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ID: 083844

Critical and hopeful area studies: emerging work in Asia and the Pacific / McKinnon, Katharine; Gibson, Katherine; Malam, Linda

McKinnon, Katharine	Journal Article
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2008.

Key Words

Power ; Representation ; Livelihoods ; Scale ; Experimentation ; Subjectification

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ID: 164023

Metaphors and paradoxes: secrecy, power and subjectification in Sufi initiation in Aleppo, Syria / Pinto, Paulo G

Pinto, Paulo G	Journal Article
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Summary/Abstract

Based fieldwork in Aleppo between 1999 and 2010, this article analyzes how secrecy and revelation, two forms of codification, maintenance and transmission of religious knowledge central to the mystical tradition of Sufism in contemporary Syria were constructed and enacted in the process of initiation (tarbiyya) into the mystical path in two Sufi zawiyas (ritual lodges) in pre-war Aleppo. Access to the unseen spheres of divine reality through initiation created both structures of charismatic power in the Sufi communities and religious subjectivities that empowered its holders as moral agents in the pre-civil war Syrian public sphere. I argue that Sufi practices of initiation that gradually revealed the divine reality to students while simultaneously also enhanced the mystery of this reality enabled Sufi practitioners to cope with the opacity of power and contradictions of everyday life of late-Ba‘thist modernity in Syria.

Key Words

Power ; Syria ; Sufism ; Secrecy ; Subjectification ; Metaphors ;
Paradoxes ; Initiation

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ID: 139766

Who is the subject of neoliberal rights? governmentality, subjectification and the letter of the law / Selmeczi, Anna

Selmeczi, Anna	Article
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Summary/Abstract

Motivated by the litigious politics of the South African shack-dwellers’ movement, Abahlali baseMjondolo, this paper enquires into the knowledge dynamics implied by the governmentality literature’s take on the (neo)liberal deployment of (human) rights. It suggests that by implicitly constructing the freedom of codified rights as illusionary and opposed to the reality of neoliberal rationalities of government, this scholarship posits a cognitive hierarchy between agents of government and the governed, and thus reproduces the power dynamics that it seeks to criticise. Interweaving a presentation of Abahlali’s self-articulation as knowledgeable and rightful subjects with Jacques Rancière’s notion of ‘literariness’, the paper accounts for codified rights’ potential to enable the disruption of such dynamics, and traces the governmentality literature’s suspicion towards this potential back to its textual methodology.

Key Words

Governmentality ; Subjectification ; Ranciere ; Abahlali base Mjondolo ; Literariness

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