Dreams from Elsewhere: Muslim subjectivities beyond the trope of self‐cultivation
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.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".