I am an anthropologist working on religious pluralism in the Netherlands. I have studied social and cultural anthropology at the University of Amsterdam and the University of Oxford, and obtained my PhD from VU University Amsterdam in 2015. After completing my PhD I conducted a postdoctoral project at Utrecht University within the HERA research project ‘Iconic religion: How imaginaries of religious encounter structure urban space’. I am currently a post-doctoral researcher within the program 'Religious Matters in an Entangled World' at Utrecht University. My currect research examines the ways in which different groups perceive, and relate to, the re-use of church buildings for various religious and secular purposes, including their reallocation as ‘migrant’ churches, mosques, theaters and cultural centers. These processes of material conversion provide a productive entry-point for analyzing the accommodation of religious and non-religious diversity, contemporary engagements with Christian heritage and anxieties about Islam. Earlier interests include youth livelihoods and patronage politics in Nigeria, the topic of my MPhil thesis at Oxford University.
Engaging with debates about lived religion, pluralism, and secularism, this book presents an ethn... more Engaging with debates about lived religion, pluralism, and secularism, this book presents an ethnographic study of committed young Muslims and Christians in the predominantly secular context of the Netherlands. Daan Beekers breaks with conventional frameworks that keep these groups apart by highlighting the common ground between revivalist-minded Protestant Christians and Sunni Muslims.
Based on in-depth fieldwork, Young Muslims and Christians in a Secular Europe shows that these young adults embark on reflexive projects of cultivating personal faith that are rife with struggles, setbacks, and doubts. Beekers argues that this shared precarious condition of everyday religious pursuits is shaped by young believers' active participation in today's high capitalist and largely secular society where they encounter other modes of imagining and living in the world. Yet he reveals that this close engagement with secular culture also fosters a reinvigorated religious commitment that demands constant care and nourishment.
Written in a clear and accessible style, this book reaches beyond longstanding divisions in the study of religion in Europe. It both provides rich insights into everyday religious lives and disrupts persistent binary oppositions between categories such as minorities and majorities, migrants and natives, and Islam and the West.
Straying from the Straight Path: How Senses of Failure Invigorate Lived Religion, ed. Daan Beekers and David Kloos (New York and Oxford), 2018
If piety, faith, and conviction constitute one side of the religious coin, then imperfection, unc... more If piety, faith, and conviction constitute one side of the religious coin, then imperfection, uncertainty, and ambivalence constitute the other. Yet, scholars tend to separate these two domains and place experiences of inadequacy in everyday religious life – such as a wavering commitment, religious negligence or weakness in faith – outside the domain of religion ‘proper.’
Straying from the Straight Path breaks with this tendency by examining how self-perceived failure is, in many cases, part and parcel of religious practice and experience. Responding to the need for comparative approaches in the face of the largely separated fields of the anthropology of Islam and Christianity, this volume gives full attention to moral failure as a constitutive and potentially energizing force in the religious lives of both Muslims and Christians in different parts of the world.
The re-articulation of Christian religion as national (or European) culture has emerged as a wide... more The re-articulation of Christian religion as national (or European) culture has emerged as a widespread trend in current debates about religion in Europe. This has important implications for processes of inclusion and exclusion, since, if Europe is defined in terms of its Christian heritage and ident1 | P a g e ity, the question arises who is being excluded from that symbolic realm. Taking up this question, this paper focuses on the Netherlands, a country that is at once characterised by widespread anti-religious sentiments and a growing reorientation on Christian heritage and culture in public and political debates. The paper examines two different expressions of what can be termed ‘culturalised Christianity’: the mobilisation of Christian identity in populist politics and the embrace of Christian heritage in debates about closed and re-purposed church buildings. Exploring the similarities and differences between these expressions, I demonstrate that the culturalisation of Christianity in the Netherlands comes with antagonist stances towards confessional religious communities, not just Muslim but also Christian ones. I further argue that while these manifestations of what can be termed identitarian Christianity and heritage Christianity differ in important ways, they share an underlying desire for rearticulating a sense of self and belonging with reference to a presumed collective past.
