Conscious deliberation is inherent to learning any skilled practice, including tradition

Evidence

To begin with, one must note that any kind of skilled practice requires a certain amount of refl and deliberation on the specifi mental and bodily exercises necessary for its acquisition. Insomuch as the capacity to perform a task well requires one to be able to stand back and judge the correctness and virtuosity of one’s performance, a certain amount of self— efl ion is intern to such labor. For example, in order for a child to learn to pray, the parent must make her conscious of her gestures, glances, and thoughts. When the child undertakes the act hurriedly, or forgets to perform it, her parents may present her with various kinds of explanations for why praying is important, what it signifies, and how it is different fr the child’s other activities. Such a pedagogical process depends upon inducing self—refl in the child about her movements and thoughts-and their relationship to an object called God-all of which require some form of refl ion about the nature of the practice. In other words, conscious deliberation is part and parcel of any ped.. agogical process, and contemporary discussions about it cannot be understood simply as a shift from the unconscious enactment of tradition to a critical refl upon tradition, as the aforementioned authors suggest. — Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 388

Categorization

• DEFINE: Reframes ‘reflexivity’ not as a modern break from tradition but as intrinsic to all pedagogical skill acquisition, groundwork for the book’s whole argument.
• XREF: Connects to apprenticeship/embodied knowledge debates in Sennett, Dreyfus, and Bourdieu’s habitus, plus to Tully and MacIntyre on tradition-constituted rationality.