The Edge of Islam

Power, Personhood, and Ethnoreligious Boundaries on the Kenya Coast

Auteur: McIntosh, Janet
Éditeur: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822344964
eISBN Pdf: 9780822390961
Lieu de publication: Durham , United States
Année de publication électronique: 2009
Mois : Juillet
Pages: 344
DDC: 305.80096762
Langue: Anglais

Légende

In this theoretically rich exploration of ethnic and religious tensions, Janet McIntosh demonstrates how the relationship between two ethnic groups in the bustling Kenyan town of Malindi is reflected in and shaped by the different ways the two groups relate to Islam. While Swahili and Giriama peoples are historically interdependent, today Giriama find themselves literally and metaphorically on the margins, peering in at a Swahili life of greater social and economic privilege. Giriama are frustrated to find their ethnic identity disparaged and their versions of Islam sometimes rejected by Swahili.

The Edge of Islam explores themes as wide-ranging as spirit possession, divination, healing rituals, madness, symbolic pollution, ideologies of money, linguistic code-switching, and syncretism and its alternatives. McIntosh shows how the differing versions of Islam practiced by Swahili and Giriama, and their differing understandings of personhood, have figured in the growing divisions between the two groups. Her ethnographic analysis helps to explain why Giriama view Islam, a supposedly universal religion, as belonging more deeply to certain ethnic groups than to others; why Giriama use Islam in their rituals despite the fact that so many do not consider the religion their own; and how Giriama appropriations of Islam subtly reinforce a distance between the religion and themselves. The Edge of Islam advances understanding of ethnic essentialism, religious plurality, spirit possession, local conceptions of personhood, and the many meanings of “Islam” across cultures.

CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTE ON LANGUAGE
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER 1 - Origin Stories: The Rise of Ethnic Boundaries on the Coast
CHAPTER 2 - Blood Money in Motion: Profit, Personhood,and the Jini Narratives
CHAPTER 3 - Toxic Bodies and Intentional Minds: Hegemony and Ideology in Giriama Conversion Experiences
CHAPTER 4 - Rethinking Syncretism: Religious Pluralism and Code Choice in a Context of Ethnoreligious Tension
CHAPTER 5 - Divination and Madness: The Powers and Dangers of Arabic
EPILOGUE
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX