Con/text analysis‘reading against the grain’

‘Mapping Hajja’s biographic narrative’

Seminar Narrative Research

March 31 2011

Karin Willemse

Anthropological research

• 1990-1992 & 1995

• Kebkabiya Town, North Darfur, Sudan

• Market women: Low status

• Female teachers : Elite members

• Islamist regime: Expulsion and Example

Umm Khaltoum

Hajja

Feminist research

• Partial and situational perspectives

The biographic narrative as:

Research method; Analytical means; Mode of representation

Focus on agency

Agency

• Not something one ‘has’

• Nor what researchers ‘give’ to those engaged in our research

Part and parcel of performing identities, of negotiating dominant discourses in specific contexts

The researcher’s engagement with the subjects of research allows us/them to understand their performance of agency as intersubjective and context bound

Responsible Representation

Research ‘against the grain’:the importance of texts-in-context

• all actions and reflections (written, oral, visual, bodily) subjected to analysis are ‘TEXTS’

• Texts carry meaning only in CONTEXTS

Both constitute each other: con/texts carry a multitude of meanings

Researcher’s choices restrict/create meanings

Research ‘against the grain’:

• About allowing alternative perspectives on the constructions of notions of self = going beyond the self-evident

• To detect layerdness of texts, to find sub-texts and to ‘hear’ silences

• To represent those alternative perspectives and alternative ‘Selves’

Writing against the grain

• Responsible, contextualised and partial representations

To connect listening, reading and writing against the grain

Focus on reading and writing: not only what is being said, but also how

Listening against the grain: Context of research

• Local: famine, ethnic conflicts, Libya/Chad war

• National: NIF - Islamist project & shari’a law implementation

• International: 1st Gulf-War => Sudan pro-Iraq

Listening against the grainConditions of research

Perspective of the ‘powerful’ = government

• Branded as ‘enemy’ by the government

• Suspicious because of research

• No freedom of movement

How to go about the research: ‘listening against the grain’

• No overt references to government =no direct references to Islam

• Thread carefully: connect to people less talking and questioning, more listening and ‘go with the flow’ (participant observation)

biographic narratives: problem became asset

defining power & space of reflection

Texts in Context

Context of listening: production of text- (Inter-)Personal

- Discursive context: (im-)material, institutional

= Context of argumentation:

• Reading texts-in-context: writing texts-in-context

intertextuality, intersectionality, intersubjectivity

Intertextuality

“The insertion of history (society) into a text and of this text into history..”(Kristeva 1986, on Bakhtin)

“The sum of knowledge that makes it possible for texts to have meaning.”(Meijer 1996:23, cf. Fairclough 1992:103-105).

infinite number of meanings: context bound

Intertextuality: discursive context

• discursive level: dominant discourses

those discourses which allow the text to have meanings, in which certain meanings are more appropriate, more probable and more powerful than others

-> Context of performing subject positions

intersectionality

• Multiple identities/identifications: context related

• Subject-positions: allotted by dominant discourse

Prioritizing and down playing: negotiating subject-positions

= context bound

Shifting and changing notions of Self & Other

intersubjectivity

• Dominant discourses position Selves and Others: boundaries and moralities

• Construction of Self always in relation to others: relational

• Change and resistance: relational processes How do women negotiate dominant discourses and

(re-)construct subject positions = context bound

Against the grain• Reading

- Acknowledge sub-texts, layerdness, silences (intertextuality)

- Acknowledge alternative subject-positions: stretching and transforming boundaries (intersectionality)

- Acknowledge sub-discourses and deconstruction (intersubjectivity: Self of researcher as embodied)

Acknowledge agency in negotiations of dominant discourses in specific contexts

Writing ‘against the grain’

• How to represent agency: as part of negotiation of dominant discourses

Intertextual contextsintersecting identitiesintersubjective relations

Emphasize fluidity, instability & contexts: self-reflexivity

Self-reflexivity

• What choices do you as a researcher make?

• Listening position:• Reading position:• Writing position:

deconstruct one’s own seemingly self-evident reflections and conclusions

Listening, reading and writing Hajja’s biography against the grain

• Hajja’s narrative as:

- a midwife, a (co-)wife, a mother and, perhaps & occasionally,

as opposed to

- a market woman

Midwife

(..)You know, ya Sa’adiya, I helped in giving birth to our raiis, as-sayeedna As-Sadiq Al-Mahdi. My friend and I, we were elected to assist our teacher: I bathed As-Sadiq while my friend took care of his mother.(..)

Market woman

• (My Q)In the past before their father died, I didn’t go to the market. When I went to the market, my daughters were grown up. When I was working as a midwife and people called me to a lot of places, their father Abu Feisal would make breakfast for his children and for me as well. But now my daughters make food for me and for themselves.

