In this theoretically rich exploration of ethnic and religious
tensions, Janet McIntosh demonstrates how the relationship between
two ethnic groups in the bustling Kenyan town of Malindi is
reflected in and shaped by the different ways the two groups relate
to Islam. While Swahili and Giriama peoples are historically
interdependent, today Giriama find themselves literally and
metaphorically on the margins, peering in at a Swahili life of
greater social and economic privilege. Giriama are frustrated to
find their ethnic identity disparaged and their versions of Islam
sometimes rejected by Swahili.
"The Edge of Islam" explores themes as wide-ranging as spirit
possession, divination, healing rituals, madness, symbolic
pollution, ideologies of money, linguistic code-switching, and
syncretism and its alternatives. McIntosh shows how the differing
versions of Islam practiced by Swahili and Giriama, and their
differing understandings of personhood, have figured in the growing
divisions between the two groups. Her ethnographic analysis helps
to explain why Giriama view Islam, a supposedly universal religion,
as belonging more deeply to certain ethnic groups than to others;
why Giriama use Islam in their rituals despite the fact that so
many do not consider the religion their own; and how Giriama
appropriations of Islam subtly reinforce a distance between the
religion and themselves. "The Edge of Islam" advances understanding
of ethnic essentialism, religious plurality, spirit possession,
local conceptions of personhood, and the many meanings of "Islam"
across cultures.
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