Can there be a Godly ethnography? Islamic anthropology, epistemic decolonization, and the ethnographic stance

Abstract

Can there be a Godly ethnography? This article explores how the epistemic entailments of this question trouble our taken‐for‐granted notions about what decolonizing anthropology demands. Disciplinary decolonization aims at more‐just futures through interrogating Eurocentric ways of knowing and approaching marginalized histories and perspectives as good to think with, not merely about. I argue that far from being a radical challenge, such decolonizing calls are internal to a secular liberal anthropology. The ethical norms they embed take paradigmatic form in the ethnographic stance and its imperative to take difference seriously as a way toward self‐transformation. This stance needs to itself be provincialized as belonging to secular traditions of critical inquiry and their attendant emancipatory politics. By contrast, a Godly ethnography, as put forth in the 1980s call for an “Islamic anthropology” by some Muslim scholars working within a broader Islamization of knowledge movement, is a more radical challenge to the discipline. Here, the study of human differences is oriented neither towards self‐determination nor solidarity but towards divine devotion. Indeed, Islamic anthropology's transcendent telos is difficult to reconcile with the secular ethic of “taking seriously” motivating call for epistemic decolonization. This difficulty necessitates more‐carefully disentangling the question of disciplinary decolonization from political liberation, asking what happens the day after epistemic decolonization.

A School of Thought in Christian Anthropology

“…Th ere is also the fact that an engagement with "disappointing subalterns" (Bialecki et al 2008(Bialecki et al : 1140-or even engaging ethnographically with people who are not subaltern at all-does not invalidate a project. On top of that, there is the possibility that all forms of decolonization are not necessarily goods in and of themselves; as Yasmin Moll (2023) has recently pointed out, it is also important to consider what comes aft er epistemic and ontological decolonization, as some post-secular, illiberal decolonial ontologies and epistemes can be as exclusionary as some of the liberal, secular ontologies and epistemes that they would supplant. Finally, we would have to weigh in the blunt fact that those drawn to your proposed school do not seem in any way sympathetic to some of the more unsettling political projects associated with colonial Christianity and Christian nationalism; I doubt very much your Marxian sensibilities would mark you as an acceptable 'fellow traveler' to unsettling Christian Nationalist movements and fi gures!…”

More‐than‐human supremacy: Himalayan lessons on cosmopolitics

“…We urge anthropologists to make room for skepticism and critique in their analysis of cosmopolitical formations rather than prematurely celebrating "ecopolitics" as anti-Western and anticolonial. Taking a skeptical stance does not necessitate a reversion to "anthropology's secular epistemology" when it comes to dealing with "difference" (Moll, 2023), but it does force a critical reckoning with the situated ethics and politics of claims to religious difference rooted in opposition to a secular universalism. In our case, skepticism is an ethical obligation when the Hindu Right both represents its politics as embodying a set of Hindu ethics that provide a global model for living with nature in this era of planetary ecological crisis and simultaneously deflects all critique as colonial, arguing that Hindu social and natural worlds cannot be analyzed in "Western" terms.…”