Veil as Choice, pt. 2

The previous post was an excerpt from a longer article about a Pakistani immigrant and her daughter's response to Islam and the veil in the U.S.  In the longer article, the daughter wrote:

When my mother turned 12, she started wearing a burqa in her hometown of Multan, Pakistan. More than a decade later, she got married and moved to Karachi, then a thriving capital of modernity, where few women wore hijabs, let alone all-encompassing veils.

Growing up in Central Valley, Calif., I had no qualms about showing off my legs in shorts and skirts, and I was shocked to learn my mother had covered every inch of her body. Even more unbelievable to me, though, was that my mother felt pressured when she moved to Karachi to suddenly give up the burqa, a blanket of fabric that had at that point been part of her identity for more than half her life. It provided her with a sense of comfort, it helped define her identity as a Muslim and a woman, and it was gone virtually overnight.

It angered me that she hadn’t protested. What had she wanted to do, I asked her. “It doesn’t matter,” she told me. “We must do what we can to fit in our community.”

She continues:

That is the crux of the problem I see today in Europe’s current battle over the veil: Communities defining how women should cover up or what they should take off.  

In a larger sense, all communities define how individuals, both male and female, should act, because communities set norms of behavior.  An Iranian male once told me that he didn't understand why Americans became upset over stoning for adultery since it was applied to both males and females (though I think he might have been blind to the frequency with which the punishment was not applied to males).  For him, this norm of behavior was coherent and equitable.  Many ethnographies deal with the relative freedom and norms of behavior granted to males and females within a community.  For one such ethnography, I could recommend:  Swartz, Marc J. 1991. The Way the World Is: Cultural Processes and Social Relations Among the Mombasa Swahili. Berkeley: University of California Press. (see:  http://www.anthro.ucsd.edu/Faculty_Profiles/swartz.html)

What is interesting to me in the quotes I've provided are two things:  1.  how the West defines female freedom as the freedom to remove clothing; and, 2.  how the daughter adopted the Western perspective of individual choice, including the choice of defying community norms, while the mother enacted her individual choice privately, allowing her 'outside' to conform, but retaining her belief in her inside.

My American students would claim that this is hypocrisy:  that having a belief includes the freedom to express this belief, and that being veiled prevents free thought or opinion, as if the outside dictates the inside.

I've taught in my class (kudos to Dr. Martin Ottenheimer for this formulation) that Americans have internalized the 'peach pit' schema of personality and personhood, while the East, broadly speaking, has internalized the 'onion' schema.  Prof. Ottenheimer did not use the term 'schema' but it fits, I think.

In the 'peach pit' schema, the notion of an unalterable core or inner self is proposed, and charges of hypocrisy can come from either: 1.  behavior that deviates from professed beliefs or values or, 2.  behavior that changes from context to context, so that the outside fails to conform to the inside.  The 'onion' schema is an idea of personality wherein each layer is present and conforms to the external condition, and as layers are peeled away, eventually the person comes to  . . . nothing.  The person is the set of layers, according to this idea.  The other idea claims that the 'real' person is inside and once social convention is stripped away, that inner, true self can be revealed.

Therefore, I think we can see how the separate schemas:  individual choice, outside conformity versus internal integrity, and the schema of the 'onion' versus the 'peach pit' are at work here.  The American daughter has confronted her own assumption that female freedom equates to baring the body, due to her exposure to alternate behaviors and community norms, but still clings to the notion that choice is internal and individual and that internal choice must match (or be expressed) on the outside of the body in order to conform to cultural schemas of person and integrity.

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A follow up post on Iranian and Shiite hypocrisy should come at some time, though I have not experienced this directly in my field work.  Also, I could work this idea into my examination (long delayed!!) of Xander within the Buffyverse (the Whedonverse, more correctly).