Social Anthropology

This article explores religious coexistence among the Yoruba of southwest Nigeria. It focuses on interfaith marriages, frequent especially between Muslim men and Christian women, as a practice that brings Islam and Christianity into a mutually productive relationship. The article explores the tension between the general understanding that interfaith marriage is a positive anchor of Muslim–Christian relations and the widespread individual scepticism towards such marriages. Rooted in distinct discourses, Muslim and Christian attitudes to interfaith marriage have undergone changes along different trajectories since the 1980s. At the same time, they share a ‘family resemblance’ because members of both religions emphasise the importance of marriage and its unequally gendered nature. The unequal and asymmetric relationships between the two religions constitute part of a wider religious field, where the shared belief in the importance of conjugality is central to the gendered social order. Thus, even though Muslim–Christian marriages are often understood as problematic, they are still seen as less problematic than the failure to marry.

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.

This paper is about pleasure, specifically the pleasure that women take in kinship. Contrary to its diminished importance within the discipline, kinship still resonates strongly for many of our interlocutors. Why is kinship so captivating? Kinship’s continued significance, I argue, is attributable not so much to its utility or morality but to the pleasure it evokes. In capturing the major implications of kinship, anthropologists have barely considered the small joys of living together with kin. Pleasure is understood in two terms. First, the experiential, where it is incidental to routine work and ritual obligations but is also deliberately sought and actively indulged in. Second, the aesthetic, where thinking abstractly and constructing genealogies are not simply anthropologists illusions, which is itself a form of pleasure for our interlocutors. Focusing on pleasure does not detract from structural constraints and customary suffering but textures everyday experiences of kinship. Offering another category to think with and opportunities to rethink extant ones, pleasure forces us to confront kinship’s open‐ended and improvisational qualities. While kinship’s consequence has been well scrutinised, privileging pleasure allows us to grapple with the insouciance with which kinship is also lived, felt and becomes taken for granted.

This introduction to the special issue traces the development history of the sub‐disciplines of the anthropologies of Christianity and Islam to suggest that these ‘monistic’ tendencies have obscured exploration and theorisation of inter‐religious coexistence and encounters for people’s lives and the societies in which they live. These sub‐disciplinary boundaries have further led to an unintended ‘provincialisation’ of both geographical spaces and theoretical debates, and stalled the development of a theoretically robust anthropology of religion. This special issue argues for the value of comparative work on multi‐religious encounters within particular contexts, as well as of thinking comparatively on a global scale, as a way to generate new questions and considerations in how we study religion. The final section offers a short overview of the contributions to the special issue.

In this paper I argue that the state is best imagined through the metaphor of a liquid crystal – a substance that, at the same time, is both structured and fluid. I combine several well‐established views on the state (as an entity that has structure, but that also needs movement), and demonstrate that the state comes into being not only through vertical (and hence hierarchical) activities, but also through multiple other attempts to build transparency and predictability. A three‐dimensional liquid crystal can be used as a model of the state that not only has structures shaped by multiple participants, but that also is partly an illusion where various centres only appear to group in a meaningful way. In the second half of the paper, I illustrate this liquid crystal metaphor of the state by using an ethnographic snapshot of Njeguši, a small village in Montenegro. Variously (un)successful attempts of villagers and other actors to shape the new road show how the liquid crystal areas are being initiated, sustained and interpreted, thus contributing to the shape the state is brought into being.