Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Self, Identity, and Individuality

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
Perceptions of Self, Power, & Gender Among Muslim Women

Abstract

This chapter introduces readers to women’s and also men’s, perceptions of self, subjectivity, and individuality. This chapter also describes various religious and nonreligious groups of the village, and how members of each group engage religion in forming their subjectivity. It appears that there is no uniformity in the descriptions of the informants. However, by engaging Michel Foucault, and Clifford Geertz, this chapter compares the Western perceptions of the self with the perceptions of the people of Chandhara. By analyzing the narratives of the informants this chapter challenges the observation of some scholars that South Asians do not possess the idea of the self. Mostly based on the narratives of women and also men, this chapter describes women’s subjectivity of Chandhara that in some cases go against popular perception of the West regarding the status of Muslim women.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 84.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 109.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD 109.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Bibliography

  • Ahearn, Laura M. 2001. “Language and Agency.” Annual Review of Anthropology 30 (October): 109–37. http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.anthro.30.1.109?journalCode=anthro.

  • Alam, Sarwar. 2010. “Sufi Pluralism in Bangladesh: The Case of the Maizbhandariyya Tariqa.” Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies XXXIV (1): 28–45.

    Google Scholar 

  • Aron, Arthur, Elaine N. Aron, Michael Tudor, and Greg Nelson. 1991. “Close Relationships as Including Other in the Self.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 60 (February): 241–53.

    Google Scholar 

  • Aron, Arthur, Tracy McLaughlin-Volpe. 2001. “Including Others in the Self: Extensions to Own and Partner’s Group Memberships.” In Individual Self, Relational Self, Collective Self, edited by Constantine Sedikides and Marilynn B. Brewer, 89–108. Philadelphia, PA: Psychology Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Asad, Talal. 1986. “The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam.” Occasional Papers Series, Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, Georgetown University.

    Google Scholar 

  • Becker, Anne E. 1995. Body, Self, and Society: A View from Fiji. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Benhabib, Seyla. 1992. Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics. London and New York: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bhabha, Homi K. 1994. The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977 [1972]. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Brewer, Marilynn B., and Wendi Gardner. 1996. “‘Who is This We’? Levels of Collective Identity and Self Representations.” Journal of Personal and Social Psychology 71 (1): 83–93.

    Google Scholar 

  • Budja, Michael. 2012. “Interpretative Trajectories Toward Understanding Personhoods in Prehistory.” Documenta Praehistorica XXXIX (December): 137–53.

    Google Scholar 

  • Busby, Celia. 1997. “Permeable and Partible Persons: A Comparative Analysis of Gender and the Body in South India and Melanesia.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 3 (2): 261–78.

    Google Scholar 

  • Chaudary, Nandita. 2008. “Persistent Patterns in Cultural Negotiation of the Self: Using Dialogical Self Theory to Understand Self-Other Dynamics within Culture.” International Journal of Dialogical Science 3 (1): 9–30.

    Google Scholar 

  • Chen, Serena, Helen C. Boucher, and Molly P. Tapias. 2006. “The Relational Self Revealed: Integrative Conceptualization and Implications for Interpersonal Life.” Psychological Bulletin 132 (2): 151–79.

    Google Scholar 

  • Das, Rahul P. 2003. Origin of the Life of a Human Being: Conception and the Female According to Ancient Indian Medical and Sexological Literature. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dimock, Edward C. Jr. 1966. “Doctrine and Practice among the Vaisnavas of Bengal.” In Krishna: Myths, Rites, and Attitudes, edited by Milton Singer, 41–63. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dimock, Edward C. Jr. 1989. The Place of the Hidden Moon: Erotic Mysticism in the Vaisnava-Sahajiya Cult of Bengal. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dumont, Louis. 1980. Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dumont, Louis. 1985. “A Modified View of Our Origins: The Christian Beginnings of Modern Individualism.” In The Category of the Person, Michael Carrithers, edited by Steven Collinns and Steven Lukes, 93–122. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dumont, Louis. 1986. Essays on Individualism: Modern Ideology in Anthropological Perspective. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Eaton, Richard M. 1993. The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204–1760. Berkeley: University of California Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ewing, Katherine P. 1990. “The Illusion of Wholeness: Culture, Self, and the Experience of Inconsistency.” Ethos 18 (3): 251–78.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ewing, Katherine P. 1997. Arguing Sainthood: Modernity, Psychoanalysis, and Islam. Durham: Duke University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Higgins, E. Tory, and Danielle May. 2001. “Individual Self-Regulatory Functions: It’s Not ‘We’ Regulation, but It’s Still Social.” In Individual Self, Relational Self, Collective Self, edited by Constantine Sedikides and Marilynn B. Brewer, 47–67. Philadelphia: Psychology Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fortes, Meyer. 1987. Religion, Morality and the Person: Essays on Tallensi Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Foucault, Michel. 1977 [1975]. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Pantheon Books.

