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DIS/EMBODYING AUTHORITY: FEMALE RADIO “PREACHERS” AND THE AMBIVALENCES OF MASS-MEDIATED SPEECH IN MALI

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2012

Dorothea Schulz
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Abstract

This article explores how the introduction of sound reproduction technologies inflects what were previously considered authoritative, standardized, and gender-specific forms of religious leadership and how these changes affect in turn the (gendered) subjects of media practice. Examining the recent, controversial public presence of female radio preachers in Mali, the article elucidates the often ambivalent reactions to their radio-mediated dissociation of voice and physical presence, ambivalences that are expressed in the form of gender-specific evaluations of the acceptability of preaching on radio. The article thus argues that analyses of the controversial position of Muslim women in religious debates might benefit from a close scrutiny of the media technologies that enable these women's public mediation and also from paying sustained attention to cultural constructions of the voice as a medium of transmitting religious knowledge.

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Articles
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International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 44 , Issue 1 , February 2012 , pp. 23 - 43
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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References

NOTES

Author's note: Earlier versions of this article were presented to the Global Media Seminar in Manila, Philippines, June 2007; at the Conference on Political Islam at the Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Israel, June 2008; and at the workshop on Khutba and Mass Media in Copenhagen, June 2009. I thank Beth Baron, Sara Pursley, and the four anonymous reviewers for their incisive criticisms and suggestions.

1 The article is based on research conducted in San, a town of about 25,000 inhabitants in southeastern Mali, and in the capital, Bamako, between July 1998 and January 2011 (twenty-seven months in total). Research was conducted in Bamanankan, the lingua franca of southern Mali, and in French. In addition to participant observation among, and more than seventy semi-structured interviews with, supporters of the Islamic moral renewal movement, I regularly attended the learning sessions of Muslim women held two or three times per week in San and Bamako. I also participated in numerous religious ceremonies and social events organized by Muslim women in these two locales. Additional information was collected through interviews with employees in charge of religious programming at the national broadcast station ORTM and with radio speakers of seven private radio stations in San and Bamako, including the two Islamic stations in Bamako.

2 Unless indicated otherwise, all foreign terms are rendered in Bamanakan, the lingua franca of southern Mali.

3 The moral renewal movement is strongest in those urban areas where lineages associated with Sufi orders and other traditional religious authorities had little political influence. In these towns, between 30 and 40 percent of adult women participate in Muslim women's groups. They are the strongest group of female supporters of Islamic renewal in Mali, in contrast to Senegal and Ivory Coast, where female students seem to play a much more prominent role in Muslim activism. See LeBlanc, Marie-Nathalie, “The Production of Islamic Identities through Knowledge Claims in Bouaké, Côte d'Ivoire,” African Affairs 98 (1999): 485–509CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Erin Augis, “Dakar's Sunnite Women: The Politics of Person” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2002).

4 An exception is Kunreuther's excellent analysis of cultural constructions of the voice and its implications for processes of radio mediation. Kunreuther, Laura, “Technologies of the Voice: FM Radio, Telephone and the Nepali Diaspora in Kathmandu,” Cultural Anthropology 21 (2006): 332–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Peters, John Durham, “The Voice and Modern Media,” in Kunst-Stimmen, ed. Kolesch, Doris and Schrödl, Jenny (Berlin: Theater der Zeit, Recherchen 21, 2004), 86Google Scholar. See also Dunn, Leslie and Jones, Nancy, “Introduction,” in Embodied Voices: Representing Female Vocality in Western Culture, ed. Dunn, Leslie C. and Jones, Nancy A. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 1–2Google Scholar.

