“Are You Married?”: Gender and Faith in Political Ethnographic Research

2021 ◽  
pp. 089124162098685
Author(s):  
Helene Thibault
Keyword(s):  
Religious Beliefs ◽  
Religious Conversion ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Religious Identities ◽  
Political Ethnography ◽  
Identity Markers ◽  
Sensitive Issues ◽  
Foreign Woman

In this article, I look at how political ethnography can contribute to the study of religious dynamics within conservative religious communities. Based on fieldwork conducted in Tajikistan within conservative Muslim circles, I take a reflexive stance by arguing that my informants used my status as a single foreign woman to steer interactions toward those of my religious conversion and need for marriage. Their repeated efforts and our interactions exposed the depth of their religious beliefs and its precedence over other identity markers such as ethnicity and language. This close access also allowed me to witness the exclusion and distrust that conservative Muslims face from the rest of the society as well as state authorities. Ultimately, I argue that political ethnography enables the production of a more nuanced portrait of conservative Muslims communities, which are often represented as hermetic and hostile. Political ethnography can be particularly useful to investigate sensitive issues such as religious identities and their complex relations to structures of power.

Ethno-Religious Communities: To the Problem of Identity Markers

2010 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victoria Arakelova
Keyword(s):  
Religious Communities ◽  
Religious Identities ◽  
Identity Markers

AbstractThe paper focuses on the phenomenon of ethno-religiousness and, particularly, on the process of the formation of ethno-religious communities. In the spotlight of the research is the Yezidi identity—the stages of its formation from the new syncretic mentality, initially exclusively with the religious vector, and later having acquired the drive to ethnicity. The similar processes can be traced in other cases of ethno-religious identities, e.g., the Mandaeans and the Druzes, both cases being used as comparative material.

Building understanding: Sensitive issues and putting the researcher in the research

2010 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer O'Brien
Keyword(s):  
Building Block ◽  
Ethical Dilemmas ◽  
Ethical Consideration ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Research Groups ◽  
Methodological Consideration ◽  
Sensitive Issues ◽  
Simple Building Block

Stemming from ethnographic research in a chronically poor district of rural Uganda, this paper recounts a number of attempts to investigate young people’s understanding of HIV and its transmission. The failure of the initial, more traditional methodologies are used to critically evaluate the positionality or role the researcher played as she became embedded within the community to the extent she lost objectivity as a researcher. Inadvertently, a simple building block game was used as a methodology. This was successful in generating interesting ‘data’ and proved that even research groups deemed difficult to access can be reached with some methodological consideration. The tool was, however, almost over successful and generated dramatic ethical dilemmas which ethically questioned the potential of the research and had a significant impact on the researcher. This paper therefore stresses the necessity to give ethical consideration to the research and its participants but to not over look the researcher.

scholarly journals Towards Religious Understanding: An Assessment of the Ambivalence Roles of Religious Leaders in Christian-Muslim Relations in Nigeria

2021 ◽  
pp. 9-20
Author(s):  
Rapheal Joseph Ojo
Keyword(s):  
Religious Communities ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Religious Leaders ◽  
General Belief ◽  
Religious Conflicts ◽  
The Government ◽  
High Level ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Religious Understanding ◽  
Shaky Ground

The world today is becoming more violent than ever before. Sometimes, the violence can be political, ethnic, economic and or religious. In most cases, distinguishing the main cause of such violence from other causes might be difficult. The factors could be a combination of two issues viz: ethnoreligious conflicts or politico-religious conflicts. The religious experience in Nigeria today, as a multi-religious society so far has proven contrary to the general belief and the widespread expectation of people about religion as an institution that promotes social integration. Christian-Muslim relations in Nigeria today (though being the dominant religions in Nigeria) is standing on shaky ground. The relationship is highly characterized by mutual suspicion, mistrust and distrust. In understanding this characterized reality in their interactions, this work interrogated the ambivalence roles played by religious leaders in Nigeria. And in doing this, the ethnographic research method was adopted. As part of its findings, it was discovered that there is a high level of intolerance among Christians and Muslims in Nigeria occasioned by unguarded utterances and abuse of freedom of speech by many uncensored religious leaders. Thus, setting the stage for avoidable and constant religious confrontations among the adherents of the two religious communities in Nigeria. The study recommends that peaceful co-existence can be possible if the government is responsible and responsive enough to address the basic needs of her masses which would reduce largely the manipulation of religion by clerics for personal gain. Furthermore, the place of meaningful dialogue should be embraced by religious leaders across different religious divides. Keywords: Christian-Muslim Relations, Dialogue, Peaceful Co-existence, Religious leaders, Religious Understanding

