Mayanthi Fernando
Biographic Data
| ID | 650156 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Mayanthi Fernando |
| GIVEN NAMES | Mayanthi |
| FAMILY NAME | Fernando |
| SIGNATURE | FERNANDO M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Santa Cruz |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5317-3560 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 27 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 405 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 27 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Rediscovering the “Everyday” Muslim. Notes on an Anthropological Divide
Uncanny Ecologies
If secularity ushered in the notion of humans as buffered subjects immune to nonhuman agents, recent attempts to recognize the agency of nonhumans and to see humans as always in relation to nonhumans—the natureculture turn—may be understood as both a posthumanist and postsecularist project. Yet this scholarship has largely restricted nonhumans to entities previously classified as “natural” phenomena, leaving “supernatural” beings out of the conve…
Overture
Beyond the Human Horizon
Amid a moment of crisis, how might the anthropology of religion shift its focus from ethics to politics? This 2021 Rappaport Lecture, delivered at the Society for the Anthropology of Religion (SAR) Biennial Meeting on 15 May 2021, begins by highlighting three ways in which our field has taken on politics in recent years: by troubling the distinction between ethics and politics, by thinking religion together with pressing political issues, and by …
Critique as Care
Critique in translation
Minorias
State Sovereignty and the Politics of Indifference
The politics of recognition remains a common way to articulate and adjudicate minorities’ claims, yet, as a number of scholars have argued, calling on the state for redress serves to secure the state’s sovereignty. Drawing on Muslim French activism in France, the author suggests that this structure of sovereignty, premised on the adjudication of minority demands (for equality, for recognition), might also be the condition of possibility for its d…
La question musulmane en France
Anthropological publics, public anthropology
Based on a transcript from the AAA 2016 roundtable on "anthropological publics, public anthropology," organized by Sindre Bangstad, held at the AAA Annual Meeting in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on November 18, 2016, and edited, referenced, and footnoted by Sindre Bangstad, this forum explores prominent anthropologists' experiences of doing "public anthropology," asks what kind of structural impediments there are in our time to the engagement of wider…
Gender, Sex and Religious Freedom in the Context of Secular Law
The impossible subject of Charlie Hebdo
Rediscovering the “everyday” Muslim
This article critically examines recent calls by anthropologists to focus on what they call "everyday Islam." We locate this new literature within two tensions central to anthropology: first, its dual commitment to humanity's heterogeneity and commonality, and second, its dual imperative to account for dominant social structures and individual resistance. We argue that the concept of everyday Islam emphasizes one side of these paradigmatic debate…
That Muslim Question
Davidson, Naomi. 2012. Only Muslim: Embodying Islam in Twentieth-Century France. Ithaca: Cornell Univeristy Press. 320 pages.Laurence, Jonathan. 2012. The Emancipation of Europe's Muslims: The Stat
What is anthropology's object of study
Counterresponse to Meditations by Samuli Schielke and Lara Deeb on Fadil, Nadia and Mayanthi Fernando 2015. "Rediscovering the 'everyday' Muslim: Notes on an anthropological divide." Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 5(2): 59-88
Intimacy Surveilled
This article examines the nexus of sex, religion, and secularity in contemporary France. It analyzes the ways in which political, legal, and institutional practices aimed at securing secularity compel Muslim French women to reveal the innermost details of their sexual and religious lives. In legal forums and public debates, for example, Muslim French women have to disclose deeply personal information about their sexual and religious beliefs and p…
The Republic Unsettled
In 1989 three Muslim schoolgirls from a Paris suburb refused to remove their Islamic headscarves in class. The headscarf crisis signaled an Islamic revival among the children of North African immigrants; it also ignited an ongoing debate about the place of Muslims within the secular nation-state. Based on ten years of ethnographic research, The Republic Unsettled alternates between an analysis of Muslim French religiosity and the contradictions o…
Ethnography and the politics of silence
This article traces a few elements of Michel-Rolph Trouillot's critique of anthropology, which was, I argue, part of his broader anthropology of the West. The article first considers Trouillot's analysis of the conditions of possibility for anthropology's emergence as a field formation, including the asymmetries and silences produced by academic disciplines like anthropology and history. It then attends to Trouillot's attempts to remake and redee…
Save the Muslim Woman, Save the Republic