    Google Scholar 

  • Foucault, Michel. 1978 [1976]. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, vol. 1. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon Books.

    Google Scholar 

  • Foucault, Michel. 1987. “The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom: An Interview with Michel Foucault on January 20, 1984.” In The Final Foucault, edited by James Bernauer and David Rasmussen, 112–31. Cambridge: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Foucault, Michel. 1990 [1985]. The Use of Pleasure. The History of Sexuality, vol. 2. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books.

    Google Scholar 

  • Friedman, Marilyn. 2003. Autonomy, Gender, Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Geertz, Clifford. 1968. Islam Observed: Religious Development in Morocco and Indonesia. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books.

    Google Scholar 

  • Geertz, Clifford. 1983. Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology. New York: Basic Books.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gilligan, Carol. 1982. In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Harder, Hans. 2011. Sufism and Saint Veneration in Contemporary Bangladesh: The Maijbhandaries of Chittagong. London and New York: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Inden, Ronald B. 2000. Imagining India. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Jalal, Ayesha. 1994. The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kabeer, Naila. 1991. “The Quest for National Identity: Women, Islam and the State of Bangladesh.” In Women, Islam and the State, edited by Deniz Kandiyoti, 115–43. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kakar, Sudhir. 1981. The Inner World: A Psychoanalytic Study of Childhood and Society in India. Delhi: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kakar, Sudhir. 1989. Intimate Relations: Exploring Indian Sexuality. New York: Penguin Books.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kashima, Yoshihisa, Susumu Yamaguchi, Uichol Kim, Sang-Chin Choi, Michele J. Gelfand, and Masaki Yuki. 1995. “Culture, Gender, and Self: A Perspective from Individualism-Collectivism Research.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 69 (5): 925–37.

    Google Scholar 

  • Knight, Lisa I. 2011. Contradictory Lives: Baul Women in India and Bangladesh. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lamb, Sarah. 2000. White Saris and Sweet Mangoes: Aging, Gender, and Body in North India. Berkeley: University of California Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lindholm, Charles. 1997. “Does the Sociocentric Self Exist? Reflections on Markus and Kitayama’s ‘Culture and Self.’” Journal of Anthropological Research 53 (4): 405–22.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lukes, Steven. 2005 [1974]. Power: A Radical View, 2nd edn. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mahmood, Saba. 2005. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Maniruzzaman, Talukder. 1980. The Bangladesh Revolution and Its Aftermath. Dhaka, Bangladesh: The University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mannan, Manzurul. 2015. BRAC, Global Policy Language, and Women in Bangladesh: Transformation and Manipulation. Albany: State University of New York.

    Google Scholar 

  • Markus, Hazel R., and Shinobu Kitayama. 1991. “Culture and the Self: Implications for Cognition, Emotion, and Motivation.” Psychological Review 98 (2): 224–53.

    Google Scholar 

  • Marriott, McKim. 1976. “Hindu Transactions: Diversity Without Dualism.” In Transaction and Meaning, edited by Bruce Kapferer, 109–42. Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues.

    Google Scholar 

  • Marriot, McKim. 1989. “Constructing an Indian Ethnosociology.” Contribution to Indian Sociology 23 (1): 1–39.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mauss, Marcel. 1985 [1938]. “A Category of the Human Mind: The Notion of Person; the Notion of Self.” In The Category of the Person: Anthropology, Philosophy, History, edited by Michael Carrithers, Steen Collins and Steven Lukes, and translated by W. D. Halls, 1–25. New York: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • McHugh, Ernestine L. 1989. “Concepts of the Person among the Gurungs of Nepal.” American Anthologist 16 (1): 75–86.

    Google Scholar 

  • McHugh, Ernestine L. 1998. “Situating Persons: Honor and Identity in Nepal.” In Selves in Time and Place: Identities, Experience, and History in Nepal, edited by Debra Skinner, Alfred Pach III, and Dorothy Holland, 155–74. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield.

