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Ordinary Lives and Grand Schemes
Everyday practice of religion is complex in its nature, ambivalent and at times contradictory. The task of an anthropology of religious practice is therefore precisely to see how people navigate and make sense of that complexity, and what the significance of religious beliefs and practices in a given setting can be. Rather than putting everyday practice and normative doctrine on different analytical planes, the authors argue that the articulation of religious doctrine is also an everyday practice and must be understood as such.
Egypt in the Future Tense
“Illustrates the complex and contradictory impact of Muslim revivalism on the expectations and hopes of Egyptian youth . . . Recommended.” —Choice Against the backdrop of the revolutionary uprisings of 2011–2013, Samuli Schielke asks how ordinary Egyptians confront the great promises and grand schemes of religious commitment, middle class respectability, romantic love, and political ideologies in their daily lives, and how they make sense of the existential anxieties and stalled expectations that inevitably accompany such hopes. Drawing on many years of study in Egypt and the life stories of rural, lower-middle-class men before and after the revolution, Schielke views recent events i...
Shared Margins
Shared Margins tells of writers, writing, and literary milieus in Alexandria, Egypt’s second city. It de-centres cosmopolitan avant-gardes and secular-revolutionary aesthetics that have been intensively documented and studied since 2011. Instead, it offers a fieldwork-based account of various milieus and styles, and their common grounds and lines of division. Structured in two parts, Shared Margins gives an account of literature as a social practice embedded in milieus that at once enable and limit literary imagination, and of a life-worldly experience of plurality in absence of pluralism that marks literary engagements with the intimate and social realities of Alexandria after 2011. Literary writing, this book argues, has marginality as an at once enabling and limiting condition. It provides shared spaces of imaginary excess that may go beyond the taken-for-granted of a societal milieu, and yet are never unlimited. Literary imagination is part and parcel of such social conflicts and transformations, its role being neither one of resistance against power nor of guidance towards norms, but rather one of open-ended complicity.
Migrant Dreams
An intimate portrait of Egyptian migrants' lives and hopes, and their return home A vivid ethnography of Egyptian migrants to the Arab Gulf states, Migrant Dreams is about the imagination which migration thrives on, and the hopes and ambitions generated by the repeated experience of leaving and returning home. What kind of dreams for a good or better life drives labor migrants? What does being a migrant worker do to one’s hopes and ambitions? How does the experience of migration to the Gulf, with its attendant economic and legal precarities, shape migrants’ particular dreams of a better life? What do those dreams—be they realistic and productive, or fantastic and unlikely—do to the s...
Ordinary Lives and Grand Schemes
Everyday practice of religion is complex in its nature, ambivalent and at times contradictory. The task of an anthropology of religious practice is therefore precisely to see how people navigate and make sense of that complexity, and what the significance of religious beliefs and practices in a given setting can be. Rather than putting everyday practice and normative doctrine on different analytical planes, the authors argue that the articulation of religious doctrine is also an everyday practice and must be understood as such.
Dimensions of Locality
As a world religion Islam is based on a highly abstract and absolute notion of the transcendent, which its followers establish and celebrate, in a seemingly contradictory fashion, at very specific sites: Mecca, Medina, Jerusalem, and in the vast and complex landscapes of mosques and Muslim saints' shrines around the world. Sacred locality has thus become a paradigm for the relationship between the human and the transcendent, a model for urban planning, regional networks, imaginary spaces, and spiritual hierarchies alike. This importance of saintly places has, however, become increasingly complicated and troubled by reformist currents within Islam, on the one hand, and the emergence of modern archeology and anthropology, on the other. While they have often tended to posit the local in opposition to the universal, in this volume islamologists, anthropologists, and sociologists offer new ways of thinking about the local, the place, and the conceptual landscapes and spaces of saints.
The Global Horizon
Although contemporary migration in and from Africa can be understood as a continuation of earlier forms of interregional and international migration, current processes of migration seem to have taken on a new quality. This volume argues that one of the main reasons for this is the fact that local worlds are increasingly measured against a set of possibilities whose referents are global, not local. Due to this globalization of the personal and societal horizons of possibilities in Africa and elsewhere, in many contexts migration gains an almost inevitable attraction while, at the same time, actual migration becomes increasingly restricted.Based on detailed ethnographic accounts, the contributors to this volume focus on the imaginations, expectations, and motivations that propel the pursuit of migration. Decentering the focus of much of migration studies on the receiving societies, the volume foregrounds the subjective aspect of migration and explores the impact which the imagination and practice of migration have on the sociocultural conditions of the various local settings concerned.
The Anthropology of Islam
Acknowledgements p. ix 1 Introduction p. 1 2 Islam: Beliefs, History and Rituals p. 13 3 From Studying Islam to Studying Muslims p. 31 4 Studying Muslims in the West: Before and After September 11 p. 53 5 From the Exotic to the Familiar: Anamneses of Fieldwork among Muslims p. 71 6 Beyond the Stereotype: Challenges in Understanding Muslim Identities p. 89 7 The Ummah Paradox p. 103 8 The Dynamics of Gender in Islam p. 117 9 Conclusion p. 139 Glossary p. 147 References p. 151 Index p. 173
Islam, Politics, Anthropology
Part of The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute SpecialIssue Book Series, Islam, Politics, Anthropology offerscritical reflections on past and current studies of Islam andpolitics in anthropology and charts new analytical approaches toexamining Islam in the post-9/11 world. Challenges current and past approaches to the study of Islamand Muslim politics in anthropology Offers a critical comprehensive review of past and currentliterature on the subject Presents innovative ethnographic description and analysis ofeveryday Muslim politics in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, andNorth America Proposes new analytical approaches to the study of Islam andMuslim politics
Muslim Subjectivities in Global Modernity
With critical reference to Eisenstadt’s theory of "multiple modernities," Muslim Subjectivities in Global Modernity discusses the role of religion in the modern world. The case studies all provide examples illustrating the ambition to understand how Islamic traditions have contributed to the construction of practices and expressions of modern Muslim selfhoods. In doing so, they underpin Eisenstadt’s argument that religious traditions can play a pivotal role in the construction of historically different interpretations of modernity. At the same time, however, they point to a void in Eisenstadt’s approach that does not problematize the multiplicity of forms in which this role of religious traditions plays out historically. Consequently, the authors of the present volume focus on the multiple modernities within Islam, which Eisenstadt’s theory hardly takes into account. Contributors are: Philipp Bruckmayr, Neslihan Kevser Cevik, Dietrich Jung, Jakob Krais, Mex-Jørgensen, Kamaludeen Nasir, Zacharias Pieri, Mark Sedgwick, Kirstine Sinclair, Fabio Vicini, and Ahmed al-Zalaf.