Using the successful Maghrebi-French feminist organisation Ni Putes Ni Soumises (NPNS) as an analytical springboard, this article examines the French Republic's sudden investment in promoting sexual equality and sexual freedom in the banlieues. Broadly, I hold that understanding the state's embrace of NPNS and its investment in Maghrebi-French sexuality requires that scholars attend to the historicity of the contemporary neoliberal moment in Fran…
Belief and/in the Law
This article examines how ‘belief’ has emerged as the privileged site of religion in human rights law, rendering some forms of ethical life unintelligible to secular-modern law and politics. I first analyze models of ethical personhood in which actions like veiling or praying do not only signify piety but are also integral to achieving it. I next turn to tracing how the 2004 French ban on headscarves in public schools was seen as a non-violation …
Reconfiguring freedom
Through an analysis of the practice of veiling, I first examine how pious Muslim French women reconcile the dominant secular oppositions between personal autonomy and religious authority, and between the "true" self and religious norms, as they constitute themselves as religious subjects. I then turn to the 2004 law banning headscarves in public schools, and to the attendant public debates, exploring how this Muslim French religiosity was rendere…
Exceptional citizens
This article traces the emergence of secular Muslim women into the French public sphere. I focus on Fadela Amara, co-founder of Neither Whores Nor Doormats (Ni Putes Ni Soumises), an association protesting the denigration of women in the immigrant suburbs. I argue that Amara is politically efficacious for the French government, shifting focus from the structural causes of socio-economic problems in the suburbs to ‘Islamic fundamentalism’. In addi…
Breaking the Silence
Book Review| March 01 2009 Breaking the Silence: French Women’s Voices from the Ghetto by Fadela Amara with Sylvia Zappi Breaking the Silence: French Women’s Voices from the Ghetto, Amara, Fadela; Zappi, Sylvia. Translated with an Introduction by Helen Harden Chenut. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. Pp. 179. ISBN 0-520-24621-7. Mayanthi Fernando Mayanthi Fernando Washington University in St. Louis Search for other works by this aut…
TheveilintheWest - Christian Joppke, Veil
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
The Republic's "Second Religion"
The Republic Unsettled
In 1989 three Muslim schoolgirls from a Paris suburb refused to remove their Islamic headscarves in class. The headscarf crisis signaled an Islamic revival among the children of North African immigrants; it also ignited an ongoing debate about the place of Muslims within the secular nation-state. Based on ten years of ethnographic research, The Republic Unsettled alternates between an analysis of Muslim French religiosity and the contradictions o…
Rediscovering the “everyday” Muslim
This article critically examines recent calls by anthropologists to focus on what they call "everyday Islam." We locate this new literature within two tensions central to anthropology: first, its dual commitment to humanity's heterogeneity and commonality, and second, its dual imperative to account for dominant social structures and individual resistance. We argue that the concept of everyday Islam emphasizes one side of these paradigmatic debate…
Reconfiguring freedom
Through an analysis of the practice of veiling, I first examine how pious Muslim French women reconcile the dominant secular oppositions between personal autonomy and religious authority, and between the "true" self and religious norms, as they constitute themselves as religious subjects. I then turn to the 2004 law banning headscarves in public schools, and to the attendant public debates, exploring how this Muslim French religiosity was rendere…
Beyond the Human Horizon
Amid a moment of crisis, how might the anthropology of religion shift its focus from ethics to politics? This 2021 Rappaport Lecture, delivered at the Society for the Anthropology of Religion (SAR) Biennial Meeting on 15 May 2021, begins by highlighting three ways in which our field has taken on politics in recent years: by troubling the distinction between ethics and politics, by thinking religion together with pressing political issues, and by …
Ethnography and the politics of silence
This article traces a few elements of Michel-Rolph Trouillot's critique of anthropology, which was, I argue, part of his broader anthropology of the West. The article first considers Trouillot's analysis of the conditions of possibility for anthropology's emergence as a field formation, including the asymmetries and silences produced by academic disciplines like anthropology and history. It then attends to Trouillot's attempts to remake and redee…
Uncanny Ecologies
If secularity ushered in the notion of humans as buffered subjects immune to nonhuman agents, recent attempts to recognize the agency of nonhumans and to see humans as always in relation to nonhumans—the natureculture turn—may be understood as both a posthumanist and postsecularist project. Yet this scholarship has largely restricted nonhumans to entities previously classified as “natural” phenomena, leaving “supernatural” beings out of the conve…
Save the Muslim Woman, Save the Republic
