Morgan Clarke
Biographic Data
| ID | 3586960 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Morgan Clarke |
| GIVEN NAMES | Morgan |
| FAMILY NAME | Clarke |
| SIGNATURE | CLARKE M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Oxford |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 101 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 29 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2006 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Religious Authority beyond Domination and Discipline: Epistemic Authority and Its Vernacular Uses in the Shi'i Diaspora
Religious authority' remains a ubiquitous but controversial term of comparative analysis. In Islamic studies, authority is generally personified in the form of the ulama and most often viewed through Weber's lens of charismatic, legal-rational, and traditional types of legitimate domination. Our particular interest, Twelver Shi'i Islam, seems a paradigmatic case, where the relationship between 'the Ayatollahs' and state power has dominated academ…
Introduction to the special issue: Beyond Self-Fashioning and Freedom-Bending, Breaking, and Adhering to Rules in Religious Contexts
Rules are a crucial part of much religious thought and practice. Their importance or insignificance, their strictness or laxness, and their rigidity or flexibility in the face of change are constant themes of debate, both within and outside religious communities. Yet they have arguably not been given the attention they deserve within recent anthropology. Since the rise of practice theory, rules have more often been considered something to look pa…
Religious rules and thick description: Some thoughts from the anthropology of Islam
The recent anthropology of ethics has sought to look beyond rules to themes such as the cultivation of the virtuous self. Anthropology generally has grown impatient with what Bourdieu called 'the fallacies of the rule' as a key term for describing the social. But rules remain a crucial dimension of ethical practice in many contexts, including religious ones. This article focuses on British Muslim conceptions and practice of the religious rules of…
The trial of Dominic Cummings: Rules and reason in the pandemic
The trip by Dominic Cummings, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson's then right-hand man, to Durham in April 2020, in seeming violation of the rules of social distancing he had helped put in place, led to intense media scrutiny and public outrage. That there might be 'One rule for them, and one for the rest of us' became a stick to beat the government with and arguably contributed to Cummings' eventual departure from Downing Street. This article …
Sharia
Sharia is a key concept in Islam and our contemporary world. Often translated into English as ‘Islamic law’, it includes financial contracts, criminal justice, and marriage and divorce. But it also covers ritual practice, dietary prohibitions, and personal and interpersonal ethics. Indeed, the rules of sharia could, in theory, encompass all of life. Sharia thus comprises both a legal system and a rule-based approach to the challenges of living a …
Islam and Law in Lebanon: Sharia within and without the State
The modern state of Lebanon, created after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, is home to eighteen officially recognised different religious communities (or sects). Crucially, political office and representation came to be formally shared along confessional lines, and the privileges of power are distributed accordingly. One such key prerogative is exclusivity when it comes to personal status laws: the family legal affairs of each community. In this b…
Cousin Marriage
Given its imprecision, the term “cousin marriage” belongs more to everyday than to anthropological discourse. Anthropologists, and people from cultures across the world, distinguish between cousins of various sorts. Where the phrase is employed, however, it is generally used as an equivalent to what is otherwise sometimes called “close” or “consanguineous marriage”: that is, in contemporary terms, marriage between people genetically closely relat…
Kinship and Marriage, Overview of
Kinship and marriage are fundamental issues in the study of human social and cultural diversity. Often bracketed together in Anglophone anthropology as just “kinship,” the topics have been central to sociocultural anthropology for much of the discipline's formative history. In the 1970s and 1980s, formalistic analyses and comparative models of kinship came to be doubted, part of a wider skepticism towards grand narratives. Studies of kinship cont…
Cross‐Cousin Marriage
Cross‐cousin marriage systems are an important theme in the anthropological literature on kinship. A “cross‐cousin” is the child of one's parent's opposite‐sex sibling: the father's sister's child or mother's brother's child (i.e., as opposed to the parallel cousin, the child of one's parent's same‐sex sibling). However, it is vital to note that this definition does not necessarily pertain to a genealogically defined individual but rather to a wh…
Consanguinity
