[Linganth] Sarah Hillewaert's book

[Ilana Gershon]

Dear Colleagues,
Kamala Russell asks Sarah Hillewaert to reflect on her book, Morality at
the Margins
today.

https://campanthropology.org

Best,
Ilana

Press blurb:  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.
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