KANAHARA Noriko (University of Tokyo)
“An Ethnographic Analysis of ‘Muslim communities’ in Recent British Policies”

“Community” has been the dominant concern in recent British policy, but there is no clear definition for the term. As it was apparent in the Prime Minister David Cameron’s recent speech, there is an implicit understanding among policy makers and scholars that Muslims as “Muslim communities” are not adhering to the “shared national identity” and leading “segregated lives,” which leads to “terrorism.”

The question they frame is whether to continue policies that promote “multiculturalism,” or let migrants assimilate to “our way of life.” While the application of “community” is taken for granted and portrayed as a term of governance in policy documents, they too have particular historical roots. What is at stake, then, is to rethink how and why people have been categorized into “communities” as such, and to see how they are portrayed as the sources of problems.

In this presentation, I try to tease out how the British policy documents create the category “Muslim communities” and political agendas concerning them. I will compare the policy documents’ use of “Muslim communities” with ethnographic data on how people identified as Muslims actually established relationships on the ground. As other scholars have noted, my fieldwork data shows that the discursive effects of policy language and presuppositions underlining thoughts embedded in the use of the term “Muslim communities” in particular has a great impact on the lives of Muslim women and men. Use of the term “community,” seems to limit the political agenda to Muslims and those who live in a particular locality, rather than to the effects of international politics, the UK’s foreign policy itself, and the British socio-economic structure.



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