Consanguinity refers to a relationship of shared descent, as opposed to one through marriage or affinity. Given its Euro‐American origins, it is potentially ethnocentric in a number of respects: its assumption that descent is a definitive mode of imagining relatedness and one that operates cognatically, and its imagination of relations of descent as constituted through shared substance and more specifically shared blood. These tenets have, howeve…
Family
“Family” is a ubiquitous term in talking about kinship in English and other European languages. As a term in ordinary language, it suffers corresponding advantages and disadvantages. Unlike the rather more artificial term “kinship,” it conveys a powerful sense of what is at stake: the affective bonds of closeness, but also their suffocating demands. But this sense of familiarity can be deceptive when it comes to ethnographic writing and cross‐cul…
Making a centre in the periphery: The legitimation of Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah’s Beirut Marjaʿiyya
Lebanon’s Sayyid Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah (d.2010) enjoyed in his later years a high profile as a ‘source of emulation’ (marjaʿ al-taqlīd) for Twelver Shiʿa in Lebanon and beyond. That high profile stemmed in part from his close association with the Shiʿi Lebanese resistance to Israeli occupation, and Hizballah in particular, but also from his avowedly ‘open-minded’ (munfatiḥ) and frequently controversial Islamic legal positions. His supporters …
De-centring Shiʿi Islam
In the introduction to this special issue, we make the case for ‘de-centring’ the study of Shiʿi Islam, conceptually, spatially and sociologically. After first noting the essentialization of Shiʿi identity within the contemporary public sphere, we question its spatialization within the modern world of nation-states and area studies, and contrast the physical and human geography of Shiʿi Islam. We then turn to the central theme of religious author…
After the Ayatollah: Institutionalisation and Succession in the marjaʿiyya of Sayyid Muḥammad Ḥusayn Faḍl Allāh
This paper deals with the death of a high religious authority, the Twelver Shiʿi marjaʿ al-taqlīd, or "Grand Ayatollah", Sayyid Muḥammad Ḥusayn Faḍl Allāh. The emphasis given to following a living authority within the Twelver Shiʿi tradition makes their passing a moment of crisis, all the more so in the case of a figure who made "contemporaneity" a cornerstone of his distinctive appeal. I examine not only the events surrounding Faḍl Allāh's death…
Legalism and the Care of the Self: Sharīʿah Discourse in Contemporary Lebanon
This chapter contends that anthropology needs a fresh, more sophisticated approach to rules as a complement to what has become a thriving 'anthropology of ethics'. That literature seeks to move beyond notions of ethics and morality as 'codes of conduct' and explore instead what Foucault calls 'the care of the self', that is, projects of virtuous self-fashioning. The neglect, even dismissal, of rules in these discussions comes despite the obvious …
The Social Politics of Islamic Bioethics
Cough sweets and angels: The ordinary ethics of the extraordinary inSufi practice inLebanon
This article presents an ethnographic account of the social production of the miraculous inSufi practice inLebanon, including displays of bodily mortification. It examines the interdependence of the extraordinary and the ordinary/everyday, following, but problematizing,MaxWeber's classic discussion of charismatic authority. ForWeber the extraordinary lies outside the bounds of rules. Adopting the terms of some recent interventions in the anthropo…
Integrity and Commitment in the Anthropology of Islam
The judge as tragic hero: Judicial ethics in Lebanon's shari'a courts
In this article, I present ethnography of judicial practice in Lebanon's shari'a courts and find a tension between the identity of the judges presiding as Islamic religious specialists and their identity as legal professionals. Just applying the rules of the law is incompatible with true religious vocation, which demands personal engagement with the morally needy. But to ignore legal strictures is to be dismissed as a mere sermonizer. I find this…
Mutuality and Immediacy Between Marjaʿ and Muqallid: Evidence From Male in Vitro Fertilization Patients in Shiʿi Lebanon
This article concerns the dominant institution of religious authority within modern Usuli Twelver Shiʿi Islam: the marjaʿiyya . The most senior clerics serve as “sources of emulation” ( marājiʿ al-taqlīd ), informing the moral conduct of their lay “imitators” ( muqallidūn ). Despite the importance of this relationship, academic writing on what we call its “affective” qualities, especially from lay perspectives, is limited. We provide ethnographic…
Reproductive disruptions: Gender, technology, and biopolitics in the new millennium - Edited by Marcia C. Inhorn
Neo-Calligraphy: Religious Authority and Media Technology in Contemporary Shiite Islam
