Saba Mahmood

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Anthropology of religion
Basic concepts Afterlife Animism Bora (Australian) Communitas Comparative religion Divination Divine language Evolutionary origin of religions Fetishism Great Spirit Henotheism Initiation Liminality Magic Mana Monotheism Polytheism Revitalization movement Rite of passage Ritual Sacred language Sacred–profane dichotomy Shamanism Theories about religions Totem Totemism Veneration of the dead
Case studies Magic Coral Gardens and Their Magic Neo-Paganism Dukun Kebatinan Ritual Slametan Revitalization movement Cargo cult Ghost dance Handsome Lake
Related articles The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life Purity and Danger Myth and ritual Archaeology of religion and ritual Poles in mythology
Major theorists Akbar S. Ahmed Talal Asad Joseph Campbell Mary Douglas Émile Durkheim Arnold van Gennep E. E. Evans-Pritchard James Frazer Clifford Geertz Robin Horton Claude Lévi-Strauss Robert Marett Roy Rappaport Saba Mahmood Marshall Sahlins Melford Spiro Stanley Tambiah Victor Turner Edward Burnett Tylor Daniel Martin Varisco Anthony F. C. Wallace
Journals Anthropological Perspectives on Religion Folklore The Hibbert Journal The Journal of Religion Oceania
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Social and cultural anthropology

Saba Mahmood is an associate professor of social cultural anthropology at UC Berkeley. She was awarded the 2013 Axel Springer Berlin Prize Fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin.

Biography

She is the author of Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (2005) in which she theorizes the concept of habitus from a genealogy that begins with Aristotle and extends into the Islamic tradition. Her ethnography explores the ways in which Cairene women following the mosque movement do not fit under a secular-liberal vision of feminist agency and resistance. In the vein of poststructural feminism, she does not presuppose a particular Western "resistance in the face of power" but instead evaluates how these women produce an ethic of piety, and a different formation of agency, through the process of veiling.

Bibliography

• Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech. With Talal Asad, Wendy Brown and Judith Butler. Fordham University Press, 2013. (First edition published by the University of California Press, 2009).
• The Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005.

Interlocutors

• Talal Asad
• Judith Butler
• Alasdair MacIntyre
• Gabriel Brahm [1]

See also

• Post-structural feminism
• Feminist anthropology

External links

• Lecture at Barnard College