Rethinking Moral Agency, Normative Piety, and Everyday Islam in the Context of Healing
My research interests lie at the intersection of medical anthropology, anthropology of religion, and anthropology of ethics and morality. Having done previous research around the questions of self-identification, tradition, (embodied) memory, and healing rituals among African communities in Turkey and Iran, I work on a religious health network in Turkey in my current PhD project, which offers an interpretation of Islamic and prophetic medicine with an epistemological and ontological difference to the biomedical paradigm. I explore the ethical self-cultivation involved in health practices of my interlocutors who subscribe to a holistic understanding of healing which becomes a site to perform moral agency including the domains of therapeutic modalities, physical and spiritual regulations of purity, consumption habits, and lifestyle changes.
Engaging with the recent debates in the anthropology of Islam about normative piety and everyday Islam (Schielke 2010, Schielke & Debevec 2012; Deeb 2015, Fadil and Fernando 2015, Mittermaier 2012; Abenante and Cantini 2014), which are reflective of the problematization of coherence and ambivalence of morally oriented action in virtue ethics and ordinary ethics respectively (Lambek 2010, 2015; Lempert 2013, 2015; Robbins 2007, Das 2007, Laidlaw 2002, Zigon 2009a, 2009b; Mattingly & Throop 2018; Mattingly 2012, 2014, 2017, Birchok 2019), I explore how being both a Muslim and healthy subject denotes an overarching ethical good and how multiple ethical goods are adjusted to one another in my research community. Bringing the ethical self-cultivation into conversation with a phenomenologically informed understanding of agency and narrative identity, I approach the coherence involved in the performance of moral agency not as absolute consistency but as narrative duration, which renders coherent self-narratives possible with ongoing ruptures of and re-habituations to individually internalized moral systems. This approach to moral agency entails then not only compliance with one overarching ethical good and adjustment of multiple ethical goods to one another but also close interaction with the continuous process of becoming a moral subject.
Addressing the broader field of virtue ethic and ordinary ethics in the anthropology of ethics and morality, I look at not where ethics can be located but how moral agency is performed in close relation to narrative re-envisioning coined by Mattingly (2014). I have combined the ethical self-formation in late Foucault (1986, 1988, 1993) and the first-person virtue ethics perspective offered by Mattingly (2012, 2014) to explain the motivations of my interlocutors to form healthy and Muslim selves. Mattingly (2014) focuses her methodological and theoretical attention on “narrative phenomenology” through which she argues that people practice “narrative experiments” in their “moral laboratories” (209). By bringing into dialogue these two approaches, I have tried to counterbalance Mahmood’s (2005) account of the agency of tradition in the pious mosque movement in Cairo, which was inspired by the Foucauldian post-structuralist virtue ethics (“third person virtue ethics”) and formulated by her as an agency which “does not belong to the women themselves but is a product of the historically contingent discursive traditions in which they are located.” (32).
Referring to Deeb’s (2015) argument that we should consider the ethical and everyday are together, we can argue that presenting normative rules of Islam and everyday experiences of Islam as “an either-or approach” could fall short of understanding the practices of different communities with different workings of piety and religiosity. Resorting to Mattingly’s (2014) “moral laboratories” in which people practice their “narrative experiments” which are informed but not always determined by normative teachings to deal with ethical decisions, but differing from her in that a theory of morality is not necessarily situated in the realm of ordinary life but at the intersection of the ordinary and the normative, I aim to show how normative texts and everyday practices interacted, if not reproduced each other, in a constant flow, or to put in Das’ words in a “mutual absorption” (2007, 6-7) in my research community. I argue that the interaction between religion and health in my research community not only shapes ethical self-cultivation and moral agency, but it also requires a critical engagement with the conceptions of science, reason, knowledge, and truth, which inform therapeutic choices and preference of my interlocutors. Thus, I explore how becoming both a Muslim and healthy subject denotes an overarching ethical good and how multiple ethical goods in health practices are adjusted to one another in a constant interaction with moral coherence and ambivalence in my research community as well as how truth claims about health practices informed by religion affects my interlocutors’ understanding of science, reason, and knowledge.
Science Religion and Health 