萨巴·马哈茂德

作品

• 2005虔诚的政治：伊斯兰复兴与女性主义主体

  在开罗妇女清真寺运动中的田野研究：这些妇女通过身体实践培养美德；要理解她们，女性主义理论必须把能动性与对自由和抵抗的愿望区分开来。

• 2016世俗时代的宗教差异：一份少数派报告

  埃及科普特人和巴哈伊信徒的处境表明，现代世俗国家并非凌驾于宗教之上，而是管理宗教，并在此过程中加剧了多数与少数之间的冲突。

立场

“Politics of Piety” (2005) studies women in Cairo who met in mosques to study the Qur’an and to cultivate pious virtues such as modesty and patience through repeated bodily practice. Liberal and feminist theory, Mahmood argued, tends to recognise agency only where people resist norms or express their own autonomous will; it therefore cannot understand women who seek to inhabit norms rather than overthrow them. Drawing on Foucault’s late work on ethics as self-formation and on Talal Asad’s anthropology of religion, she proposed to understand agency as the capacity for action that particular relations of power and practice create. She took up Judith Butler’s theory of performativity, but argued that Butler’s emphasis on subversion still tied agency to resistance. In “Religious Reason and Secular Affect” (2009) she used the controversy over the Danish cartoons of the Prophet to show how secular assumptions shape what counts as injury. “Religious Difference in a Secular Age” (2016) examined Copts and Bahais in Egypt and argued that the modern secular state does not stand above religion but regulates it, and in doing so can sharpen the divide between majority and minorities. Critics asked whether her approach left room for judging coercion; Mahmood answered that understanding had to precede judgement.

生平与背景

Saba Mahmood was born on 3 February 1962 in Quetta, Pakistan, and moved to the United States to study. She first studied architecture and urban planning at the University of Washington in Seattle and then took a doctorate in anthropology at Stanford University in 1998. From 1995 to 1997 she did fieldwork with the women’s mosque movement in Cairo. In 2004 she joined the University of California, Berkeley, where she became professor of anthropology and was also active in critical theory. With Talal Asad, Wendy Brown and Judith Butler she published “Is Critique Secular?” (2009), and she co-directed a research project on the politics of religious freedom. She died of pancreatic cancer in Berkeley on 10 March 2018, aged 56.

其他主要作品

• Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (2005)
• Religious Reason and Secular Affect: An Incommensurable Divide? (in Is Critique Secular?, 2009)
• Politics of Religious Freedom (co-editor, 2015)
• Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report (2016)