Con/text analysis
‘reading against the grain’
‘Mapping Hajja’s biographic narrative’
Seminar Narrative Research
March 31 2011
Karin Willemse
Anthropological research
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1990-1992 & 1995
Kebkabiya Town, North Darfur, Sudan
Market women: Low status
Female teachers : Elite members
Islamist regime: Expulsion and Example
Umm Khaltoum
Hajja
Feminist research
• Partial and situational perspectives
The biographic narrative as:
Research method; Analytical means;
Mode of representation
 Focus on agency
Agency
• Not something one ‘has’
• Nor what researchers ‘give’ to those engaged in our
research
 Part and parcel of performing identities, of negotiating
dominant discourses in specific contexts
 The researcher’s engagement with the subjects of research
allows us/them to understand their performance of agency
as intersubjective and context bound
 Responsible Representation
Research ‘against the grain’:
the importance of texts-in-context
• all actions and reflections (written, oral,
visual, bodily) subjected to analysis are
‘TEXTS’
• Texts carry meaning only in CONTEXTS
Both constitute each other: con/texts carry a
multitude of meanings
 Researcher’s choices restrict/create
meanings
Research ‘against the grain’:
• About allowing alternative perspectives on
the constructions of notions of self = going
beyond the self-evident
• To detect layerdness of texts, to find subtexts and to ‘hear’ silences
• To represent those alternative perspectives
and alternative ‘Selves’
Writing against the grain
• Responsible, contextualised and partial
representations
To connect listening, reading and
writing against the grain
 Focus on reading and writing: not only
what is being said, but also how
Listening against the grain:
Context of research
• Local: famine, ethnic conflicts,
Libya/Chad war
• National: NIF - Islamist project & shari’a
law implementation
• International: 1st Gulf-War
=> Sudan pro-Iraq
Listening against the grain
Conditions of research
Perspective of the ‘powerful’ = government
• Branded as ‘enemy’ by the government
• Suspicious because of research
• No freedom of movement
How to go about the research:
‘listening against the grain’
• No overt references to government =
no direct references to Islam
• Thread carefully: connect to people
 less talking and questioning, more
listening and ‘go with the flow’ (participant
observation)
biographic narratives: problem became
asset
Texts in Context
Context of listening: production of text
- (Inter-)Personal
- Discursive context: (im-)material, institutional
= Context of argumentation:
• Reading texts-in-context: writing texts-in-context
intertextuality, intersectionality, intersubjectivity
Intertextuality
“The insertion of history (society) into a text and of this text into
history..”
(Kristeva 1986, on Bakhtin)
“The sum of knowledge that makes it possible for texts to have
meaning.”
(Meijer 1996:23, cf. Fairclough 1992:103-105).
 infinite number of meanings: context bound
Intertextuality:
discursive context
• discursive level: dominant discourses
those discourses which allow the text to
have meanings, in which certain
meanings are more appropriate, more
probable and more powerful than
others
-> Context of performing subject positions
intersectionality
• Multiple identities/identifications: context related
• Subject-positions: allotted by dominant discourse
 Prioritizing and down playing: negotiating
subject-positions
= context bound
 Shifting and changing notions of Self & Other
intersubjectivity
• Dominant discourses position Selves and Others:
boundaries and moralities
• Construction of Self always in relation to others:
relational
• Change and resistance: relational processes
 How do women negotiate dominant discourses and
(re-)construct subject positions
= context bound
Against the grain
• Reading
- Acknowledge sub-texts, layerdness, silences
(intertextuality)
- Acknowledge alternative subject-positions:
stretching and transforming boundaries
(intersectionality)
- Acknowledge sub-discourses and deconstruction
(intersubjectivity: Self of researcher as embodied)
 Acknowledge agency in negotiations of dominant
discourses in specific contexts
Writing ‘against the grain’
• How to represent agency: as part of
negotiation of dominant discourses
Intertextual contexts
intersecting identities
intersubjective relations
Emphasize fluidity, instability & contexts:
self-reflexivity
Self-reflexivity
• What choices do you as a researcher make?
• Listening position:
• Reading position:
• Writing position:
 deconstruct one’s own seemingly selfevident reflections and conclusions
Listening, reading and writing Hajja’s
biography against the grain
• Hajja’s narrative as:
- a midwife, a (co-)wife, a mother and,
perhaps & occasionally,
as opposed to
- a market woman
Midwife
(..)You know, ya Sa’adiya, I helped in giving birth
to our raiis, as-sayeedna As-Sadiq Al-Mahdi. My
friend and I, we were elected to assist our teacher:
I bathed As-Sadiq while my friend took care of his
mother.(..)
Market woman
• (My Q)
In the past before their father died, I didn’t go to
the market. When I went to the market, my
daughters were grown up. When I was working as
a midwife and people called me to a lot of places,
their father Abu Feisal would make breakfast for
his children and for me as well. But now my
daughters make food for me and for themselves.