Religious authority and its relation to the mundane, and especially to the domains of politics and the state, is a perennial issue of sociological and theological concern. Within the Islamic world, my focus here, this issue takes particular form, inflected through the powerful trope of the shari'ah (Arabic,sharī'ah), most commonly glossed in English as 'Islamic law,' although God's right 'way' through life potentially addresses every aspect of hu…
Islam and New Kinship: Reproductive technology and the shariah in Lebanon
Assisted reproductive technologies such as in vitro fertilization have provoked global controversy and ethical debate. This book provides a groundbreaking investigation into those debates in the Islamic Middle East, simultaneously documenting changing ideas of kinship and the evolving role of religious authority in the region through a combination of in-depth field research in Lebanon and an exhaustive survey of the Islamic legal literature. Leba…
New kinship, Islam, and the liberal tradition: Sexual morality and new reproductive technology in Lebanon
Recent kinship studies take interest in new reproductive technologies (NRT) such as in vitro fertilization. Such studies are frequently situated within a larger body of work, 'the new kinship studies', that follows David Schneider in challenging the notion of 'natural' foundations of kinship. In the course of my own research into NRT in Lebanon, I found many examples of the 'elective', non-biogenetic relations that are foregrounded in these recen…
The modernity of milk kinship: The Modernity of Milk Kinship
In Islamic law, breastfeeding institutes a type of kinship relation (, ‘milk kinship’), historically a medium for complex social and political networks in the Middle East, although of diminished frequency in modern times. My research focuses on Islamic Middle Eastern reactions to new reproductive technologies such as fertilisation: for Muslim religious specialists, milk kinship provides a way of thinking through and resolving the ethical dilemmas…
The judge as tragic hero: Judicial ethics in Lebanon's shari'a courts
In this article, I present ethnography of judicial practice in Lebanon's shari'a courts and find a tension between the identity of the judges presiding as Islamic religious specialists and their identity as legal professionals. Just applying the rules of the law is incompatible with true religious vocation, which demands personal engagement with the morally needy. But to ignore legal strictures is to be dismissed as a mere sermonizer. I find this…
Cough sweets and angels: The ordinary ethics of the extraordinary inSufi practice inLebanon
This article presents an ethnographic account of the social production of the miraculous inSufi practice inLebanon, including displays of bodily mortification. It examines the interdependence of the extraordinary and the ordinary/everyday, following, but problematizing,MaxWeber's classic discussion of charismatic authority. ForWeber the extraordinary lies outside the bounds of rules. Adopting the terms of some recent interventions in the anthropo…
New kinship, Islam, and the liberal tradition: Sexual morality and new reproductive technology in Lebanon
Recent kinship studies take interest in new reproductive technologies (NRT) such as in vitro fertilization. Such studies are frequently situated within a larger body of work, 'the new kinship studies', that follows David Schneider in challenging the notion of 'natural' foundations of kinship. In the course of my own research into NRT in Lebanon, I found many examples of the 'elective', non-biogenetic relations that are foregrounded in these recen…
Neo-Calligraphy: Religious Authority and Media Technology in Contemporary Shiite Islam
Religious authority and its relation to the mundane, and especially to the domains of politics and the state, is a perennial issue of sociological and theological concern. Within the Islamic world, my focus here, this issue takes particular form, inflected through the powerful trope of the shari'ah (Arabic,sharī'ah), most commonly glossed in English as 'Islamic law,' although God's right 'way' through life potentially addresses every aspect of hu…
Closeness in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Debating Kinship and Biomedicine in Lebanon and the Middle East
Anthropological studies of assisted reproduction and allied technologies offer new ways of understanding kinship. This paper follows those themes in the context of the Middle East, specifically Lebanon. The nearest equivalent to a word for "kinship" in Arabic is arguably qarābah, or "closeness," an important category within Islamic discourse: closeness is also a useful term for approaching a broader set of thematic concerns in the region, includi…
Children of the Revolution: ‘Ali Khamene'i's ‘Liberal’ Views on in vitro Fertilization
While commentators on Iran often present a dichotomy between ‘liberal’ reformists, on the one hand, and conservatives, on the other, reality is more complex. This article analyses the views of one, paradigmatic conservative, Ayatollah ‘Ali Khamene'i, the current Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic, on medical ethics, in particular on artificially assisted reproduction. Khamene'i's views in this field are strikingly, indeed uniquely, unrestrict…
