研究・教育・社会活動
博士論文一覧
博士論文要旨
論文題目：Community in Crisis: Language and Action among African-American Muslims in Harlem
著者：中村 寛 （NAKAMURA, Yutaka）
博士号取得年月日：2008年6月27日
This dissertation is an ethnography of the everyday lives of African-American Muslims in Harlem, New York. It is based on fieldwork carried out in Harlem, at which many African-Americans (both Muslims and non-Muslims) and an increasing number of new-coming African immigrants concentrate. Inspired by the phenomenological categories conceived by Charles Sanders Peirce and the writings of several semiotically inclined anthropologists and philosophers, it depicts the everyday experience of the Muslim individuals and explores the relationship between their senses of reality, their narratives, and the community “shared” among them. By so doing, this dissertation seeks to clarify the relationship and gap between their language and action. The specific “reality” it tries to examine is violence. The aim is to make explicit the ways in which what appears as “violence” may not materialize itself as violent acts, and what appears as “non-violence” may indeed lead into violence.
In the fall of 2002, I came to Harlem, New York to conduct my fieldwork in the African-American Muslim community. My focus then was not specifically on the Nation of Islam but on African-American Muslims in general, most of whom were not current members of the NOI but had had some experience with the organization. I wanted to learn the way in which individual Muslims actually practiced and experienced Islam in their daily life. Before long, I encountered the articulation of many criticisms and frustration not only about “whites” and “America,” but also about the community of “Harlem,” of “African-Americans,” and of “Muslims.” There was an obvious sense of frustration, of pain, of suffering, and of crisis in their accounts. Many of the Muslims I met in Harlem often expressed their anger and frustration against violent measures they had to endure. What does it mean for those individuals to have such sense of frustration and crisis, especially when narrating their own past and present? How are their narratives to be interpreted? And perhaps more importantly, what does it mean to give such an account to what they sense?
Ever since returning to Tokyo, Japan in the fall of 2004, I have contemplated how to understand and interpret the experience I had in Harlem, what to do with the plethora of field notes, the numerous memos, and the tapes and materials I had gathered over the years. Finally, I have come to put my questions in the following manner.
1. The accounts of crises and frustration I encountered hint at the location of violence. African-American Muslims in Harlem, for example, often express their frustration against the persisting institution and contemporary effect of slavery. While this frustration is articulated by the particular African-American Muslim individuals in Harlem, the language that is used to express it is often shared among African-American Muslims who have been exposed to the teaching of the NOI. What seems a series of brutal actions in the past indeed was carried out and sustained by the fact that, although the institution of slavery did not operate as a single mechanism of social control, the majority of people under its influence did not recognize it as brutal at the time. Thus, one needs to question one’s sense of history, which enables one to justify the claim that the triumph of reason has abolished the institution of slavery, reduced the amount of violence, and improved the situation as a whole. One needs to take into consideration those elements that are too subtle to be recognized as clear and present violence. What is, then, the slavery of the present that many African-Americans in Harlem currently experience and affirm? Where is the violence located? How is this violence to be understood? What particular mode of reasoning and of being constitutes and sustains such violence?
2. Sometimes the language African-American Muslims employ to express such “emotion” as anger and frustration seems itself violent to the eyes of an observer from outside the community. But the “violent” language is not to be mistaken as a violent act or violence itself. Nor is it to be taken as the plain indication of their strong, persisting belief that directly leads to their practice. One does not need to read the literatures of anthropology to confirm that people say one thing and act quite another and that there is almost always a gap, a space of discontinuity, between words and deeds. But the question still remains: What does this space mean and do to one’s conception of violence?
When faced with anger and frustration, another temptation is to attribute such strong, emotional elements to an individual psyche. This process of reduction, however, comes at price. To reduce the frustration and anger articulated by the individuals to the level of individualized psychology or psychopathology is to give in to a particular mode of logic, which attributes a manifested phenomenon to an individual effort by ignoring such social factors as “cultural capital” or discursive space. While pain and suffering inflicted at the collective level are seemingly manifested at an individual level, and vary greatly from individual to individual, this, nevertheless, does not mean that their experience of and response toward violence can be reduced to the problem of an individual.
