Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (40 page)

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In this respect my argument diff from that of J ames Faubion, who has also argued for the productive application of Foucault's work on ethics to anthropology. Faubion suggests that Foucault's elaboration of ethics can be usefully mapped onto culturally specific notions of the self-such as the Haagen and Greek conceptions of personhood (2001, 90). In contrast, I am suggesting that there is no single conception of the self that corresponds to the discursive practices of a given culture, but that many different conceptions may exist simultaneously and perhaps in tension with one another, depending upon the particular regimes of truth to which they accede.

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As will become evident to the reader, my arguments share certain aspects of Marcel Mauss

and Marilyn Strathern's work from this tradition of scholarship. With the former, I share an in- terest in how bodily techniques help construct specifi conceptions of personhood (Mauss 1979), and with the latter I share a concern with the role diff rent articulations of interiority and exteri- ority play in securing a particular sense of the self and its relationship to "the social" (Strathern 1988).

scious manifests itself in somatic forms. My understanding of bodily practices resonates with what Pierre Hadot calls "spiritual exercises"-a-t he coined
·
to elaborate a conception of life and ethics endemic to ancient Greek philos..·

ophy (Hadot 2002 ), and that was infl in Foucault's formulation of "technologies of the self' (Foucault 1997c) . Hadot describes the not ion of spiritual exercises as "practices which could be physical, as in dietary regimes, or discursive, as in dialogue and meditation, or intuitive, as in contemplation, but which were all intended to effect a modifi and transformation in the

subject who practiced them" (Hadot 2002,
6).
What is striking about this ap.. proach to the explication of the self is that the
work
bodily practices perform in crafting a subject-rather than the
me
they signify ( Bowen 1 993 ;

Starrett 1995a)-carries the analytical weight. In other words, the "how" of practices is explored rather than their symbolic or hermeneutical value.

Toward the end of the chapter, I will show how such an analysis of bodily practices helps
us
understand the question of politics, particularly the rela.. tionship between social authority and individual freedom. Specifi ally, I will argue that, far fr being inconsequential, differential understandings of per.. formative behavior and ritual observance among contemporary Egyptian Muslims enfold contrasting conceptions of individual and collective free.. dam-c that have radically different implications for the orga.. nization of political life within public and personal domains. My ethnographic account of current debates about the formal requirements of bodily comport.. ment will show that what is at stake in these debates are different imaginaries of personal and collective freedom, presupposing different relations to forms of social authority ( whether enshrined in scripture, national citizenship, or exemplary models). As I will make clear, my argument diff rs fr one made by certain liberal and communitarian philosophers who maintain that diff r.. ent conceptions of the individual depend upon the social milieus that produce and sustain these conceptions. In contrast, my argument is that the mosque movement's activities require a much deeper questioning of the weight ac.. corded to the distinction between the individual and the social within theo..