Dreams from Elsewhere: Muslim subjectivities beyond the trope of self‐cultivation
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Drawing on dream stories from a Sufi community in Egypt, this article probes the limits of the paradigm of self‐cultivation which has come to be widely employed in the anthropology of Islam. While the concept of self‐cultivation has complicated the equation of agency and resistance, its emphasis on intentionality and deliberate action obscures other modes of religiosity that centre neither on acting within nor on acting against but on being acted upon. Far from reaffirming a self‐cultivating subject, narratives of visitational and divinely inspired dreams are profound reminders of the unpredictability of divine interventions and the contingency of life itself. Through an analysis of Egyptian dream narratives and in conversation with anthropological literatures on an ethics of passion, this article traces a relational understanding of subjectivity which poses an even more radical challenge to the liberal model of the autonomous self than do practices of self‐cultivation. Résumé À partir des récits de rêves d'une communauté soufie égyptienne, le présent article explore les limites du paradigme du développement personnel que l'on rencontre largement aujourd'hui dans l'anthropologie de l'islam. En même temps que ce concept de culture de soi compliquait l'équation de l' agency et de la résistance, l'accent mis sur l'intentionnalité et l'action délibérée a occulté d'autres modes de religiosité qui ne sont centrés ni sur l'action « dans », ni sur l'action « contre » mais sur le fait de subir une action. Au lieu de corroborer l'idée d'un sujet qui se cultiverait lui‐même, les récits de rêves de visitation et d'inspiration divine rappellent fortement l'imprévisibilité des interventions divines et la contingence de la vie humaine. Par l'analyse de ces récits de rêves recueillis en Égypte et en dialogue avec la littérature anthropologique consacrée à l'éthique de la passion, cet article retrace une appréhension relationnelle de la subjectivité qui remet en question le modèle libéral du soi autonome, encore plus radicalement que ne le font les pratiques de développement personnel.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it