Este artigo foca na criação de iconicidade através da arquitetura religiosa em Amsterdã, Holanda.... more Este artigo foca na criação de iconicidade através da arquitetura religiosa em Amsterdã, Holanda. Ao examinar a Mesquita de Fatih, abrigada em uma antiga igreja católica no centro da cidade, apresentamos de que maneiras os esforços para fazer desta uma mesquita icônica são moldados pelo terreno icônico da construção, pelo qual determinamos seu envolvimento com outros locais (religiosos e não religiosos) do passado e do presente. Esse campo icônico é caracterizado pelas cadeias de conversão que precederam a mesquita, legados materiais e discursivos de “ocultação” e interações simbólicas contemporâneas com construções próximas, como a Igreja Ocidental. Ao desenvolver uma análise dos entrelaçamentos espaciais e temporais da Mesquita com o espaço urbano de Amsterdã, buscamos revitalizar uma abordagem diacrônica e relacional que vem sendo negligenciada, principalmente em estudos sociais-científicos de mesquitas no Ocidente. Não iremos analisar um único local de devoção em um momento espe...
This introduction proposes directions for a comparative anthropology of Muslim and Christian reli... more This introduction proposes directions for a comparative anthropology of Muslim and Christian religion. While the anthropologies of Islam and Christianity flourish, comparative inquiries across religious boundaries have remained remarkably underdeveloped. As a result, parallels, overlaps, and situated differences between religious groups in today’s pluralist environments are often disregarded. This piece sets out the aim of this special section to develop ethnographic comparison, not of religious traditions as such, but of the ways in which everyday religious lives take shape within a shared social space, whether local or national. Such comparative work has the potential to provide insights and reveal connections that would likely be overlooked in non-comparative accounts, and that invite a critical rethinking of conventional understandings of difference and particularity.
This contribution looks comparatively at the everyday pursuit of religious commitment among young... more This contribution looks comparatively at the everyday pursuit of religious commitment among young, revivalist-oriented Sunni Muslims and Protestant Christians in the Netherlands. In both public debates and academic scholarship, the differences between these groups tend to be stressed, particularly through dichotomies such as migrant/native and minority/majority. This article, by contrast, takes their potential common ground as a starting point by examining the pursuit of religious aspirations under shared conditions of consumer capitalism and cultural pluralism. I argue that my Christian and Muslim interlocutors experienced a noticeably similar dynamic of constraint on and reinvigoration of their faith. Further, I note the different degrees to which they emphasized their moral distinctiveness, and discuss how this disparity is related to dominant public representations of these groups.
This article offers a comparative study of everyday sexual ethics among Dutch Sunni Muslim and ev... more This article offers a comparative study of everyday sexual ethics among Dutch Sunni Muslim and evangelical Christian young adults, both those born into religious families and those converted later in life. In European public debates, the sexual values of observant Christians and-especially-observant Muslims, are commonly understood to deviate from progressive norms. Particularly for Muslims, this has become a ground for questioning their belonging to the moral nation. Our ethnographic analysis complicates these conventional representations, which are partly reflected in quantitative survey research. We argue that the sexual ethics of the young Muslims and Christians we studied are multi-layered, situational, and dialogical. Discussing the convergences and divergences between these groups, we point to a paradox: while Muslims tend to be set apart as sexually 'other', the young Christians we worked with-and to a lesser extent the converted Muslims-put strikingly more effort into distinguishing themselves from, and criticising, dominant sexual norms.
In: Straying from the Straight Path: How Senses of Failure Invigorate Lived Religion, ed. Daan Beekers and David Kloos, pp. 1-19. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2018
In this introductory chapter we introduce the theme of moral failure, by which we denote the expe... more In this introductory chapter we introduce the theme of moral failure, by which we denote the experiences of shortcoming, inadequacy and imperfection that are often at the heart of lived religion. We argue that a critical exploration of senses of failure in everyday religious lives offers a possibility for transcending a dichotomy that has emerged within both the anthropology of Islam and the anthropology of Christianity, that between pursuits of ethical perfection and the ambivalences of everyday life. Much work on religious ethics stresses the opposition between religious and non-religious ethical repertoires, effectively placing experiences of imperfection outside of the domain of religious experience ‘proper’. In contrast, we contend that moral failure is often part and parcel of, and productively contributes to, processes of ethical formation. In this introduction, we outline this dialectics of religious pursuits, which is addressed in different ways by each of the contributions to this special issue.
