Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Hillewaert, Sarah

Titel

Morality at the Margins: Youth, Language, and Islam in Coastal Kenya

Auflage

1

Ort / Verlag

New York: Fordham University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2019

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Models how linguistic anthropological methods-including attention to speech acts and even gestures-can be used to provide new insights into discussions of ethical self-fashioning. This book considers the day-to-day lives of young Muslims on Kenya's island of Lamu, who live simultaneously on the edge and in the center. At the margins of the national and international economy and of Western notions of modernity, Lamu's inhabitants nevertheless find themselves the focus of campaigns against Islamic radicalization and of Western touristic imaginations of the untouched and secluded. What does it mean to be young, modern, and Muslim here? How are these denominators imagined and enacted in daily encounters? Documenting the everyday lives of Lamu youth, this ethnography explores how young people negotiate cultural, religious, political, and economic expectations through nuanced deployments of language, dress, and bodily comportment. Hillewaert shows how seemingly mundane practices-how young people greet others, how they walk, dress, and talk-can become tactics in the negotiation of moral personhood. Morality at the Margins traces the shifting meanings and potential ambiguities of such everyday signs-and the dangers of their misconstrual. By examining the uncertainties that underwrite projects of self-fashioning, the book highlights how shifting and scalable discourses of tradition, modernity, secularization, nationalism, and religious piety inform changing notions of moral subjectivity. In elaborating everyday practices of Islamic pluralism, the book shows the ways in which Muslim societies critically engage with change while sustaining a sense of integrity and morality. Offers a first-rate ethnography of young people negotiating cultural, religious, and economic pressures and expectations, while seeking to be both Muslim and modern.Interweaves wonderfully illuminating ethnography on life in contemporary Swahili society with important theoretical discussions on the everyday negotiation of moral subjectivity.Wonderfully and clearly written, beautifully focused, with an easily followed narrative style.Contributes to understandings of Islamic pluralism and the ways in which Muslim societies critically engage with change while sustaining a sense of integrity and morality.