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Book Cover
E-book
Author Hillewaert, Sarah, author

Title Morality at the margins : youth, language, and Islam in coastal Kenya / Sarah Hillewaert
Published New York : Fordham University Press, 2020
©2020

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Description 1 online resource : illustrations, maps
Contents Introduction -- Interlude 1 : Mila Yetu Hufujika (our traditions are being destroyed) / by Mahmoud Ahmed Abdulkadir -- "This is Lamu" : belonging, morality, and materiality -- Dialects of morality -- Interlude 2 : kiSwahili / by Mahmoud Ahmed Abdulkadir -- "Youth" as a discursive construct -- Reframing morality through youthful voices -- Interlude 3 : Tupijeni Makamama (let's embrace) / by Mahmoud Ahmed Abdulkadir -- Senses of morality and morality of the senses -- Epilogue -- Appendix : Note on language
Summary This book considers the day-to-day lives of young Muslims on Kenya's island of Lamu, who live simultaneously on the edge and in the center. At the margins of the national and international economy and of Western notions of modernity, Lamu's inhabitants nevertheless find themselves the focus of campaigns against Islamic radicalization and of Western touristic imaginations of the untouched and secluded. What does it mean to be young, modern, and Muslim here? How are these denominators imagined and enacted in daily encounters? Documenting the everyday lives of Lamu youth, this ethnography explores how young people negotiate cultural, religious, political, and economic expectations through nuanced deployments of language, dress, and bodily comportment. Hillewaert shows how seemingly mundane practices--how young people greet others, how they walk, dress, and talk--can become tactics in the negotiation of moral personhood. Morality at the Margins traces the shifting meanings and potential ambiguities of such everyday signs--and the dangers of their misconstrual. By examining the uncertainties that underwrite projects of self-fashioning, the book highlights how shifting and scalable discourses of tradition, modernity, secularization, nationalism, and religious piety inform changing notions of moral subjectivity. In elaborating everyday practices of Islamic pluralism, the book shows the ways in which Muslim societies critically engage with change while sustaining a sense of integrity and morality
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index
Notes Print version record
Subject Muslim youth -- Kenya -- Lamu Island -- Social conditions -- 21st century
Social change -- Kenya -- Lamu Island
Swahili language -- Kenya -- Lamu Island
Nonverbal communication -- Kenya -- Lamu Island
Muslim youth -- Social conditions
Nonverbal communication
Social change
Social conditions
Swahili language
SUBJECT Lamu Island (Kenya) -- Social conditions -- 20th century
Subject Kenya -- Lamu Island
Form Electronic book
ISBN 9780823286522
0823286525
9780823286539
0823286533
Other Titles Youth, language, and Islam in coastal Kenya