6 See, for example, Nelson, Kristina, The Art of Reciting of the Qurʾan (New York: The American University in Cairo Press, 2001 [1985])Google Scholar; Antoun, Richard, Muslim Preacher in the Modern World: A Jordanian Case Study in Comparative Perspective (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Messick, Brinkley, The Calligraphic State: Textual Domination and History in a Muslim Society (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1993)Google Scholar; and Gaffney, Patrick, The Prophet's Pulpit: Islamic Preaching in Contemporary Egypt (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 LeBlanc, Islamic Identities; Augis, Politics of Person; Alidou, Ousseina, Engaging Modernity: Muslim Women and the Politics of Agency in Postcolonial Niger (Madison, Wisc.: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005)Google Scholar; Masquelier, Adeline, Women and Islamic Revival in a West African Town (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2009)Google Scholar; Göle, Nilüfer, The Forbidden Modern: Civilization and Veiling (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 1996)Google Scholar; and Navaro-Yashin, Yael, Faces of the State: Secularism and Public Life in Turkey (Princeton, N.J., and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002)Google Scholar.

8 This observation also applies to other recent publications on “public Islam.” See Eickelman, Dale and Salvatore, Armando, eds., Public Islam and the Common Good (Leiden, Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 2004)Google Scholar; Launay, Robert and Soares, Benjamin, “The Formation of an ‘Islamic Sphere’ in French Colonial West Africa,” Economy and Society 28 (1999): 467–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Soares, Benjamin, Islam and the Prayer Economy: History and Authority in a Malian Town (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 2005)Google Scholar; and Rosa de Jorio, “Between Dialogue and Contestation: Gender, Islam, and the Challenges of a Malian Public Sphere,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (2009): 95–111. For an incisive critique of this “instrumentalist” reading of media technologies, see Stolow, Jeremy, “Religion and/as Media,” Theory, Culture and Society 22 (2005): 125–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Deeb, Lara, An Enchanted Modern: Gender and Public Piety in Shiʿi Lebanon (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006)Google Scholar.

10 Hirschkind, Charles, The Ethical Soundscape (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006)Google Scholar; Eisenlohr, Patrick, “Technologies of the Spirit,” Anthropological Theory 9 (2009): 273–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Miller, Flagg, The Moral Resonance of Arab Media (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007)Google Scholar.

11 This perspective has been fruitfully pursued by several authors. See, for example, Meyer, Birgit, “Religious Remediations: Pentecostal Views in Ghanaian Video-movies,” special issue on “Mediating Film and Religion,” guest edited by Hughes, Stephen and Meyer, Birgit, Postscripts 2/3 (2005): 155–81Google Scholar; Meyer, Birgit and Moors, Annelies, eds., “Introduction,” in Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2006), 1–28Google Scholar; Schulz, Dorothea, “Promises of (Im)mediate salvation: Islam, Broadcast Media, and the Remaking of Religious Experience in Mali,” American Ethnologist 33 (2006): 210–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, “Evoking Moral Community, Fragmenting Muslim Discourse: Sermon Audio-recordings and the Reconfiguration of Public Debate in Mali,” Journal for Islamic Studies 27 (2007): 39–72; and Stolow, Jeremy, “Communicating Authority, Consuming Tradition: Jewish Orthodox Outreach Literature and Its Reading Public,” in Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere, ed. Meyer, Birgit and Moors, Annelies (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2006), 73–90Google Scholar. Following Gitelman and Pingree, I suggest that the debates surrounding the introduction of a new media technology deserve greater attention because they shed light on the insecurities generated in this process. See Gitelman, Lisa and Pingree, Geoffrey B., “Introduction: What's New about New Media,” in New Media, 1740–1915, ed. Gitelman, Lisa and Pingree, Geoffrey B. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004), xiiGoogle Scholar.

12 Patrick Gaffney strikes a convincing balance between emphasizing continuities and historical shifts in modes of validating authoritative preaching. See The Prophet's Pulpit. Hirschkind's study of the “ethics of cassette listening” similarly highlights historical continuities with respect to long-standing conventions and understandings of ethical self-making, conventions that are not undercut by, but rather perpetuated through, the use of new media technologies. Hirschkind, Ethical Soundscape, 63–66.