This article focuses on the making of iconicity through religious architecture in Amsterdam, the ... more This article focuses on the making of iconicity through religious architecture in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Examining the Fatih Mosque housed in a former Catholic church in the city center, we show in what ways the efforts at making this mosque iconic are shaped by the building’s iconic field, by which we denote its entanglement with other (religious and non-religious) sites in the past and the present. This iconic field is characterized by the conversion chains that preceded the mosque, material and discursive legacies of “hiddenness” and contemporary symbolic interactions with nearby sites such as the Western Church. By developing an analysis of the mosque’s temporal and spatial entanglements in Amsterdam’s urban space, we seek to revitalize a relational and diachronic approach that has suffered from neglect, particularly in social-scientific studies of mosques in the West. Rather than looking at a singular place of worship at a particular moment in time, we draw attention to the relations between Islamic and other religious architecture and to the ways in which this mosque intersects with broader genealogies and geographies of religion, not only by association but also by actual links in relationships, politics or material culture.
In this article, I examine the discursive as well as embodied and sensorial forms of persuasion t... more In this article, I examine the discursive as well as embodied and sensorial forms of persuasion that undergird the formation of religious authority, Islamic authority in the Netherlands more specifically. I argue that particular momentary occasions can play important roles in facilitating the mobilization of these discursive and non-discursive forms of persuasion. Based on a close reading of an event I participated in during my fieldwork among young Muslims in the Netherlands, the analysis focuses on such a key moment of persuasion, paradoxically characterised by a preacher’s apparently failed attempt at conversion. Despite this failure, this preacher can be seen to have succeeded in offering his young Muslim audience a model of how to be a Muslim and of how to represent Islam to non-Muslims. Apart from contributing to anthropological debates on Islamic authority in Europe and religious persuasion more generally, I discuss an important new type of Islamic leaders – referred to here as ‘travelling preachers’ – and the new kinds of youth-centred settings of religious learning in which they operate.
Culture and Religion: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 2014, 15(1): 72-99
In this article I compare the active religious engagement found among many of today’s young Dutch... more In this article I compare the active religious engagement found among many of today’s young Dutch Muslims and Christians. I show that such comparison requires a move beyond the separate frameworks through which these groups are commonly perceived, found both in widely shared public discourses (‘allochthons’ versus ‘autochthons’) and in academic research (minority studies versus the sociology of religion). In their stead, this comparative analysis examines in what ways both groups give shape to observant religious practice in the shared context of contemporary Dutch society. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, I show that young Christians as well as Muslims participate in social settings of religious pedagogy, where they are encouraged to attain, sustain and improve personal piety in today’s pluralist Dutch society. Such social participation does not preclude, but rather comes together with a strong emphasis on reflexivity and authenticity.
This article is an ethnographic exploration of the ways in which young, strictly practicing Sunni... more This article is an ethnographic exploration of the ways in which young, strictly practicing Sunni Muslims and Protestant Christians in the Netherlands deal with issues of sexuality. It is often stated in public debates that the sexual values of Christians, and even more so those of Muslims, diverge from the progressive, secular sexual values that have increasingly come to be taken as the norm. Similar conclusions emerge from existing comparative studies, which are mainly based on quantitative research. However, such research, in which the opinions of religious people are ‘measured’, tells us little about the roles these values play in religious life. Based on my ethnographic research among Sunni and Protestant young adults, my focus in this article is on this lived dimension of values. Discussing the similarities and differences in dealing with issues of sexuality between these groups, I show that, more than my Muslim interlocutors, the young Christians with whom I worked strongly emphasized the theme of sexuality in their attempts at distinguishing themselves from the secular ‘mainstream’.
Dit artikel is een etnografische verkenning van de omgang met seksualiteit onder jonge, strikt-pr... more Dit artikel is een etnografische verkenning van de omgang met seksualiteit onder jonge, strikt-praktiserende soennitische moslims en gereformeerde christenen in Nederland. Een veel gehoord geluid in het publieke debat is dat de seksuele waarden van christenen, en nog meer die van moslims, afwijken van de progressieve seksuele waarden die steeds meer als norm zijn gaan gelden. Uit veel bestaande vergelijkende studies, die grotendeels gebaseerd zijn op kwantitatief onderzoek, komt een soortgelijk beeld naar voren. Dergelijk onderzoek, waarin de opvattingen van gelovigen worden 'gemeten' , zegt echter weinig over de rol die deze waarden in het religieuze leven spelen. Op basis van mijn antropologisch onderzoek naar jonge soennitische moslims en gereformeerde christenen richt ik me in dit artikel op die geleefde dimensie van waarden. Ik bespreek de overeenkomsten en verschillen in de omgang met seksualiteit en laat zien dat mijn islamitische en christelijke gespreksgenoten seksualiteit in ongelijke mate benadrukken als een thema waarmee ze zich kunnen onderscheiden van de seculiere 'mainstream'.
