Page 157 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

public should serve as a space only for the settling of arguments, not for the
articulation of identities. The recent diversi¤cation of the media landscape fa-
cilitated the public assertion of a plurality of identities, a plurality that Arendt
(1958) identi¤ed as at once a necessary and inevitable component of the public
sphere under conditions of political modernity. In the case of Mali, it is not the
formation of political interest groups, or the expression of their aspirations in
terms of “identity,” that undermines the critical potential of public debate. In-
stead, this potential is limited by the absence of the institutional preconditions
for political participation and of a normative order that would offer an alter-
native to the one promoted by the current government.

Notes

The article is based on research conducted in San, Segu, and Bamako between 1996 and
2003 (sixteen months altogether). Previous versions of the article were presented at the
Free University of Berlin (Department of Anthropology); to the Annual Meeting of the
Canadian Anthropological Association in Montreal, 2001; to the Alexander von Hum-
boldt Foundation Summer Institute “Muslim Identities and the Public Sphere,” Berlin,
July 2001; and to the conference “Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere” in Amster-
dam, organized by Birgit Meyer and Annelies Moors in December 2001. I thank my col-
leagues at the Free University, the participants of the Summer Institute (in particular
Dale Eickelman and Armando Salvatore) and the participants of the Amsterdam confer-
ence, especially Annelies Moors and Birgit Meyer, for their critical comments. The re-
search on which this paper is based would not have been possible without the assistance
and patience of numerous Ansar Dine devotees. I owe a special gratitude to Madame
Diaby Adam Dembele and her husband for their hospitality and readiness to engage in
a dialogue.

1. Alpha Konaré and his party, ADEMA (Alliance pour la Démocratie au Mali), won
the ¤rst democratic elections and were reelected in 1997. In June 2002 Colonel Toumani
Touré, the leader of the military putsch of 1991, was elected president.
2. My analytical perspective contrasts with Soares’s (2004) use of the notion of
“public” in his account of forms of Islamic piety in postcolonial Mali. Soares dismisses
the relevance of Habermas’s concept for his own material by observing that Habermas
underestimated the role of religious associations and values in the emergence of the
eighteenth-century public sphere in Western Europe (see Zaret 1992). I posit that espe-
cially Habermas’s insistence on the interlocking of changes in the economy and in the
nature of “publicness” warrants important insights into recent changes in public de-
bate in Mali, and into the place of religion in these debates.
3. At the same time there is an increasing need for the state to create or to reinvent
itself discursively and performatively, as the central locus of political power and as the
guarantor of a “commonwealth” that transcends class and sectarian interests (also see
Harvey 1989, 108; Comaroff and Comaroff 2001, 37–40).
4. While the term arabisants refers to a common educational background, intégristes

146 Dorothea E. Schulz