Hostname: page-component-77c89778f8-9q27g Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-19T04:59:59.693Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Debate about Gender, Religion, and Rights: Thoughts of a Middle East Anthropologist

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Lila Abu-Lughod
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

I want to raise some questions in this essay about the impoverished way debates on the relation among gender, religion, and human rights are often framed. I approach this issue as an anthropologist who comes from a discipline that, whatever its flaws, thinks hard about social and cultural processes and what it is to be human; I also approach it as someone who has spent her academic life thinking about and studying the Muslim Middle East, a region that carries a heavy symbolic load in the Western imagination with respect to the relation between religion and women's rights.

Type
Little-Known Documents
Information
PMLA , Volume 121 , Issue 5 , October 2006 , pp. 1621 - 1630
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2006

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Abu-Lughod, Lila. “Do Muslim Women Need Saving? Reflections on Cultural Relativism and Its Others.” American Anthropologist 104 (2002): 783–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Abu-Lughod, Lila. “Is There a Muslim Sexuality? Changing Constructions of Sexuality in Egyptian Bedouin Weddings.” Gender in Cross-Cultural Perspective. Ed. Brettell, Caroline and Sargent, Carolyn. 2nd ed. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice, 1997. 167–76.Google Scholar
Abu-Lughod, Lila. Writing Women's Worlds: Bedouin Stories. Berkeley: U of California P, 1993.Google Scholar
Gil, Anidjar. “Secularism.” Critical Inquiry 33 (2006): forthcoming.Google Scholar
An-Na'im, Abdullahi, ed. Human Rights in Cross-Cultural Perspectives: A Quest for Consensus. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1992.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Arjun, Appadurai. Modernity at Large. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996.Google Scholar
Talal, Asad. “The Construction of Religion as an Anthropological Category.” Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Religion. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1993. 27–54.Google Scholar
Talal, Asad. “Redeeming the ‘Human’ through Human Rights.” Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003. 127–58.Google Scholar
Wendy, Brown. Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Multiculturalism and Empire. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2006.Google Scholar
Antoinette, Burton. Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1994.Google Scholar
Judith, Butler. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1999.Google Scholar
James, Clifford. The Predicament of Culture. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1988.Google Scholar
E., Daniel Valentine. Fluid Signs. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984.Google Scholar
Durkheim, Émile. The Division of Labor in Society. Trans. George Simpson. New York: Free, 1964.Google Scholar
Michel, Foucault. “Afterword: The Subject and Power.” Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. By Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982. 208–26.Google Scholar
Michel, Foucault. The Use of Pleasure. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Random House, 1985. Vol. 2 of The History of Sexuality. 3 vols. 1985–90.Google Scholar
Clifford, Geertz. “The Growth of Culture and the Evolution of Mind.” The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic, 1973. 55–86.Google Scholar
Clifford, Geertz. “Religion as a Cultural System.” The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic, 1973. 87–125.Google Scholar
Jan, Goodwin. Price of Honor: Muslim Women Lift the Veil of Silence on the Islamic World. 1994. New York: Plume, 2003.Google Scholar
Hirschkind, Charles, and Mahmood, Saba. “Feminism, the Taliban, and the Politics of Counter-insurgency.” Anthropological Quarterly 75 (2002): 339–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Will, Kymlicka. Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995.Google Scholar
Dorothy, Lee. Freedom and Culture. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice, 1959.Google Scholar
MacIntyre, Alisdair. After Virtue: A Story in Moral Theology. Notre Dame: U of Notre Dame P, 1981.Google Scholar
Saba, Mahmood. Politics of Piety. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2005.Google Scholar
Lata, Mani. Contentious Traditions. Berkeley: U of California P, 1998.Google Scholar
Mastnak, Tomaž. Crusading Peace: Christendom, the Muslim World, and Western Political Order. Berkeley: U of California P, 2002.Google Scholar
Tomoko, Masuzawa. The Invention of World Religions; or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2005.Google Scholar
Marcel, Mauss. “A Category of the Human Mind: The Notion of Person, the Notion of ‘Self.‘” Sociology and Psychology: Essays. Trans. Ben Brewster. London: Routledge, 1979. 59–94.Google Scholar
Mayer, Ann Elizabeth. “Cultural Particularism as a Bar to Women's Rights: Reflections on the Middle Eastern Experience.” Women's Rights, Human Rights: International Feminist Perspectives. Ed. Julie Peters and Andrea Wolper. New York: Routledge. 176–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Merry, Sally Engle. Human Rights and Gender Violence: Translating International Law into Local Justice. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2006.Google Scholar
Merry, Sally Engle. “Transnational Human Rights and Local Activism: Mapping the Middle.” American Anthropologist 108 (2006): 38–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Uma, Narayan. Dislocating Cultures: Identities, Traditions, and Third-World Feminism. New York: Routledge, 1997Google Scholar
Martha, Nussbaum. Sex and Social Justice. New York: Oxford UP, 1998.Google Scholar
Okin, Susan Moller. “Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?” Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? Ed. Cohen, Joshua, Howard, Matthew, and Nussbaum, Martha. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1999. 7–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Okin, Susan Moller. “Reply.” Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? Ed. Cohen, Joshua, Howard, Matthew, and Nussbaum, Martha. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1999. 117–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Robbins, Bruce, and Stamatopoulou, Elsa. “Reflections on Culture and Cultural Rights.” South Atlantic Quarterly 103 (2004): 419–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rosaldo, Michelle Zimbalist. Knowledge and Passion: Ilongot Notions of Self and Social Life. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1980.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Edward, Said. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon, 1978.Google Scholar
Sangari, Kumkum, and Vaid, Sudesh. “Institutions, Beliefs, Ideologies: Widow Immolation in Contemporary Rajasthan.” Embodied Violence: Communalising Women's Sexuality in South Asia. Ed. Jayawardena, Kumari and Alwis, Malathi de. London: Zed, 1996. 240–96.Google Scholar
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Righting Wrongs.” South Atlantic Quarterly 103 (2004): 523–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sunder Rajan, Rajeswari. “Women's Human Rights in the Third World.” Sex Rights: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures 2002. Ed. Bamforth, Nicholas. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005. 119–36.Google Scholar
Van Sommer, Annie. “Hagar and Her Sisters.” Introduction. Our Moslem Sisters: A Cry of Need from Lands of Darkness Interpreted by Those Who Heard It. Ed. Sommer, Van and Zwemer, Samuel. New York: Young People's Missionary Movement, 1907. 15–23.Google Scholar