13 Some of these divisions have their roots in the French colonial period, when the colonial administration supported representatives of a supposedly traditional “African Islam” against those who, influenced by Sunni Salafi reformist trends in Egypt and other areas of the Middle East, sought to reform established forms of religious practice. These divisions were altered, and partly reinforced, under the first two governments of independent Mali and continue to oppose religious specialists associated with (what in local parlance is referred to as) “traditional Islam” to those deemed representatives of “Arab Islam.” See Brenner, Louis, “Constructing Muslim Identities in Mali,” in Muslim Identity and Social Change in Sub-Saharan Africa, ed. Brenner, Louis (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press 1993), 59–78Google Scholar; and Dorothea Schulz, “Evoking Moral Community, Fragmenting Muslim Discourse.”

14 Schulz, Promises of (Im)mediate Salvation.

15 A notable example of the educational activities of Muslim elite women is Djedo Haidara, the daughter of Cherif Oumar Moukhtar, an influential opponent of French colonial rule. Djedo's tomb in Kayes is today an attraction point for religious “visits” (ziyārāt). Interviews with Ramata Dia, Bamako, August 2004 and January 2010. For a similar role played by elite women in Northern Nigeria, see Umar, Sani, “Mass Islamic Education and the Emergence of Female Ulama in Northern Nigeria: Background, Trends, and Consequences,” in The Transmission of Learning in Islamic Africa, ed. Reese, Scott S. (Leiden, Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 2004), 99–120Google Scholar.

16 Although more and more people in southern Mali converted to Islam starting in the 1920s, religious learning remained the privilege of a small elite of Muslim merchants and scholars. Written textual knowledge of Islam played a minor role in shaping people's opinions about Muslim female educators and the validity of their teachings.

17 Brenner, Louis, Controlling Knowledge, Religion, Power and Schooling in a West African Muslim Society (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2001), 39–84Google Scholar.

18 See, for example, Eickelman, Dale, “Mass Higher Education and the Religious Imagination in Contemporary Arab Societies,” American Ethnologist 19 (1992): 643–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kamalkhani, Zahra, “Reconstruction of Islamic Knowledge and Knowing: A Case of Islamic Practices among Women in Iran,” in Women and Islamization, ed. Tjomsland, Karin and Ask, Marit (Oxford: Berg, 1998), 177–94Google Scholar; and Taraki, Lisa, “Islam is the Solution: Jordanian Islamists and the Dilemma of the ‘Modern’ Woman,” British Journal of Sociology 46 (1995): 658CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

19 For a detailed discussion of the dispositional and emotional qualities the female leaders exact from their followers, see Schulz, Dorothea, Muslims and New Media in West Africa: Pathways to God (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2011), Chap. 5Google Scholar.

20 Schulz, Dorothea, “Piety's Manifold Embodiments: Muslim Women's Quest for Moral Renewal in Urban Mali,” Journal for Islamic Studies 28 (2008): 26–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 The majority of these radio stations cover towns and their immediate surroundings in Mali's southern triangle. In spite of nominal differences in statute and funding modalities, commercial and community radio stations do not differ significantly with regard to their organizational structure, programming, or financial and technical constraints. They all enjoy an immense popularity because of their national language broadcasting, their featuring of local oral traditions, and their audience-friendly formats, all of which are features that make them important platforms for the self-presentation of various groups of society. See Schulz, Dorothea, “In Pursuit of Publicity: Talk Radio and the Imagination of a Moral Public in Mali,” Africa Spectrum 2 (1999): 161–85Google Scholar.

22 Radio Islamique is the radio station of the national Muslim organization AMUPI (Association Malienne pour l'Unité et le Progrès de l'Islam). Radio Dambe was founded in the early 2000s by a former member of the AMUPI steering committee who, after an internal disagreement over the AMUPI's positioning vis-à-vis the government, set up his own station.

