ANTHROPOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE AND SHARIA
The symbolic and cognitive approaches are the two major anthropological frameworks for the description and analysis of micro details of human behavior and cultural creativity. Clifford Geertz (1973), a pioneer of symbolic anthropology, argued that culture is a public system of symbols and that the main task of anthropologists is to provide a “thick description” or intuitive interpretation of the meanings of symbolic action.
In his perspective, symbols are vehicles for conceptions that are outside the boundaries of individuals and located in the “intersubjective world of understandings into which all individuals are born” (92). Symbolic action is “ideational” only in the sense that the meanings of symbols are concepts, but not in any way requiring individual minds that internalize or reproduce them. In fact, Geertz (10–13) severely criticized the ideas of Ward Goodenough and Stephen Tyler, two cognitive anthropologists of the time, claiming that the cognitive perspective confuses the knowledge of how to perform symbolic acts with their actual performance, and further that it commits a “cognitive fallacy” in positing that culture consists of formally analyzable mental phenomena. Moreover, he questioned cognitive anthropological attempts at representing what local people think, suggesting that inferred knowledge structures are only “clever simulations” that are substantively different from what people actually think (11). These charges against cognitive anthropology, regardless of their inaccuracy, have had a lasting impact.Cognitive anthropologists strive to understand patterns of behavior through inferring mental representations, or knowledge structures, such as taxonomies, scripts, models, schemas, and theories, and psychological processes from social action and discourse. In the cognitive perspective, knowledge structures and cultural logic are public and private, distributed in society and internalized in individual minds.
Rather than emphasizing intuitive interpretations that aim to render human behavior intelligible, cognitive anthropologists have stressed rigorous data collection and analysis aiming at explanations of behavioral regularities. There has been a strong awareness among cognitive anthropologists that their representations of human thought are just that—representations—and not reflections of actual thought. Roy D’Andrade (1995, 157–58), a prominent cognitive anthropologist, notes that there is “no effective alternative” to cognitive and symbolic anthropologists inferring cultural models from observable forms of behavior, since mental representations do not appear as physical entities in the world. In addition to relying on observable facts, some cognitive anthropologists try to refine their postulated models through eliciting responses about them from local interlocutors and testing them in practice. Cognitive anthropologists have, in turn, criticized symbolic anthropologists for lacking a theory of the mind, inaccurate descriptions of symbolism, and proposing a nonpsychological anthropology while presupposing psychological claims in “describing cultural realities which to a certain extent are acquired, memorized, modified, represented and misrepresented by the actors themselves” (Boyer 1993, 12). Nevertheless, it was the symbolic anthropologists’ criticism of the cognitive subdiscipline that stuck and had staying power. Cognitive anthropology became marginalized from the 1980s onward, as symbolic anthropology became a core paradigm, flawed though it may be, of cultural anthropologists—including those studying Islam.Several cultural anthropologists have argued for a convergence of symbolic and cognitive approaches in order to produce a more powerful social science.5 Benjamin Colby, James Fernandez, and David Kronenberg (1981), pointing out the strengths and weaknesses of each of these subdisciplines, tried to project the way forward for a substantive merging of them, thereby forming a more rigorous and contextual approach.