Using the successful Maghrebi-French feminist organisation Ni Putes Ni Soumises (NPNS) as an analytical springboard, this article examines the French Republic's sudden investment in promoting sexual equality and sexual freedom in the banlieues. Broadly, I hold that understanding the state's embrace of NPNS and its investment in Maghrebi-French sexuality requires that scholars attend to the historicity of the contemporary neoliberal moment in Fran…
What is anthropology's object of study
Counterresponse to Meditations by Samuli Schielke and Lara Deeb on Fadil, Nadia and Mayanthi Fernando 2015. "Rediscovering the 'everyday' Muslim: Notes on an anthropological divide." Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 5(2): 59-88
Anthropological publics, public anthropology
Based on a transcript from the AAA 2016 roundtable on "anthropological publics, public anthropology," organized by Sindre Bangstad, held at the AAA Annual Meeting in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on November 18, 2016, and edited, referenced, and footnoted by Sindre Bangstad, this forum explores prominent anthropologists' experiences of doing "public anthropology," asks what kind of structural impediments there are in our time to the engagement of wider…
Belief and/in the Law
This article examines how ‘belief’ has emerged as the privileged site of religion in human rights law, rendering some forms of ethical life unintelligible to secular-modern law and politics. I first analyze models of ethical personhood in which actions like veiling or praying do not only signify piety but are also integral to achieving it. I next turn to tracing how the 2004 French ban on headscarves in public schools was seen as a non-violation …
State Sovereignty and the Politics of Indifference
The politics of recognition remains a common way to articulate and adjudicate minorities’ claims, yet, as a number of scholars have argued, calling on the state for redress serves to secure the state’s sovereignty. Drawing on Muslim French activism in France, the author suggests that this structure of sovereignty, premised on the adjudication of minority demands (for equality, for recognition), might also be the condition of possibility for its d…
La question musulmane en France
Critique in translation
The impossible subject of Charlie Hebdo
That Muslim Question
Davidson, Naomi. 2012. Only Muslim: Embodying Islam in Twentieth-Century France. Ithaca: Cornell Univeristy Press. 320 pages.Laurence, Jonathan. 2012. The Emancipation of Europe's Muslims: The Stat
Breaking the Silence
Book Review| March 01 2009 Breaking the Silence: French Women’s Voices from the Ghetto by Fadela Amara with Sylvia Zappi Breaking the Silence: French Women’s Voices from the Ghetto, Amara, Fadela; Zappi, Sylvia. Translated with an Introduction by Helen Harden Chenut. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. Pp. 179. ISBN 0-520-24621-7. Mayanthi Fernando Mayanthi Fernando Washington University in St. Louis Search for other works by this aut…
The Avowal and Disavowal of Difference France
Paul Silverstein. Algeria in France: Transpolitics, Race, Nation. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press. December, 2004. 288 pp. In Algeria in France: Transpolitics, Race, and Nation, a theoretically sophisticated and thoroughly researched study drawing on twenty months of fieldwork in Paris and its working-class suburbs in the mid 1990s, Paul Silverstein maps out the production, deployment, contestation, and re-deployment of social difference…
The Avowal and Disavowal of Difference France
Paul Silverstein. Algeria in France: Transpolitics, Race, Nation. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press. December, 2004. 288 pp. In Algeria in France: Transpolitics, Race, and Nation, a theoretically sophisticated and thoroughly researched study drawing on twenty months of fieldwork in Paris and its working-class suburbs in the mid 1990s, Paul Silverstein maps out the production, deployment, contestation, and re-deployment of social difference…
The Republic's "Second Religion"
Droit, laïcité et diversité culturelle. L’État français face au défi du pluralisme
Exceptional citizens
This article traces the emergence of secular Muslim women into the French public sphere. I focus on Fadela Amara, co-founder of Neither Whores Nor Doormats (Ni Putes Ni Soumises), an association protesting the denigration of women in the immigrant suburbs. I argue that Amara is politically efficacious for the French government, shifting focus from the structural causes of socio-economic problems in the suburbs to ‘Islamic fundamentalism’. In addi…
Breaking the Silence
Book Review| March 01 2009 Breaking the Silence: French Women’s Voices from the Ghetto by Fadela Amara with Sylvia Zappi Breaking the Silence: French Women’s Voices from the Ghetto, Amara, Fadela; Zappi, Sylvia. Translated with an Introduction by Helen Harden Chenut. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. Pp. 179. ISBN 0-520-24621-7. Mayanthi Fernando Mayanthi Fernando Washington University in St. Louis Search for other works by this aut…
TheveilintheWest - Christian Joppke, Veil
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Reconfiguring freedom
Through an analysis of the practice of veiling, I first examine how pious Muslim French women reconcile the dominant secular oppositions between personal autonomy and religious authority, and between the "true" self and religious norms, as they constitute themselves as religious subjects. I then turn to the 2004 law banning headscarves in public schools, and to the attendant public debates, exploring how this Muslim French religiosity was rendere…
