São Paulo – Brazilian anthropologist Francirosy Barbosa, who has been working with Muslim communities for 12 years, has just published book Olhares Femininos sobre o Islã – Etnografias, Metodologias e Imagens (Female Outlook on Islam – Ethnography, Methodology and Images), through publishing house Hucitec (Humanismo, Ciência e Tecnologia). The work includes papers by several Brazilian researchers, including essays, photographs, excerpts from dissertations and theses on Islam.
The author has developed a kind of “anthropology of anthropology”, as made the invited authors themselves into objects of study, researching their theories and methodologies to show how they deal with questions related to Muslim women, the reasons that caused them to study Islam and the unfolding of their trajectories and works produced.
“When I started my research, in 1998, I felt very alone in this area. The question was not discussed by academia. But, half way through, I met other researchers who worked with Islamic communities in cities like São Paulo, Brasília, Florianópolis and Rio de Janeiro,” said the anthropologist.
According to her, readers will be surprised to identify that Islam may be studied through different methods, that of practicing observers, of life stories, of photography, of cinema and of cultural interaction, as well as that of women who preserve or modify cultural and religious standards as immigrants or on returning to their country of origin.
The anthropologist, who developed master’s and doctoral theses regarding Muslim communities, studied the visual aspect very much, that of images. “I was interested in researching photographs of families and what media produces. The other themes arose during the work,” she said.
Apart from that, during the doctoral research she produced three documentaries. The first Allahu Akbar, was about fasting in Islam, the second Sacrifício (Sacrifice), about the sacrifice of Abraham and the third Vozes do Islã (Voices of Islam), showed three people discussing the place of Muslim women in society, the matter of marriage and also relations with the researchers.
“Images make the work more human and bring researchers and readers in the communities studied closer together. This visual material is very important, as it places the speakers in front of each other, showing, for example, that the veil has a religious aspect, of women’s relations with God, not as we are used to seeing, in a sort of stereotypical way,” she pointed out. “They wear the veil, guide their lives according to religion, family. They are other values and respect to what is different is a basic rule [in relations],” she said.
Francirosy Campos Barbosa is an anthropologist and professor who collaborated in the Post-Graduate Program of the Arts Institute at the University of Campinas (Unicamp).
Service
Female Outlook on Islam – Ethnography, Methodology and Images
Publishing house: Hucitec
Price: US$ 25
Pages: 287
*Translated by Mark Ament
