Instead of continuing to research, describe Islamic cultures, some European anthropologists appear resolved to join, promote (their) metaphysical misconceptions
by Dr. Piyush Mathur
At a time when repressive, violent forms of authoritarianism have become particularly good at feasting upon various metaphysical forms of zealotry, a group of European cultural anthropologists have, somewhat disturbingly, put forward a proclamation of departure from (what they consider to be) ‘secular’ approaches to research. This is not some standalone, official proclamation issued by some anthropological foundation; it is rather an aspiration-cum-agenda that comes integrated into a report on a workshop that these academics had organized at the Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul through September 7-8, 2023. Titled ‘Rethinking anthropology in light of ‘“Muslim Worlds”: Ephemerality, language and relations in field encounters with transcendence’, this 5-page report is jointly authored by Lili Di Puppo, Fabio Vicini, and Stefan Williamson Fa; it showed up on January 3, 2024 on Maydan Islamic Thought, a website hosted by the AbuSulayman Center for Global Islamic Studies at George Mason University of the United States.
While some of the report’s details are discussed further below, one of its telling statements includes the notion that anthropology should be cared for by being ‘liberated from its secular conditioning’. Overall, the report lays out a retrograde approach to anthropology that its writers believe is some kind of a frontier in research. Consider how they describe the prompt for the workshop that they are reporting:
Departing from the long-held anthropological approach in which experiences of transcendence have been studied from the perspective of belief, we invited the workshop participants to reflect instead on the forms of knowledge disclosed by their encounters with transcendence, God, and non-immediately-perceptible realities in the field. [Original italics]
The ‘workshop participants’ mentioned in the excerpt are the anthropologists who had been invited to the workshop. Ordinarily, as the excerpt implies, these anthropologists would have been expected to approach the so-called ‘religious’ experiences of members of a local community being studied by them as that community’s ‘beliefs’; for this workshop, though, they had been asked to narrate and ponder over their own ‘encounters’ with allegedly metaphysical/religious phenomena within their ethnographic survey fields. What that implies—whether these writers realize it or not—is that these participants had been pre-screened for the workshop based upon the criterion that they had had such encounters: which is yet another way to say that fancies like ‘transcendence’, ‘God’, and ‘Divine,’ at some level, would have already been fact to them (and, of course, to the workshop organizers themselves).
As for the reference to those ‘non-immediately perceptible realities in the field’, they could, realistically, run the gamut from anything to anything—having to do with the anthropologist’s poor understanding of the cultural context to his being new to the exact scene of his survey to his lack of training in disciplines/instruments required to make sense of a given phenomenon. A dog sneaking up on him from behind won’t be immediately perceptible, either; for other things, he might need a specialized laboratory and a set of skills that he might not have as a cultural anthropologist.
Why should one have to case out Muslims for fanciful anthropology?
One question that should be raised upfront is why these anthropologists must relate these types of encounters from their survey regions, per se. If (religious) ‘transcendence’, ‘God’, and ‘Divine’ are some type of facts (not beliefs, leave aside fancies) to them, then why should they not be asked to relate their encounters with them from anywhere really? Don’t the spiritually deluded also claim that ‘God’ made everything and is everywhere?
The only real answer one could think of to that question is that, on one level, these anthropologists are predisposed to framing Muslim communities, specifically, as viable candidates (qua anthropological subjects) for venting a class of fanciful fabrications across the academic fora. There is no direct component in this anthropological agenda for recording encounters with Santa Clause or ‘God’ or ‘Lucifer’ in Scandinavia or New York City (or Ganesh, Shiva, Lakshmi, Athena in any geographies one might think of). In reality, this agenda’s starting point is a world of glorified, manipulative fancies that most earthlings (not just Muslims) have been handed down, by different names, through their ancestors who could not have known better or were coerced and/or did not mind being coercive themselves—and it should not matter to the enlightened of today whether these fancies function as the foundational notions of any of the three religions or multifarious other worshipping traditions.
