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Climate Change And The Ancestors: Rain, Gender And Politics In An African Water Catchment, Jessie Fredlund
Climate Change And The Ancestors: Rain, Gender And Politics In An African Water Catchment, Jessie Fredlund
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Uluguru, a small mountain range in eastern Tanzania and one of the rainiest places in East Africa, serves as the principal water catchment for Tanzania’s largest city, Dar es Salaam, and for commercial farms along the country’s central coast. Home to smallholder farmers who cultivate a variety of crops on mostly rain-fed farms, the catchment has been a site of struggle over water and nature since the nineteenth century. Today, climate change has rendered rainfall increasingly unpredictable, and a wave of “sustainable development” interventions has pressured farmers to change their practices and to engage in unpaid forms of ecological labor …
The Shari'a Courts Of Mogadishu: Beyond "African Islam" And "Islamic Law", Ahmed Ibrahim
The Shari'a Courts Of Mogadishu: Beyond "African Islam" And "Islamic Law", Ahmed Ibrahim
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This dissertation, based on a year and eight months of fieldwork, is a historical ethnography of a Shari‘a-based movement which appeared in Mogadishu, Somalia within a year after the complete disintegration of the central government in 1991. The movement originated when religious authorities and “traditional” elders established centers in various neighborhoods in Mogadishu to deal with the vacuum of power after the fall of the state. Since Shari‘a structures of authority and discourse were integral to the formation and functioning of the centers, they became known as Shari‘a courts. My work on the Shari‘a courts intervenes in the literature on …
Breaking Cover: Confronting Crisis And Displacement In Timbuktu, Mali, Andrew Hernann
Breaking Cover: Confronting Crisis And Displacement In Timbuktu, Mali, Andrew Hernann
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
In Spring 2012, a loose alliance of ethnic Tuareg nationalist and Jihadi-Salafist militant groups occupied Mali’s northern regions, forcibly displacing nearly 300,000 residents and ultimately imposing their harsh interpretation of shari’a among those who remained. Later, in January 2013, as these groups began marching towards southern Mali, the French army suddenly intervened, “liberating” urban centers in the North as the militants fled into the Sahara Desert and across the Algerian border. My research examines this period of occupation, displacement and intervention, which most Malians have come to term “the crisis.” Specifically, I analyze the cultural and religious frameworks through which …
Lucumi And The Children Of Cotton: Gender, Race, And Ethnicity In The Mapping Of A Black Atlantic Politics Of Religion, Akissi M. Britton
Lucumi And The Children Of Cotton: Gender, Race, And Ethnicity In The Mapping Of A Black Atlantic Politics Of Religion, Akissi M. Britton
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
In this dissertation I have examined claims to religious authenticity, purity, legitimacy and authority through the lens of a Black and African American Orisa community in Brooklyn, New York. Through these claims, made both internally and to a broader Orisa community within the United States and throughout different locales in the Black Atlantic, I have articulated how they are more often than not linked to very non-religious aspects of social life. Members of this community, and the broader Orisa Atlantic of which they are a part, do not practice this tradition in a social, cultural, or political vacuum. In fact, …
Latinas Converting To Islam In New York: Habitus’ Influence In Modern Identity Formation, Amalia Alonzo
Latinas Converting To Islam In New York: Habitus’ Influence In Modern Identity Formation, Amalia Alonzo
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This paper explores the topic of religious conversion in relation to Pierre Bourdieu's theory of habitus, with a focus on Catholic Latina converts to Sunni Islam. Bourdieu suggests that these types of religious choices are not choices at all, but predetermined by an individual's history, culture, and setting. That is, an individual already has dispositions that are taken for granted. While this study's participants report that Islam is a new religion for them and not a continuation of their Catholic faith (as habitus would suggest,) this study shows that these converts retain dispositions that are consistent with their previous religious …