Common difference: Conceptualising simultaneity and racial sincerity in Jewish-Muslim relations in the United Kingdom
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Building upon ethnographic research conducted among participants in UK-based initiatives in Jewish-Muslim dialogue, the paper contributes to anthropological literature on the essentialising nature of state-sponsored constructions of minoritised groups. More specifically, I put forward two sets of arguments. Firstly, I suggest a concept of simultaneity that challenges colonially inflected conceptualisations of the relationship between communities and their respective traditions. Activists of Jewish-Muslim inter-community work subvert dominant conceptualisations of intergroup commonalities and divergencies by developing a theorisation of Jewish-Muslim relations that acknowledges group similarities and differences as overlapping categories. Secondly, I contribute to John Jackson's (2005) theorisation of racial sincerity, a notion offering a conceptual challenge to the notion of authenticity. I argue that the complexity of my interlocutors’ thematisations of Jewish-Muslim relations underpinned by the diversity of the sources of knowledge that they rely on could be best understood as an example of this analytic. On a broader theoretical plane, the paper proposes a framework that underscores the agentive power of minority communities and pays close attention to the way they define their positionalities vis-à-vis the majorities and each other in ways that go beyond binaries-based theorisations.
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Creative Copmmons Attribution 4.0 International
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Link to article including link to pdf, Common difference: Conceptualising simultaneity and racial sincerity in Jewish-Muslim relations in the United Kingdom
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Common difference: Conceptualising simultaneity and racial sincerity in Jewish-Muslim relations in the United Kingdom. 2023: https://archive.jpr.org.uk/10.1177/14634996231179520