On another level, within the scope of this neo-religious agenda, targeted geographies exhibiting a local culture have been traded in favour of localities exhibiting lifestyle impressions and attitudes claimed to reflect the priorities of a religion, Islam. Within this framework, a community would be a fit ‘native’ subject for cultural anthropology so long as it is Muslim—no matter whether it exists in Malaysia, India, China, Saudi Arabia, Turkiye, or Nigeria (and maybe even New York City). But as if to validate itself as a research programme within cultural anthropology (conventionally entrusted to produce reports on specific cultures—typically in a regional sense—and share them at and through far away centres of global learning), this agenda chooses to overlook the general presence of these primitive fabrications (whereby allowing it to specify the Muslims worldwide dubiously, as a class, as suitable anthropological subjects).
Moreover, this agenda aims either to re-theorize the notion of ‘study’ itself or to get rid of it entirely in favour of something amorphous enough to include a celebratory, convivial embrace of precisely those metaphysical fabrications and their derivates that these anthropologists would like us to believe are unique to Islam. As for any centres of global learning—through which anthropology is supposed to make any impact in the world of knowledge—nobody should expect them anyway to indoctrinate people into believing in the misleading fictions of ‘transcendence’, ‘God’, and ‘Divine’ as if they were some cornerstones of knowledge.
The point is that this agenda inheres in a lot of disciplinary contortion in order to sustain and promote spiritual fabrications in the name of researching cultures influenced by a particular religion.
Cultural anthropology is under threat—but this neo-religious agenda is poor marketing, too.
The foregoing is not necessarily a criticism (leave aside a dismissal) of particular insights from individual research efforts that have been looped into the articulation of this agenda in the workshop report: It is rather the agenda itself, on its own level, that should be rejected. For, while cultural anthropology has had a lot of desperate repurposing to do in the wake of the 1990s (post-Euro-colonial) globalization, this agenda seems like another level of that repurposing for a discipline conceived and developed through the crucible of European colonization of the globe (involving the racist manufacture of global 'White' supremacy)—whose antecedents are frequently traceable to the early days of Euro-Christians’ global exploration, just the same. Here we also have to keep in mind that cultural anthropology, like many other humanistic disciplines, faces a significant threat anyway in our advancing years of the Information Age.
Sitting in New York City or Paraguay, would you study a book (or an academic article) on some region of Tibet or see several YouTube/Facebook/X videos in 360 degrees (including in real time) from that region—and form your own opinion on it to satisfy your curiosity? How deep do you have to know a region or a culture anyway before you could make it meaningful to yourself, for your own purposes, in your own heart? At a time when global travel and in-depth media products and processes abound, cultural anthropology, specifically, faces a particular threat—say, as a discipline mandated to report accurately, via critical thinking and well-informed analysis, on cultures (near or far) for the benefit of anybody who might be interested in them but may not otherwise be able to observe them. That fundamental purpose (and associated curiosity) on the part of cultural anthropology is no longer marketable enough as an academic discipline, given that an average person can easily access far flung cultures of the world as well as their ordinary or not-so-ordinary natives themselves; as for specialized agencies somehow interested in any cultures, they rely on their informants stationed abroad and/or use real-time surveillance systems to learn about them (and it is not as if academic cultural anthropologists are extinct yet anyway).
As for those manipulative metaphysical fancies—of ‘transcendence’, ‘God’, and ‘Divine’—they have all the market in the world (and they are a remarkably successful marketing techniques themselves for those interested in selling all sorts of other things). But to live out, imbibe those fancies for real, humans already have access to countless specialized hubs (mosques, temples, churches, allegedly ‘sacred’ spaces), aside from their own families and a vast array of power-packed spaces that are often half-baked political rings. What hope for neo-religious anthropology, then, to outcompete all those well-established hubs of fundamentally fictitious notions?
An alleged miraculous fish—and the agenda’s sleights of hand!
The agenda that these European anthropologists are pushing would have to contend with the above general backdrop; were it to gain popularity, it is likelier to make cultural anthropology even less dependable, informative, relevant, and marketable as a field of inquiry than it has already been becoming. Embracing the fanciful while passing off the unexplained/unexplainable as mystical is at the heart of this deeply muddled, delusional agenda: It foregrounds those ‘encounters’ that emanate from one Muslim community or another—basically as knee-jerk reactions by the native subjects to peculiar occurrences within the ethnographic field.