Belief and/in the Law
This article examines how ‘belief’ has emerged as the privileged site of religion in human rights law, rendering some forms of ethical life unintelligible to secular-modern law and politics. I first analyze models of ethical personhood in which actions like veiling or praying do not only signify piety but are also integral to achieving it. I next turn to tracing how the 2004 French ban on headscarves in public schools was seen as a non-violation …
Save the Muslim Woman, Save the Republic
Using the successful Maghrebi-French feminist organisation Ni Putes Ni Soumises (NPNS) as an analytical springboard, this article examines the French Republic's sudden investment in promoting sexual equality and sexual freedom in the banlieues. Broadly, I hold that understanding the state's embrace of NPNS and its investment in Maghrebi-French sexuality requires that scholars attend to the historicity of the contemporary neoliberal moment in Fran…
Intimacy Surveilled
This article examines the nexus of sex, religion, and secularity in contemporary France. It analyzes the ways in which political, legal, and institutional practices aimed at securing secularity compel Muslim French women to reveal the innermost details of their sexual and religious lives. In legal forums and public debates, for example, Muslim French women have to disclose deeply personal information about their sexual and religious beliefs and p…
The Republic Unsettled
In 1989 three Muslim schoolgirls from a Paris suburb refused to remove their Islamic headscarves in class. The headscarf crisis signaled an Islamic revival among the children of North African immigrants; it also ignited an ongoing debate about the place of Muslims within the secular nation-state. Based on ten years of ethnographic research, The Republic Unsettled alternates between an analysis of Muslim French religiosity and the contradictions o…
Ethnography and the politics of silence
This article traces a few elements of Michel-Rolph Trouillot's critique of anthropology, which was, I argue, part of his broader anthropology of the West. The article first considers Trouillot's analysis of the conditions of possibility for anthropology's emergence as a field formation, including the asymmetries and silences produced by academic disciplines like anthropology and history. It then attends to Trouillot's attempts to remake and redee…
Rediscovering the “everyday” Muslim
This article critically examines recent calls by anthropologists to focus on what they call "everyday Islam." We locate this new literature within two tensions central to anthropology: first, its dual commitment to humanity's heterogeneity and commonality, and second, its dual imperative to account for dominant social structures and individual resistance. We argue that the concept of everyday Islam emphasizes one side of these paradigmatic debate…
That Muslim Question
Davidson, Naomi. 2012. Only Muslim: Embodying Islam in Twentieth-Century France. Ithaca: Cornell Univeristy Press. 320 pages.Laurence, Jonathan. 2012. The Emancipation of Europe's Muslims: The Stat
What is anthropology's object of study
Counterresponse to Meditations by Samuli Schielke and Lara Deeb on Fadil, Nadia and Mayanthi Fernando 2015. "Rediscovering the 'everyday' Muslim: Notes on an anthropological divide." Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 5(2): 59-88
Gender, Sex and Religious Freedom in the Context of Secular Law
The impossible subject of Charlie Hebdo
La question musulmane en France
Anthropological publics, public anthropology
Based on a transcript from the AAA 2016 roundtable on "anthropological publics, public anthropology," organized by Sindre Bangstad, held at the AAA Annual Meeting in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on November 18, 2016, and edited, referenced, and footnoted by Sindre Bangstad, this forum explores prominent anthropologists' experiences of doing "public anthropology," asks what kind of structural impediments there are in our time to the engagement of wider…
Critique as Care
Critique in translation
Minorias
State Sovereignty and the Politics of Indifference
The politics of recognition remains a common way to articulate and adjudicate minorities’ claims, yet, as a number of scholars have argued, calling on the state for redress serves to secure the state’s sovereignty. Drawing on Muslim French activism in France, the author suggests that this structure of sovereignty, premised on the adjudication of minority demands (for equality, for recognition), might also be the condition of possibility for its d…
Overture
Beyond the Human Horizon
Amid a moment of crisis, how might the anthropology of religion shift its focus from ethics to politics? This 2021 Rappaport Lecture, delivered at the Society for the Anthropology of Religion (SAR) Biennial Meeting on 15 May 2021, begins by highlighting three ways in which our field has taken on politics in recent years: by troubling the distinction between ethics and politics, by thinking religion together with pressing political issues, and by …
Political science (20 works) · Sociology (18 works) · Law (14 works) · Philosophy (13 works) · Politics (11 works) · Multiculturalism, Politics, Migration, Gender (10 works) · Philosophy (9 works) · Law (8 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (7 works) · Anthropology (7 works)