大学共同利用機関法人 人間文化研究機構　国立民族学博物館

Objectives

This research seeks to shed light on the diversity and commonalities of Islam developing in the Middle East, Asia, Africa and the Americas through the study of visual representations, such as photographs and films, which visually capture and chronicle various themes such as ceremonies, physical technique and material culture.

Concerning the diversity of Islam, as numerous previous ethnographic descriptions have made clear, there is an obvious tendency to view uniformly various actions arising from methods for recitation of the Koran and worship, as well as the constituent elements of mosques and their functions. This research group seeks to utilize a wealth of visual materials from the Muslim world centering on the Middle East including geographically peripheral areas, and squarely reexamine the diversity within commonality that has previously been overlooked. Through this work, we hope to question the conventional thinking that tends to regard individual Islamic areas as one entity in a regional framework. Then we plan to discuss individual cases using a cross-sectional method and for the final analysis reinvestigate actual concepts such as center and peripheral.