A note on blog comments

A note on comments:

First of all, thanks for all the comments from readers. Most comments I’ve published, and I try to answer them as often and as best I can. So keep up the good work, faithful readers!

Here is one comment on my last post which I wanted to address for everyone:

“It's funny, sometimes reading this I almost forget your host family is Muslim. And then I read this discussion and remember that England/America/Christendom is one side and they are on the other. And again, I'm impressed at your being in a place so foreign and coping with it.”

I find it revealing that the quote links countries (England and America) often associated predominately with terms like "the West" and with "Christendom". Certainly, American religion has become so entangled with American culture (for further reading I recommend Alan Wolfe’s The Transformation of American Religion) with concepts of Christendom in the earthly sense, that we often, at least in our thinking, use America and Christendom interchangeably and pit this category against "the East", "Arabs" or "Muslims". We had better be careful about forming "us versus them" mentalities. I'm seeing more and more that when we Americans create this sort of dichotomy, even quite innocently, Muslims take the cue and assume that the two categories (America and Christendom) are inherently linked, not just as historically constructed, linked categories, but connected at the deepest level, and hence adopt the same sort "clash of civilizations" thinking of which we are guilty and which fuels Islamic fundamentalism. While many ideas and practices in American culture may be very different from those in Muslim societies, it has been and continues to be American foreign policy which contributes most to the perceived "clash". Let's not confuse cultural values with more tangible political policies in our understanding of "us and them".

The last thing I want to do in my blog entries is to "other" my host family, that is to make them seem inherently different from myself and my readers. I’m glad to hear that some readers “forget” that my host family is Muslim while reading about them, at least in the sense that I’m not creating “an other”. But I never forget that they are Muslim – I’m confronted with it everyday; the only way “to cope” is to seek to understand. That doesn’t mean that I’ll embrace everything about my host culture and “go native”, but that I’ll observe, analyze, and interpret what I encounter as best as I can as a novice anthropologist. And as I conduct my field work over the next five weeks, as a Christian (and not just a cultural Christian), I’ll always be aware of the moral dimension in my work.

Please feel free to continue to comment and question – this sort of interaction is really helpful to us all. I’d like to think that my blog, at times more thoughtful than others, is one small way of not just sharing my experiences with general readers, but of helping to improve intercultural dialogue between “East and West”.