Making an ethical self

Making an ethical self

Ryan Schram
ANTH 2700: Key debates in anthropology
ryan.schram@sydney.edu.au
Social Sciences Building 410 (A02)
Week of April 28, 2025 (Week 9)

Slides available at https://anthro.rschram.org/2700/2025/9

Main reading: Mahmood (2001); Mahmood (2003)

Other reading: Rudnyckyj (2011); Zigon (2013)

Mic check

• 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.
  • 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.
  • 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).
  • 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).
• 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).

Should a secular, tolerant society regulate religious practice?

In a society where

• every person has the individual right to their own religion, and
• different people belong to different religions, but
• these religions are expressed differently,

should the state impose rules about how, when, where, and how much people and groups can practice their religion?

Use this webmeter to answer the question: Go to https://menti.com and use code 1810 2293, or go to https://www.menti.com/al1xmpkj5x1g.

Liberalism raises more questions than answers

• In choosing yes or no, what are you thinking is the most important part of religion for the religious person?
• What is valuable for you about having freedom of religion? Could you be OK without this guarantee?
• What is the meaning of other people’s sacred things to you?

Religion is the epitome of difference in the 21st century, but religious differences can be easy to misread

• 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.
• 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.

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.

But Aristotle’s works were lost in Europe for a long time.

• Arab scholars translated and interpreted his works from Greek, preserving them after the fall of the Roman Empire.
• Arab colonization of parts of Europe allowed their translations to travel there.
• Europeans receive Aristotle’s idea via Arab philosophers in the 12th century, which corrected many of their mistaken ideas about Greek philosophy.

Contemporary philosophers have reread Aristotle

Scholastics (e.g. Thomas Aquinas) said that Aristotle argued that ethics were part of the laws of nature (that is, ethics are deontological).

• There are objective reasons for why something is morally good or bad, and we can discover these reasons, and thus the natural laws of ethics.
• The Greek term hexis was usually translated as habitus, but which was interpreted in Aristotle’s writings as character.

Deontological ethics is more fully developed by Kant, and for many centuries this was the dominant way to think about all ethical questions at the neglect of Aristotle’s ideas about virtue (see Jaffa [1952] 1979; Corbett 2009).

Recent thinkers have emphasized Aristotle’s ideas about the cultivation of virtue through one’s actions.

• Character is not fixed; it can be learned.
• You are what you repeatedly do; You become a good, virtuous person by performing virtuous acts, which in turn develops a hexis (habitus)—a disposition—toward virtue.
• An ethical philosophy based on this idea of virtue (a virtue ethics) does not require us to assume there are laws of the universe to be found (Foot [1977] 2002; MacIntyre [1981] 2007).

Note: Theologically, Aristotle presents a problem for Christian philosophers since Aristotle locates the ultimate good in the world (the good life, eudaimonia), rather than in God. Aquinas attempts to reconcile Aristotle with Christianity. Whether he succeeds is open to debate (and cannot be addressed in this lecture).

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.

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.
• 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.
  • 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).
• 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

• Aristotle’s term for disposition is hexis, translated as habitus in Latin. One’s health is a hexis. It’s relatively stable in stable environmental conditions, but it is not fixed, intrinsic, or innate.
  • 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).
  • 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.”
• I think Mahmood would also emphasize the role of a teacher of virtue, which is important to Aristotle, but not for Bourdieu. Relationships are constitutive of the actor in a way that they are not for Bourdieu.

A footnote

Aristotlean virtue ethics, particularly as applied by Mahmood, is very similar to Hochschild’s ([1983] 2012) idea of “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. Book your time slot.
• An essay has an 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

Aksorndej, Kornkamol. 2018. “Tolerance Under Stress as ‘Loud’ Mosque Prayers Draw Complaints.” Nation Thailand. October 7, 2018. https://www.nationthailand.com/in-focus/30355992.

Ashraf, Hassan al-. 2011. “Debate Heats over Calls for Banning Mosque Microphones in Morocco.” Al Arabiya English. August 29, 2011. https://www.alarabiya.net/articles/2011%2F08%2F29%2F164551.html.

Corbett, Ross J. 2009. “The Question of Natural Law in Aristotle.” History of Political Thought 30 (2): 229–50. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26224099.

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.

Goh Chok Tong. 2010. “Speech by Senior Minister Goh Chok Tong at the MUIS International Conference on Muslims In Multicultural Societies.” Newsroom. Prime Minister’s Office Singapore. katherine_chen. July 14, 2010. https://www.pmo.gov.sg/Newsroom/speech-mr-goh-chok-tong-senior-minister-muis-international-conference-muslims.

Hochschild, Arlie Russell. (1983) 2012. The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkeley: University of California Press. http://california.degruyter.com/view/title/556320.

Jaffa, Harry V. (1952) 1979. Thomism and Aristotelianism: a study of the commentary by Thomas Aquinas on the Nicomachean ethics. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press. http://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy1510/78021520-b.html.

“List of Dry Communities by U.S. State.” 2025. In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_dry_communities_by_U.S._state&oldid=1283103279.

MacIntyre, Alasdair C. (1981) 2007. After virtue: a study in moral theory. Third edition. Notre Dame IN: University of Notre Dame Press. https://public.ebookcentral.proquest.com/choice/publicfullrecord.aspx?p=4454360.

Mahmood, Saba. 2001. “Rehearsed Spontaneity and the Conventionality of Ritual: Disciplines of Şalat.” American Ethnologist 28 (4): 827–53. https://doi.org/10.1525/ae.2001.28.4.827.

———. 2003. “Ethical Formation and Politics of Individual Autonomy in Contemporary Egypt.” Social Research: An International Quarterly 70 (3): 837–66. https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/article/558592.

Rudnyckyj, Daromir. 2011. “Circulating Tears and Managing Hearts: Governing Through Affect in an Indonesian Steel Factory.” Anthropological Theory 11 (1): 63–87. https://doi.org/10.1177/1463499610395444.

Singh, Santosh, and Apurva Vishwanath. 2025. “Constitution and the Cow: How a 1958 Ruling Shaped the Debate on Slaughter Bans.” The Indian Express (blog). March 21, 2025. https://indianexpress.com/article/long-reads/constitution-cow-1958-ruling-shaped-debate-slaughter-bans-9897657/.

“Sunday Shopping.” 2025. In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sunday_shopping&oldid=1281238858.

Zigon, Jarrett. 2013. “Human Rights as Moral Progress?: A Critique.” Cultural Anthropology 28 (4): 716–36. https://doi.org/10.1111/cuan.12034.