Ferdiansyah Thajib – författare

Embracing Faith and Desire investigates the intersection of gender, sexuality, and religion from an anthropological lens. Taking women’s, non-binary, and queer religious life-worlds in Muslim and Christian contexts as a cross-cutting research theme, the book brings together scholars from different disciplines and regional contexts who are interested in the interconnectedness of gender dynamics, queerness, and religious principles.

The explosive growth of contesting religions, especially in a Christian-Muslim context, represents a distinctively religious-political dynamic within globalization. It disrupts the global world order, influences hegemonic negotiations within and across nation-states, and shapes self-imaginations and practices of social actors. Consequently, it carries far-reaching political, religious, economic, and social ramifications. Embracing Faith and Desire explores these ramifications on various levels. The volume thereby contributes to debates on intersectionality, queer, and religious approaches alike by showcasing how the scopes and scales of action and the constructive shaping of self-images, social relations, and political actions of people are fundamentally dependent upon religious, gendered, and sexualized backgrounds.

Embedding the contributions in the anthropology of religion, anthropology of gender, and queer anthropology, the book reconfigures our understanding of lived religion through the lens of gendered and queered imaginations, practices, and ideologies.

Embracing Faith and Desire investigates the intersection of gender, sexuality, and religion from an anthropological lens. Taking women’s, non-binary, and queer religious life-worlds in Muslim and Christian contexts as a cross-cutting research theme, the book brings together scholars from different disciplines and regional contexts who are interested in the interconnectedness of gender dynamics, queerness, and religious principles.

The explosive growth of contesting religions, especially in a Christian-Muslim context, represents a distinctively religious-political dynamic within globalization. It disrupts the global world order, influences hegemonic negotiations within and across nation-states, and shapes self-imaginations and practices of social actors. Consequently, it carries far-reaching political, religious, economic, and social ramifications. Embracing Faith and Desire explores these ramifications on various levels. The volume thereby contributes to debates on intersectionality, queer, and religious approaches alike by showcasing how the scopes and scales of action and the constructive shaping of self-images, social relations, and political actions of people are fundamentally dependent upon religious, gendered, and sexualized backgrounds.

Embedding the contributions in the anthropology of religion, anthropology of gender, and queer anthropology, the book reconfigures our understanding of lived religion through the lens of gendered and queered imaginations, practices, and ideologies.

This book illustrates the role of researchers’ affects and emotions in understanding and making sense of the phenomena they study during ethnographic fieldwork. Whatever methods ethnographers apply during field research, however close they get to their informants and no matter how involved or detached they feel, fieldwork pushes them to constantly negotiate and reflect their subjectivities and positionalities in relation to the persons, communities, spaces and phenomena they study.

The book highlights the idea that ethnographic fieldwork is based on the attempt of communication, mutual understanding, and perspective-taking on behalf of and together with those studied. With regard to the institutionally silenced, yet informally emphasized necessity of ethnographers’ emotional immersion into the local worlds they research (defined as “emic perspective,” “narrating through the eyes of the Other,” “seeing the world from the informants’ point of view,” etc.), this book pursues the disentanglement of affect-related disciplinary conventions by means of transparent, vivid and systematic case studies and their methodological discussion. The book provides nineteen case studies on the relationship between methodology, intersubjectivity, and emotion in qualitative and ethnographic research, and includes six section introductions to the pivotal issues of role conflict, reciprocity, intimacy and care, illness and dying, failing and attuning, and emotion regimes in fieldwork and ethnography.