The brotherhood of Freemason sisters
Subtitle: knowledge, subjectivity, and discretion in Italian Masonic Lodges
By: by Lilith Mahmud-Abdelwahab
Published: 2008
Language: eng
Number of pages: 275
Description: My dissertation examines gender and class in Italy through an ethnographic study of Masonic Lodges. Founded in the intellectual salons of the Enlightenment as secret societies for men, Masonic Lodges have maintained their elitism and mystery in contemporary Italy, where they are widely perceived as powerful "brotherhoods" of upper-class, right-wing individuals. Women have increasingly found paths to membership in mixed-gender or single-sex women's Lodges. Drawing on 18 months of fieldwork I conducted between 2004 and 2006 among different Italian Masonic Lodges, this dissertation focuses on women's participatory experiences in Freemasonry, as an understudied form of class-based and gender-based social activism. Part I addresses the ritual and social processes by which 'Mason' becomes a core identity category. The 33-degree Masonic initiation path is aimed explicitly at procuring the betterment of society through the betterment of individuals. Through a disciplined cultivation of selves -as Masons, as brothers, as sisters- my women informants engaged in a progressive and humanist project that sought universal fraternity within the structures of a male brotherhood, while explicitly rejecting feminist models.

Part II focuses on the contents and the pedagogy of knowledge transmission in Masonic Lodges, and the gender hierarchies operating in such systems. As Masons cultivated both esoteric and exoteric knowledge, prestige within the lodges was affirmed through a pursuit of secret knowledge and through a cultivation of cultural capital marked by class and gender. Women's struggle for legitimacy inside Masonic Lodges resulted, therefore, from the engendering of intellectual personae as much as from esoteric rituals and practices. Finally, Part III concludes with the paradoxical tension between being model citizens of the nation and oppressed subjects of the state that most Freemasons experienced. As objects of conspiracy theories and state surveillance, Italian Freemasons perceived themselves to be unfairly persecuted, and enacted various tactics of discretion that relied on both secrecy and transparency to counteract their negative public image. In my analysis, a challenge of the hyphenated nation-state model is tied to an examination of conspiracy and publicity as complementary discourses of a 'Western' country's liberal democratic core, which Freemasons are accused of undermining.
Notes: "April 2008."

Thesis (Ph.D., Dept. of Anthropology)--Harvard University, 2008.

Includes bibliographical references.