February SAR News - Anthropology News

At the recent Montr?al meetings, the Society for the Anthropology of Religion announced the 2011 Clifford Geertz Prize winner in the Anthropology of Religion.

The society thanks the prize committee, Maarit Forde, Janet Hoskins, Janet McIntosh, Doug Rogers, Catherine Wanner and Barbara Tedlock, as well as the prize coordinator, Aisha Khan, for their time and energies. This month we have words from our new SAR president, Janet Hoskins. Next month we will feature the winner?s acceptance speech.

Announcing the 2011 Clifford Geertz Prize in the Anthropology of Religion

By Janet Hoskins (U Southern California)

The jurors carefully read, evaluated, and discussed all of the books submitted for this year?s prize. We are deeply impressed with the vitality of the anthropology of religion as a field, and with the wide array of theoretical and ethnographic approaches taken by these books. We have learned an enormous amount in this process, and we are grateful to all of the authors for sharing their impressive scholarship with us. Many of the books we considered deserve wide readership and will make lasting contributions to anthropology and neighboring disciplines.

We have decided to award the 2011 Clifford Geertz Prize to Amira Mittermaier for her terrific book Dreams that Matter: Egyptian Landscapes of the Imagination. In our discussion, jurors noted that Dreams that Matter was ?wonderful,? ?truly special,? ?a beautifully realized ethnography,? and that it ?has risen clearly above the rest.? We were looking for a combination of sophisticated theoretical analysis in the anthropology of religion and a vivid well-written ethnography that would be both compelling and illuminating.

Mittermaier examines dream interpretation in contemporary Cairo, against the background of the Gulf wars, in a context where Freudian ideas meet and blend with an Islamic tradition in which dreams are sought to derive from divine sources. The Islamic revival is examined from the perspective of individual subjectivity and practices, never divorced from politics or material consequences, but also focused on somewhat different goals. Looking at dialogues between television authorities, skeptical reformists, Sufi devotees of a charismatic shakyh and people who claim to have spoken directly to the Prophet Mohammed, she weaves a complex tapestry of modern Egyptian encounters with the dream world.

Mittermaier argues that, ?Dreams are not bubbles that float through the secular modern; they speak directly to, of, and within the modern. In this sense the perpetual attempts of the secular modern to erase its own dreamy sides attest not to the effectiveness of these attempts but to their ongoing failure.? So her exploration of the controversies surrounding dream interpretation leads into a new anthropology of the imagination, in which both the imagined and the real have to be rethought.

In this study, dreams are a lens into the complicated, messy and ongoing negotiation between ?Islam? and ?reality.? Since dreams cannot be directly observed, Mittermaier had to ?cultivate a mode of listening that does not presume to know better than my interlocutors what kind of experience the dream really is.? For believers, the dream is not a projection, but an encounter, ?the universe?s mode of self disclosure,? and thus a way to tune in to greater mysteries. Most chapters open with a casual conversation, first quoted and then explored at great depth, which follows a pathway along what Freud called ?the royal road? into the unconscious and the unknown, blending virtual realities and visionary ones in cyberspace and television broadcasts as well as religious sermons. Our own theoretical and analytical horizons are explored by placing them in dialogue with alternative models of the imagination.

Clifford Geertz was known for his lively and elegant prose, which attracted a much wider readership to anthropology, and Mittermaier?s book shares this literary grace?a feat that is especially impressive since she is not a native speaker of English. Born and raised in Germany, with an Egyptian mother and a German father, she navigates our journey into an unfamiliar dreamscape with the sure and lucid hand of a master stylist.

We have decided not to award an honorable mention in 2011.

Please send column contributions to jselby@mun.ca.

Source: http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2012/02/10/february-sar-news/

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