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Department of Anthropology and Sociology

Mr Andre Chappatte

Overview

Andre Chappatte
Name:
Mr Andre Chappatte
Email address:
Thesis title:
" 'Sini be Allah bolo' (Tomorrow is in God's hands): destinies, blessing practices, and popular piety or the making of personal goals and ambitions among Muslims in the town of Bougouni in Southwest Mali."(working title)
Year of Study:
2007-2008 (year started)
Internal Supervisors

Biography

Memory, migratory practices, urbanisation, kinship, material cultures, cash economy, subjectivity, piety and the anthropology of Islam.

PhD Research

Based on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork in the Malian town of Bougouni, my PhD dissertation explores how global processes of rapid urbanisation and economic transformations and the advent of a liberal and democratic era since the since the coup d’état of 1991 is impacting upon life in Bougouni. In this context, what does self-fulfilment mean for pious Muslims? How do Malian Muslims negotiate worldly ambitions in contemporary secular Mali?

Most Western analyses of Islam have focused on religious elites. Their aim has been to study the relations of domination shaping Islamic orthodoxy and the compatibility of political Islam with the concept of a secular modern state. Propounded by the fear of pan-Islamism, in political and journalistic discourses this trend often takes the form of a simplistic dualism between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Islam. By contrast, I focus on ‘ordinary Muslims’ in order to eschew the notions of a Muslim essence and of a dichotomy between modernity and Islam, and to show how such reductions impoverish our understanding of the multiple and complex formation of Muslim discourses and identities. However, by studying the ethical self-fashioning of ‘reformists movements’ only, many anthropologists still fail to go beyond scriptural Islam. What does piety mean for the vast majority of Malian Muslims? To do this, I propose a new approach to the notion of piety that does not restrict religious life to practices of dogma only. As a Malian religious scholar pointed out: ‘Muslims throughout Mali agree on the five Islamic pillars. The rest is only disagreement’. Conceptions of pious Muslim life are therefore contested and not only defined by Islamic precepts, but also by local understanding of emotions and proper intellectual reasoning. What then might piety involve for Muslims in terms of their religious experience, rather than as a doctrinal orthodoxy?

My ethnography of everyday Islam resonates with current popular critics of public Islam such as the Ançar Dine Muslim association in Mali and their emphasis on attitude (jogo) in the making of piety. I explore Muslim urban migrants who strive to be pious in making for themselves a better life on Earth (by contrast to the classic ‘access to Heaven’ betterment of doctrinal orthodoxy). This study of religious experience aims first and foremost to understand how their practices of piety are also shaped by this worldly ambitions occurring in the complexity of everyday life. In making a virtuous life, Muslims in Bougouni perceive their possible futures in terms of different destinies to which Muslims attribute moral and occult causes (sababu) that are understood in particular cultural settings. Urban activities, and the opportunities presented in the course of them, create multiple sababu capable of changing one’s goals. I want to understand how Muslims evolve within the dynamics of invention and intervention that are transforming Africa’s regional towns into complex and creative crossroads for the making of personal achievements.

Since 1991, the liberal and democratic shifts in Mali have been characterized by an increasingly lively public sphere, abetted by the new freedom of the press and association, and by the multiplication of innovative media of religious communication (TV and radio, recorded sermons, pamphlets…), which have undermined religious consensus, and opened new ways of being Muslim. Furthermore, the recent influx of cheap manufactured products from China has enabled a materialistic culture of consumption to take hold among sections of the Malian urban populace. Western-style clothes, cell phones, television, and motorbikes are some of the objects that have recently become desired and above all accessible to elements of urban consumers. These new practices of consumption challenge the local notion of blessed child (barika den) which, in turn, has influenced precepts of proper Muslim economic behaviour and well being. Money is also understood as sign of blessing, however worldly material ambitions are replete with moral gaps, feelings of anxiety, and public concern about egoism (nyègoya) in Bougouni.

My ethnography seeks to understand how popular piety is shaped, not only by the micropolitics of canonical texts, but also along the whole roughness of daily life. Inspired by an islam mondain (Soares & Osella 2009), Muslims reflect upon being pious within the actual world in which they find themselves. Allah rewards and punishes Muslims on earth already. ‘Moving forward in life’ is as important as ‘the gates of Paradise’ for Muslim believers in Bougouni. In this earthly path, contemporary worldly ambitions, elders’ blessings, and local notion of noble mind (horonya) are crucial self-fulfilments for the making of Muslim pious identity in Bougouni.

PhD Publications

PhD Conferences

  • 2007. "Islam and inequalities in southern Mali". Seminar organised by Professor Roy Dilley, University of St Andrews, Scotland.
  • 2010. "Religion et spiritualité dans la coopération au développement; éléments de réflexion" (in collaboration with Anne-Marie Holenstein). West Africa Division Seminar, Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, Fribourg, Switzerland.
  • 2012. "Public Islam and 'zigzag' Muslims in the town of Bougouni (Southwest Mali)". The LSE African Initiative Seminar Series, The London School of Economics and Political Science, London, United Kingdom.

PhD Affiliations

  • Full time Fellowship for Prospective Researcher awarded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (2009-2012)
  • University of London Central Research Fund
  • SOAS Additional Award for Fieldwork Grant