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Talk on :
Islam is not a culture: Shaping the Muslim self in diasporas
Date: |
7 October 2008 |
Location: |
Malay Studies Seminar Room, The Shaw Foundation Building, AS7, #04-13, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, NUS
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Organized by South Asian Studies Programme and Religion Research Cluster, FASS, NUS.
Speaker:
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Prof. Katherine Ewing, Director of North Carolina Center for South Asian Studies, Duke University
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About the Speaker: Katherine Pratt Ewing is Professor of Cultural Anthropology and Religion at Duke University and the Director of the North Carolina Center for South Asia Studies. Her books include Arguing Sainthood: Modernity, Psychoanalysis and Islam (Duke, 1997), Stolen Honor: Stigmatizing Muslim Men in Berlin (Stanford, 2008), and the edited volumes Shariat and Ambiguity in South Asian Islam (California, 1988) and Being and Belonging: Muslim Communities in the US since 9/11 (Russell Sage, 2008), as well as numerous journal articles. She has done fieldwork in Pakistan, Turkey, Germany and the US, and received psychoanalytic training at the Institute for Psychoanalysis in Chicago. Her recent research has investigated how second generation Muslim immigrants negotiate the cultural differences between their families' cultures of origin and the requirements of life in a new society, and what role Muslim communities, networks, and institutions play in this process of negotiation and adaptation. In a new project, she will examine the role of transnational networks in shaping local debates over Islamic practice among South Asian Muslims.
Abstract:
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The theme “Islam is not a culture” now echoes throughout the Muslim world, especially among young diasporic Muslims growing up in the United States and Europe. This assertion is a complex rhetorical positioning that draw on an anthropological concept of culture, as this has filtered into popular discourse. Though some anthropologists react with scorn at this use of the concept of culture, my goal is to examine the geneaology of this idea and the contexts in which it is used. I consider to what effect young South Asian Muslims in the US who have negotiated adolescence in the wake of 9-11 assert that “Islam is not a culture” and what they pose as alternative characterizations of Islam.
Please email jannah[at]nus[dot]edu[dot]sg if you are interested in attending .
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