Islamic bioethics and new kinship studies
My first major research project, funded by the ESRC, examined Islamic bioethics, in particular regarding assisted reproduction, through an engagement with Islamic legal specialists and medical practitioners in Lebanon. Alongside a series of articles, the resulting book, Islam and New Kinship: Reproductive Technology and the Shariah in Lebanon (Berghahn, 2009), both gave a pioneering account of the range of Islamic opinion regarding these challenging new possibilities, and built on this to develop a critical discussion of the ‘new kinship’ studies in anthropology. In a subsequent collaboration with colleagues at the University of Hamburg, I have reflected on the nature of Islamic bioethics as a novel assemblage of different forms of knowledge/power – religious, biomedical and state-legal (Clarke, Eich and Schreiber 2015). For some years I was part of the Medical Anthropology teaching team here at Oxford. I also served as the associate editor responsible for Kinship, Relatedness, Reproduction and Life Stages for the twelve-volume Wiley International Encylopedia of Anthropology (2018).
Sharia courts and the civil state
My second major project, funded by the British Academy and a Simon Research Fellowship, was an ethnography of the social life of sharia in Lebanon, focusing on sharia (family law) courts and their relationship to both the civil state and non-state Islamic institutions. Beyond the Sunni and Shi‘i courts, that included fieldwork in mosques, Sufi circles and the offices of major religious scholars, not least Lebanon’s own Ayatollah Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah. This work, which combined ethnographic and textual analysis, led to my second book, Islam and Law in Lebanon: Sharia Within and Without the State (CUP, 2018). Here I present both an authoritative account of how Islamic family law works in Lebanon, and an exploration of the ways in which ‘Islamic law’ overflows the boundaries that the state tries to set for it. This required bringing together the traditions of the anthropology of law and the anthropology of ethics in innovative ways. I end by proposing the notion of an ‘Islamic state effect’, whereby the imagined utopia of the Islamic state provides a vantage point for critique of bureaucratic positive law.
Religious authority and rules
Building on my work in Lebanon, I have published on other aspects of religious authority, from the ordinary ethics of Sufi miracles (Clarke 2014) to the impact of digital technologies in Twelver Shi‘ism (Clarke 2010, 2016). A Princeton-Oxford collaborative grant allowed me and my colleagues to argue for the importance of ‘De-Centring Shi‘i Islam’ (Clarke and Künkler 2018), and in subsequent work I have developed more bottom-up understandings of religious authority and practice in response, not least through my long-term collaboration with Ali-Reza Bhojani in the UK. (We reflect on the interpositional and interdisciplinary dynamics of our collaboration here.) Our study of religious law in ordinary practice informs my broader project of developing new anthropological approaches to rules, funded by the Leverhulme Trust. In addition to my co-edited book Rules and Ethics (Clarke and Corran 2021), I have also co-edited a journal issue on ‘Bending, Breaking and Adhering to Rules in Religious Contexts’ (Alava, Clarke and Gussman 2022) and contributed the chapter on ‘Rules’ in the Cambridge Handbook for the Anthropology of Ethics (Laidlaw 2023).
Teaching
I welcome applications for doctoral research and other collaborations in any of these areas, and in the anthropology of Islam, law and ethics more generally. I also teach on the MSc and MPhil programmes in Social Anthropology and am closely involved in the teaching and administration of the undergraduate degrees in Human Sciences and Archaeology and Anthropology, also serving as the tutor for anthropology at Keble College.
