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Paper short abstract:

This paper aims to analyse the lived experiences of members of a Sufi brotherhood in Senegal. It questions the way in which religious imaginaries mediate between the everyday and the moral, the economic and the spiritual, to express the relationship between subjectivities and freedoms.

Paper long abstract:

The piety turn in religious anthropology has proposed rethinking religious commitment by overcoming the dichotomy between adhesions to beliefs and pushes to autonomy of the subject (Asad 2003, Hirschkind 2006, Mahmood 2005). According to such an approach, the practices and discourses promoted by piety reveal processes of internalization and incorporation of rules aimed at realizing a self-cultivated subject. A recent reflection on the intertwinement of everyday life and religious experiences (Fadil and Fernando 2015, Schielke and Debevec 2012) has questioned the completeness of these processes in light of the unstable nature of the lived experiences of religion in relation to ordinary life. Furthermore, the use of the notion of self remains problematic. It recalls the anthropological concept of person, thus embedding processes of self-cultivation to a social context that cannot be reduced to the religious sphere. And despite the overcoming of the universalism inherent in the secular conception of the self and Freedom, such an approach leaves open the question of the relationship between historical repertories of freedom ad subjectivity reducing the first to an ahistorical dimension of the second (Sopranzetti 2017). This paper aims to analyse the lived experiences of young members of a Sufi brotherhood in Senegal. In particular, it intends to question the notion of djayanté (inner jihad or sacrifice in French) and the way in which religious imaginaries mediate between the banal and the ideal, the everyday and the moral, the economic and the spiritual, to offer an expression of the relationship between subjectivities and freedoms.