Field and river

20th International Conference of Ethiopian Studies (ICES20)
Mekelle University, Ethiopia

"Regional and Global Ethiopia - Interconnections and Identities"
1-5 October, 2018

ICES20 logo

Use the "back" button of your browser to return to the list of abstracts.

GROWING UP UNDER THE GAZE OF SAINTS: YOUNG PEOPLE AND ISLAM IN HARAR, ETHIOPIA [Abstract ID: 1304-18]

Lindsay RANDALL, The University of Edinburgh

This paper, based on long-term ethnographic research conducted in Harar, Ethiopia, examines how ‘modern’ Muslim youth is constructed and enacted admist global and local debates about the place and practice of Islam. To date, studies of religious self-cultivation of adults in spaces delineated specifically for the task of religious growth has been a common focus of current anthropological studies of Islam (cf. Mahmood 2005; Hirschkind 2009). This paper hopes to build upon these lessons by exploring religiosity among young people in a broad range of contexts, specifically within contexts that are not isolated for the sole purpose of crafting religious subjects. Thus, this paper, seeks to also understand how religion exists within the everyday of Harar and to the fabric of the city itself – both within and without explicit spaces of religious cultivation – and understand how religion may permeate the ordinary. By analytically foregrounding Muslim children and youth, this research enriches, broadens, and challenges anthropological scholarship on the crafting of ‘modern’ Islamic selves, gender in Islam, and how young people construct, resist, adapt, or craft (non)secular cultural futures. This includes how (non)secular cultural futures may be imposed, resisted, crafted, and re-adapted by young people during the process of growing up.