ABSTRACT
Political Islam, or what C. Geertz has labelled as fundamentalism, is a reaction to modernity, with the latter being – B. F. Soares and F. Osella noticed both Geertz and E. Gellner making this point – ‘ a Western prerogative that spreads with colonialism. The rhetoric of contemporary civilizers, no different from their progenitors, is centred in the discourse of ‘ ethos ’ – that is, ideals, values and perceptions of how one ought to live. Stigma is in many respects a statement about value and worth made by a stigmatizer about those he or she might stigmatize and, thus, one form of symbolic power in Bourdieu’s terms. With respect to stigma, this is evident in the idea of ‘internalized’ or ‘self’ stigma. Finally, the exercise of symbolic power is often buried in taken-for-granted aspects of culture and thereby hidden, or ‘misrecognized’ as Bourdieu puts it, both by the people causing the harm and by those being harmed.
