The Powers of Observation: Ideologies and Practices of Paying Attention among rural Malian Muslims in Mande.

Paying Attention;Mali (West Africa);Materiality;Islam (West Africa);African Studies;Social Sciences;Anthropology

Florusbosch, Jolande HenrikeSilverman, Raymond A. ;

University of Michigan

关键词: Paying Attention;    Mali (West Africa);    Materiality;    Islam (West Africa);    African Studies;    Social Sciences;    Anthropology;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/86571/jflorusb_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

This dissertation presents an ethnography of the ways in which an ideology and practices of ;;paying attention” (kolosi in Bamana and Maninka) pervade modes of sociality, knowing, and being among contemporary rural Muslims living in the Mande region of Mali, between Bamako and the Mali-Guinea border.Among the Malians I worked with, the ;;lived world” was understood to be replete with signs—embodied in the minutest details of objects, people, and other beings, as well as social relationships and situations, forms and genres of speech, domestic spaces and geographic features—which might corroborate, modify, negate, or reposition each other in unexpected ways.I trace the contours of an ideology of kolosi in a variety of contexts—from the history embedded in the physical landscape of Mande, to the auto-surveillance entailed in paying attention to one self, and the practices of scrutiny at the basis of the establishment of new social relations, particularly through marriage—that mirror the range of topics that my interlocutors most insistently brought to my own attention.I describe practices and distinctions that variously situated people tried to position or had successfully positioned as no longer worthy of attention, and present case studies of conflicts that illustrate how the tensions and gaps inherent in local politics of knowledge and frames of interpretation open up productive spaces for people to reconsider, contest, and debate what is most worth paying attention to in specific cases.The key contribution of the dissertation is that it not only shows the culturally and historically specific ways of perception and attention that are relevant in people’s social lives, but also establishes that Mande people have constructed an original theory about these issues, in which fluidity, the possibility for mistakes, and the creative construction of new knowledge are central tenets.Secondarily, my research also shows that despite people’s frequent comments about the radical shifts in social relations instituted by Islam (especially in its newer, reform-minded forms), both Islam and perceived ;;traditional” modes of being alike employ and enact an underlying ideal of kolosi.