Threading knowledge: Sihr and divination practices in contemporary Kuwait
Bibliographic record
Abstract
English: Islam in Kuwait, namely, state Islam tends to regard the practices of magic and divination, sihr in Arabic as illicit.In this light, state Islam has tried to discourage or eliminate such customs through local organizations, Islamic reformers, and government institutions.Despite the efforts of the state, particularly in the view of the difficulty of providing legal traceability to so-called magical or divinatory practices, these have been able to endure through a set of gray areas and legal ambiguities.Predominantly, on the fringes of society, practitioners of traditional magic continue to offer their services to this day, often for considerable sums of money.However, and despite the fact that they are at odds, their way of conceiving and putting into words these practices is nonetheless influenced by State Islam, even if they are not determined by it.Practitioners and their clients thus make themselves able to step outside the framework of this Islam, while being inspired by it.This echoes the content of the practices themselves, insofar as they are part of a perspective in which the notions of free will and fatality take on concrete meaning and allow themselves to be negotiated.In my thesis, I seek to contextualize the notion of agency within this oscillation, while linking it to the socio-economic climate of Kuwaiti society.So, I ask the following question: What form does the hegemonic force of state Islam take on the fringes of society?French: L'islam au Koweit, à savoir l'islam d'État, a tendance à considérer les pratiques liées à la magie et la divination, sihr en arabe, comme autant de choses illicites.Dans cette optique, cet islam s'est efforcé de décourager ou d'éliminer ce genre de coutumes par le biais d'organisations locales, de l'influence des réformistes, et des institutions du gouvernement.Malgré les efforts de l'État, eut égard notamment à la difficulté de fournir une traçabilité légale aux pratiques dites magiques ou divinatoires, celles-ci ont pu perdurer par un jeu de zones grises et d'ambiguïtés.Aux marges de la société pour une bonne part, les praticiennes de la magie traditionnelle continuent encore aujourd'hui à offrir leurs services, moyennant souvent des sommes considérables.Pour autant, et malgré le fait qu'elles se situent en porte-à-faux, leur manière de concevoir et de mettre en mots ces pratiques n'en est pas moins influencée par l'islam d'État, même si elles ne se laissent pas déterminer par celui-ci.Les praticiennes et leurs clients se rendent ainsi capable de sortir des cadres de cet islam, tout en s'en inspirant.Ceci fait d'ailleurs écho au contenu des pratiques elles-mêmes, dans la mesure où elles s'inscrivent dans une optique où les notions de libre-arbitre et de fatalité prennent un sens concret et se laissent négocier.Dans ma thèse, je cherche à contextualiser la notion d'agentivité (agency) au sein même de cette oscillation, tout en la mettant en lien avec le climat socio-économique de la société Kuwaitienne.Ainsi je pose la question suivante: quelle forme prend la force hégémonique de l'islam d'État aux marges de la société? and their friendship.I am deeply thankful for the support of Olga Harmazy, Joanne Terrasi and Connie Giuseppe who consistently resolved my many bureaucratic issues related to my thesis, and my motherland.This research is further indebted to my generous and insightful professors: Dr. Katherine Lemons, Dr. Setrag Manoukian, and Dr. Diana Allan.Their sharp insights, considerable patience (especially Professor Lemons), and wealth of knowledge was the only reason I managed to finish this thesis!I consider my time at McGill University foundational to my thinking, and I take everything I have learned from my teachers into my next stage in postgraduate study.I also want to thank the many people who were kind enough to allow me to share my thoughts and ideas and offer me advice and suggestions along the way.Lastly, I thank my pillar of strength, my mother, who has been consistently supportive and has showed sufficient interests in my studies.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".