Muslim Ethics and the Ethnographic Imagination
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 14760744 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Kirsten Wesselhoeft (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2023 |
| Volume | 51 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 108-120 |
| Publication date | 2023-03-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Religious Ethics (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0384-9694 • E-ISSN: 1467-9795 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1111/jore.12417 |
| OpenAlex | W4319790345 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 22 |
Theoretical and methodological discussions of ethnography and ethics have appeared regularly in the Journal of Religious Ethics for at least the past 13 years. Many of these conversations have been preoccupied by the relationship between “normative” work in religious ethics and “descriptive” work on moral worlds and patterns of reasoning. However, there has often been a perceived impasse when it comes to drawing “normative” ethical arguments from fine‐grained ethnographic study. This paper begins by assessing significant contributions to religious ethics made by ethnographers of Islam, focusing on the way they render a stark descriptive/normative binary irrelevant. I then turn to an example from my own fieldwork that expands our understanding of the relationship between ethnography and ethics. Through this example, I argue that ethical thinkers working outside the academy—theologians, activists, and cultural producers—also draw on an “ethnographic imagination” to make moral arguments. I end by reflecting on how the “ethnographic imagination” situates religious ethics as part of broader humanistic inquiry, showing that careful accounts of how people do live are always enmeshed with visions of how we should live
Epistemology · Ethnography · Humanism · Meta-ethics · Normative · Nursing ethics · Political science · Sociology · Theology · Vision · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Anthropology · Law · Philosophy · Religion and Society Interactions · Religion, Society, and Development
What Is Islam?
The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam
Peaceful Families
Politics of Piety
Focus on Ethnography, Anthropology, and Comparative Religious Ethics
Ethnography and Jewish Ethics
Introduction
Ethnography and Subjectivity in Comparative Religious Ethics
Ethnography, Anthropology, and Comparative Religious Ethics
Normativity in Comparative Religious Ethics
The Constraints of Choice
The Inheritances of Immigration
Shifting Boundaries
Destabilizing Orthodoxy, De-territorializing the Anthropology of Islam
To Work for Change
Recent Work in Moral Anthropology
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,33 |
| Citation span | 2023 - 2023 (1) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |