Schools are central to projects of state-formation and nation-building but they are also sites for the reproduction of social inequalities and for projecting and negotiating ideals of ethical subject formation. In this highly interesting and accessible book, anthropologist Hansjörg Dilger explores how the rise of private, faith-oriented schools in Tanzania has affected these processes thereby also operating as a vector of modern secularity.
Dilger's starting point are the ongoing quarrels among Christians and Muslims about their relative position in Tanzanian state and society and the ways these are anchored in (post-)colonial history and fuelled by the increasing privatisation of education and the unequal performance of Christian and Muslim schools in attendant audit cultures. While always having an eye on the complex relationships between social inequalities and religious difference, Dilger seeks to go beyond the narrative of reproduction. Instead, he anchors his analysis and arguments in the idea that faith-oriented schools fashion themselves as, and to some extent are, production sites of moral meaning and ordinary ethics where values are inculcated via discipline (à la Foucault) but also imagined and embodied (3). These embodiments articulate larger historical forces related to the role of religion under German and British colonialism and Nyerere's Ujamaa programme. While chiefly inspired by the newer anthropology of ethics, I found much resonance here in Dilger's arguments with Bourdieu's notion of educational habitus as embodied history.
The book consists of two parts. The first part discusses key elements of the analysis of religion and schools as institutional fields and arenas of morality, revisits the history of Christian–Muslim encounters in Tanzanian history and then zooms in on the contemporary governance of religion. This part contains a fascinating discussion of the politics around the registration of religious NGOs. Dilger reveals the remarkably similar distribution of registration of Christian and Muslim organisations across time despite the divergent administrative routes towards registration. He also pinpoints the extent to which the withering of a large Muslim welfare society was mainly due to internal struggles and less a result of political antipathy towards Muslims. In the three chapters of the second part, Dilger examines the self-perceptions, values and educational practices of staff and students in a Catholic school, a Muslim seminary and a school owned by a Pentecostal pastor.
While clearly going beyond a narrow focus on class relations, much of the ethnography echoes Paul Willis’ classical arguments in fascinating ways. In the decidedly middle-to-upper class Catholic school, students’ self-image is one of unfettered aspirations towards future global leadership, extending into charity events they organise for poor kids (192). Even teachers suffer from the way students are full of themselves while co-producing the idea of inhabiting a ‘top school’ in a world of legitimate privilege. Teachers and students in the Islamic seminary, by contrast, cultivate the time-honoured notion of Muslims’ marginalisation and unfair treatment by Christian elites, and reproduce their own marginality by creating enclaves of piety. The Pentecostal school, in turn, is dominated by a discourse on performance, ambition and achievement. Overall, we see that while the fashioning and embodiment of religious values and moral meanings is central to parents’, learners’ and teachers’ views on a good life, the self-understanding as ‘morally superior’ vis-à-vis other schools is inseparable from the competitive struggles over status gains through education. While one could say that the sampling partly predicts such findings the extraordinary value of the analysis lies in the unearthing of mechanisms that contradict overarching discourses. Thus, Dilger shows that while teachers in the Islamic seminary blamed the Christian bias in government for their lower status it was mainly internal tensions, struggles over payment, funding cuts by Kuwaiti sponsors and so on that accounted for failures. Taking inspiration from Dilger's book, future research should seek to further connect the pressing issues of religious habitus and religious diversity to the thriving sociological debate on African middle classes and class-based aspirations.
