Thinking Beyond Religion and Resistance: Hierarchy, Sufism, and Subaltern Subjectivities in Downtown Karachi

我的项目旨在研究等级制度的模式，我的意思是不平等地位的人之间的有组织的关系，在两组对话者中实践：苏菲宗教禁欲主义者（Fakirs）和女性呈现性别变体的人（Khwaja Siras）。我相信，这可以提供新的见解的论点，平等主义作为规范的目标的阻力：等级关系，而不是平等是什么组织这些下层群体，以及他们寻求实现的地位与主流社会的特点。这些行为者有资格被称为底层，因为他们被剥夺了获得霸权的机会，处于主流话语的边缘，只是作为嘲笑的对象或贫困的受害者出现。借鉴神秘的苏菲论述，苦行僧和Khwaja Siras在他们自己的社区内建立了另一种等级制度，建立在师徒关系的基础上，带来了不同形式的亲属关系，政治和经济活动，这些活动破坏了公认的宗教分析类别的边界。与此同时，与苏菲主义的这种联系使他们能够与那些依赖他们作为精神资源的处于霸权地位的行为者建立所需的赞助关系，并在这样做的过程中将他们对精神的要求具体化。鉴于现有的学术界对南亚的苦行僧和Khwaja Siras/Hijras有一种倾向，倾向于被人类学上流行的“统治-抵抗”范式所过度确定，我打算探讨这些下级主体性如何构成另一种道德经济，使抵抗和等级制度之间的简单区分复杂化。实地调查将在异质的卡拉奇市中心的Kharadar社区进行。

My project intends to study modes of hierarchy, by which I mean the organised relationships of people with unequal status, practiced among two sets of interlocutors: Sufi religious ascetics (Fakirs) and feminine presenting gender variant people (Khwaja Siras). I believe this can offer new insight into arguments that situate egalitarianism as the normative goal of resistance: relations of hierarchy and not equality are what organise these subaltern groups, as well as characterising the status they seek to achieve with mainstream society. These actors qualify as subaltern as they are denied access to hegemonic power, and are situated at the margins of mainstream discourses, appearing only as objects of ridicule or victims of poverty. Drawing on mystic Sufi discourses, Fakirs and Khwaja Siras set up alternative hierarchies within their own communities building on master-disciple relationships, bringing to life distinct forms of kinship, politics, and economic activity that compromises the boundaries of the received analytical category of religion. Simultaneously, this association with Sufism allows them to enter into desired relations of patronage with hegemonically positioned actors who rely on them as spiritual resources, and in so doing reify their claims to the spiritual. Whereas existing scholarship on Fakirs and Khwaja Siras/Hijras in South Asia has had a tendency towards being overdetermined by the anthropologically vogue 'domination-resistance' paradigm, I intend to explore how these subaltern subjectivities constitute alternative moral economies that complicate an easy distinction between resistance and hierarchy. The fieldwork will take place in the heterogenous inner-city Karachi neighbourhood of Kharadar.