In this dissertation I explore social identity, secularism, and Indian Muslims' conceptions and experiences of living in a secular state while debating among themselves the meanings of ethical Muslim selfhood. Through participant observation and interviews based on over 15months of intensive field research, undertaken in a predominantly Muslim area of south-east Mumbai, my research focused on two groups of Muslim men--middle-class entrepreneurs and householders in their early to mid thirties, and senior students, from their late teens to early twenties, from a madrasa (Islamic seminary) attached to a prominent mosque in the city. Owing to its complex and intense dynamism, I also emphasize the city as an important agent in shaping everyday life. The core of my work is to explore secular life and secularism, central to India's liberal conception of itself as a pluralist democracy, that emerge through the lived experiences of Muslim men engaging with various daily pressures and transactions in an intensely dynamic urban context while trying to maintain a self understood to be ethical in terms of an inherited Islamic tradition. In discussing everyday phenomena such as piety and religious authority, gender, childraising, popular culture, personal and professional pursuits and ethical conduct, I demonstrate that the ostensibly `religious' domain of Islam is not necessarily the only, or even primary, basis for achieving selfhood for even those who identify as observant and devout Muslims. Rather, I argue, the religious domain of Islam in this context is defined as such and intersected by discourses and practices of the self as a political and economic agent, that is, a self defined in terms of political modernity. Thus this dissertation also contributes to the current anthropological rethinking of categories like `religion', `secularism', and `politics' in relation to social processes and subjects: a series of projects that are related, in the Indian context, to modernity and liberal conceptions of statehood, sovereignty, and personhood. A major conclusion of this work is that while most Indian Muslims have largely internalized (and accept) the liberal differentiation of politics and religion, the modern secular project in India nevertheless remains incomplete.

In contemporary Damascus, the modern oboe and an instrument known as its predecessor, the zurna, are heard on a daily basis as they continue to be employed in Syrian popular and folk music practices. After observing the pervasiveness of the sounds of these instruments in Syria, I proceeded to investigate the socio-cultural processes surrounding their usage. This study provides a history of the zurna, traces its development in Europe into the modern oboe, and explores the oboe's re-entry into musical practices in the Middle East. Through empirical fieldwork, I collected data that allowed me to observe the social significance of the sounds of these instruments for musicians and listeners alike in the Greater Damascus area. Using Jonathan Shannon's modernity improvisation model (Shannon 2006) as a departure point, I analyze the way Syrians use instruments such as the zurna and oboe in seemingly diverging ways to create their own "modern" subjectivities. Additionally, I demonstrate how these sounds reflect what Clifford Geertz refers to as the inevitable struggle between essentialism and epochalism in post-colonial nations such as Syria (Geertz 1971) through the analyzation of discourse surrounding instruments so deemed "modern" or "authentic" (such as the oboe and zurna, respectively) in contemporary Syrian society. Musical examples are included in order to demonstrate performance practice and provide perspective on the music theory behind the ways composers and musicians include the sounds of the oboe and zurna in particular works and genres.

Youth in Tonga occupy a particularly fraught social position due to their symbolic status as both the "purveyors of global modernity" and "the future of the nation and tradition." This precarious standing provides the basis for my analysis of the ways in which youth engage in the negotiation of moral frameworks in everyday life. I employ both sociocultural and linguistic anthropological methods and theory to examine how morality is construed across multiple domains of daily life, including language, aesthetic self-fashioning, and social action. Global modernity has brought significant changes in the kinds of goods available and lives imaginable by Tongans, but has also introduced considerable ambivalence about how Tongan culture and tradition can be reconciled with new opportunities. In particular, digital technologies and links with transnational organizations have begun to mediate gendered notions of what it means to be moral in the rapidly changing local context. In a society where strong relationships with kin are still one of the major institutions critical to the fulfillment of basic daily needs and to making extra-local connections for education or work, these changes have led to increasing concern about the maintenance of Tongan "tradition," including moral obligations to extended family. As new technologies, expanded fields of sexuality, and other enticements instill desires for different kinds of lives, the affective and material ties of generous, loving kin continue to keep youth rooted in traditional social networks. Throughout the negotiation of desires and obligations, youth work to present themselves as socially appropriate actors in their daily activities, while casting an eye to the larger global stage. This research stands on the premise that globalization must be understood as a set of processes operating on micro-levels of intimate social practices rather than viewing it as simply a collection of macro-scale economic or political forces. I argue that, as youth re-interpret the meanings of morality in light of global modernity, they subtly shift cultural understandings of emotional and epistemological frameworks as well, changing the balance of power relations between and within the local and global contexts.

