Institutional Repository UIN Sunan Kalijaga YogyakartaGEOGRAFI MORAL DAN SENSIBILITAS ETIS PEREMPUAN JAMAAH TABLIGH DI BANDUNG INDONESIANIM.: 21300011042Annisa Fitri AmaliahauthorThis dissertation examines how the piety of Tablighi Jamaat women in Bandung is shaped through the relationship between the body, space, and urban moral order. Within the anthropology of Islam, Muslim women’s agency has often been understood through the dichotomy of obedience and resistance, whereby piety is interpreted either as the product of autonomous will or as a form of symbolic domination. This study takes a critical stance toward such readings by arguing that piety does not emerge solely from individual volition but is produced through repeated ethical practices embedded within particular socio-historical formations. Drawing on Saba Mahmood’s notion of self-cultivation, Talal Asad’s conception of ethical formation, and Philippa Williams’s work on urban moral geography, this dissertation demonstrates that the formation of the religious self is not constituted solely through bodily discipline but is also mediated by spaces that regulate affect, mobility, boundaries of interaction, and ethical hierarchies. Bandung is approached as an urban moral geography, a landscape saturated with moral evaluations concerning how piety should be displayed, constrained, and adjusted across different social contexts. The findings show that masturah and other Tablighi Jamaat activities function as intensive ethical spaces in which women cultivate pious dispositions through silence, bodily discipline, restricted social interaction, the cultivation of adab, engagement with religious texts, and the intensification of religious affect. Yet as women move between the markaz, the home, masturah, and the more plural social worlds of the city, they encounter divergent moral expectations. In these circumstances, they neither simply maintain nor abandon the forms of piety cultivated within the movement. Rather, they continuously assess the moral weight of different spaces and recalibrate their bodily comportment, dress, voice, mobility, and social interactions without relinquishing their commitment to piety. This argument is based on ethnographic research conducted in the Tablighi Jamaat markaz in Bandung between February 2022 and May 2023, supplemented by ongoing online communication until January 2026. Data were collected through participant observation in a range of Tablighi Jamaat activities, in-depth interviews with female members, and the analysis of the movement’s internal texts. This dissertation employs ethical sensibility as an analytical lens to explain how Tablighi women perceive and respond to the differing moral weight of the social spaces they inhabit. Ethical sensibility operates not merely as moral awareness but as the basis for their capacity to regulate the body, manage affect, assess situations, and adjust pious practices across spaces governed by different moral demands. Building upon this ethical sensibility, the dissertation proposes the concept of liminal agency, defined as women’s capacity to engage in ethical navigation under conditions of in-betweenness: between the private and the public, between ideal stability and social uncertainty, and between religious aspirations and the demands of everyday life. This form of agency enables women to sustain their commitment to piety without reproducing identical forms of religious expression across all spaces. By bringing together moral geography, ethical sensibility, and liminal agency within a single analytical framework, this dissertation contributes to the anthropology of Islam by expanding prevailing understandings of Muslim women’s agency beyond the dichotomy of obedience and resistance.305.3 Gender2026-07-13UIN SUNAN KALIJAGA YOGYAKARTA;PASCASARJANAThesis

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