Engaging with debates about lived religion, pluralism, and secularism, this book presents an ethn... more Engaging with debates about lived religion, pluralism, and secularism, this book presents an ethnographic study of committed young Muslims and Christians in the predominantly secular context of the Netherlands. Daan Beekers breaks with conventional frameworks that keep these groups apart by highlighting the common ground between revivalist-minded Protestant Christians and Sunni Muslims.
Based on in-depth fieldwork, Young Muslims and Christians in a Secular Europe shows that these young adults embark on reflexive projects of cultivating personal faith that are rife with struggles, setbacks, and doubts. Beekers argues that this shared precarious condition of everyday religious pursuits is shaped by young believers' active participation in today's high capitalist and largely secular society where they encounter other modes of imagining and living in the world. Yet he reveals that this close engagement with secular culture also fosters a reinvigorated religious commitment that demands constant care and nourishment.
Written in a clear and accessible style, this book reaches beyond longstanding divisions in the study of religion in Europe. It both provides rich insights into everyday religious lives and disrupts persistent binary oppositions between categories such as minorities and majorities, migrants and natives, and Islam and the West.
Straying from the Straight Path: How Senses of Failure Invigorate Lived Religion, ed. Daan Beekers and David Kloos (New York and Oxford), 2018
If piety, faith, and conviction constitute one side of the religious coin, then imperfection, unc... more If piety, faith, and conviction constitute one side of the religious coin, then imperfection, uncertainty, and ambivalence constitute the other. Yet, scholars tend to separate these two domains and place experiences of inadequacy in everyday religious life – such as a wavering commitment, religious negligence or weakness in faith – outside the domain of religion ‘proper.’
Straying from the Straight Path breaks with this tendency by examining how self-perceived failure is, in many cases, part and parcel of religious practice and experience. Responding to the need for comparative approaches in the face of the largely separated fields of the anthropology of Islam and Christianity, this volume gives full attention to moral failure as a constitutive and potentially energizing force in the religious lives of both Muslims and Christians in different parts of the world.
The re-articulation of Christian religion as national (or European) culture has emerged as a wide... more The re-articulation of Christian religion as national (or European) culture has emerged as a widespread trend in current debates about religion in Europe. This has important implications for processes of inclusion and exclusion, since, if Europe is defined in terms of its Christian heritage and ident1 | P a g e ity, the question arises who is being excluded from that symbolic realm. Taking up this question, this paper focuses on the Netherlands, a country that is at once characterised by widespread anti-religious sentiments and a growing reorientation on Christian heritage and culture in public and political debates. The paper examines two different expressions of what can be termed ‘culturalised Christianity’: the mobilisation of Christian identity in populist politics and the embrace of Christian heritage in debates about closed and re-purposed church buildings. Exploring the similarities and differences between these expressions, I demonstrate that the culturalisation of Christianity in the Netherlands comes with antagonist stances towards confessional religious communities, not just Muslim but also Christian ones. I further argue that while these manifestations of what can be termed identitarian Christianity and heritage Christianity differ in important ways, they share an underlying desire for rearticulating a sense of self and belonging with reference to a presumed collective past.