Religious Authority beyond Domination and Discipline: Epistemic Authority and Its Vernacular Uses in the Shi'i Diaspora
Religious authority' remains a ubiquitous but controversial term of comparative analysis. In Islamic studies, authority is generally personified in the form of the ulama and most often viewed through Weber's lens of charismatic, legal-rational, and traditional types of legitimate domination. Our particular interest, Twelver Shi'i Islam, seems a paradigmatic case, where the relationship between 'the Ayatollahs' and state power has dominated academ…
Mutuality and Immediacy Between Marjaʿ and Muqallid: Evidence From Male in Vitro Fertilization Patients in Shiʿi Lebanon
This article concerns the dominant institution of religious authority within modern Usuli Twelver Shiʿi Islam: the marjaʿiyya . The most senior clerics serve as “sources of emulation” ( marājiʿ al-taqlīd ), informing the moral conduct of their lay “imitators” ( muqallidūn ). Despite the importance of this relationship, academic writing on what we call its “affective” qualities, especially from lay perspectives, is limited. We provide ethnographic…
The trial of Dominic Cummings: Rules and reason in the pandemic
The trip by Dominic Cummings, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson's then right-hand man, to Durham in April 2020, in seeming violation of the rules of social distancing he had helped put in place, led to intense media scrutiny and public outrage. That there might be 'One rule for them, and one for the rest of us' became a stick to beat the government with and arguably contributed to Cummings' eventual departure from Downing Street. This article …
Making a centre in the periphery: The legitimation of Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah’s Beirut Marjaʿiyya
Lebanon’s Sayyid Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah (d.2010) enjoyed in his later years a high profile as a ‘source of emulation’ (marjaʿ al-taqlīd) for Twelver Shiʿa in Lebanon and beyond. That high profile stemmed in part from his close association with the Shiʿi Lebanese resistance to Israeli occupation, and Hizballah in particular, but also from his avowedly ‘open-minded’ (munfatiḥ) and frequently controversial Islamic legal positions. His supporters …
Introduction to the special issue: Beyond Self-Fashioning and Freedom-Bending, Breaking, and Adhering to Rules in Religious Contexts
Rules are a crucial part of much religious thought and practice. Their importance or insignificance, their strictness or laxness, and their rigidity or flexibility in the face of change are constant themes of debate, both within and outside religious communities. Yet they have arguably not been given the attention they deserve within recent anthropology. Since the rise of practice theory, rules have more often been considered something to look pa…
Religious rules and thick description: Some thoughts from the anthropology of Islam
The recent anthropology of ethics has sought to look beyond rules to themes such as the cultivation of the virtuous self. Anthropology generally has grown impatient with what Bourdieu called 'the fallacies of the rule' as a key term for describing the social. But rules remain a crucial dimension of ethical practice in many contexts, including religious ones. This article focuses on British Muslim conceptions and practice of the religious rules of…
Kinship, Propriety and Assisted Reproduction in the Middle East
Anthropological debates on kinship in the Middle East have centred on the 'problems' of patriparallel cousin marriage and milk kinship. A focus on Middle Eastern reactions to assisted reproductive technologies such as in vitro fertilisation allows a fresh perspective on the study of kinship in the region. My own research has investigated Islamic legal reactions to assisted reproductive technologies and the practice of assisted reproduction in Leb…
Islam, kinship and new reproductive technology
Islam, kinship and new reproductive technology
The modernity of milk kinship: The Modernity of Milk Kinship
In Islamic law, breastfeeding institutes a type of kinship relation (, ‘milk kinship’), historically a medium for complex social and political networks in the Middle East, although of diminished frequency in modern times. My research focuses on Islamic Middle Eastern reactions to new reproductive technologies such as fertilisation: for Muslim religious specialists, milk kinship provides a way of thinking through and resolving the ethical dilemmas…
Kinship, Propriety and Assisted Reproduction in the Middle East
Anthropological debates on kinship in the Middle East have centred on the 'problems' of patriparallel cousin marriage and milk kinship. A focus on Middle Eastern reactions to assisted reproductive technologies such as in vitro fertilisation allows a fresh perspective on the study of kinship in the region. My own research has investigated Islamic legal reactions to assisted reproductive technologies and the practice of assisted reproduction in Leb…
Children of the Revolution: ‘Ali Khamene'i's ‘Liberal’ Views on in vitro Fertilization