Market woman
• (MY Q)
I had my own money, because women would give
me some money when I assisted them in giving
birth. I even went on haj with my own money. With
LS100, I went on pilgrimage. Ah, but that was in
1960 before I went to the market. Then money was
worth more than it is now.
Hajja’s biographic narrative
• Patchy, fragmented: no coherence
• Contrast to Umm Khalthoum, the female
teacher
• Narrated over a longer period: in around
her compound
Text analysis
• Linguistic aspects(often biography seen as
western (See Abu-Lughod, Comaroffs) &
Style
• Wording, grammar, punctuation, turn-taking,
pauses, hesitations, sudden change of style
 We - I/eye: responsible - unique
 They/them - you/one: shared responsibility
agency
• Hajja’s negotiation of the dominant
discourse:
- Resistance is covert not overt
midwife / market women
- Constructing a moral self:
good female Sudanese Muslim citizen
- Creating contrast between ´self´ and others among
the market women
 constructing (moral) differences
Reading against the grain
• My discontent with this realization
 fitted too neatly into the Sudanese
government’s division of high and low
class women
 agency or cultural dope/dupe?
Reading against the grain: format
• Why patchy, why fragmented
Lack of coherence = lack of education
or something else?
 Literally contextualizing her narrative
 Mapping Hajja’s narrative in space
and time
Hajja’s moral landscape
• Landmarks refer to ‘life-marks’
• She was literally ‘all over the place’
• Her history surrounded her, was laid out in front of
her
==> this landscape provided the chronology of her life
and thus the ‘chapters’ in her biographic narrative
The land and the tide
• Days in the week: from places to spaces
- days marked her activities and locations of
performance
- contexts of identities related to time and space
==> She did not need coherence in her
narrative since she lived that coherence
every day (and I did ‘went along’)
Representation
• Mapping Hajja’s narrative
- locate her surroundings as a context
and as points of reference
- Tie these to days in a week: activities
 performed identities
From places to spaces
• De Certeau (1984)
“ Space is a practised place “
Spaces and Places:
narratives
• Places and spaces like mapping and
touring
• A narrative makes use of places to
anchor the stories of Self: takes the
listener/reader on a ‘tour’ through a life
with a map as foundation/boundaries
• Maps are fixed, tours may alter
Understanding Hajja’s picture:
The white tobe
The current tobe
• Nowadays, the tobe is typically a four to
six meter long cloth of about a meter
width, which is a loosely wrapped over
the ‘in-door’ clothes, often a skirt and a
blouse, a dress or even trousers.
The tobe
• The current fabric was introduced under
Turco-Egyptian rule (1823-1882) and
made in India, which was a British colony
at that time (Spaulding 1985:193).
• The new fabric caused a different way of
wearing, as compared to the local veil,
which was made of homespun course
cotton or even of leather.
The White Tobe
• An intertextual reading ‘against the grain’:
layered-ness of meaning of a garment
- historical
- discursive (turning place into space)
- Subjectivities/alternative identities: agency
veiling
• Marks wealth, status, position of a
protected female relative
• Cloth from India: economic and
political piece of fabric
• Modernity: new elite and new lifestyle: new knowledge horizon
Historical context
• Anglo-Egyptian Condominium
(1899-1956)
Sudanese junior administrators to
rule the country with/for them
Shift in distinction private-public
White tobe
• Colour
• British: immaculateness:
-> fysical, mental and moral
• Cordon sanitaire: being protected
White tobe
• White colour:
Sudanese:
- tradition (first tobes)
- Status (new elite)
- Widow hood (social death)
White tobe
• Marks the interface between the state and its
subjects
-> A protected female subject that is the face of
the state to its (female)subjects:
->On behalf of the state, in and for the public
domain
British rule
• Relegated Islam to the private sphere
• Shari’a courts only addressing “personal cases”
(divorce, custody, inheritance)
• In public domain: the state rules – British law,
structures, institutions and morals
White tobe
• Education for women: position
• Professions for women: salary
- added a new phase to women’s
lives
==> adolescence/single woman
Agency
• This new phase ment a new identity
Instead of derivative membership of elite
(via father, husband, brother etc.)
Upward mobility on their own
Sense of autonomy & different networks
New ‘white tobe class’
• Analogy to ‘white board class’
• New elite, different from the male
members of the new elite
• Knowledge horizon, ambitions,
anticipations
Agency and strategy
• “ I did not find the right husband yet.”
• Mass – weddings
• Opposition kinship moral landscape and
the nationalist elite moral landscape
Hajja and the White Tobe
• Marks Hajja’s position as a non-literate
‘trained’ midwife as one of the
government elite
It allowed her to construct herself as
different from other market women and
as ‘in reality’ an elite woman
 She was allowed to wear the white
tobe
Not place but space
• De Certeau (1984, 117):
‘Space is a practiced place’
 Mapping and touring:
narrating a space of self - a self in space
Not identity but
performativity
“I narrate, therefore I am”
contextualize
“ I narrate (in a specific) space, therefore I
become”