Webb Keane: Saba Mahmood died on March 10, 2018, at the age of 57. Born in Pakistan, she earned degrees in architecture and urban planning before completing an anthropology doctorate at Stanford and becoming a professor at Berkeley. One of the most influential anthropologists of her generation, she was a vivid public figure and original political thinker whose impact went well beyond discipline or academy.
[…] Her work was animated by a fundamentally anthropological ethic. Raising questions about the ethnocentric sources of even self-declared post- or anti-colonial political thought and emancipatory projects, this ethic has implications that reach well beyond any particular discipline.
It is an ethic of self-displacement or self-parochialization; that is, of taking on another’s perspective, not just to understand them, but also in the service of a political, cultural, or moral critique of one’s own society, even of one’s own values. For, among other goals, this ethic engages with alternative visions of political life, social well-being, and human flourishing—without necessarily advocating them—as affording positions from which to see things in a new light. At its strongest, the anthropological ethic is an argument for the possibility of radical differences among the worlds that people might inhabit.
Mahmood’s practice both sheds light on the limits of prevailing forms of progressivist critical theory and suggests how to rethink them. Her work ranges well beyond her particular discipline of anthropology. But as a limit case, anthropology can offer an especially revealing site from which to reflect on the Euro-American underpinnings of critical thought with which many academics are most comfortable and the paradoxes to which this thought can lead. More here.