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Grace Yukich, Review of “Believing in South Central: Everyday Islam in the City of Angels”, Social Forces, Volume 100, Issue 3, March 2022, Page e9, https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soab099
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Extract
When even the methodological appendix brings you to tears, you know you have found a gem of a book. Such is the case with Pamela J. Prickett’s wonderfully-written new book Believing in South Central: Everyday Islam in the City of Angels. An urban ethnography of an African American mosque in South Central Los Angeles, the book is an embodiment of the magic that ethnography can do when done well: it can create an intimate portrait of the complicated and beautiful everyday lives of people and communities. Prickett writes, “Ethnography is the best (perhaps the only) method for doing justice to the complicated relationships of a community like MAQ’s, where believers’ lives are entwined with emotion and history” (144). This book is a shining example of what we can learn about religion and its intersections with race, class, gender, and yes, history and emotion, when we are in the hands of a careful ethnographer.