One example cited in the report involves the anthropologist Ashraf Hoque’s ‘ethnographic story of his family friend, and avid fisher, Ahmet’s many failed attempts to capture a pike fish in a family pond in Sylhet, Bangladesh.’ The upshot of that ‘story’ is that Ahmet, having failed to catch that particular fish over the course of the past several years, was ‘unexpectedly’ able to catch it on the day ‘of a commemorative feast hosted for Hoque’s mother who had recently passed away in the UK.’
The report goes on to point out that the gathered mourners ‘agreed that the timing of the fish’s capture was a miracle in honor of’ the anthropologist’s dead mother, ‘and that the fish radiated nur, the divine light, its plenitude coming from the invisible, al-ghayb.’ Notably, the ‘story’ that was supposed to show (per the preceding parts of the report) the anthropologist’s own encounters with the allegedly divine fizzles out into restricting that burden to the shoulders of the native study subjects. This restriction is reinforced in this following sentence, marked by its passive voice: ‘The fish that nourished the mourners was perceived as a miracle; a miracle inscribed in the daily life of a Bangladeshi village.’
Here, we must remember that while previously it was the timing of this catch that was claimed to be miraculous, that distinction has now been transferred over to the fish itself—which, of course, could not have aimed to nourish anybody: That hapless creature simply lost its life to a game of chance. And as for its ‘divine light’, it won’t be any different from any healthy fish of that species—and it would have had nothing to do with anything divine anyway. Alas, that type of clarity won’t be in the cards for the drafters of this anthropological agenda—who must persist with that fish’s status as a miracle.
Check out their next gem:
The miraculous fish provides a vivid illustration of the ephemerality and unexpectedness of experiences of transcendence, demonstrating how easily such experiences escape the researcher’s control.
Let me repeat myself: There was nothing ‘miraculous’ about that fish, to begin with. As for the fact that Ahmet was able to catch it on a day of mourning (and associated feast) for the anthropologist’s mother who had passed away in the UK, sure it was an off chance that could be claimed to be an illustration ‘of the ephemerality and unexpectedness of experiences’—but one must stop right there, for the sake of sanity, and not extend that sentence to include ‘of transcendence’.
Excuse me, but anthropologists were not expected to control anything among their survey subjects anyway!
In reality, one goes through such occurrences daily in relation to phenomena that might not be important enough to even be noticed; and as for whether that occurrence demonstrates that ‘such experiences escape the researcher’s control’, it is baffling that these writers would have assumed at all that researchers (at least in anthropology) were meant to or are supposed to ‘control’ anything within an ethnographic observational field itself! Contingent upon that false assumption about (anthropological) research is their next assumption: that experiences from an ethnographic field have to be ‘transported’ to an academic environment (which they misleadingly characterize as ‘secular’).
In point of fact, there is neither the need for nor the possibility of transporting, per se, an experience that a researcher might have had anywhere: One can only convey, relate (as honestly as possible) what one might have experienced—even if as an observer whose perception (and even personality and character) unexpectedly transformed at the field, thanks to the novel situation on the ground (and the often unacknowledged factor of pressure from one’s social ‘peers’ at the field: the natives on whom one would have had to depend for one’s survival there).
That one cannot transport an experience to others is not exclusive to anthropology, of course. By definition, an experience is not itself an observation or a representation (though one experiences, neurologically and otherwise, observations as well as representations, just the same, while performing, producing or interacting with them). What a cultural anthropologist can be expected to do is something the reverse of what these writer surmise: Based upon one’s field research, one may compose an account that may enable people coming across it to transport themselves mentally back to the time and site of the account’s origin.
