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This book considers the day-to-day lives of young Muslims on the island of Lamu (Kenya) who live simultaneously “on the edge and in the center”: they are situated at the edge of the (inter)national economy and at the margins of Western notions of modernity; yet they are concurrently the focus of (inter)national campaigns against Islamic radicalization and are at the heart of Western (touristic) imaginations of the untouched and secluded. What does it mean to be young, modern, and Muslim in this context? And how are these denominators differently imagined and enacted in daily encounters? Documenting the everyday lives of Lamu youth, this ethnography explores how young people negotiate different cultural, religious, political and economic pressures and expectations through nuanced deployments of language, dress, and bodily comportment. It thereby illustrates how seemingly mundane practices—from how young people greet others, to how they walk, dress, and talk—can become tactics in the negotiation of moral personhood. A central concern of the book lies with the shifting meaning and ambiguity of such everyday signs and thus the dangers of semiotic misconstrual. By examining this uncertainty of interpretation in projects of self-fashioning, the book highlights how shifting and scalable discourses of tradition, modernity, secularization, nationalism, and religious piety inform changing notions of moral subjectivity. Documenting how Lamu youth navigate this contested field in a fast-changing place with a fascinating history, this book offers a distinctly linguistic anthropological approach to discussions of ethical self-fashioning and everyday Islam.

What are the moral challenges and consequences of animal research in academic laboratory settings? Animal Ethos considers how the inescapable needs of lab research necessitate interspecies encounters that, in turn, engender unexpected moral responses among a range of associated personnel. Whereas much has been written about the codified, bioethical rules and regulations that inform proper lab behavior and decorum, Animal Ethos, as an in-depth, ethnographic project, probes the equally rich—yet poorly understood—realm of ordinary or everyday morality, where serendipitous, creative, and unorthodox thought and action evidence concerted efforts to transform animal laboratories into moral, scientific worlds. The work is grounded in efforts to integrate theory within medical anthropology (and, more particularly, on suffering and moral worth), animal studies, and science and technology studies (STS). Contrary to established scholarship that focuses exclusively on single professions (such as the researcher or technician), Animal Ethos tracks across the spectrum of the lab labor hierarchy by considering the experiences of researchers, animal technicians, and lab veterinarians. In turn, it offers comparative insights on animal activists. When taken together, this range of parties illuminates the moral complexities of experimental lab research. The affective qualities of interspecies intimacy, animal death, and species preference are of special analytical concern, as reflected in the themes of intimacy, sacrifice, and exceptionalism that anchor this work.