CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2017
| Author | Cantori, Valentina |
|---|---|
| Title | The "New Horizons" of American Muslims. The Role of Symbolic Boundaries and Social Stigma in Processes of Identity Formation |
| Summary | In the past decades, literature on Muslim Americans has been burgeoning due to the increased numerical presence and growing visibility of Muslims in the American public sphere. Nonetheless, much of this scholarship approaches the study of Muslim American identity formation from the theoretical perspective of whether and to what extent Islam is becoming an American religion, thus begging the fundamental question of why religion is becoming a crucial identity marker for American Muslims. This research suggests a different approach to embark on the study of Muslim Americans. By looking at strategies of ethnic and religious boundary reconfiguration adopted by a sample of parents that enroll their offspring in the New Horizon Islamic Schools in Los Angeles, this thesis argues for the combination of theories on symbolic boundaries with theories on stigma management to account for the increased salience of the religious marker in Muslim Americans’ identity formation strategies. The analysis of the data collected from: a) expert interviews; b) semi-structured interviews; and c) participant observation, demonstrates that three elements partake in the reconfiguration of ethnic and religious boundaries within Muslim Americans: 1) religious and/or cultural continuity; 2) stigma management; and 3) processes of outbidding. From the identification of these crucial and interconnected variables follows the conclusion that the blurring of ethnic boundaries and the salience of religious ones is not causally linked to the substantive content of Islam itself, but rather to meso-institutional incentives and macro-social processes that affect individual and collective representations. |
| Supervisor | al-Bagdadi, Nadia; Miller, Michael Laurence |
| Department | Nationalism Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2017/cantori_valentina.pdf |
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