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--- 2700:2025:9 [2025/04/27 18:43] – Ryan Schram (admin)
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   * Mosques call all Muslims to prayer, five times a day, beginning at dawn (around 5 a.m.).
-    * During Friday worship and during Ramadan, everyone in the congregation should hear the prayers recited in the mosque, even if they are outside on the steps or on the sidewalk due to lack of space.
+    * During Friday worship and during Ramadan, **everyone in the congregation should hear the prayers** recited in the mosque, even if they are outside on the steps or on the sidewalk due to lack of space.
-    * It is common to use microphones and a public-announcement system to make the //adhan// (the call to prayer; literally, announcement) and to broadcast prayers during worship.
+    * **It is common to use microphones** and a public-announcement system to make the //adhan// (the call to prayer; literally, announcement) and to broadcast prayers during worship.
-  * But in Morocco, Singapore, Thailand, Australia, and many other pluralistic and multicultural societies, Muslims and their mosques are neighbors with people of different religions.
+  * But in Morocco, Singapore, Thailand, Australia, and many other pluralistic and multicultural societies, Muslims and their mosques are **neighbors with people of different religions**.
     * Singapore’s government asked mosques to point their speakers away from high-rise apartments, or use a radio broadcast for the //adhan// (Goh Chok Tong 2010).
-    * In response to anonymous complaints, a Bangkok mosque voluntarily turned down the volume. Complaints continued but no official regulation was applied (Aksorndej 2018)
+    * In response to anonymous complaints, a Bangkok mosque voluntarily turned down the volume. Complaints continued but no official regulation was applied (Aksorndej 2018).
     * Scholars in Morocco have debated whether amplification of prayers should be banned out of respect for non-Muslims (al-Ashraf 2011).
 ==== Every religion has some kind of public presence ====
-  * Singapore’s government also asked Taoist temples to stop burning joss sticks outdoors because the smoke irritated neighbors (Goh Chok Tong 2010).
+  * Singapore’s government also asked **Taoist temples** to stop burning joss sticks outdoors because the smoke irritated neighbors (Goh Chok Tong 2010).
-  * In the US South, there are many “dry” counties and municipalities where the sale of alcohol is prohibited on Sundays or every day. Arkansas is almost completely dry on Sundays (“List of Dry Communities by U.S. State” 2025).
+  * In the US South, there are many **“dry” counties** and municipalities where the sale of alcohol is prohibited on Sundays or every day. Arkansas is almost completely dry on Sundays (“List of Dry Communities by U.S. State” 2025).
     * Almost all retail business is banned on Sundays in Poland (“Sunday Shopping” 2025).
-  * Several states in India ban the slaughter of cows out of respect for Hindu beliefs, and these laws have been judged not to violate the secular constitution (Singh and Vishwanath 2025).
+  * Several states in India **ban the slaughter of cows** out of respect for Hindu beliefs, and these laws have been judged not to violate the secular constitution (Singh and Vishwanath 2025).
 ===== Should a secular, tolerant society regulate religious practice? =====
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   * Religious differences can be the basis for asserting a distinct group identity.
-    * But we should be careful not to assume that all public expressions of religion are identitarian.
+    * But we should be careful **not to assume** that all public expressions of religion are identitarian.
   * Religious differences are usually old and durable because religions are old, perhaps even thousands of years old.
-    * But we should not assume that people’s public expressions of religious are merely lingering attachments to traditions.
+    * But we **should not assume** that people’s public expressions of religious are merely lingering attachments to traditions.
 ===== Aristotle, theorist of natural law or virtue ethics? =====
-Aristotle talks a lot about what it takes to be a good person and a good citizen. For him, a (normative) theory of civic virtue is a first step in a (normative) theory of politics.
+Aristotle talks a lot about what it takes to be a good person and a good citizen. For him, a (normative) theory of **civic virtue** is a first step in a (normative) theory of politics.
 But Aristotle’s works were lost in Europe for a long time.
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 ===== Bourdieu’s habitus and Aristotle’s habitus =====
-Mahmood (2003) argues that Bourdieu’s concept of the habitus is not adequate for understanding people’s religious practices.
+Mahmood (2003) argues that Bourdieu’s concept of the //habitus// is not adequate for understanding people’s religious practices.
 ==== Bourdieu’s habitus ====
-  * The habitus is a site for translation of abstract social norms or values into a template that an individual can apply to actions in a field.
+  * The //habitus// is a site for translation of abstract social norms or values into a template that an individual can apply to actions in a field.
   * It is the embodiment of rules of a social game, and thus a means by which an actor can accumulate symbolic capital.
-  * Social inequality leads to inequality of access to valued habitus for a given social field.
+  * Social inequality leads to inequality of access to valued //habitus// for a given social field.
     * People who grew up in wealthy families will be better able to behave normally in elite environments, which in turn confirms their supposedly natural talents in the eyes of others.