An anthropologist can use the best of literary techniques to write an account that would enable its audience to get transported to the ethnographical site through it—or she could use these literary techniques in combination with Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, and Artificial Intelligence systems of today to compose, prepare that account. Leave that aside, not everybody wants to be mentally transported to an ethnographic field, per se, via a written anthropological account about it—and perhaps those who do have already been watching 360-degree videos capturing those areas! For contemporary academics to pretend that these alternative channels to real-time knowledges about human societies and regions do not exist would be to continue to sleep in the fool’s den.
Cultural anthropologists, in particular, stand to aggravate their situation if they think that, while ignoring those technological advances’ impact on the contemporary commoners’ grasp of far off cultures, they might serve the cause of knowledge better by treading into the mystical instead of focusing on generating more accurate accounts (even if by restricting themselves to the conventional mode of writing). The point is that cultural anthropology deserves to use some type of an overhaul if it wishes to retain or regain its currency—but embrace of metaphysical falsities, which these writers have appeared to do somewhat effortlessly, should not be part of that overhaul. (And it also appears that these writers mistake communication for ‘transportation’.)
An alleged failure of ‘transporting’ an anthropological experience need not be made to rest upon the binary between the religious and the secular.
Communicating, imparting one’s personal experiences to an audience located at a distant context—or transporting people mentally from the context of one’s communication of a personal experience back to that of its context of occurrence—has no special connection to whether academia is ‘secular’ or not. Misconceptions about the foregoing, though, show up variously in the workshop report.
In elaborating upon the challenges of making sense of their field experiences to themselves (and for the purpose of articulating them to their distant academic audience further down the line), the report’s writers refer to ‘gaps in understanding…related to moments of uncertainty experienced in the field’—but they immediately gets down to exploiting those gaps to reinforce a presumed polarity between the religious and the secular (except, now, within the internal context of research communication). Check this out:
[A]n anthropologist would not end an academic text with the words Allahu’alam, “Allah knows best,” a phrase commonly used to emphasize the limits of human knowledge in the Islamic scholarly tradition, as this would undermine the confident posture that is demanded of her.
Alas, the presumption behind the saying ‘Allah knows best’ retains a naturalized claim to certainty that there is an entity called ‘Allah’ that also happens to know ‘best’. As it happens, there is no evidence to support the first component of that uncompromising presumption (and there is all the evidence to point to the contrary)—and thus it cannot support the second component, no matter how confidently one parrots that saying. What goes for the word ‘Allah’ of course goes for all such references to presumably divine entities; meanwhile, it is expected of all researchers, not only anthropologists, to admit to what they do not understand or could not access—and it is a given for all researchers that existing findings remain open to challenges, improvement, and dismissal. Outside academia, people say ‘Who knows?’ all the time anyway—an expression not restricted to English, either—and when they say that (or something similar), they at least refrain from pinning the possession of best knowledge on to a figment of their ancestors’ imagination.
Nor is it the case, as the report suggests—citing another anthropologist—that ‘humble sincerity’ is unique to religious (as in Islamic) cultures, and that that predisposition runs counter to ‘the confident and self-reliant attitude to the truth that is often demanded of the anthropologist.’ The real problem is that humans across authoritarian cultures—including those of irreligious ones, such as that of North Korea—are groomed early on to not question authority, to abide closely by dominant forms of perception, and to manipulate facts (even to themselves) so that they fit into the given framework (instead of pursuing the facts toward a truth that might challenge, overthrow that framework). The only difference is this: While the religious or traditional cultures-of-worship coerce communities toward the fabrications of ‘God’, ‘Allah’ and allegedly superhuman deities—even as these cultures’ own powerful mortals use them to keep their own authority (often by raising humbly sincere subjects), irreligious authoritarian cultures coerce, indoctrinate their natives to remain humbly sincere predominantly toward their mortal overlords!