‘I wish to be no other but as he’: Persia, masculinity, and conversion in early-seventeenth-century travel writing and drama

Conversions ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chloë Houston
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Travel Literature ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
Religious Conversion ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Religious Identities ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Complex Relationships ◽  
Early Modern Travel Literature

In classical descriptions, Persians and their rulers are seen as being given to both tyranny and femininity; early modern Europe thus inherited a view of Persia in which the performance of religious identity, political power and gender were inter-connected. Given the complex relationships between Islam, tyranny and gender, early modern European interest in the possible religious conversion of Persia and its people marks a moment at which contemporary anxieties about religious and gender identities converge. This chapter argues that European writers’ interest in the prospect of Persian conversion became tied up with their ideas about the links between Persian effeminacy and tyranny. The prospect of the conversion of Persian Shahs in early modern travel literature and drama gives rise to particular anxieties about masculinity, both in Persian figures and in the Christian European travellers and dramatists who portrayed them. Despite the tradition of viewing Persia as feminised and luxurious, the sources betray an underlying concern that Muslims’ gender and religious identities might in fact be more ‘fixed’ than those of Christian travellers, who experienced their own conversions to Islam and to Persian identities in ways that were troubling to them both as Christians and as men.  

Faith in Ethnographic Process

2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 182-189
Author(s):  
Kathleen E. Jenkins
Keyword(s):  
Research Question ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Analytic Method ◽  
Scientific Methods ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
Practical Theological

This article addresses methodological points related to ethnography that are not found as commonly in social scientific methods sections: the anxiety related to the development of ethnographic research question(s), decisions regarding sampling, and the extensive process of coding and analysis. I argue that embracing serendipity in ethnographic research and developing trust in an analytic method is a valuable stance for addressing sociological and practical theological questions in the study of dynamic religious communities.

scholarly journals ‘In times of crisis, followers of one true god unite’

2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (19) ◽  
pp. 119-139 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kiran Vinod Bhatia
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
High School Students ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
Political Polarization ◽  
School Students ◽  
Religious Identities ◽  
Online Networks ◽  
Social Media Networks ◽  
Media Ethnography ◽  
Village Communities

This paper is based on a research study designed to explore how adolescents, in situations of political polarization, deploy online networks to articulate, negotiate, and enact their political and religious identities. Based on social media ethnography tracing the online engagements of 44 high school students over a period of eighteen months, and supplemented with in-depth interviews conducted in their village communities, this study explores why social media networks emerge as ideological niches frequented by students to enact their participation as members of their respective religious communities. It suggests that in situation of experienced political polarization and discrimination, students use social media affordances to replicate their offline socio-political and religious engagements onto their virtual spaces and in the process reinforce their radical religious identities.

The Somatics of Syncretism: Tying Body and Soul in Haitian Religion

2010 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 379-403 ◽  
Author(s):  
Terry Rey ◽  
Karen Richman
Keyword(s):  
African Diaspora ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
African Religion ◽  
Body And Soul ◽  
Religious Syncretism ◽  
National Boundaries ◽  
And Performance

The convergence of African religion and Christianity in the Atlantic world has inspired some of the most significant and most analyzed examples of syncretism in the study of religion. Scholarly discussions of these phenomena, however, tend to portray religions like Vodou in Haiti and Candomblé in Brazil as mergers of various Euro-Christian and ‘‘traditional’’ African elements that chiefly result from processes of cognitive ideation, thereby blurring the integrative somatic dimensions of religious syncretism. Modes of embodying knowledge, power, and morality are thus largely absent from the discussion of religious syncretism in Haitian Vodou and Catholicism, as well as other contact-cultural religions, whose congregational and performance spaces now span national boundaries. Drawing upon the historiography of Kongolese and Haitian religion, and on our multi-site ethnographic research among religious communities in Haiti, to think about religious syncretism in the African diaspora, this paper focuses on two key metaphors of mimetic knowledge and embodiment, mare and pwen (tying and point), arguing that they are both fundamental processes in Haitian religious syncretism and essential tropes for understanding Haitian Vodou and Catholicism, processes that are of predominantly Central African, and especially Kongolese, origin.