    Google Scholar 

  • McLaren, Margaret A. 2002. Feminism, Foucault, and Embodied Subjectivity. Albany: State University of New York Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mines, Mattison. 1988. “Conceptualizing the Person: Hierarchical Society and Individual Autonomy in India.” American Anthropologist 90: 568–79.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mines, Mattison. 1994. Public Faces, Private Voices: Community and Individuality in South India. Berkeley: University of California Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Morton, Stephen. 2007. Gayatri Spivak: Ethics, Subalternity and the Critique of Postcolonial Reason. Cambridge: Polity Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Morris, Brian. 1978. “Are There Any Individuals in India? A Critique of Dumont’s Theory of the Individual.” Eastern Anthropologist 31 (4): 365–77.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ortner, Sherry B. 2005. “Subjectivity and Cultural Critique.” Anthropological Theory 5 (1): 31–52. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228344709_Subjectivity_and_cultural_critique.

  • Rahman, Sheikh Mujibur. 2012. The Unfinished Memoirs. Translated by Fakrul Alam. Dhaka, Bangladesh: The University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Rasmussen, Susan. 2008. “Personhood, Self, Difference, and Dialogue (Commentary on Chaudhary).” International Journal for Dialogical Science 3 (1): 31–54.

    Google Scholar 

  • Reddy, Gayatri. 2005. With Respect to Sex: Negotiating Hijra Identity in South Asia. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Roy, Asim. 1983. The Islamic Syncretistic Tradition of Bengal. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sangren, P. Steven. 1995. “Power” Against Ideology: A critique of Foucaultian Usage.” Cultural Anthropology 10 (1): 3–40.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sax, William S. 2002. Dancing the Self: Personhood and Performance in the Pandav Lila of Garhwal. New York: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Schimmel, Annemarie. 1975. Mystical Dimensions of Islam. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Schimmel, Annemarie. 1997 [1995]. My Soul is a Woman: The Feminine in Islam. Translated by Susan H. Ray. New York: Continuum.

    Google Scholar 

  • Scott, James C. 1990. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven: Yale University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Shweder, Richard, A., and Bourne, Edmund J. 1984. “Does the Concept of the Person Vary Cross-Culturally?” In Culture Theory: Essays on Mind, Self, and Emotion, edited by Richard A. Shweder and Robert A. LeVine, 158–99. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Shweder, Richard A., Manamohan Mahapatra, and Miller Joan B. 1990. “Culture and Moral Development.” In Cultural Psychology: Essays on Comparative Human Development, edited by James W. Stigler, Richard A. Shweder, and Gilbert H. Herdt, 130–204. New York: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sinha, Lalita. 2008. Unveiling the Garden of Love: Mystical Symbolism in Layla Majnun & Gita Govinda. Bloomington: World Wisdom.

    Google Scholar 

  • Smith, Eliot R., Susan Coats, and Dustin Walling. 1999. “Overlapping Mental Representations of Self, In-Group, and Partner: Further Response Time Evidence and a Connectionist Model.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 25 (July): 873–82.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sokefeld, Martin. 1999. “Debating Self, Identity, and Culture in Anthropology.” Current Anthropology 40 (4): 417–48.

    Google Scholar 

  • Spiro, Melford. 1993. “Is the Western Concept of the Self ‘Peculiar’ Within the Context of World Cultures?” Ethos 21 (2): 107–53.

    Google Scholar 

  • Spivak, Gayatri C. 1988. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Lawrence Grossberg and Cary Nelson, 271–313. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Staple, Diederik A., and Willem K. Koomen. 2001. “I, We, and the Effects of Others on Me: How Self Construal Level Moderates Social Comparison Effects.” Journal of Personal and Social Psychology 80 (5): 766–81.

    Google Scholar 

  • Strathern, Marilyn. 1988. The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia. Berkeley: University of California Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • The Bhagavad-Gita: Krishna’s Counsel in Time of War. 2004. Translated by Barbara S. Miller. New York: Bantam Classic.

    Google Scholar 

  • Turner, John C., and Rina S. Onorato. 1999. “Social Identity, Personality, and the Self-Concept: A Self-Categorization Perspective.” In The Psychology of the Social Self, edited by Tom R. Tyler, Roderick M. Kremer, and Oliver P. John, 11–46. Mahwah: Erlbbaum.

    Google Scholar 

  • Upanisads. 1996. Translated by Patrick Olivelle. New York: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Veer, P. van der. 1994. Religious Nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India. Berkeley: University of California Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Williams, Raymond. 1977. Marxism and Literature. New York: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. King Fahd Center for Middle East Studies, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, AR, USA

    Sarwar Alam

Authors
  1. Sarwar Alam
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2018 The Author(s)

About this chapter

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this chapter

Alam, S. (2018). Self, Identity, and Individuality. In: Perceptions of Self, Power, & Gender Among Muslim Women. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73791-1_3

Download citation

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation