2021
Amira Mittermaier
Writing an ethnography of God with help from Guggenheim Fellowship
2021
Writing an ethnography of God with help from Guggenheim Fellowship
Dr. Amira Mittermaier, winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship in religion, is tackling a very challenging topic: the ethnography of God.
“An ethnography, traditionally being a book that we write about a place or a people or a community or a person maybe – well I’m trying to make God the centre of that ethnographic text, which is paradoxical and complicated,” says the University of Toronto professor. “For me it’s very interesting as a writing challenge also.”
Dr. Mittermaier is particularly interested in God as a figure that Muslim lives gravitate around. “I’m interested in Islam and how it is lived on the ground, looking at how people interact with their religious tradition in their day-to-day lives.”
Her current project, supported by the Guggenheim award, “builds on the anthropology of Islam, but also Muslim life…and what Islam means in a place like Egypt.”
“I’m also committed to this work because I find my field, the anthropology of Islam, hasn’t been making enough space for God, as if God is not a very central figure. To get a better understanding of Islam we need to make space for God.
“It’s also a way for me to push back against a stereotypical understanding of Islam as the counterpart to Christianity…Islam has sometimes been portrayed, even by Pope Benedict XVI, as the quintessential religion of transcendence—with a god far removed, unapproachable, unknowable—and I don’t find that to be true. God can be intimately present in Muslim lives.”
The Guggenheim means Dr. Mittermaier can have time off from teaching and administrative responsibilities to write her ethnographic study of God.
“That’s the big gift of the Guggenheim,” she says. “It’s the time.”