Under those circumstances, ‘humble sincerity’ is constantly enforced—by all authoritarian cultures (who, as such, do not send out their home-employed anthropologists to study foreign, individualistic cultures of freedom, openness, and democracy for any ethnographic fact-finding about them anyway). Other than that, there is nothing to indicate that the religious, when somehow finding themselves in cultures of foreign polities, won’t exhibit a ‘confident and self-reliant attitude to the truth’—for how else can one explain the history of global evangelism? In fact, there have been plenty of religious people lately who, in their adoptive foreign lands where religion does not dominate, have exhibited tremendous conviction in their beliefs; some of them have been called radicals or fanatics there. In some ways, they might be the unofficial ‘anthropologists’ (I might call them retro-religious anthropologists) sent from bona fide religious or worshipping cultures into the cultures of freedom—given that they do tend to explain the latter, frequently with the grating frankness of an outsider, to their own religious-cultural audience (who, in turn, might be located only in their adoptive countries).
Instead of trapping ourselves inside the notion of ‘humble sincerity’, I suggest that we focus instead on finding out which cultures encourage the keenest, most patient, and dedicated listeners—to all sorts of things, but especially to novel, evidentiary ideas and reasonable ways of doing things.
The rest of the report of course has other similar assumptive attributions of uniqueness—say, to Islamic cultures. For instance, the report refers to Jean-Paul Baldacchino’s (2019) ‘remark on kneeling as…an unusual posture for the secular researcher’—apparently neglecting the fact that, religion or not, humans kneel for all sorts of reasons in everyday life: be it as a plumber or as sexual partners or while cleaning, painting a home (and so on); moreover, it is not as if kneeling is terribly routine even for the religious (including the Muslim)—who spend most of their day sleeping, standing, walking, and sitting. What is unusual for an irreligious or realistic person is to kneel in deference to an obvious falsehood, no matter how important that falsehood might be for those who were denied fact and reality from their very birth.
An academic workshop—or a groundless therapy session?
There are always gaps between human experiences and their representations (via one type of expression or another)—which is why representatives and communicators need years of training, experience on top of some natural talent to perform in their roles as such. Even so, full justice can never be done to the problem of imparting an experience, no matter what kind, to another person: The extent and character of difficulty in trying to do any justice to it would always rest upon a varying range of factors.
Ergo, one can barely think of a time when cultural anthropologists did not fret over the gulf between the field and academia, and about how best to present their observations within the latter’s context. Inasmuch as the report writers have turned that ancient intellectual conundrum into a problem owed to an assumed binary between a ‘secular’ academia and a ‘religious’ ethnographic field, they point up their own predilections rather than the status, needs of academia or anthropology. Using that conundrum as the basis for a therapy session—as their workshop would have been like, given its representation in their report—is unlikely to melt the hearts of those who care about reality.
Academia is supposed to put a premium on verifiable evidence based upon credible analysis and argumentation: If an experience took place within the realm of verifiable evidence, then academia would have to accommodate it (even if a very specific evidence for a particular incident is not available). But the pseudo-phenomena that these anthropologists are trying to push on to academia do not work out even in theory (in that they come enmeshed into flawed logic, unexamined notions, contradictions, and whatnot that academia has been shedding for a long time). If what academia has been shedding historically has been sheltered in places of worship by those who worship what does not even exist—and if that whole thing is put on the side of what is called ‘religion’—then it is not the fault of academia (whose characterization as ‘secular’ is merely a face-saver promoted by the religious and their power brokers).
Coming back into the religious and/or spiritually deluded cultures, here is one recent incident (February 2024) whereby ‘humble sincerity’ was enforced in Pakistan—when a woman had to issue this statement after the fact: ‘I had no intention of disrespecting the Quran, but I apologise for any offence caused.’ Here is another (February 2024), from India, where a teacher was suspended from her job on the grounds that she had disrespected Saraswati, the Indian deity of education/wisdom (yeah, get that). And here is yet another (February 2024), from Kenya, where a woman was stoned to death on the suspicion of being a witch: which may not sound too religious to the religious of today (dig up some history, though)—but as far as all these three ladies (and billions of other people) are concerned, ‘humble sincerity’ might seem like an attractive alternative indeed.