In their afterword to two special issues of the American Ethnologist on symbolism and cognition, Janet Dougherty and Fernandez (1982, 820) noted that “no total synthesis” emerged in any of the papers, but that there was a “convergence” in the sense of several “emergent foci of inquiry.” My detailed ethnographic study (Daniels 2009) of Islamic diversity in Java went a long way toward synthesizing these approaches. Nevertheless, there is little interest in contemporary anthropology for incorporating the strengths of the cognitive perspective into social theory. Mainstream cultural anthropology has combined the symbolic or interpretative approach with the new focus on practice and the ambiguities of power. Anthropologists of Islam, including those working on Islam in Malaysia, have followed this post-structuralist trend in anthropology.6There are three major negative repercussions of integrating a defective symbolic/interpretative approach with post-structuralist foci of inquiry in studies of Islam in Malaysia and beyond. First, many researchers continue to describe Islamic symbols and concepts as if they were the same as signs such as words or lexical items with particular referents. For instance, some researchers conflate the signs and symbols of Islamic revival in Malaysian society. While the words tudung (headscarf), kopiah (skullcap), and janggut (beard) are linguistic signs or signifiers with particular meanings, these articles of clothing and forms of bodily appearance are symbols that evoke potentially unlimited meanings. Similarly, the word flag has a definite dictionary meaning, but the familiar American red, white, and blue flag is a symbol that evokes many, and at times contradictory, meanings. The popular, Geertzian-style approach treats symbols as if they were linguistic signs, eliding the polysemy or multiple meanings of symbols in favor of singular, conventional meanings. Likewise, many researchers describe performance of rituals and complex religious concepts as if they were linguistic signs or icons with a definite referent.
Second, intuitive interpretations researchers make based on these faulty descriptions of symbols and concepts tend to overestimate consensus and downplay variation. Thus, Malays are assumed to share meanings for headscarves, skullcaps, beards, and acts of worship that are associated with Malay or Muslim identity. Malays also are interpreted to share a conceptual framework that conceives of Islamic narratives, greetings, and practices as icons. However, meanings of these symbols and Islamic conceptual frameworks are diverse and vary across society and even over the course of the life of an individual, as they become part of different social networks and change in their subjectivities. In addition, other levels of hermeneutic interpretations built on these bases are unreliable, such as Hoffstaedter’s intuitive spin that elite Malays are committing “politicide” on lower-class Malays by promoting exclusionary Malay and Muslim identities (2011, 219).7
Third, many researchers, striving to situate their studies within the macro perspective or broader sociopolitical processes and power relations, produce interpretations based on linking these defective descriptions of symbolic meanings, concepts, and/or embodied practices to particular projects or organized social usage of knowledge. Such presumed linkages are also misleading or, even worse, mistaken. One common faux pas in this regard is the assumption that the state’s projects are more dominant or powerful than the data indicate. For instance, Fischer (2008), disregarding his own ethnographic reporting that dakwah groups’ discourses are influential among many of his interlocutors, concludes that the Malaysian state’s “nationalization of Islam” and control of halal certification exert control over the everyday lives of Malay Muslims, who are depicted as “shopping for the state.” A related error is to tacitly or explicitly treat one project, usually the state’s, as the only project. This often stems directly from the presumption of a shared public code and totalizing state hegemony.
For instance, Peletz (2002, 278) argued, “the Islamic courts in Malaysia, and local institutions of Islam as a whole, have encouraged a certain type of modernity and civil society that is characteristically Asian and distinctively Malaysian.” Moreover, he argues that the prevalence of sulh (M. suluh; mediation) and nusyuz (disobedience) in sharia courts is “an entailment of bureaucratic rationality” within the Malaysian state’s modernity project (Peletz 2013, 624). My study demonstrates that many of the government religious scholars, officials, and civil servants operate with ideas and visions that contrast with those of Malay political elites. The UMNO political leaders’ approach to sharia and modernity is one of several projects that, even if they are not analyzed fully in any particular study, should at least be acknowledged. Furthermore, analysis of the dynamic interplay between these various projects, under the auspices of state and non-state actors, is vital to understanding broader sociopolitical processes at work in Malaysia.I strive to resolve these problems by adopting a revised anthropology of knowledge approach that incorporates the intuitive, contextual-based, and translation-oriented strengths of the symbolic/interpretative perspective, and connecting it with social theories of power. Within an anthropology of knowledge, “we envision human agents with the cognitive capacities and predispositions that constitute the common architecture of the mind. Using these abilities, actors construct mental models from experience. These models in turn facilitate and are potentially modified in future activities. The human cognitive architecture simultaneously constrains and provides the potential for knowledge representation. Yet specific representational structures are derived from and applied in the everyday contexts of human behavior” (Keller and Keller 1996, 171). From this theoretical perspective, I consider symbols evocative rather than semiotic (Sperber 1974; Lehman 1997).
