Paper short abstract:

The paper aims at analyzing the interplay between urban everyday life and religious boundary work and in the Indian Ocean port city of Mahajanga, Northwest Madagascar.

Paper long abstract:

The paper aims at analyzing the interplay between urban everyday life and religious boundary work and in the Indian Ocean port city of Mahajanga, Northwest Madagascar. It follows the main question of how cities' historical, cultural, and spatial conditions shaped religious plurality and the interaction of religious communities and how these communities themselves affected social urban life. Inspired by the recent debate in the anthropology of Islam on morality, piety and everyday life (Debevec, 2008; Fadil & Fernando, 2015; Jouili, 2015; Schielke, 2015), I take the complexities and inherent ambiguities of everyday lives as starting point to scrutinize the (un)making of religious boundaries within an urban milieu that is characterized by a high degree of religious diversity (including spirit possession, ancestor veneration, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, as well as varying expressions of the "magical"). My aim is to reach beyond interpretations of religion that focus exclusively on the ritual character and attempts to find the intersections as well as divisions of religious and (urban) "ordinary ethics" (Lambek, 2010) while investigating how social actors, discourses and power relations work toward the construction of difference and diversity or even unity based on consensus, tolerance and concord. As such, the presentation touches on a number of complex socio-political questions concerning the nature of religious freedom, the limits of toleration and about the role of religions in urban (secular) societies (Barnes, 2005; Das, 2014). My argument is mainly based on fieldwork among educated middle class milieus in Mahajanga, conducted between 2012 to 2015.