If one followed the global news with care, one would notice that reports of physical attacks by the metaphysically deluded and the religious have been popping up with enormous frequency for a long time now. When the metaphysically deluded and the religious are not being physically violent, they overwhelmingly obscure and obstruct a human’s path to fact anyway through systemic silences, familial enforcement of conformity, inherited lies, and muddle. In this context, it is important to note that there are blithe reference to colonialism in this workshop report—and somehow anti-colonialism is assumed to be a natural ally of religion (Islam specifically). Without getting into the details of pre-European/Western/Christian phases of imperialism/colonization (and even slavery), let me just suggest to the natives (and expatriates) of contemporary post-colonial cultures to ponder over this recent public query that Professor Leo Igwe, a pre-eminent African philosopher, posted on his Facebook wall on January 28, 2024: ‘If Africa's best minds spend most of their time, energy and life explaining Africa to the West, who will change it?’
Concluding remarks
In the case of the given agenda, though, anthropologists (many of whom would be Muslim expatriates) are being urged to go even beyond ‘explaining’, let’s say, postcolonial Muslims cultures (basically) to the West: They are being encouraged to join in and promote the fanciful and the misleading that permeates those cultures (even though, as I have repeatedly stressed, it is also found, in different forms, across all sorts of non-Muslim cultures). Such an approach stands to reinforce and perpetuate the delusions of the deluded, be they Muslims or not.
Other than that, there are many good things that can result (and have resulted) from fundamental misconceptions (including the religions and groundless fancies) across the history of global cultures—and anthropologists should be allowed and even encouraged to explore, describe those things as well as the misconceptions that may have led to them. However, encouraging those misconceptions, per se, and participating in them for anything other than research would be to destroy what is left of the humanistic disciplines of academia.
And as for the alleged experiences of ‘transcendence’ or ‘God’, it is high time that cultural anthropologists heeded advances in neuroscience and psychology—in as much as even out-of-body experiences (OBEs) have been ‘localized in the temporo-parietal junction (TPJ) of the brain.’
Dr. Piyush Mathur is a Research Scholar at Ronin Institute, and the author of Technological forms and ecological communication: A theoretical heuristic (Lexington Books, 2017). Check out his list of informative videos on the Israel-Palestine history by clicking here. You may post your comments on this article using the form at the bottom; if you wish to send your inputs to Thoughtfox or contact Dr. Mathur, click here.
References
Global TV Kenya (February 26, 2024) ‘Drama in Marsabit county as elderly woman is stoned to death after being a suspected witch’ (Downloaded from the following URL on February 26, 2024: https://fb.watch/qsh-zqSmv-/)
Igwe, Leo (January 28, 2024) ‘If Africa’s best minds…’ [Status update]. Facebook. (Downloaded from the following URL on February 28, 2024: https://www.facebook.com/leo.igwe/posts/pfbid0294qmErNBaBFCNg3vssKcSvKTeqg9KCUascPTqkBiUvcHz2KQrNRWLCAnSKu847u4l)
Lili di Puppo, Fabio Vicini, and Stefan Williamson Fa (January 3, 2024) “Rethinking anthropology in light of ‘Muslim worlds’: Ephemerality, language and relations in field encounters with transcendence” (Downloaded from the following URL on February 26, 2024: https://themaydan.com/2024/01/rethinking-anthropology-in-light-of-muslim-worlds-1st-easa-report/) (pdf)
Press Trust of India (February 24, 2024) “Rajasthan Teacher Suspended For 'Disrespecting' Goddess Saraswati” (Downloaded from the following URL on February 26, 2024: https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/rajasthan-teacher-suspended-for-disrespecting-goddess-saraswati-5120665)
Romand, Raymond & Günter Ahret (2023) ‘Neuro-functional modeling of near-death experiences in contexts of altered states of consciousness’ Frontiers in Psychology (Downloaded from the following URL on February 26, 2024: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.846159/full )
Tribune (February 26, 2024) “‘Lahore…another drama’: Pakistan woman mobbed by crowd after they mistake Arabic writing on her dress for Quran verses” (Downloaded from the following URL on February 26, 2024: https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/trending/lahore%E2%80%A6another-drama-%C2%A0pakistan-woman-mobbed-by-crowd-after-they-mistake-arabic-writing-on-her-dress-for-quran-verses-594747)