Balancing the rights of the individual to lead a self-determined life while accommodating traditional identity groups is a central goal of liberal society. The modernity argument suggests that processes within modernity are capable of liberalizing societies. The emergence of modern information technology has drastically increased the speed of the liberalizing influence of modernity to the point that this goal is threatened. However, using tools found within discourse theory, traditional identity groups may be able to mitigate these incoming influences to such a degree as to rebalance these liberal goals.

At the turn of the nineteenth century, global capitalism has introduced an unprecedented phenomenon: the reorientation of temporality and spatiality. Capitalist temporality and global space allowed Asian intellectuals to imagine, for the first time, a synchronized globe, where Asia became consciously worldly. Asian intellectuals began to reinterpret the indigenous categories such as the tributary system in order to make sense of the regionalization of Asia in the capitalist world system. The unity of Asian countries formed an alliance which resisted the homogeneity and universality claimed by European hegemony. Along with the revival of the Asian ideal, the tributary system was reimagined as the incarnation of Asian heterogeneity, a source that could be utilized in the common struggle of resisting European hegemony. What the tributary system represented in the discourse of Asianism at the turn of the twentieth century, then, is a new possibility of relation between nation-states.

Major attempts to control the natural environment characterized government ‘developmental' activity in twentieth-century Sind. This thesis argues that the construction of three barrage dams across the River Indus, along with a network of irrigation canals, enacted human control over nature as a political project. The Raj and its successor state in Sind, Pakistan, thereby claimed legitimacy through their capacity to benefit humans by re-modelling the landscape. These claims depended on an implied narrative of material progress, which irrigation development was expected to bring about, in a province considered technologically and socially backward. In allocating land that was newly made available for cultivation, government officials found an unprecedented opportunity to also re-shape agrarian society. As well as providing the means by which ‘ideal types' of cultivator could be encouraged to proliferate, the development of Sind's irrigation system was based on concepts of modernization that promoted increasing state intervention in agrarian life to render a ‘disordered' society more easily governable. This trend was constrained, however, by successive administrations' need to balance the lure of radical modernization against the powerful claims on new land of local magnates. The colonial belief in the agricultural, economic, and social benefits of large-scale irrigation projects was transplanted into the post-colonial state. The construction of irrigation works, the colonization of land, and their political implications before and after Independence are therefore analyzed, in order to demonstrate how and why the logic of large infrastructure schemes remained consistent. At the same time, differences in how successive administrations framed and enacted barrage projects are shown to have depended on contemporary circumstances. In the process, the thesis sheds new light on the tensions between and within the central and provincial governments, demonstrating the contested nature of concepts of Imperial governance, nation-building, and material progress.

Islam has, throughout its history, played a pivotal role in the lives of its adherents. Islam’s significance for its adherents stems from and is informed by it as a doctrine, a system of discipline and ritual, and a system of social ethics and practices. Throughout Islamic history, Islam has undergone significant reformation efforts as was socially and culturally perceived to be necessary from within its community. However, with the advent of colonialism, the introduction of the concept of the nation-state, and the ushering of the age of modernity, the form and structure of such reformation was much informed by the relationship of Islam and its adherents to the ‘other’ (the West) and its knowledge systems. Islam has since been confronted with the question of its own validity, from inside and outside the community of adherents. The struggle with the place of religion, the place of the sacred, has played out throughout the history of Islam within Egypt, at times expanding, at others withdrawing, as it dealt with political, social and cultural forces. This presented and presents its adherents with a dilemma of identity: a constant shifting, manipulating, rejecting, and reforming of religious symbols and meaning and further knowledge systems within Islam – an attempt to deal with the state of (post)coloniality, and the project of modernity. It is my contention that one can map the sacred within Egyptian writing: one that is associated with locations, with time, with human interactions, with social, cultural, historical and religious significance. Mapping such sacred spaces within (post)modern Egyptian writing presents deep insights into the struggle for individualism and representation. Egyptian writing is an expression of cultural contestation, and the struggle for self-definition, mirroring one that is pre-existing in Egyptian society. This is evidence of: a) social and cultural self-awareness; b) an engagement with and a response to ‘other’ narratives; c) an attempt to search for an ‘authentic’ self-sufficient discourse; and, d) an attempt to conjure up viable options for sustainability. This has not always led to self-certainty. In fact, it has led to epistemological uncertainty, ontological anxiety, and a threatened self-identity, to which Egyptian Muslims respond in a myriad of voices through these texts/narratives – tackling existential issues.

