Introduction

Марсден, Магнус; Retsikas, Konstantinos

doi:10.1007/978-94-007-4267-3_1

Cited by 9 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 65 publications

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“…Second, I take inspiration from a recent turn toward the "everyday" and the "lived" in the anthropology of Islam (Deeb 2015;Marsden & Retsikas 2013;Schielke 2010Schielke , 2018Soares & Osella 2010). This research agenda conceptualizes the everyday as a site of contingency where "ethical strivings" informed by normative models of Islam encounter mundane practices, and where Islam rubs up against other "grand schemes" within people's wider life-worlds (Deeb 2015;Marsden & Retsikas 2013;Schielke 2010Schielke , 2018Soares & Osella 2010). Finally, I borrow from the conceptual vocabulary developed by Erving Goffman (1959Goffman ( , 1963Goffman ( , 1971 to explain the microdynamics of everyday encounters among American and British people in the twentieth century.…”

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confidence: 99%

Flags and Shields: Muslim Socialities and Informal Livelihoods in Dar es Salaam

Kirby

2020

City & Society

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In this article, I explore entanglements of Muslim sociality and informal livelihoods in Dar es Salaam. I propose that Muslim practices of affiliation deserve to be counted among the ordinary strategies that urban majorities employ to navigate the city amidst conditions of uncertainty. Building on Stephan Lanz and Martijn Oosterbaan's (2016) work on "entrepreneurial religion," I draw on fifteen months of ethnographic research in Kariakoo, a super-dense market district at the center of the city. The first part of my analysis explores associational life in Dar es Salaam, combining a historical overview with ethnographic description. I explore how urban actors use affiliations to football teams and political parties to generate livelihood opportunities and to secure protection. The second part of my analysis uses emic notions of "flags" (bendera) and "shields" (ngao) to demonstrate that Muslim modes of association operate in strikingly similar ways to those pertaining to football and politics. Engaging with the conceptual vocabularies of AbdouMaliq Simone and Erving Goffman, as well as recent debates about "everyday" and "lived Islam," this article foregrounds the interplay between religious forms and neoliberal processes of informalization as they are unfolding in African cities and beyond.

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Flags and Shields: Muslim Socialities and Informal Livelihoods in Dar es Salaam

Kirby

2020

City & Society

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“…His self-definition and attributed “Muslimness” complicate articulations of Islam as static, permanent or predictable (c.f. Marsden and Retsikas, 2013: 7). By way of conclusion, I want to further explore how, following Homi Bhabha's (2004) notion of “cultural translation,” the breakdown of translatability is partly explained by the culture talk context and its constant call for Canadian Muslims to perform “goodness,” and to demonstrate that they are peaceful and unthreatening.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 98%

“…We sought to move away from a replication of “World Religions” or “five-pillar” characterizations of Islam that may act as instruments of religious standardization and “demands for a unitary profession of faith” (Hefner, 1998: 92). This approach aimed to dislocate how Islam is often characterized in scholarship by “exceptional coherence” (Marsden and Retsikas, 2013: 25). We asked participants about their beliefs and practices by pointing to contexts and situations, hoping this specificity would allow individuals to tailor their accounts of religiosity to lived moments.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“Muslimness” and multiplicity in qualitative research and in government reports in Canada

Selby

2016

Critical Research on Religion

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With reference to a qualitative study on everyday religiosity among Muslims in St. John's, Canada, this paper examines trends in academic sources and public policy on Islam that over-privilege the most committed practitioners, thereby narrowly depicting “Muslimness.” I situate this overemphasis by reflecting on what Mamdani calls “culture talk,” an essentializing discourse heightened in the post-9/11 west (c.f. Shryock on “Islamophilia”). Interview data, along with a trend in social scientific research on Muslims that emphasize the most pious and the outcomes following the Ontario “Boyd Report” and the Quebecois “Bouchard–Taylor Report” show the pervasiveness of culture talk that erases Muslim multiplicity.

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“…Alongside works that focused on differing relations to sacred text or Muslim piety, others have addressed practice, where the question of what can or should legitimately be understood as Islam is much more ambiguous and contested, not least by Muslims themselves, such as experiences of spirit possession (McIntosh ; Nourse ), or they have argued that Muslim (and other) selves are addressed to multiple, often contradictory, referential frames, rather than being unitary and coherent (Ewing ; Louw ). The question of what anthropologists are actually studying when they engage with Muslims has once more explicitly re‐emerged in critiques of an over‐emphasis in recent anthropological work on questions of piety (Marsden ; Marsden & Retsikas ). In Samuli Schielke's words, there is ‘too much Islam in the anthropology of Islam’ (: 2).…”

Section: Anthropology Of Islammentioning

confidence: 99%

Anthropology in conversation with an Islamic tradition: Emmanuel Levinas and the practice of critique

Rasanayagam

2017

Royal Anthropological Inst

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As an alternative to approaching Islam as an object for anthropological analysis, this article develops the idea of an anthropologist participating in conversations going on within an Islamic tradition. The idea of a conversation is developed through the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas and his ideal of knowing as an ethical relation with an infinite other. Levinas opposes a sterile and oppressive relation of 'totality', where the knowing self encompasses the other within concepts and thought that originate in the self, with a critical and creative relation of 'infinity', in which the alterity of the other is maintained and invites conversation that brings the self into question. In the article, recent disciplinary discussions of how anthropology should engage with alterity, which have been framed in terms of ontology and post-secular anthropology, are examined in the light of Levinas's ideal of knowing as ethical and critical practice.How can, or, perhaps more importantly, how should, anthropology engage with Islam? I was first prompted to revisit this problem by a response in the question-and-answer session following a talk I gave at a university anthropology department in the United States on the topic of Islam in Uzbekistan. The questioner, a Muslim, said that he had been offended by my presentation. I had been talking about lived experience as a site for the development of moral selves. A person comes to an understanding of what it is to be a Muslim, I had argued, through rituals and practices that refer to Muslim histories and sacred texts, but also in the ongoing flow of experience, in marrying off one's children successfully, helping a neighbour to build a house, participating fully in a sociality of neighbourhood and kinship, and, perhaps more problematically for my questioner, in dream or waking interaction with spirits, often in the context of illness, whether as a patient or a healer. I sought to engage sincerely with the experience of individual Muslims in Uzbekistan. But the questioner felt that I was misrepresenting what Islam is truly about, that I was presenting beliefs and practices that many Muslims would themselves view as humanly produced tradition, the misunderstandings or nonQur'anic practices of some Muslims, as standing for Islam itself.I was taken by surprise by the response because this is not a new problem and is one I thought had long been resolved. It was the central concern of disciplinary

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Introduction

Cited by 9 publications

References 65 publications

Flags and Shields: Muslim Socialities and Informal Livelihoods in Dar es Salaam

Flags and Shields: Muslim Socialities and Informal Livelihoods in Dar es Salaam

“Muslimness” and multiplicity in qualitative research and in government reports in Canada

Anthropology in conversation with an Islamic tradition: Emmanuel Levinas and the practice of critique

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