Prayer in the City. Religious Plurality, the (Un)Making of Religious Boundaries and Urban Everyday Life in Mahajanga/Madagascar

The project focuses on urban spaces so contexts for the making and unmaking of the religious. It analyses the interplay between the (un)making of religious boundaries and urban everyday life in Indian Ocean port city of Mahajanga in northwest Madagascar. Inspired by recent debates in anthropology on morality, piety, and everyday life (Debevec 2008, Fadil & Fernando 2015, Jouili 2015, Schielke 2015), the complexities and inherent ambiguities of everyday life serve as a starting point to investigate religious boundary work between Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, as well as Malagasy concepts of ancestor veneration, spirit possession, and “magic”. The project follows the research questions of how cities’ historical, cultural, and spatial conditions shape religious plurality and the interaction of religious communities and how these communities themselves affect social urban life. As such, it engages in complex socio-political questions about the nature of religious freedom, about the limits of toleration, and about the role of religion in urban (secular) societies.

Project staff: Dr. Patrick Desplat
Project publications:

Desplat, Patrick. 2018. “Closed circles of mistrust: Envy, aspirations and urban sociality in coastal Madagascar.” Africa: Special Issue “Urban Kinship” (forthcoming).
Desplat, Patrick. 2018. “Madagascar.“ In: Fleet, Kate et al. (eds.). The Encyclopedia of Islam 3. Brill: Leiden (forthcoming).
Desplat, Patrick.2016. “East Africa”. In: Martin, Richard (ed.): Encyclopedia of Islam and the Muslim World (2nd edition). Macmillan Reference USA: New York. 311–318.