Blasphemy accusations: Power, purity and the enemy within

Abstract

During my fieldwork, I studied more than 50 incidents of blasphemy accusations closely and surveyed many others from a distance. One striking commonality between almost all the cases I came across was that they started within microlevel interpersonal relationships between people known to each other. While wider religious and nationalistic narratives that enable blasphemy accusations and punishments to take place are constructed and promulgated at structural and societal levels, it is within everyday interpersonal relationships that these narratives are acted out— relationships characterised by prior familiarity and hierarchical power relations, built on symbolic and conceptual boundaries. I focus on the everyday and the interpersonal to answer two interrelated questions: 1) what triggers blasphemy accusations; and 2) why are certain people targeted with these accusations? The discussion will show that accusations of blasphemy are often triggered by perceived transgressions of hierarchical symbolic boundaries and are made against expendable familiar others.