Mosques as religious infrastructure: Muslim selfhood, moral imaginaries and everyday sociality

Abstract

ABSTRACT This study examines the role of technologies and infrastructures within the realm of religion, which so far has received little attention within infrastructural approaches in anthropology. Introducing the notion of ʻreligious infrastructure', the analysis sheds light on the socio-material processes contributing to the spread of a specific understanding of religious knowledge ilim in present-day Kyrgyzstan, and how these shape Muslim selfhood and Muslim sociality. In addition, the article illustrates how this infrastructure transforms and reconfigures under specific historical as well as technological circumstances. This temporal embeddedness is furthermore demonstrated by the moral imaginaries elicited via religious infrastructure, which may be taken as representative of how interlocutors during the research connect their everyday lives to past and future visions of leading meaningful lives.