23 On the basis of interviews and informal conversations with twenty-six animatrices between 1998 and 2011, I would argue that Nantènè's reminiscences speak for the experiences of many female program presenters. For interviews with animatrices that substantiate this point, see Sylla, Nene Gale, Le Rôle des Animateurs dans la Société et la Difference entre les Radios Privées (Libres) et les Radios Nationales, Rapport de Recherche (Bamako, Mali: Centre Point Sud, 2010), 55–68Google Scholar, 95–99.

24 Zahan, Dominique, La Dialectique du Verbe chez les Bambara (Paris: Mouton & Co, 1963)Google Scholar.

25 The term mèn (to hear) also denotes “to heed.” For a detailed discussion of the ethical significance that many people in Mali attribute to the acts of hearing and listening, see Schulz, Pathways to God, Chap. 7.

26 Schulz, In Pursuit of Publicity.

27 See the extensive literature on the value attributed to speech and the so-called “masters of the word,” including Camara, Sory, Gens de la Parole: Essai sur la Condition et le Rôle dans la Sociètè Malinkè (Paris, France: La Haye, 1976)Google Scholar; Kendall, Martha, “Getting to Know You,” in Semantic Anthropology, ed. Parkin, David (London and New York: Academic Press, 1982), 197–209Google Scholar; and Hoffman, Barbara, “Power, Structure, and Mande Jeliw,” in Status and Identity in West Africa: Nyamakalaw of Mande, ed. Conrad, David C. and Frank, Barbara E. (Bloomington, Ind.: University of Indiana Press, 1995), 36–45Google Scholar. For a discussion of ambivalences toward the spoken word, see Diawara, Mamadou, L'Empire du Verbe et l'Èloquence du Silence: Vers une Anthropologie du Discours dans les Groupes Dits Dominés au Sahel (Cologne, Germany: Rüdiger Köppe, 2003)Google Scholar.

28 The terms refer to the social categories in Bamana society. The same divisions exist in other ethnic groups of Mali.

29 Schulz, Dorothea, Perpetuating the Politics of Praise: Jeli Praise Singers, Radios, and Political Mediation in Mali (Cologne, Germany: Rüdiger Köppe, 2001)Google Scholar.

30 Goffman, Erving, Forms of Talk (Philadelphia, Pa.: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981)Google Scholar.

31 Kendall, Getting to Know You, 82; Schulz, Dorothea, “Pricey Publicity, Refutable Reputations: Jeliw and the Economics of Honour in Mali,” Paideuma 45 (1999): 275–92Google Scholar.

32 Keita may indicate a former slave identity but never a nyamakala social origin.

33 The methodological shortcomings in this oral research include the telescoping of historical processes in present-day recollections of past religious practice and in reconstructions of earlier receptions of female sermonizing. Although the oral reports open the door for multiple and contending interpretations, they also hint at how present-day ambivalences toward the spoken word are projected onto past events and transformations. See Schulz, Politics of Praise, Chap. 4.

34 Interviews with Binta Sacko, Nara, August 1998; Amina Traore, San, July 2002; and Bintou Toure, Bamako, September 2004.

35 Schulz, Politics of Praise, Chap. 6.

36 The recruitment of younger women for the religious programs at the national broadcast station might seem to contradict the argument that the criticism leveled against female radio lecturers reflects the deeply ambivalent feelings generated by radio-mediated female speech and voice. However, one could argue that those in charge of religious programming keep these women “in check” by requiring them to keep to the texts and content provided by the ORTM.

37 See, for example, Meyer and Moors, Introduction; and Stolow, Communicating Authority.

38 Macho, Thomas, “Stimmen ohne Koerper. Anmerkungen zur Technikgeschichte der Stimme,” in Stimme: Annaeherungen an ein Phaenomen, ed. Kolesch, Doris and Krämer, Sybille (Frankfurt/Main, Germany: Suhrkamp, 2006), 130–46Google Scholar.