scholarly journals Islam’s Encounter with English and Ismail al-Faruqi’s Concept of Islamic English: A Postcolonial Reading

2014 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Md. Mahmudul Hasan
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Target Language ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
British Colonialism ◽  
Religious Identities ◽  
The Past ◽  
Binary Relationship ◽  
Indigenous Groups ◽  
Communication Interaction ◽  
Semantic Associations

In the past, many Muslims maintained strong reservations about using English as a means of communication, interaction, and intellectual practices mainly due to its association with British colonialism. In the postcolonial world Muslims and other religious communities, as well as various ethnic and indigenous groups, have moved away from the ideological and political assumptions of a binary relationship between English and their cultural and religious identities. As a result, several hundred million Muslims now use English as their first or second language, and more books on Islam are published in it than in any other language. However, Ismail al-Faruqi (1921-86) sees a serious anomaly in how Muslim names and Islamic theological terms are transliterated and translated, as the dominant practice shows not a loyalty to meaning, but to the norms of the target language. Such an approach causes these names and terms to lose semantic associations and religious connotations. To rectify this, al-Faruqi proposes the introduction of “Islamic English.” Based on his linguistic diagnosis and remedy, I will discuss this approach from a postcolonial perspective. 

Digitally Mapping the Poetry and Correspondence of Amelia Opie

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Naomi Chernos
Keyword(s):  
Religious Conversion ◽  
Religious Faith ◽  
Christian Faith ◽  
Digital Analysis ◽  
Religious Identities ◽  
Revolutionary Politics ◽  
Romantic Era ◽  
Digital Methods ◽  
Interesting Area ◽  
Amelia Opie

Amelia Opie was a Romantic era writer, engaged in revolutionary politics, who in midlife, became a devout Quaker, and gave up the publishing of fiction. Many scholars and contemporaries of Opie have commented on her sudden religious conversion, and suggested that Opie was engaged in a complicated “conscious struggle to mediate an identity which could include both her talents as a writer and her personal faith (“Introduction” LII). The Quaker faith had strict rules against the publishing of fiction, and a Quaker should never be engaged in creative authorship. Consequently, Opie’s poetry written after her turn to Quakerism forms an interesting area, and raises questions about her negotiation of artistic and religious identities. Digital methods of statistical analysis were used to examine the shifts in her poetry personal correspondence, particularly with regards to Opie’s attitudes towards mourning and religious faith were examined. Indications were that Opie used religion as consolation in her elegies as well as her life. However, a closer examination of her poetry and letters reveal that Opie was somewhat uneasy with her reliance on Christian faith, negotiating between that and her worldly concerns, rather than being wholly comforted by God. In the case of her father Opie found her faith to be inadequate, showing that only a whole acceptance allows for proper mourning. Although a digital analysis indicates that Opie used her faith as consolation for suffering, a closer reading suggests that this process was complex that her faith was ultimately unable to provide an adequate substitute.

Confessionalism and Mobility in Early Modern Ireland

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Vital Role ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
Religious Identities ◽  
Church Of Ireland ◽  
Confessional Identity ◽  
Migratory Experience

This is a book about the intersection between processes of mobility and religious identity and practice in Early Modern Ireland. The period between c.1580 and c.1685 was one of momentous importance in terms of the establishment of different confessional identities in the island, and various typesof mobility played a key role in the development, articulation, and maintenance of separate religious communities. Part I examines the dialectic between migration and religious adherence, paying particular attention to the transnational dimension of clerical formation which played a vital role in shaping the competing Catholic, Church of Ireland, and non-conformist clergies. Part II investigates how more quotidian practices of mobility such as pilgrimage and interparochial communions helped to elaborate religious identities and the central role of figurative images of movement in structuring Christians’ understanding of their lives. The final chapters of the book analyze the extraordinary importance of migratory experience in shaping the lives and writings of the authors of key confessional identity texts. Hitherto underestimated or taken for granted, the book argues that migrants and exiles were of crucial significance in forging the self-understanding of the different religious communities of the island.

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