“We need to trust in God”: Living with hope in Morocco and the problem of agency in a secular anthropology
Johan Rasanayagam – University of Aberdeen
Date: 24 / 02 / 2025 Digital Lecture: 15.00 – 16.30 CET
In this online seminar, Johan Rasanayagam (University of Aberdeen) reflects on the theme of hope through conversations with Muslims in Morocco on the need to place trust in God and through reading of parts of the Islamic scholarly tradition, putting this in dialogue with anthropological discussions on hope.
He sees this effort as a post-secular anthropology that seeks to recognise modes of perceiving, knowing, and being expressed within the Islamic tradition. Anthropological discussions on hope have been greatly influenced by the philosopher Ernst Bloch’s The Principle of Hope. They predominantly frame hope as an anticipatory reaching forward in the present towards the realisation of a desired future. Bloch infuses hope with an active, agentive quality, and this is what makes it intelligible as a universal theme for anthropological theorising. Conversations in Morocco decentre the emphasis on anticipatory, future orientated hope. Critically, the Islamic tradition grounds living with hope in an agency external to and greater than the human. This makes it unintelligible to a secular anthropology, except as an expression of a specifically Islamic worldview. To recognise this Islamic conception of hope is to open ourselves to the suggestion that human being is itself made possible by reliance on something beyond human agency.
Johan Rasanayagam has conducted extensive fieldwork in Uzbekistan, Central Asia on themes of Islam, citizenship, and moral selfhood. More recently, he has conducted research on Islam, illness and healing in Morocco. His current research focuses on developing an engagement between anthropology and Islamic traditions of thought.
