Anthropologist Receives Rockefeller Grant To Study Ambiguous Terrain

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — Like most immigrants who come to America, Muslims from Sierra Leone face the challenge of shaping a different sense of home and identity while at the same time struggling to maintain their ethnic and cultural heritage. They live in a world of dislocation and relocation, members of a diverse and increasingly global Muslim community in search of identity.

JoAnn D’Alisera, an assistant professor of anthropology in Fulbright College, has won a Rockefeller Foundation Resident Fellowship in the Humanities to continue her ongoing research into the position of Muslims in the modern American urban landscape. Her work, funded through the Center for Ethnicities, Communities and Social Policy at Bryn Mawr College, is part of a larger three-year research project on the meaning and experience of ethnicity in the 21^st century.

"The theme for 2002-2003 will be immigration and global links," said D’Alisera. "My research will be focused on the ways ethically diverse transnationals from Sierra Leona use religion to fashion a sense of community, how their interactions with a broader Muslim population shape a sense of both belonging and alienation in America, and how they and their children, many of whom are born in America, struggle with different senses of what it means to be Muslims, Africans, and Americans of African descent."

The fellowship will allow D’Alisera to finish 11 years of research and study for a book she is writing, Ambiguous Terrain, in which she examines the lives of Sierra Leonean Muslims from diverse backgrounds who now live in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area.

"The two primary issues I look at are how they engage with both a homeland to which they frequently traveled until the outbreak of a vicious civil war, and with a larger Muslim community that is undergoing a search for identity."

The longing of exiled memory and the pain of disconnection are reflected through stories the Muslims tell, tales marked by images of homeland and displacement. Their search for identity is made even more difficult by the complexities of American social life in the national capital.

"Often they use their religion, Islam, to fashion a sense of community, but Islam itself is being transformed in America by a multiplicity of these transnational communities. The Sierra Leoneans with whom I work are at once shaping this transformation and being shaped by it," said D’Alisera.

As anthropologists like D’Alisera re-examine basic concepts such as community and culture, they are discovering that they must devise new research approaches that take into account the myriad ways in which social practices overlap around the globe, blurring the distinction between geographic boundaries.

"When Sierra Leoneans speak of Africa," said D’Alisera, "they remind us that we may find Africa in Harlem, where West Africans hawk their wares on street corners, in Georgetown, where a cabbie may well be Ghanaian or Malian, in the District, where Ethiopian women run hot dog stands, or in Fayetteville, where African students remind us that the "Black Atlantic" links West Africa to the diverse cultural traditions of the Caribbean, Latin, North American, and European diasporas."

In her book D’ Alisera lets individuals describe their triumphs and disappointments as they adjust to a world of unprecedented movement of people, goods, and ideas across national boundaries. While conducting research in Washington, she attended life cycle rituals, cultural events, community meetings, and communal prayers. In 1989 she traveled to Sierra Leone, to study Islam among the Susu, a group of farmers, merchants, and fishermen found primarily in Guinea, West Africa.

"A parent once told me that to change a name to sound American was to erase that person’s existence," said D’Alisera. "On one level, it’s the classic immigrant tale. But in a world of dislocation and relocation, of constant movement between homeland and adopted home, it is a tale told with new inflection."