Muslim Communities and Cultures of the Himalayas by Jacqueline H. Fewkes Megan Adamson Sijapati

Author:Jacqueline H. Fewkes, Megan Adamson Sijapati [Jacqueline H. Fewkes, Megan Adamson Sijapati]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780367210380
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2020-12-21T00:00:00+00:00

6 Perspectives

A Photo Essay

Jacqueline H. Fewkes and Megan Adamson Sijapati

From the very beginning of this project, as we discussed bringing together diverse perspectives on Muslim experiences in the Himalaya to challenge bounded notions of both regions and religious communities, we envisioned a multiauthored photographic essay that brought together diverse views of Muslim life in the Himalaya. Our vision was of documenting whole ways of life – not exclusively religious practices, but not excluding them either – to illustrate some of the different perspectives of Muslims of the Himalaya, demonstrating shared experiences but also embracing difference. The images we have collected here capture the complexity of the symbolic vocabularies of the Muslim communities of the Himalaya, providing a visualization of the confluences and divergences of Islamically-inflected cultural practices in these communities. However, there are distinct challenges to providing visual arguments that being Muslim is not a monolithic experience, either in its historical influences or contemporary practices.

As Fewkes has written about in a previous visual study (2008), it is challenging to use images to represent specific cultural settings without tending towards emphasizing difference as a primary feature of culture. Such an approach to visual representations of culture is classically demonstrated in the magazine National Geographic, which has long accentuated cultural difference through the selection of images such as “brightly colored, ‘different’ dress,” and people “engaged in initially strange-seeming rituals or inexplicable behavior” (Lutz and Collins, 1993, p. 89). These magazine photos that are commonly considered aesthetically arresting – vivid, unusual, filled with juxtapositions – not only may misrepresent the daily lived experiences of the people they purport to represent (we will come back to the idea of representation more critically a bit later), they also widen a conceptual gap between the viewer and photographic subject that promotes cultural othering. Such images have long been used to fuel historical Orientalist imaginings of Muslim Others (Said, 1978) and continue to reproduce biases against Muslim communities in global media and discourses (see, for example, Graham-Brown, 1988; Said, 1981; and Yeğenoğlu, 1999). This is true particularly of iconic images such as the 1985 “Afghan Girl” photograph from National Geographic, which has been framed and reframed to promote problematic stereotypes of Muslim women even while purporting to “empower” them (Zeiger, 2008). Ironically, the same is true of many images related to non-Muslim life in the Himalayan region as well, where the stereotype of a mountain “Shangri-la” may obscure the struggles and real-life experiences of other religious communities (Ortner, 1999; Lopez, 1998). When these issues are compounded with the complexity of image production in communities that are frequently photographed by tourists (Gillespie, 2006), and therefore may have established genres of deliberate photographic self-representation – which, like all such expressions, are informed by economic, social, and political interests – the question of what is a meaningful “everyday” image becomes all the more complex. Combined with the practical constraints on publishing images in a book – which require difficult editorial decisions due to the limited number of images possible in

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