-    * We trust people based on how they act, but some people have a head start on acquiring the habitus that allows them to “earn” our trust (that is, convert their material advantages into cultural capital, and then convert cultural capital into social capital).
+    * We trust people based on how they act, but some people have a head start on acquiring the //habitus// that allows them to “earn” our trust (that is, convert their material advantages into cultural capital, and then convert cultural capital into social capital).
-  * In that sense, then, the habitus is also a mystique of social structures of inequality. **Because we engage a social field with a matched habitus, we fail to see (we misrecognize) that the game is rigged.**
+  * In that sense, then, the //habitus// is also a mystique of social structures of inequality. **Because we engage a social field with a matched //habitus//, we fail to see (we misrecognize) that the game is rigged.**
 ==== Aristotle’s habitus ====
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     * You can acquire a //hexis// through learning, but you also have to maintain it actively.
   * A virtuous person has a //hexis// of virtue (rather than a fixed personality or character). They have learned to be moderate, and strive for the mean between two extremes, e.g. selfishness and self-denial.
-  * Especially important for Mahmood is the Arab interpretation of hexis as an inner quality one cultivates through exposure to and interaction with positive models or situations that stimulate the inner virtue (Mahmood 2003, 852).
+  * Especially important for Mahmood is the Arab interpretation of //hexis// as an inner quality one cultivates through exposure to and interaction with positive models or situations that stimulate the inner virtue (Mahmood 2003, 852).
     * You are what you repeatedly do; You are virtuous by emulating virtue in others and by repeatedly doing virtuous (moderate) things.
     * For Aristotle, unlike Bourdieu, **the game is not rigged**. Cultivating virtue actually does make the person more wise and discerning of what is ethical, and thus brings the actor closer to realizing a “good life.”
@@ Line 112: / Line 112: @@
 Aristotlean virtue ethics, particularly as applied by Mahmood, is very similar to Hochschild’s ([1983] 2012) idea of [[https://anthro.rschram.org/1002/2024/8.1#feelings_have_rules|“feeling rules”]] (which she derives from Goffman’s work).
+===== A new view of Foucault’s ideas of power and the subject =====
+When you think of Michel Foucault, what’s the first word that pops into your head?
+  * Power?
+  * Power/knowledge?
+  * Discipline? Disciplinary power?
+  * Pastoral power?
+  * Governmentality, neoliberalism…
+Yeah, he’s the //power guy//…. That’s the ticket!
+==== Yes… but… ====
+> Perhaps I’ve insisted too much on the technology of domination and power. I am more and more interested in the interaction between oneself and others, and in the technologies of individual domination, in the mode of action that an individual exercises upon himself by means of the technology of the self. (Foucault [1982] 2000, 225)
+(Note the year, 1982. Foucault died in 1984. He was giving lectures in a College de France course entitled “The courage of the truth” ([1984] 2011) right up until he became too ill to work. 😢)
+In his later years, Foucault said he wanted to write a **“history of the different ways in our culture that humans develop knowledge about themselves”** (Foucault [1982] 2000, 224)
+===== Mahmood’s alternative to the liberal public sphere =====
+This aspect of Foucault’s work is what matters for Mahmood. It is also related to a challenge to a lot of received ideas in Western democracies.
+  * Habermas and the bourgeois culture of the public sphere
+  * Foundational exclusions of the public sphere
+  * The possibility of transgressing the boundary of public and private
+===== Tutorial agenda: Steps to the final essay =====
+==== Writing your final essay ====
+* The rest of this semester is a series of steps to developing your final essay.
+* Your presentation on your essay. [[https://canvas.sydney.edu.au/courses/64258/assignments/593074|Book your time slot]].
+* An essay has an [[:the_quest:building_an_argument|argument for a thesis]]
+  - In this class, you are making a claim about another scholar's claims: it's a "meta" paper
+==== Foucault gives us a "warrant"—let's use it ====
+* Question: Why do women of the mosque movement pray (and behave piously)? They don't "have to." No one is making them do it.
+* Foucault says that ethics is "care of the self"
+  * Apply this warrant to the ethnographic facts on pages 833, 840, and throughout Mahmood's 2001 article on public piety.
+==== What would Mahmood say? ====
+* What would be Mahmood's take on disputes about mosques amplifying or turning down the *adhan*?
 ===== References and further reading =====
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 Foot, Philippa. (1977) 2002. //Virtues and vices and other essays in moral philosophy//. New ed. Oxford: Clarendon.
+Foucault, Michel. (1982) 2000. “Technologies of the Self.” In //Ethics: Essential Works, 1954-84//, edited by Paul Rabinow, translated by Robert Hurley, 1:223–51. London: Penguin Books.
+———. (1984) 2011. //The Courage of the Truth//. Edited by Frédéric Gros, François Ewald, and Alessandro Fontana. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230309104.