Ordinary Trouble: Reflexive Ethnography of a Form of Madness in a Salafist Context (Tizi-Ouzou, Algeria)
This article examines a form of mental trouble observed during a year-long ethnographic research project carried out within the Salafist environment of the city of Tizi-Ouzou (Algeria). It focuses on Abdel, a forty-year-old man suffering from compulsive thoughts which he described using the Arabic e...
সংরক্ষণ করুন:
| প্রকাশিত: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/sources, |
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| প্রধান লেখক: | |
| বিন্যাস: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| ভাষা: | Anglais |
| প্রকাশিত: |
Sources
2024
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| বিষয়গুলি: | |
| অনলাইন ব্যবহার করুন: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| সংক্ষিপ্ত: | This article examines a form of mental trouble observed during a year-long ethnographic research project carried out within the Salafist environment of the city of Tizi-Ouzou (Algeria). It focuses on Abdel, a forty-year-old man suffering from compulsive thoughts which he described using the Arabic expression waswās (“Satanic whispers”). I gradually became more aware of this “trouble” as I immersed myself in my ethnographic project, during which uncertain situations arose where it was often difficult to tell whether it was the ethnographer or their interlocutor who was the more troubled. The phrase “ordinary trouble” expresses this indeterminacy of waswās, at the crossroads of the knowing subject, the subject of knowledge, and the situation in which they meet. The sources are WhatsApp conversations later deleted, discussions captured fortuitously during everyday life, which reveal moments of trouble and disquiet, first of all in the ethnographic relation itself, which proceeded amidst an atmosphere of mistrust—and then, subsequently, in biographical episodes recounted by Abdel. In this way, I interrogate the “proper distance” necessary to conduct ethnography, the role played by chance in ethnographic research, and the researcher’s capacity for improvisation in order to generate knowledge in spite of opacity and silence. I also attempt to think reflexively and to suspend the affectivity stemming from ethnographic socialization, through objectivation processes focusing solely upon the words of the muwaswās (the bearer of waswās). In this light, mental trouble becomes a powerful instrument through which to analyse dynamics of power and domination. Abdel’s mistrust can then be understood through the lens of subalternity—as a resistance strategy in a situation of asymmetrical relationships. |
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