The anthropology of Muslim contexts from a Spanish perspective: Immigration, Islamization and Islamophobia

Abstract

The origins of the anthropology of Islam have been linked to an epistemological reconsideration of the work of Arabists and Orientalists-which anthropology has sought to differentiate-in order to prevent the reification of Islam and the essentialisation of large areas and groups of people on an alleged religious basis. Ethnographies prioritised understanding the people and dodged essentialisms, but the theoretical framework of the anthropology of Islam identifies an object-Islam-which in certain respects reproduces some of the perspectives for which Arabism has been criticised, while at the same time containing fundamental reflections for the job of the anthropologist. This cartography provides an overview of the contributions from the anthropology of Muslim contexts from the academic perspective of the Spanish state in an attempt to reconstruct the reasoning behind different topics and approaches and to identify regularities. The aim is to offer a roadmap to navigate the enormous amount of existing work and to propose debates that situate anthropology in a space that is not only academic, but also related to the production of critically- and politically-constructed public discourses.