Rethinking difference: Muslim and Christian lives in comparative perspective

In recent decades, the anthropology of religion has produced detailed and diverse insights into the experience of religious groups living in societies across the world. Whereas most efforts to research two such groups in a society have focused on points of interaction, Daan Beekers, Hansjörg Dilger and Daniel Nilsson DeHanas call for a comparative ethnographic approach. Studies of Christian and Muslim groups in a shared social space will improve our understanding not only of these subgroups but of society as a whole.

While many in our globalizing world seem preoccupied with religious difference, Muslim and Christian communities often share much common ground. Ethnographic scholars of religion are well positioned to highlight and investigate this mutuality, but have so far largely neglected the task. Without a doubt, the anthropology of religion has flourished in recent decades. It has witnessed the coming of age of prolific subfields, particularly the anthropologies of Islam and Christianity. These have stimulated rich and detailed ethnographic studies throughout the world. At the same time, the growing focus on the complex dynamics within Christian and Muslim life worlds has foreclosed comparative inquiries across different religious settings.

In our view, it is high time to overcome the often rigid boundaries between the study of Islam and Christianity. The Muslims and Christians we encounter in our research sites often coexist in shared social spaces – within nations, cities, neighborhoods or villages. They are exposed to the same societal and political conditions, institutional regimes and cultural trends – even if they often inhabit different, and internally varying, structural positions in relation to these. Ethnographic work on how Muslims and Christians respond to these shared conditions – and the extent to which their everyday (religious) lives converge and diverge – is urgent in today’s pluralist societies. So what, we ask, could such a comparative anthropology look like?

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The London School of Economics and Political Science
The LSE Religion and Global Society
[blogs.lse.ac.uk]

Keyword: ethnography; the scientific description of the customs of individual peoples and cultures.