Este artigo foca na criação de iconicidade através da arquitetura religiosa em Amsterdã, Holanda.... more Este artigo foca na criação de iconicidade através da arquitetura religiosa em Amsterdã, Holanda. Ao examinar a Mesquita de Fatih, abrigada em uma antiga igreja católica no centro da cidade, apresentamos de que maneiras os esforços para fazer desta uma mesquita icônica são moldados pelo terreno icônico da construção, pelo qual determinamos seu envolvimento com outros locais (religiosos e não religiosos) do passado e do presente. Esse campo icônico é caracterizado pelas cadeias de conversão que precederam a mesquita, legados materiais e discursivos de “ocultação” e interações simbólicas contemporâneas com construções próximas, como a Igreja Ocidental. Ao desenvolver uma análise dos entrelaçamentos espaciais e temporais da Mesquita com o espaço urbano de Amsterdã, buscamos revitalizar uma abordagem diacrônica e relacional que vem sendo negligenciada, principalmente em estudos sociais-científicos de mesquitas no Ocidente. Não iremos analisar um único local de devoção em um momento espe...
This introduction proposes directions for a comparative anthropology of Muslim and Christian reli... more This introduction proposes directions for a comparative anthropology of Muslim and Christian religion. While the anthropologies of Islam and Christianity flourish, comparative inquiries across religious boundaries have remained remarkably underdeveloped. As a result, parallels, overlaps, and situated differences between religious groups in today’s pluralist environments are often disregarded. This piece sets out the aim of this special section to develop ethnographic comparison, not of religious traditions as such, but of the ways in which everyday religious lives take shape within a shared social space, whether local or national. Such comparative work has the potential to provide insights and reveal connections that would likely be overlooked in non-comparative accounts, and that invite a critical rethinking of conventional understandings of difference and particularity.
This contribution looks comparatively at the everyday pursuit of religious commitment among young... more This contribution looks comparatively at the everyday pursuit of religious commitment among young, revivalist-oriented Sunni Muslims and Protestant Christians in the Netherlands. In both public debates and academic scholarship, the differences between these groups tend to be stressed, particularly through dichotomies such as migrant/native and minority/majority. This article, by contrast, takes their potential common ground as a starting point by examining the pursuit of religious aspirations under shared conditions of consumer capitalism and cultural pluralism. I argue that my Christian and Muslim interlocutors experienced a noticeably similar dynamic of constraint on and reinvigoration of their faith. Further, I note the different degrees to which they emphasized their moral distinctiveness, and discuss how this disparity is related to dominant public representations of these groups.
This article offers a comparative study of everyday sexual ethics among Dutch Sunni Muslim and ev... more This article offers a comparative study of everyday sexual ethics among Dutch Sunni Muslim and evangelical Christian young adults, both those born into religious families and those converted later in life. In European public debates, the sexual values of observant Christians and-especially-observant Muslims, are commonly understood to deviate from progressive norms. Particularly for Muslims, this has become a ground for questioning their belonging to the moral nation. Our ethnographic analysis complicates these conventional representations, which are partly reflected in quantitative survey research. We argue that the sexual ethics of the young Muslims and Christians we studied are multi-layered, situational, and dialogical. Discussing the convergences and divergences between these groups, we point to a paradox: while Muslims tend to be set apart as sexually 'other', the young Christians we worked with-and to a lesser extent the converted Muslims-put strikingly more effort into distinguishing themselves from, and criticising, dominant sexual norms.
In: Straying from the Straight Path: How Senses of Failure Invigorate Lived Religion, ed. Daan Beekers and David Kloos, pp. 1-19. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2018
In this introductory chapter we introduce the theme of moral failure, by which we denote the expe... more In this introductory chapter we introduce the theme of moral failure, by which we denote the experiences of shortcoming, inadequacy and imperfection that are often at the heart of lived religion. We argue that a critical exploration of senses of failure in everyday religious lives offers a possibility for transcending a dichotomy that has emerged within both the anthropology of Islam and the anthropology of Christianity, that between pursuits of ethical perfection and the ambivalences of everyday life. Much work on religious ethics stresses the opposition between religious and non-religious ethical repertoires, effectively placing experiences of imperfection outside of the domain of religious experience ‘proper’. In contrast, we contend that moral failure is often part and parcel of, and productively contributes to, processes of ethical formation. In this introduction, we outline this dialectics of religious pursuits, which is addressed in different ways by each of the contributions to this special issue.