3. Closely entangled with this problem of violence and language is the problem of (dis-)communication. The repeated emphasis on the need for a strong community and for unity by African-American Muslims, especially by the leaders of the Nation of Islam but by no means limited to them, has, for example, been largely circulated by mass media and understood and criticized as a separatist, exclusivist idea. The name “separatist” or “exclusivist” holds a derogatory and regressive connotation and is perceived as posing a threat to the institution of the U.S. That is, the very idea articulated by African-American Muslims for building their own community can be understood as a violation of the current regime of America.
I soon found out, however, that what the term “community” signifies, when used by African-American Muslims in Harlem, varies significantly according to context. While the expression such as “our community” or “the community” may seem to indicate a somewhat exclusive population that is differentiated or discriminated from “the others,” it has different meanings to it. It can mean African-American community, African-American Muslims, Muslim community, Harlem community, or Muslim community of a certain organization such as American Society of Muslim, the Nation of Islam, etc. It is my observation that many of the African-American Muslims’ languages, contrary to their apparent simplicity and plainness, escape being a mere “descriptive statement” and have plural and complex roles and meanings. They are metaphorical in a sense that they permit a wide range of (re)interpretation by others as well as themselves.
What is it, then, that makes those who criticize “separatist” and “exclusivist” language feel violated? What is at stake when the adherents of the idea of tolerance feel upset? What are the conditions under which those advocators in America are able to justifiably criticize “separatist” and “exclusionary” language? I am interested in the ways in which those metaphors produce communication and dis-communication not only within the community of African-American Muslim community in Harlem but also with other populations such as Arab-Muslim community, African immigrant community, White community, and so on. How and in what context is the term “community,” for example, employed to distinguish African-American Muslims “themselves” from a certain population? How are the borders that emerge by themselves negotiated, changed, and redrawn?
4. Last but not least is the problem of “being there” as an “observer” who writes. Ever since the issues of “crisis of representation,” of “an author’s authority,” and of “writing culture” were addressed in the field of anthropology, the violence inherent in the act of writing and in what is written and published has been seriously and sometimes somberly debated. Indeed, observers are observed. To say this aloud may make one feel proud of being “self-reflexive,” but to constantly live according to the wisdom of the statement is not as easy as it seems. Related to this problem is the issue of positionality. I am an anthropologist, who happens to be non-Muslim, visually inscribed as Asian, and holding a Japanese passport. It would have been a lot simpler if the matter had stopped there. But the community I “chose” to enter and study has been the target of violent writing for quite some time. How can one avoid being completely trapped in the fallacies of “narcissistic reflexivity” (Pierre Bourdieu’s term) and still manage to write ethnography? How is it possible to deal with (symbolic) violence attached to researching, studying, writing, and publishing while still practicing them? Although I would not directly deal with these questions in any particular chapter, they remain the crucial issues connoted in this dissertation.
With the leading questions above, my research focuses on the experiences of African-American Muslims in Harlem and explores the relationship between (a) the violence, pain, and suffering they encounter, which most of the time cannot distinctly be articulated, (b) the language they use to perceive and communicate such elements, and (c) the culture or community they construct and are embedded in at once, which seeks to share and (re)institutionalize the ontic suffering and the language.
The dissertation has three parts: History, Street Life, and Communi(ty/cation). The first section, “Histories of the Present/The Presence of Histories: Formation of the African-American Muslim Communities and the Position of Archive,” examines the way in which the histories of African-American Muslim are conceived and articulated, and the location of violence that is hinted at by their articulation. Chapter One is titled “Archivization of Histories” and examines the problems of history and of individual life-history and their relation to archive. Chapter Two, “Frustrated Past,” further explores the problems of history and the relationship between narrative culture and archive culture.
The second section, “Across 116th Street: Ethnographic Sketches of the Street Life,” depicts several scenes of confrontation and conflicts to explore plural and complex relationships between violence and language. Chapter Three titled “Dynamism of Differentiation” describes in the manner of story-telling several events that mainly take place on 116th Street, on which many African-American Muslims and new-coming African Muslims concentrate. Chapter Four, “Different Boundaries, Different Contexts,” examines the scenes of confrontation and conflict between Harlem and non-Harlem.
The third section, “Community Deferred: Communication and Dis-communication among Individuals and Communities,” looks at a local social movement led by several Muslim individuals and explores the relationship between their language and community. Chapter Five, “Constitution and Deconstitution of an Islamic Organization,” looks at the process in which a relatively small and new Islamic movement was organized and disorganized.