This thesis examines the contemporary religious renewal and discourse on modernity of the Shi‘a Imami Ismaili Muslims of Nizari branch (hereinafter Ismaili) in post-Soviet Tajikistan. These developments are set against their reunion with the worldwide spiritual leader, the Aga Khan IV, and their convergence with the transnational (or global) Ismailis, following seven decades of Soviet isolation. The subject of ‘religious renewal’ among Ismailis of Tajikistan remains barely explored both in post-Soviet and Western academia. It is situated against the backdrop of rapidly expanding body of scholarly analysis on Central Asian Islam, which until recently was framed predominantly through securitisation discourses. These discourses provided a distorted picture of the nature of Islam in post-Soviet Central Asia. While not negating the relevancy of the aforementioned securitisation discourses, this thesis challenges their portrayal of both ‘international Islam’ and Islam in Central Asia as monolithic entities. It also questions how the former is being perceived as anti-Western, and therefore anti-modern, and the latter as a passive receiver. Drawing on the notions of ‘multiple modernities’ (Eisenstadt 2000) and ‘discursive tradition’ (Asad 1986), this thesis emphasises the multiplicity, diverse trajectories and distinct patterns of Islamic discourses on modernity not just among, but within each Central Asian state. It provides a better understanding of the complex and constantly evolving nature of Islam in Central Asia and its dynamics with modernity. Moreover, the research findings contribute to the understanding of modernity and secularisation, and indeed westernisation, as not identical in Central Asia. They highlight that dynamics between Islam and modernity are inclusionary, which interact, cross-fertilise and transform one another critically and creatively, rather than through a dichotomous relationship between the traditional and the modern, Islamic and secular (and/or Western). This work builds its analysis on local archives, reports, oral memories and multiple interviews with various stakeholders from within the Ismaili community and outside, in Gorno-Badakhshan region of Tajikistan and beyond. It depicts how contemporary readings of modernity within Ismailism in Tajikistan and its discourses derive extensively from the religious and temporal guidance of the Aga Khan that are entrenched in Ismaili doctrines and values of Islam. It also portrays how these discourses are then informed, altered and recreated acutely by various dynamics both within the faith and without, including the historical past and growing globalisation. As a result, this paper came to argue that these dynamics [within and without] are contested widely among the local Ismailis. They instigate systematic and indigenous approaches and answers that go beyond the ‘traditional’ discourses on Islam and modernity, and, nevertheless, accentuate the continuity of the Ismaili tradition.