39 Peters, John Durham, “The Voice and Modern Media,” in Kunst-Stimmen, ed. Kolesch, Doris and Schrödl, Jenny (Berlin, Germany: Theater der Zeit, Recherchen 21, 2004), 95Google Scholar. For related studies of the contingent ways in which technologies of storing or amplifying sound intervene in the construction of the relationship between body and voice, see Connor, Steven, Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001)Google Scholar.

40 Schulz, Politics of Praise, Chap. 4.

41 For a discussion of the paradoxical repercussions of these processes, see Schulz, Politics of Praise, 124–220.

42 But the voice is also important to listeners’ approval of male preachers, as illustrated in the controversial assessments of the media-savvy preacher Sharif Haidara. See Schulz, Dorothea, “‘Charisma and Brotherhood’ Revisited: Mass-mediated Forms of Spirituality in Urban Mali,” Journal of Religion in Africa 33 (2003): 146–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

43 The hearing experiences generated by audio recordings differ in many ways from those of radio broadcasts, with regard to the sound patterns—and interferences—coupled with the two technologies (such as radio frequency interferences as opposed to the “scratching” and other “noises” associated with the frequent use of audiotapes) and also with respect to the temporal, spatial, and social organization of the listening event. However, as I discuss elsewhere, although listeners acknowledge—in passing—the discrepancies between radio and audiotape sound experiences, they consider them largely irrelevant to their capacity to mediate the leader's compelling speech. See Schulz, Dorothea, “Channeling the Powers of God's Word. Audio-recordings as Scriptures in Mali,” Postscripts 4 (2008): 135–56Google Scholar.

44 Many Muslim women also insist on the cognitive relevance of their listening practices, for instance, when they emphasize the “benefits” (nafa) of “scrutinizing” (sègèsègèli) a sermon's deep meanings. For a discussion of the complex significance of this form of “scrutiny,” see Schulz, Pathways to God, Chaps. 5 and 7.

45 Schulz, Pathways to God, Chap. 7; and Hirschkind, Ethical Soundscape, 71–75.

46 Schulz, Dorothea, “Touched by Divine Grace: Religious Objects and the Mediation of Spiritual Power in Urban Mali,” in Trance Media and New Media, ed. Zillinger, Martin et al. (New York: Fordham Press, forthcoming)Google Scholar.

47 By insisting on the importance of the materiality of media objects, I draw inspiration from Larkin's inquiry into the kinds of experiences generated by the material and sensuous architectonics of “going to the movies” in Kano, Northern Nigeria. Larkin, Brian, Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure and Urban Culture in Nigeria (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009), 146–49Google Scholar.

48 Sterne, Jonathan, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003), 182–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

49 For concrete examples of such incidents, see Schulz, “‘Channeling’ the Powers of God's Word,” 135.

50 While “live teachings” and aurally mediated “moral lessons” generate distinct, and culturally acknowledged, forms of religious experience and emotional identification, both assist and refer to the same conventions and understandings that authenticate a tontigi's mass-mediated intervention as compelling and truthful.

51 Schulz, Evoking Moral Community; and idem, Pathways to God, Chap. 7.

52 Messick, Brinkley, “Just Writing: Paradox and Political Economy in Yemeni Legal Documents,” Cultural Anthropology 4 (1989): 26–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

53 Meeker, Michael, Literature and Violence in North Arabia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979)Google Scholar; Miller, Flagg, The Moral Resonance of Arab Media: Audio-Cassette Poetry and Culture in Yemen (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007)Google Scholar.

54 Asad, Talal, The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam, Center for Contemporary Arab Studies Occasional Papers Series (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University, 1986)Google Scholar; Bowen, John, Muslims through Discourse: Religion and Ritual in Gayo Society (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993)Google Scholar.

55 See Messick, Calligraphic State.