The Association for Feminist Anthropology (AFA) announced that Professor Khoja-Moolji’s book Rebuilding Community: Displaced Women and the Making of Shia Ismaili Muslim Sociality has been awarded the AFA Senior Book Prize Honorable Mention.
The Prize recognizes a scholar’s second (or subsequent) book that exemplifies feminist anthropological theory and that helps to move the field in bold new directions. The prize awards a senior scholar for a book that advances the theory, method, and epistemological scope of feminist anthropology. Rebuilding Community received the only awarded honorable mention.
The AFA Award committee shared the following commendation at its Business Meeting on November 23rd, 2024:
“Khoja-Moolji takes the reader through North America, East Africa, Pakistan, and beyond, weaving together stories of care, spirituality, and world-making. Part reconstruction of women’s role in Ismaili history and part ethnography of the enactment of Ismaili faith through quotidian acts of care, Rebuilding Community is rich with intergenerational narratives told with great attention and evident admiration. Khoja-Moolji offers methodological clarity on the way that feminist anthropologist can frame the research relationships through purposeful positionality to enable or disable particular forms of sociality. Beyond its methodological intent, Rebuilding Community offers sophisticated theoretical insight. Focused on the reproductive work of women beyond frameworks of productivity, the author suggests a reframing of reproduction as the production of sociability, trauma repair, and the enactment of faith communities through bonds of kinship.
Rebuilding Community exemplifies feminist anthropology’s finest form of innovative and experimental writing. To give but one example, Khoja-Moolji focuses one chapter on cookbooks as demonstrative of how identity, agency, the enactment of belonging, and authorship is embedded in carework. Rebuilding community narrates cookbooks as acts of remembrance that conjure ancestors, histories of migration through space and social class, and faith into being through the making of food. Khoja-Moolji is firmly positioned as cook and receiver of the meals that constitute social reproduction of the community and the self. Khoja-Moolji’s prose shines as compels the reader to see Ismaili faith as acts care work for coreligionists drawing on themes that have framed the very finest ethnographies in feminist anthropology: care work, migration, social reproduction, social inequality, intimacy, and world-making.”
Professor Shenila Khoja-Moolji is the Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani Chair of Muslim Societies and an Associate Professor at Georgetown University. Rebuilding Community is available through OUP’s website: Rebuilding Community: Displaced Women and the Making of a Shia Ismaili Muslim Sociality (30% discount code: AAFLYG6)