This article focuses on the making of iconicity through religious architecture in Amsterdam, the ... more This article focuses on the making of iconicity through religious architecture in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Examining the Fatih Mosque housed in a former Catholic church in the city center, we show in what ways the efforts at making this mosque iconic are shaped by the building’s iconic field, by which we denote its entanglement with other (religious and non-religious) sites in the past and the present. This iconic field is characterized by the conversion chains that preceded the mosque, material and discursive legacies of “hiddenness” and contemporary symbolic interactions with nearby sites such as the Western Church. By developing an analysis of the mosque’s temporal and spatial entanglements in Amsterdam’s urban space, we seek to revitalize a relational and diachronic approach that has suffered from neglect, particularly in social-scientific studies of mosques in the West. Rather than looking at a singular place of worship at a particular moment in time, we draw attention to the relations between Islamic and other religious architecture and to the ways in which this mosque intersects with broader genealogies and geographies of religion, not only by association but also by actual links in relationships, politics or material culture.
In this article, I examine the discursive as well as embodied and sensorial forms of persuasion t... more In this article, I examine the discursive as well as embodied and sensorial forms of persuasion that undergird the formation of religious authority, Islamic authority in the Netherlands more specifically. I argue that particular momentary occasions can play important roles in facilitating the mobilization of these discursive and non-discursive forms of persuasion. Based on a close reading of an event I participated in during my fieldwork among young Muslims in the Netherlands, the analysis focuses on such a key moment of persuasion, paradoxically characterised by a preacher’s apparently failed attempt at conversion. Despite this failure, this preacher can be seen to have succeeded in offering his young Muslim audience a model of how to be a Muslim and of how to represent Islam to non-Muslims. Apart from contributing to anthropological debates on Islamic authority in Europe and religious persuasion more generally, I discuss an important new type of Islamic leaders – referred to here as ‘travelling preachers’ – and the new kinds of youth-centred settings of religious learning in which they operate.
Culture and Religion: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 2014, 15(1): 72-99
In this article I compare the active religious engagement found among many of today’s young Dutch... more In this article I compare the active religious engagement found among many of today’s young Dutch Muslims and Christians. I show that such comparison requires a move beyond the separate frameworks through which these groups are commonly perceived, found both in widely shared public discourses (‘allochthons’ versus ‘autochthons’) and in academic research (minority studies versus the sociology of religion). In their stead, this comparative analysis examines in what ways both groups give shape to observant religious practice in the shared context of contemporary Dutch society. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, I show that young Christians as well as Muslims participate in social settings of religious pedagogy, where they are encouraged to attain, sustain and improve personal piety in today’s pluralist Dutch society. Such social participation does not preclude, but rather comes together with a strong emphasis on reflexivity and authenticity.
This article is an ethnographic exploration of the ways in which young, strictly practicing Sunni... more This article is an ethnographic exploration of the ways in which young, strictly practicing Sunni Muslims and Protestant Christians in the Netherlands deal with issues of sexuality. It is often stated in public debates that the sexual values of Christians, and even more so those of Muslims, diverge from the progressive, secular sexual values that have increasingly come to be taken as the norm. Similar conclusions emerge from existing comparative studies, which are mainly based on quantitative research. However, such research, in which the opinions of religious people are ‘measured’, tells us little about the roles these values play in religious life. Based on my ethnographic research among Sunni and Protestant young adults, my focus in this article is on this lived dimension of values. Discussing the similarities and differences in dealing with issues of sexuality between these groups, I show that, more than my Muslim interlocutors, the young Christians with whom I worked strongly emphasized the theme of sexuality in their attempts at distinguishing themselves from the secular ‘mainstream’.
Dit artikel is een etnografische verkenning van de omgang met seksualiteit onder jonge, strikt-pr... more Dit artikel is een etnografische verkenning van de omgang met seksualiteit onder jonge, strikt-praktiserende soennitische moslims en gereformeerde christenen in Nederland. Een veel gehoord geluid in het publieke debat is dat de seksuele waarden van christenen, en nog meer die van moslims, afwijken van de progressieve seksuele waarden die steeds meer als norm zijn gaan gelden. Uit veel bestaande vergelijkende studies, die grotendeels gebaseerd zijn op kwantitatief onderzoek, komt een soortgelijk beeld naar voren. Dergelijk onderzoek, waarin de opvattingen van gelovigen worden 'gemeten' , zegt echter weinig over de rol die deze waarden in het religieuze leven spelen. Op basis van mijn antropologisch onderzoek naar jonge soennitische moslims en gereformeerde christenen richt ik me in dit artikel op die geleefde dimensie van waarden. Ik bespreek de overeenkomsten en verschillen in de omgang met seksualiteit en laat zien dat mijn islamitische en christelijke gespreksgenoten seksualiteit in ongelijke mate benadrukken als een thema waarmee ze zich kunnen onderscheiden van de seculiere 'mainstream'.
