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AEGIS European Conference on African Studies
11 - 14 July 2007
African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands
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Muslim Youth Perspectives on the Dilemmas of Social Change: Cross-Temporal Resources for Morality in Everyday Language
| Panel |
14. New Modes of Sociality in Muslim Africa
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| Paper ID | 37 |
| Author(s) |
Smid, Karen E.
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| Paper |
No paper submitted
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| Abstract | Experiences or perceptions of recent, dramatic social changes in West Africa – in terms of changing systems of educational and economic organization, new technology, and religious reformism – pose moral dilemmas for Muslims of all ages. They must decide if and how to affiliate themselves with these new movements and practices and how to evaluate, from a moral or religious standpoint, the involvement in them of others. Since many of the existent sources of moral authority (e.g. Sufi religious experts, male and female elders, men from prestigious “noble” lineages, and oral religious folklore) are themselves implicated in these changes, what resources and points of reference are people using to anchor their moral decisions?
This paper will discuss how people draw on discourses from the past and about the past and future to discursively construct and defend their moral perspectives on contemporary social changes. Using analytical methods from linguistic anthropology, I explore the overt and implicit ways that people talk about the morality of these changes and situate them in historical time. In narratives and everyday conversations, speakers establish affiliations and assign obligations and responsibilities in relation to new movements and practices. They delineate causality and relationships of continuity and discontinuity over short-term and long-term time. For Muslim believers, continuities to a mythical or scriptural past or to a prophesized future have relevant implications for evaluating the morality and inevitability of contemporary situations and practices.
The perspectives of youth on these social changes are particularly significant to future understandings of what it means to be Muslim in West Africa. Youth often have more awareness of and contact with these changes than do elders. Their resources for moral decision-making may be less pre-determined. I will highlight examples from their ways of speaking about social changes and compare these with those of older women and men. All data comes from recent ethnographic and linguistic fieldwork at urban and rural sites in the northern Fouta Djallon region of Guinea-Conakry. This location is comparable to other parts of West Africa in terms of the kinds of social changes occurring, but there are significant regional variations in the extent to which these changes are taking hold and how eager people are to embrace them.
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