Premium
A catalogue of vice: a sense of failure and incapacity to act among Roma Muslims in Macedonia
Author(s) -
OustinovaStjepanovic Galina
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
journal of the royal anthropological institute
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.62
H-Index - 62
eISSN - 1467-9655
pISSN - 1359-0987
DOI - 10.1111/1467-9655.12610
Subject(s) - commit , agency (philosophy) , ethnography , action (physics) , order (exchange) , sociology , gender studies , political science , anthropology , social science , finance , physics , quantum mechanics , database , computer science , economics
Understood in terms of action and efficacy, the regnant notion of agency in anthropology is juxtaposed with an ethnographic category of failure. Agency is problematized and refined through the fieldwork‐grounded analysis of a faltering reform of a Sufi order in Macedonia, where failure was perceived and racially marked as the intrinsic incapacity of ‘Gypsies’ to commit to ritual action and overcome their propensity towards vice, thus achieving a desired self‐transformation into virtuous beings.