Ritual vs. Mundane action

I am convinced by Mahmood’s distinction between ritual action and mundane action. I have read previous pieces of her work and she always causes me to rethink things I had taken for granted. The distinction we are accustomed to making between ritual action and mundane action is based on our Western distinction between sacred and non sacred. However, as the women’s piety movement shows, this is not a distinction taken for granted, and that, on the contrary, living with piety in all the mundane acts of one’s life is both the method and the goal of piety. I think we are much more results-focussed, in that traditional Christian viewpoints see the mundane life and the holy life as anti-thetical and our everyday lives are actually an obstacle to be overcome.

The women’s piety movement on the other hand doesn’t seem to create this duality, every daily activity is saturated with an awareness of the divine, and it is this constant vigilance which then makes ritual acts easy to perform. It is a subtle, but important distinction; the Western-liberal conception of piety would entail, first rising to prayer, and this ritual action then permeating one’s consciousness, and second having this holy disposition affect one’s daily activities so that one lives a more fully pious life. The women’s movement first go about their daily activities with the pious mindset that then enables them to perform ritual activity.

This distinction then leads to the broader question of how do ritual and interpretation relate? In Islam, it is the daily activities which are responsible for the construction of the pious self, whereas in Western thought, one’s pious thought and understanding of the self is the cause for one’s action eg. In one tradition action comes first, and in the other, reflection. This is an overly simplistic division, and I evoke it in order to problematizes, and to draw attention to the relation between bodily practices and interpretation that I think is at the root of Mahmood’s article. In fact, this is an area she has engaged with before, criticizing Bourdieu’s notion of bodily hexis: the process wherein any ideology: political mythology, cosmology, an ethic, a metaphysic, or political philosophy, is em-bodied into a permanent disposition, thereby affecting one’s way of moving, speaking, thinking and feeling. Of course this is a problematic method to apply to Islam, because it implies that Islam is not self-reflective, which is patently not the case.

Mahmood is interested in the differences between traditions when it comes to the construction of the moral self; thus my question is; can a self be constructed by the physical actions it performs, or are the actions the self performs simply reflective of a self already constructed? I think Mahmood summarizes this well, when she says, “external behavioural forms and formal gestures are integral to the realization and expression of the self” as opposed to the idea that “external behaviour may serve as a means of disciplining the self, but as I have shown above remains inessential to that self” (836).

My initial instinct was always to go with what I had been taught, that one’s self determines one’s actions and one’s relations to the institutions around you. However, now I take a more Foucauldian view, and I think we are partially constructed by the institutions around us, and by the physical practices they force upon us. For example, the traditional classroom, rows of students facing one authority figure: being constantly socialized in this way, one becomes used to passivity and receptive of authority more easily than one might if a classroom was set up as a circle. Or, one looks at the way prisons are set up, based on the idea of the Panopticon: a central guardtower which looks into the cells of the various inmates. The inmates cannot see whether anyone is in the guardtower, but they have the feeling that they are constantly being watched. This awareness then affects their behaviour, which in turn affects their construction of the self, and its relation (passivity) to the world around it (dominant).

I don’t go as far as Foucault in seeing these physical practices constituting us to the exclusion of all else, but I also think it would be too optimistic of me to assume that I am the way I am because of self-conscious reflection and decision. To some extent I am sure I am formed by the institutions around me, and even by the bodily hexis that those institutions continue to impose on us.