Market woman

• (MY Q)I had my own money, because women would give me some money when I assisted them in giving birth. I even went on haj with my own money. With LS100, I went on pilgrimage. Ah, but that was in 1960 before I went to the market. Then money was worth more than it is now.

Hajja’s biographic narrative

• Patchy, fragmented: no coherence

• Contrast to Umm Khalthoum, the female teacher

• Narrated over a longer period: in around her compound

Text analysis

• Linguistic aspects(often biography seen as western (See Abu-Lughod, Comaroffs) & Style

• Wording, grammar, punctuation, turn-taking, pauses, hesitations, sudden change of style

We - I/eye: responsible - unique

They/them - you/one: shared responsibility

agency

• Hajja’s negotiation of the dominant discourse:

- Resistance is covert not overt

midwife / market women

- Constructing a moral self:

good female Sudanese Muslim citizen

- Creating contrast between ´self´ and others among the market women

constructing (moral) differences

Reading against the grain

• My discontent with this realization

fitted too neatly into the Sudanese government’s division of high and low class women

agency or cultural dope/dupe?

Reading against the grain: format

• Why patchy, why fragmented

Lack of coherence = lack of education or something else?

Literally contextualizing her narrative

Mapping Hajja’s narrative in space and time

Hajja’s moral landscape

• Landmarks refer to ‘life-marks’

• She was literally ‘all over the place’

• Her history surrounded her, was laid out in front of her

==> this landscape provided the chronology of her life and thus the ‘chapters’ in her biographic narrative

The land and the tide

• Days in the week: from places to spaces

- days marked her activities and locations of performance

- contexts of identities related to time and space

==> She did not need coherence in her narrative since she lived that coherence every day (and I did ‘went along’)

Representation

• Mapping Hajja’s narrative

- locate her surroundings as a context and as points of reference

- Tie these to days in a week: activities

performed identities

From places to spaces

• De Certeau (1984)

“ Space is a practised place “

Spaces and Places: narratives

• Places and spaces like mapping and touring

• A narrative makes use of places to anchor the stories of Self: takes the listener/reader on a ‘tour’ through a life with a map as foundation/boundaries

• Maps are fixed, tours may alter

Understanding Hajja’s picture:

The white tobe

The current tobe

• Nowadays, the tobe is typically a four to six meter long cloth of about a meter width, which is a loosely wrapped over the ‘in-door’ clothes, often a skirt and a blouse, a dress or even trousers.

The tobe

• The current fabric was introduced under Turco-Egyptian rule (1823-1882) and made in India, which was a British colony at that time (Spaulding 1985:193).

• The new fabric caused a different way of wearing, as compared to the local veil, which was made of homespun course cotton or even of leather.

The White Tobe

• An intertextual reading ‘against the grain’: layered-ness of meaning of a garment

- historical- discursive (turning place into space)- Subjectivities/alternative identities: agency

veiling

• Marks wealth, status, position of a protected female relative

• Cloth from India: economic and political piece of fabric

• Modernity: new elite and new life-style: new knowledge horizon

Historical context

• Anglo-Egyptian Condominium (1899-1956)

Sudanese junior administrators to rule the country with/for them

Shift in distinction private-public

White tobe

• Colour

• British: immaculateness:-> fysical, mental and moral

• Cordon sanitaire: being protected

White tobe

• White colour:Sudanese: - tradition (first tobes)- Status (new elite)- Widow hood (social death)

White tobe

• Marks the interface between the state and its subjects

-> A protected female subject that is the face of the state to its (female)subjects:

->On behalf of the state, in and for the public domain

British rule

• Relegated Islam to the private sphere

• Shari’a courts only addressing “personal cases” (divorce, custody, inheritance)

• In public domain: the state rules – British law, structures, institutions and morals

White tobe

• Education for women: position• Professions for women: salary

- added a new phase to women’s lives

==> adolescence/single woman

Agency

• This new phase ment a new identity Instead of derivative membership of elite

(via father, husband, brother etc.)

Upward mobility on their own

Sense of autonomy & different networks

New ‘white tobe class’

• Analogy to ‘white board class’

• New elite, different from the male members of the new elite

• Knowledge horizon, ambitions, anticipations

Agency and strategy

• “ I did not find the right husband yet.”

• Mass – weddings

• Opposition kinship moral landscape and the nationalist elite moral landscape

Hajja and the White Tobe

• Marks Hajja’s position as a non-literate ‘trained’ midwife as one of the government elite

It allowed her to construct herself as different from other market women and as ‘in reality’ an elite woman

She was allowed to wear the white tobe

Not place but space

• De Certeau (1984, 117):

‘Space is a practiced place’

Mapping and touring:

narrating a space of self - a self in space

Not identity but performativity

“I narrate, therefore I am”

contextualize

“ I narrate (in a specific) space, therefore I become”