"Living with Muslims, Living With Difference: Pluralism Through a Pedagogy of Discomfort" with David Montgomery

Visiting Scholar Brown Bag Series

Wednesday, March 23, 2016 12:00 PM EDT
Commerce Building, Conference Room 2006

In many parts of the West, Muslims are seen as the “other” against which national identities define themselves; the “Jewish Question” of the 18th century has become the “Muslim Question” of contemporary Europe and the U.S., where refugees and labor migrants are seen as threatening to the cultural values of, for example, what it means to be French, Dutch, German, British, etc. To a large extent, tolerance in the 20th century was bought through the emergence of a market economy and the privatization of religion, where the difference of the “other” is seen as something to overcome or ignore. As the world becomes increasingly diverse, we need to develop new ways of living with the other—be it Muslims with one another or with their Christian, Jewish, or secular neighbors (and vice versa)—that do not trivialize the differences that define us but recognize the limits of what can be (and need to be) shared. In this talk, David Montgomery discusses his new book, Living with Difference: How to Build Community in a Divided World (2015, University of California Press, coauthored with Adam Seligman and Rahel Wasserfall), and how CEDAR—Communities Engaging with Difference and Religion—has worked to demonstrate the centrality of difference in creating community.

David W. Montgomery is the Director of Program Development for CEDAR--Communities Engaging with Difference and Religion; an American Association for the Advancement of Science Policy Fellow; Associate with the Central Asia Program at George Washington University; Research Associate with the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh; and Visiting Scholar with the Ali Vural Ak Center for Global Islamic Studies at George Mason University. He has conducted long-term anthropological field research in Central Asia and the Balkans, where his work focuses on the transmission of religious and cultural knowledge; the expressions of everyday religious life; and the social aspects of religious change. He has taught at the University of Pittsburgh, Emory University, and Boston University. His publications include: Living with Difference: How to Build Community in a Divided World (2015, University of California Press, coauthored with Adam Seligman and Rahel Wasserfall); Practicing Islam: Knowledge, Experience, and Social Navigation in Kyrgyzstan (forthcoming, University of Pittsburgh Press); Negotiating Well-being in Central Asia (2013, editor; special issue of Central Asian Survey); and The Politics of Well-being in Central Asia (2015, editor; special issue of Central Asian Affairs).