While commentators on Iran often present a dichotomy between ‘liberal’ reformists, on the one hand, and conservatives, on the other, reality is more complex. This article analyses the views of one, paradigmatic conservative, Ayatollah ‘Ali Khamene'i, the current Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic, on medical ethics, in particular on artificially assisted reproduction. Khamene'i's views in this field are strikingly, indeed uniquely, unrestrict…
Closeness in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Debating Kinship and Biomedicine in Lebanon and the Middle East
Anthropological studies of assisted reproduction and allied technologies offer new ways of understanding kinship. This paper follows those themes in the context of the Middle East, specifically Lebanon. The nearest equivalent to a word for "kinship" in Arabic is arguably qarābah, or "closeness," an important category within Islamic discourse: closeness is also a useful term for approaching a broader set of thematic concerns in the region, includi…
New kinship, Islam, and the liberal tradition: Sexual morality and new reproductive technology in Lebanon
Recent kinship studies take interest in new reproductive technologies (NRT) such as in vitro fertilization. Such studies are frequently situated within a larger body of work, 'the new kinship studies', that follows David Schneider in challenging the notion of 'natural' foundations of kinship. In the course of my own research into NRT in Lebanon, I found many examples of the 'elective', non-biogenetic relations that are foregrounded in these recen…
Islam and New Kinship: Reproductive technology and the shariah in Lebanon
Assisted reproductive technologies such as in vitro fertilization have provoked global controversy and ethical debate. This book provides a groundbreaking investigation into those debates in the Islamic Middle East, simultaneously documenting changing ideas of kinship and the evolving role of religious authority in the region through a combination of in-depth field research in Lebanon and an exhaustive survey of the Islamic legal literature. Leba…
Reproductive disruptions: Gender, technology, and biopolitics in the new millennium - Edited by Marcia C. Inhorn
Neo-Calligraphy: Religious Authority and Media Technology in Contemporary Shiite Islam
Religious authority and its relation to the mundane, and especially to the domains of politics and the state, is a perennial issue of sociological and theological concern. Within the Islamic world, my focus here, this issue takes particular form, inflected through the powerful trope of the shari'ah (Arabic,sharī'ah), most commonly glossed in English as 'Islamic law,' although God's right 'way' through life potentially addresses every aspect of hu…
Mutuality and Immediacy Between Marjaʿ and Muqallid: Evidence From Male in Vitro Fertilization Patients in Shiʿi Lebanon
This article concerns the dominant institution of religious authority within modern Usuli Twelver Shiʿi Islam: the marjaʿiyya . The most senior clerics serve as “sources of emulation” ( marājiʿ al-taqlīd ), informing the moral conduct of their lay “imitators” ( muqallidūn ). Despite the importance of this relationship, academic writing on what we call its “affective” qualities, especially from lay perspectives, is limited. We provide ethnographic…
Integrity and Commitment in the Anthropology of Islam
The judge as tragic hero: Judicial ethics in Lebanon's shari'a courts
In this article, I present ethnography of judicial practice in Lebanon's shari'a courts and find a tension between the identity of the judges presiding as Islamic religious specialists and their identity as legal professionals. Just applying the rules of the law is incompatible with true religious vocation, which demands personal engagement with the morally needy. But to ignore legal strictures is to be dismissed as a mere sermonizer. I find this…
Cough sweets and angels: The ordinary ethics of the extraordinary inSufi practice inLebanon
This article presents an ethnographic account of the social production of the miraculous inSufi practice inLebanon, including displays of bodily mortification. It examines the interdependence of the extraordinary and the ordinary/everyday, following, but problematizing,MaxWeber's classic discussion of charismatic authority. ForWeber the extraordinary lies outside the bounds of rules. Adopting the terms of some recent interventions in the anthropo…
Legalism and the Care of the Self: Sharīʿah Discourse in Contemporary Lebanon
This chapter contends that anthropology needs a fresh, more sophisticated approach to rules as a complement to what has become a thriving 'anthropology of ethics'. That literature seeks to move beyond notions of ethics and morality as 'codes of conduct' and explore instead what Foucault calls 'the care of the self', that is, projects of virtuous self-fashioning. The neglect, even dismissal, of rules in these discussions comes despite the obvious …
The Social Politics of Islamic Bioethics
After the Ayatollah: Institutionalisation and Succession in the marjaʿiyya of Sayyid Muḥammad Ḥusayn Faḍl Allāh
