Sociology Department Colloquium: Pamela Prickett

Date
Tue January 17th 2017, 12:30 - 1:45pm
Location
Mendenhall 101
Sociology Department Colloquium: Pamela Prickett

Please join us for a colloquium being given by Pamela Prickett from Rice University.

“Believing in South Central: Everyday Islam in an Inner City Community”

My work uses ethnographic research to bridge the study of Islam and gender with sociological research on urban poverty. Drawing on more than five years of fieldwork in an African American-led mosque in a poor neighborhood, I explore how mosque members engaged Islam, in gender-specific ways, with the explicit hope that being Muslim will help them get ahead-materially as well as morally. In this talk I focus on data collected during Ramadan, when Muslims engage in greater acts of charity. I examine what happened when members of limited means tried to help the non-Muslim poor around them, the ways in which this charity work reinforced members’ perceptions of moral distinction, and the gender specific contours of their work. When members turned into receivers of charity, as when wealthier non-black Muslims from other mosques donated resources, members found their perceptions of moral worth violated and responded by using gendered stereotypes of Islam as a frame of cultural resistance. In both cases tensions emerged over how to distribute resources that reveal the limits of agency in the face of structural disadvantage. I situate these findings in wider discussions about the role of culture in urban poverty and the study of gender within American Islam.