Social Anthropology

Chew, Sing C. 2018. The Southeast Asia connection: trade and polities in the Eurasian world economy, 500 BC–AD 500. New York: Berghahn Books. 188 pp. Hb.: US$135.00. ISBN: 978‐1‐78533‐788‐8.

In this commentary, I argue that we need to expose the multiple layers of historical thinking about the production of the category of religion that play into both our scholarly thinking and the way religion is lived, understood and fought for in the lives of our informants. We can no more take the contours (or limits) of any particular religion for granted, or as self‐evident, than we can take the category of religion, named as such, as a natural human phenomenon that is somehow free from the domain of culture.

Drawing on research about settings in South India and West Africa characterised by significant religious diversity, we reflect on the ways in which everyday religiosity among contemporary Muslims is constituted through difference and contestation. Our cases are from two ostensibly secular states – India and Nigeria – both former British colonies where secularism has been interrogated over the past few decades. In our focus on what we call ‘lived’ Islam, we pay attention not only to intra‐Muslim differences but also to how religiosity is formed and experienced through engagement and encounters with Others, whether religious, ethnic or political, both locally and globally. Everyday religiosity in such settings as South India and Nigeria emerges at the interstices of such encounters where Muslims often seek to draw boundaries at the same time as they fashion themselves – in lifestyle, sociality, aesthetics – in relation to various Others. As we argue, such ethnographic cases with their comparative angle underscore the importance of studying religiosity in heterogeneous settings so as to explode the flawed, idealised sense of wholeness that emerges in some of the literature on the anthropology of one religious tradition or another with such traditions sometimes represented as deriving from self‐contained theologies.

This article focuses on the Kyangyang (‘the shadows’ or ‘the shades’), a prophetic movement that emerged in Guinea‐Bissau in 1984, in which ‘animistic’ Balanta farmers‐and‐herders learned to pray as Muslims and Christians do. We want to propose that (a) more attention needs to be paid to religious movements that bridge the polarisation between Islam and Christianity in West Africa and (b) a broader focus on the overall pluralistic setting is necessary in order to understand the conditions of possibility for the emergence of a particular religion. We want to propose, too, that some religions glossed as mimetic (such as Kyangyang) are not as ‘secondary’, in relation to a putative primary source (Islam or Christianity being the model to be copied), as we may intuitively assume at first sight. Copying is part and parcel of human action and transformation but, paradoxical as it may sound, it may not be as opposed to originality as we tend to think. By looking at how Kyangyang works, how imagination is put to play by prophets in order to make Balanta farmers ‘move forward’ towards a potential ‘new world’, we may be getting at the very heart of what it means to be original, at least in terms of religious creativity.

The Pentecostal movement in Nigeria, with its emphasis on this‐worldly blessings and healing, has become so vibrant that today even Muslim organisations appear to be increasingly ‘Pentecostalised’. Nasrul‐Lahi‐il Fathi Society of Nigeria or NASFAT is a case in point. In an effort to compete with Pentecostalism on Yorubaland‘s religious marketplace, NASFAT has copied Pentecostal prayer forms, such as the crusade and night vigil, while emphasising Muslim doctrine. As such, the case of NASFAT illustrates that religious borrowing does not imply that religious boundaries do not matter: indeed, NASFAT is a powerful example of the preservation of religious differences through the appropriation of Pentecostal styles and strategies. In this spirit, religiously plural movements such as NASFAT prompt us to unlock analytical space in the nearly hermetically sealed anthropologies of Islam and Christianity and to develop a comparative framework that overcomes essentialist notions of religious diversity.

Kenyan Pentecostals attempt to ‘live as Londoners do’ without compromising their devotion to God. Doing so necessitates coexisting with religious and non‐religious others, including Muslims who they view simultaneously as a ‘threat’ to historically Christian Britain and an ‘example’ to emulate. While the anthropologies of Christianity and Islam have developed as separate sub‐fields, pluralist settings like East London demand attention to inter‐religious coexistence. To understand these born‐again Christians’ subjectivities and lives, I draw on existential anthropology to explore how they navigate the circumstances in which they find themselves. I argue that Pentecostalism offers them the means to live as ‘good’ Christians, allowing them to seek material success and salvation in such a setting. More broadly, I suggest that an existential anthropological lens is well suited for studying pluralist contexts where relational encounters between diverse people and ideas are inevitable.

Delighting in kinship

Women’s relatedness and casual pleasures in village Tamil Nadu

Chua, Liana and Nayanika Mathur (eds.) 2018. Who are ‘we’? Reimagining alterity and affinity in anthropology. New York: Berghahn Books. 264 pp. Hb.: US$135.00. ISBN: 978‐1‐78533‐888‐5.

Stafford, Philip. 2018. The global age‐friendly community movement: a critical appraisal (Vol. 5). New York: Berghahn Books. 286 pp. Pb.: US$135.00. ISBN: 9781785336676.

Appadurai, Arjun and Neta Alexander. 2019. Failure. Cambridge: Polity Press. 120 pp. Hb.: £40.00. ISBN: 9781509504718.