This paper deals with the death of a high religious authority, the Twelver Shiʿi marjaʿ al-taqlīd, or "Grand Ayatollah", Sayyid Muḥammad Ḥusayn Faḍl Allāh. The emphasis given to following a living authority within the Twelver Shiʿi tradition makes their passing a moment of crisis, all the more so in the case of a figure who made "contemporaneity" a cornerstone of his distinctive appeal. I examine not only the events surrounding Faḍl Allāh's death…
Making a centre in the periphery: The legitimation of Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah’s Beirut Marjaʿiyya
Lebanon’s Sayyid Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah (d.2010) enjoyed in his later years a high profile as a ‘source of emulation’ (marjaʿ al-taqlīd) for Twelver Shiʿa in Lebanon and beyond. That high profile stemmed in part from his close association with the Shiʿi Lebanese resistance to Israeli occupation, and Hizballah in particular, but also from his avowedly ‘open-minded’ (munfatiḥ) and frequently controversial Islamic legal positions. His supporters …
De-centring Shiʿi Islam
In the introduction to this special issue, we make the case for ‘de-centring’ the study of Shiʿi Islam, conceptually, spatially and sociologically. After first noting the essentialization of Shiʿi identity within the contemporary public sphere, we question its spatialization within the modern world of nation-states and area studies, and contrast the physical and human geography of Shiʿi Islam. We then turn to the central theme of religious author…
Islam and Law in Lebanon: Sharia within and without the State
The modern state of Lebanon, created after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, is home to eighteen officially recognised different religious communities (or sects). Crucially, political office and representation came to be formally shared along confessional lines, and the privileges of power are distributed accordingly. One such key prerogative is exclusivity when it comes to personal status laws: the family legal affairs of each community. In this b…
Cousin Marriage
Given its imprecision, the term “cousin marriage” belongs more to everyday than to anthropological discourse. Anthropologists, and people from cultures across the world, distinguish between cousins of various sorts. Where the phrase is employed, however, it is generally used as an equivalent to what is otherwise sometimes called “close” or “consanguineous marriage”: that is, in contemporary terms, marriage between people genetically closely relat…
Kinship and Marriage, Overview of
Kinship and marriage are fundamental issues in the study of human social and cultural diversity. Often bracketed together in Anglophone anthropology as just “kinship,” the topics have been central to sociocultural anthropology for much of the discipline's formative history. In the 1970s and 1980s, formalistic analyses and comparative models of kinship came to be doubted, part of a wider skepticism towards grand narratives. Studies of kinship cont…
Cross‐Cousin Marriage
Cross‐cousin marriage systems are an important theme in the anthropological literature on kinship. A “cross‐cousin” is the child of one's parent's opposite‐sex sibling: the father's sister's child or mother's brother's child (i.e., as opposed to the parallel cousin, the child of one's parent's same‐sex sibling). However, it is vital to note that this definition does not necessarily pertain to a genealogically defined individual but rather to a wh…
Consanguinity
Consanguinity refers to a relationship of shared descent, as opposed to one through marriage or affinity. Given its Euro‐American origins, it is potentially ethnocentric in a number of respects: its assumption that descent is a definitive mode of imagining relatedness and one that operates cognatically, and its imagination of relations of descent as constituted through shared substance and more specifically shared blood. These tenets have, howeve…
Family
“Family” is a ubiquitous term in talking about kinship in English and other European languages. As a term in ordinary language, it suffers corresponding advantages and disadvantages. Unlike the rather more artificial term “kinship,” it conveys a powerful sense of what is at stake: the affective bonds of closeness, but also their suffocating demands. But this sense of familiarity can be deceptive when it comes to ethnographic writing and cross‐cul…
Sharia
Sharia is a key concept in Islam and our contemporary world. Often translated into English as ‘Islamic law’, it includes financial contracts, criminal justice, and marriage and divorce. But it also covers ritual practice, dietary prohibitions, and personal and interpersonal ethics. Indeed, the rules of sharia could, in theory, encompass all of life. Sharia thus comprises both a legal system and a rule-based approach to the challenges of living a …
Sociology (28 works) · Islamic Studies and History (20 works) · Law (20 works) · Political science (20 works) · Anthropology (19 works) · Islam (17 works) · Philosophy (17 works) · History (11 works) · Politics (11 works) · Epistemology (10 works)