ASC Working Paper 101, Leiden: Africa Studies Centre, 2012.
Even if ‘good governance’ goals have dominated public policy in postcolonial polities in the last... more Even if ‘good governance’ goals have dominated public policy in postcolonial polities in the last decades, their politics and public administration often continue to be marked by authoritarianism, nepotism and corruption – the very practices good governance policy was to eradicate. In this article, we try to account for this apparent intractability of ‘poor’ and, occasionally, outright ‘bad’ governance. First, we argue that what appears as ‘bad’ governance to those embracing conventional, essentially Weberian, ‘good governance’ conceptions, may in fact be ‘good’ governance after all. Practices of political clientelism or patronage may reflect and accord with widely shared cultural beliefs about good and legitimate governance. Second, we show that the predominance of personalism and unofficial relationships that characterizes political clientelism may combine with modern bureaucracy in ways that drastically subvert the type of ‘good governance’ embodied by traditional moral economies of patronage. We dissect the logics of neopatrimonialism, a type of regime in which ruling elites use the state for personal enrichment and profit from a public administration that is patently unstable, inefficient, nontransparent and that fails to distribute public resources to large segments of the population. Third, we argue that the pragmatic survival strategies to which ‘ordinary’ citizens resort in response to such neopatrimonial neglect often, and ironically, entail the direct engagement with – rather than an outright distancing from – neopatrimonial politics.
Listeners to the Religious Studies Project, particularly in a European context, might be quite fa... more Listeners to the Religious Studies Project, particularly in a European context, might be quite familiar with the sight of a former church building that has now turned derelict, or is being used for a purposes that perhaps it wasn’t intended for, or is being rejuvenated by another ‘religious’ community, another Christian community, or put to some other use. Chris is joined today by Daan Beekers to discuss spatial contestations and conversions, particularly looking at (former) church buildings in the Dutch context. We discuss some of the research projects he has been involved in, before looking at two particular case studies – the Fatih Mosque, and the Chassé Dance Studios – where Church ‘conversions’ have taken place. We discuss the various discursive entanglements surrounding these buildings, and the contested notions of heritage that come from different constituencies who are invested in their presence. Finally, we ask if there is anything necessarily ‘religious’ going on here… (Unsurprisingly, the answer is, ‘it’s complicated… but there’s nothing sui generis).
Ontwijd, verkocht en weer open als dansstudio of reclamebureau: kerken krijgen door teruglopend b... more Ontwijd, verkocht en weer open als dansstudio of reclamebureau: kerken krijgen door teruglopend bezoek een aardsere functie. Zes voormalige godshuizen en hun nieuwe bestemming.
Controverses om nieuwe moskeegebouwen, restauratie van vooroorlogse synagogen, herbestemming van ... more Controverses om nieuwe moskeegebouwen, restauratie van vooroorlogse synagogen, herbestemming van leegstaande kerken: de discussies over religieuze gebouwen vertellen veel over de veranderende plaats van religie in Europa. Dit boek neemt deze strubbelingen onder de loep. Waarom zijn nieuwe synagogen in Duitsland zo modern en nieuwe westerse moskeeën vaak zo conventioneel? Zijn kerkgebouwen symbolen van het christendom of juist iconen van de ontkerkelijking? Hoe materialiseer je de moderne behoefte van burgers aan rust en waarom ervaren buurtbewoners een nieuwe moskee vaak als visuele herrie?
In acht essayistische reportages verkennen drie antropologen de hedendaagse religieuze architectuur en ontwikkelen zo een originele visie op het dynamische religieuze landschap in Nederland en daarbuiten. Moskeeën, synagogen en kerken doen namelijk meer dan religie faciliteren en symboliseren; de intieme relatie die we aangaan met religieuze gebouwen raakt — in positieve en negatieve zin — het wezen van wat religie tegenwoordig is.
Dit boek biedt een antropologische blik op de hedendaagse beleving van religie in Nederland en Europa, aan de hand van etnografische reportages over de bouw, sloop of herbestemming van moskeeën, synagogen en kerkgebouwen.