Abstract The study explores the narratives on the 1988 death of 28 year old British tourist, Julie Ann Ward in Kenya's Maasai Mara Game Reserve. Julie Ward's death in Kenya attracted widespread attention in Kenya and Britain culminating in at least three true crime books, significant media coverage and rumours in Kenya. The study reflects on the narratives on Julie Ward's death, with particular interest in the discourses that gained expression through, or were inscribed, on Julie Ward's death and the quest for her killers. The study is also interested in the ways in which the Julie Ward case and the discourses it inspired offer a critique of rationality, and the accompanying unity of the subject, expressed through a logocentric impulse as key tenets of a Western modernity that continues to mediate metropolitan readings of postcolonial Africa. The study reveals that Julie Ward's death traversed various discursive sites, which were laden with specific ideas on race, gender, the postcolonial African state, Western modernity, female sexuality and black male sexuality, among a host of other issues; all of which tinted British and Kenyan narratives on the circumstances surrounding the death. The study argues that the authors of the three books on the Ward tragedy rely on colonial archives on Africa, and actively mobilize notions such as the myth of the uncontrollable black male libido and its threat to the vulnerable white woman in understanding the Ward tragedy. While these writers cling to these notions of the black peril, the noble savages, Africa as the tourist's wildlife paradise, and the dysfunctional postcolonial state; Kenyan publics read the murder as another symptom of a criminal political elite's brutal deployment of violence to secure immunity for its criminal activities.However, the two sets of ideas are largely disarticulated, and as the study reveals, the British stakeholders in the case are blinded by a rigid polarization of Kenya and Britain, which presumes a superior British moral and technological integrity. These assumptions blind the Ward family to British complicity in the cover up of the truth in Julie Ward's murder; while at the same time, rendering them illiterate in the local textualities which remain inaccessible to the instruments of Western modernity that are privileged in the quest for truth and justice in the Julie Ward murder. Julie Ward’s presence in Kenya, her death and the subsequent quest for her killers is consistently haunted by neat dichotomies, derived from various masternarratives. The study traces these dichotomies, in a bid to outline their configurations and the outcomes of their deployment, while consistently keeping the grey areas of entanglements between these dichotomies in sight. It is in these grey areas that we see the contradictions, blindspots, critiques, complicities and forms of agency that were at play just under the radar of these neat polarities. From these grey terrains, we catch glimpses of the workings of these dichotomies as discursive masks which conceal the faultlines that rend the masternarratives. The study finds that in many ways, Julie Ward's death in Kenya may be positioned in a transitional space between colonial whiteness and an emergent postcolonial whiteness, which betrays heavy imprints of the grammars of colonial whiteness, including the messianic white male authority, wildlife tourism and conservation. To this end, the study suggests, one of the factors that hampers the quest for truth and justice in the Ward case is the failure to forge viable grammars of whiteness in the postcolonial context. Such viable grammars would be able to access local textualities and retain an awareness of the underlying complicities and faultlines that now rig colonial Manichean binaries, which are largely mediated by the interests of capital. The novel The Constant Gardener and the film Ivory Hunters (1989) - both of which make implicit allusions to the Julie Ward case – eloquently articulate these complicities and faultlines.

Thesis advisor: Arthur Madigan / This dissertation is based on the claim that Taylor, in his immense philosophical writings, looks for the unifying forces, principles, and those desires in the human agent that can transform modern partial comprehension of reality into a new collage, i.e. a deeper and more meaningful picture of who we are and what is most essential for us. I argue that Taylor in his reflection on modernity adopts Hegel's concern for how to unite two ideals - radical freedom and expressive fullness. In search for an answer to Hegel's concern, Taylor repeatedly comes to the same conclusion. Adequate understanding of modernity, moral sources of modern identity, human agency, and human language, requires insertion in its context; therefore, the description of time, space, and other factors that condition modernity, is crucial. There are some aspects in Taylor's reflection on modernity that either preclude or impede the modern agent's search for fulfillment and freedom (i.e., reduction of the human sciences to the principles of the natural sciences), or open neglected or undiscovered perspectives for investigation, and offer new answers (i.e., challenge of achieving peaceful coexistence in a multicultural society). Underneath these aspects of modernity, Taylor perceives human desire to be free, authentic, and fulfilled. In the recent publications, Taylor brings into focus the closed horizons of modernity in the field of religion, especially the mainstream secularization theory. As long as modernity considers religion and spirituality as unimportant and pushes them aside from our daily life, it effectively closes off some possible answers regarding agent's fulfilment, flourishing, and freedom. It does not mean that every form of religious practice and belief brings us automatically to the goal; some might be narrow and exclusive as well, and therefore have to be examined in turn. Taylor's reflection unfolds the answer to Hegel's concern only gradually. In order to be free, fulfilled, and have a meaningful life, no dimension of human existence can be excluded, all dimensions remain to be examined. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2012. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Philosophy.