Rather than signifying specific meanings, like the word headscarf, symbolical materials—flags, headscarves, beards, ritual objects and actions—trigger associations that remind people of other concepts. Lehman (1997) distinguishes two broad kinds of symbols: ones that “stand for” something specific, thereby holding conventional meaning, through evoking many encyclopedic lines of association, and ones that do not “stand for” any particular referent at all or hold conventional meaning, although some of the wide variety of referents evoked may share some features. This helps differentiate between arbitrary linguistic signs and open-ended symbols with conventional meanings based on the distinct ways they are associated with referents. Likewise, instead of reducing concepts to signs and icons, I will seek to discern and represent various forms of cultural knowledge associated and interconnected with relevant concepts. Complex religious concepts often constitute or are embedded within culturally particular theories of a domain (Keller and Lehman 1991). In this study of sharia in Malaysia, I attempt to infer and explicate cultural models from written and spoken discourse.Such a description and analysis of symbolical and conceptual representations informs interpretations about the distribution and flow of knowledge in society. Attention to micro-descriptive details of discourse collected across many segments of society allows interpretation of the variation and social placement of ideas about sharia—those in favor and opposed to varying degrees to the implementation of sharia family and criminal laws. Further interpretations can be made about the interplay between social actors, socially distributed cultural models, and sociopolitical contexts. Subsequently, these interpretations facilitate movement to even broader levels of analysis, including the ways these forms of knowledge articulate with structures of power and power relations, drawing on some of Antonio Gramsci’s and Michel Foucault’s ideas about power. Here, I attempt to describe and evaluate the social struggles for influence and hegemony over whose ideas about, and projects pertaining to, sharia and interconnected issues will hold sway. The interpretation that certain discourses of sharia may hold greater or lesser influence informs more extensive interpretations about agency and subject formation, sociopolitical dynamics, and the interplay of projects. Thus, haphazard intuitive interpretations are avoided by aiming to situate each level of interpretation on sound description and analysis.
Finally, I situate my treatment of “discourse” and “practice” within this revised anthropology of knowledge. Foucault and Bourdieu, two influential social theorists, have proposed overly broad conceptions of “discourse” and “practice.” In Foucault’s theory, “discourses” are frameworks that organize and produce talk, writing, thought, understanding, and conduct. They define and construct ways for talking and thinking about topics, such as sharia, and influence “how ideas are put into practice and used to regulate the conduct of others” (Hall 2001, 72). Similarly, in Bourdieu’s theory of practice, he uses habitus to refer to “predispositions that produce practices and representations conditioned by the structures from which they emerge” (Ahearn 2012, 23). Foucault (1972) collapses talk, thought, and understanding into “discourses,” and Bourdieu (1977) does the same with practice and thought in habitus. They thereby suggest overly broad and blunt tools of social analysis, when sharper and finer ones are needed. I use the term discourse to refer to “all the varieties of talk and text,” including the “invitations and clues, the silences, [and] the inferences that the literal content of a text or an utterance invites” (Hill 2008, 32–33). From an analysis of spoken and written discourse, I infer diverse and socially distributed cultural models. Likewise, I treat “practice” as observable behaviors, performed in social contexts, that “emerge from the mental, material, and social structures in which they are situated and, in turn, reproduce or lead to transformations of those structures” (Keller and Keller 1996, 16). Rather than collapsing thought into practice, I consider practice, including cultivated techniques of the body, to be embodied with knowledge (Mauss 1973; cf. Asad 1993, 2003). Furthermore, I conceive of knowledge and practice within a dynamic perspective that recognizes that “ideas acquired through prior experiences are at risk as subsequent experiences unfold and practices are at risk in reflected thought” (Keller and Keller 1996, 205). That is, changes in mental representations and knowledge structures can emerge in practices and changes in practices can arise through interpretation and reasoning.