Presented at the World Congress of the International Association for the History of Religions at ... more Presented at the World Congress of the International Association for the History of Religions at Erfurt (panel 'Iconic Religion in Public Space'), 27 August 2015.
In this seminar we look at personal religiosity and self-perceived ethical ‘setbacks’ among Musli... more In this seminar we look at personal religiosity and self-perceived ethical ‘setbacks’ among Muslims in two quite different parts of the world. Our research projects, respectively based in the Netherlands and Indonesia, provide each other’s mirror image in an important sense: Daan’s work is concerned with young people who set themselves high standards of piety in the ‘secularized’ context of the Netherlands. In contrast, the people central to David’s research, although living in the increasingly ‘Islamized’ context of the Indonesian province of Aceh, do not necessarily emphasize pious perfection in their attempts to live a good life. Yet, what many of these Dutch and Acehnese Muslims share is their approach to religious engagement as a highly personalized process of ethical improvement. In recent years there has been a marked increase in scholars’ attention for ethical work on the self and the personal dimension of pious practice and experience. Many of these studies focus on the attempts of Muslims to follow the ‘straight path’ towards a good Muslim life. In this seminar we suggest that struggle and sinfulness – and the concomitant senses of failure – are equally important starting points for the study of Muslim religiosities today.
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Books by Daan Beekers
Based on in-depth fieldwork, Young Muslims and Christians in a Secular Europe shows that these young adults embark on reflexive projects of cultivating personal faith that are rife with struggles, setbacks, and doubts. Beekers argues that this shared precarious condition of everyday religious pursuits is shaped by young believers' active participation in today's high capitalist and largely secular society where they encounter other modes of imagining and
living in the world. Yet he reveals that this close engagement with secular culture also fosters a reinvigorated religious commitment that demands constant care and nourishment.
Written in a clear and accessible style, this book reaches beyond longstanding divisions in the study of religion in Europe. It both provides rich insights into everyday religious lives and disrupts persistent binary oppositions between categories such as minorities and majorities, migrants and natives, and Islam and the West.
Straying from the Straight Path breaks with this tendency by examining how self-perceived failure is, in many cases, part and parcel of religious practice and experience. Responding to the need for comparative approaches in the face of the largely separated fields of the anthropology of Islam and Christianity, this volume gives full attention to moral failure as a constitutive and potentially energizing force in the religious lives of both Muslims and Christians in different parts of the world.
Papers by Daan Beekers
Based on in-depth fieldwork, Young Muslims and Christians in a Secular Europe shows that these young adults embark on reflexive projects of cultivating personal faith that are rife with struggles, setbacks, and doubts. Beekers argues that this shared precarious condition of everyday religious pursuits is shaped by young believers' active participation in today's high capitalist and largely secular society where they encounter other modes of imagining and
living in the world. Yet he reveals that this close engagement with secular culture also fosters a reinvigorated religious commitment that demands constant care and nourishment.
Written in a clear and accessible style, this book reaches beyond longstanding divisions in the study of religion in Europe. It both provides rich insights into everyday religious lives and disrupts persistent binary oppositions between categories such as minorities and majorities, migrants and natives, and Islam and the West.
Straying from the Straight Path breaks with this tendency by examining how self-perceived failure is, in many cases, part and parcel of religious practice and experience. Responding to the need for comparative approaches in the face of the largely separated fields of the anthropology of Islam and Christianity, this volume gives full attention to moral failure as a constitutive and potentially energizing force in the religious lives of both Muslims and Christians in different parts of the world.
In acht essayistische reportages verkennen drie antropologen de hedendaagse religieuze architectuur en ontwikkelen zo een originele visie op het dynamische religieuze landschap in Nederland en daarbuiten. Moskeeën, synagogen en kerken doen namelijk meer dan religie faciliteren en symboliseren; de intieme relatie die we aangaan met religieuze gebouwen raakt — in positieve en negatieve zin — het wezen van wat religie tegenwoordig is.
Dit boek biedt een antropologische blik op de hedendaagse beleving van religie in Nederland en Europa, aan de hand van etnografische reportages over de bouw, sloop of herbestemming van moskeeën, synagogen en kerkgebouwen.