Muslim marriages - Four PhD candidates in Anthropology or closely related discipline The Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences - Department of Sociology and Anthropology
https://www.uva.nl/over-de-uva/werken-bij-de-uva/vacatures/item/14-205.html
Deadline 1 July 2014
Project description
This ethnographic project employs the term ‘Muslim marriages’ in a broad sense, as it emerges in public debate and as a form of marriage practice that at least one of the parties concerned considers Islamically valid.
It investigates both when and how particular marriage forms have become subject to public debate and what kinds of new (or new uses of old) marriage forms and wedding celebrations are emerging in everyday life.
Depending on context, this includes, for instance, unregistered, visiting, temporary, interreligious, transnational, and polygamous marriages. Who are participating in these marriage forms, and how are they performed? Who are able to shape these new forms? How and by whom are such marriages authenticated, authorized or contested as Muslim marriages? Under which conditions do particular forms of Muslim marriages emerge and become licit while other forms become devalued and marginalized? The wider question this project addresses is what economic, political, religious and cultural work these new Muslim marriages do. What subjectivities and socialities do they produce? How do they shape economic relations, group boundaries, religious ethics, and cultural forms? Theoretically, this project intends to contribute to fields such as: Islam, public debate, legal practices, and everyday life; globalization, marriage and reproduction; the family, economy, and intimacy; the body, gender, and sexuality; religion, ethics and aesthetics.
PhD candidates will be based in Amsterdam at the AISSR and will conduct longer term ethnographic fieldwork, preferably in Indonesia, Lebanon, Morocco, the Gulf States and the Balkans. Candidates with strong arguments to do fieldwork elsewhere may also apply.