[Bilimsel Haber] Call for Papers - Islamic Ethnographies: Describing Religious Practices in the Muslim World

[Onur Inal]

Call for papers - Workshop and edited volume

Islamic Ethnographies: Describing Religious Practices in the Muslim World

In the last three decades social sciences in general and anthropology in
particular developed an ambiguous relation with their descriptive
traditions, as epistemic relativism and self-defeating critique lead
scholars to reflexive deadlocks and fruitless glosses. Without advocating
any return to positivism, we contend that social sciences should pay closer
attention to actual practices enfolding within the social world and adopt a
more empirical and analytical attitude vis-à-vis their object of scrutiny.
It holds especially true when religious phenomena are concerned. Instead of
attempting at describing the social world as it enfolds when empirically
observed, most anthropological studies confine within a glossing attitude
that looses its object and proposes in its place new narratives devoid of
the contextual and praxiological specificities of any actual situation. This
is probably due to a theorizing attitude that looks for big explicative
schemes and neglects the situational and self-producing capacity of the
social to produce its own endogenous order.

This workshop, which is planned in May 2009 in a still indeterminate place,
and the subsequent edited volume aim to explore the contribution of the
ethnographic method for the comprehension of religious phenomena linked to
Islam in various social and cultural contexts. Ethnographic fieldwork was
consecrated as a research method by anthropology, but it has also been
adopted by other academic disciplines - such as sociology and political
science - in the last three decades. The importance of the ethnographic
method raised as social sciences gradually shifted their focus from the
structural organization of social systems to the role of the people in
producing and reproducing social processes through their everyday practices.

The ethnographic method allows the researcher to describe the complex ways
in which people orient to normative codes, material, corporal and social
constraints, and intentional strategies that inform their social practices.
This is particularly important for the understanding of religious phenomena,
for the ethnographic approach allows to better catch how people attach and
belong to religious communities and how religious subjectification affects
cultural and individual practices. 

Thus, we consider that a reflection about the contribution of the
ethnographic method to the understanding of Islam in its many forms can
provide a methodological framework for a more complex and pluralistic
understanding of these phenomena.

We call for proposals concentrating on Islamic religious practices,
considered in their own right, in a descriptive manner. Visual documentation
is welcome. No particular affiliation to any specific 

school of thought will be asked from the contributors, but only a commitment
to the production and detailed analysis of an empirical material devoid of
the ex-post-facto character of interviews. It means that the close
description of a variety of phenomena related to Islam one way or another
will be favored, beginning with classical objects of anthropology like
religious rituals, institutions and ceremonies. However, while classical
Islamic ethnographies mostly focused on "popular Islam" and left the study
of its "scholarly" forms to text-based disciplines such as Islamology and
History, this project should include contributions on topics such as Muslim
scholars, intellectuals, religious teaching and legal practices. We also aim
to show that the ethnographic method can be useful to fields of study which
are not usually associated with it. Consequently, authors are encouraged to
submit proposals concerning less expected topics like ordinary
conversations, media productions, economics and politics. We especially
welcome the collaboration of non-anthropologists who turned to ethnography
due to the shortcomings of more familiar techniques such as press reviews
and interviews.

People who want to participate in the project are required to send a
one-page abstract describing the theme of their contribution and the
methodology that will be used.

Deadline: 31 January 2008

The abstract and a short CV should be sent to:

Baudouin Dupret (CNRS, Institut des Sciences Sociales du Politique (ISP),
Ecole Normale Supérieure de Cachan, France) : dupret at link.net 
Paulo Pinto (Departement of Anthropology/Center for Middle east Studies,
Universidade Federal Fluminense, Brazil) : philu99 at hotmail.com 
Thomas Pierret (FNRS - Université de Louvain, Belgique - IEP-Paris) :
thomaspierret at yahoo.fr 

Thomas Pierret 
Ph.D. Candidate in Political Sciences
Aspirant du Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique de Belgique (FNRS)
Université Catholique de Louvain - CISMOC Institut d'Etudes Politiques de
Paris - CERI
21 rue la Ville
4357 Jeneffe
BELGIQUE
 <mailto:thomaspierret at yahoo.fr> thomaspierret at yahoo.fr 

 

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