turn for healing in e s of personal crisis. But understanding this “nodal lnt in local circles of meaning requests a theoretical P ure from the view that modernity is everywhere the in Ste . r narr ative of our times, bearing an overwhelm- oru ^cursive and material force. Such a rupture can 7 be achieved through a complete reappraisal of such concepts as hegemony, consciousness, and the subject, and leads to a new perception of the postcolonial subject. This theoretical task is the prime concern of the introduction, in which K. Ewing demarcates herself from the work of expatriate postcolonial academics who “regard their cultural heritage as an irretrievably lost object, overwhelmed by the forces of modernity” (8), and also from the social theorists who both in the West (the poststructuralists, etc.) and in India (the Subaltern Studies group), though using the concept of hegemony to “deconstruct the totalizing grand narrative” (16), privileged Western capitalism and colonization as a unique transformative force. What the author puts forward, using mostly the works of Freud, Gramsci, Lacan, Foucault, Althusser, Kristeva, and Deleuze and Guattari, is a decentered, fragmentary subject. By this, she means the individual who tries to constitute himself as a subject in a postcolonial landscape characterized by the historical diversity of competing discourses. This individual becomes the site of “conflicting desires and multiple subjective modalities” (35): he aligns himself inconstantly with diverging ideologies, being usually oblivious of his own inconsistencies. Thus, though re lying on Lacan for considering the subject as split by its entry into language and for explaining thereby the power of ideologies “to stimulate desire and move people to action and submission without positing a cohesive ego as agent” (270), K. Ewing rejects the psychoanalyst’s view of a unique Symbolic Order constituting the speak ing subject. She suggests instead, using Deleuze and Guattari, that access to the world is often unmediated by language, and that recognition by the Other is not the only human aspiration of an individual who is a fragmentary flux of experience. Such a conceptualization has a direct bearing on the author’s anthropological approach, as she basically eval uates the extent to which ordinary Pakistani urbanites are shaped by a discourse of modernity, by the ideologies that arise out of and in reaction to it, and by conceptions and practices inherited from the precolonial past. In the first section of her study, she first shows how first under the British and then in Pakistan the tradition-modernity dichotomy became the hegemonic discourse. Regarding popular Sufism, the British colonizers, while developing a legislation which confined religion to the private sphere, constructed the plr as a prosperous (and often corrupt) magnate, quite aloof from the “pure” Islamic mysticism of the Orientalists, and as a “traditional” local chief whom they could use to control the superstitious impulses of the natives (41-50). They had an even more negative view of the wandering ascetics. Perceiving their use of drug (50-52), their wandering (52-57), and their begging (57-61) as a threat to social order and feeling them as an alternative source of authority, they com bated their ideology and tried to control their practices. Though like the Romanticists and the Theosophists, scholars would acknowledge the past profoundness of Indian spirituality, the British thus produced a very negative image of the holy man, split between the landed

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