What’s in a Name? on Religious Identities, Methodological Challenges, and Responsibilities

In this paper, I examine the methodological issues surrounding the construction, use, and implications of categories such as “Muslim,” “religious,” and “minority” within the context of European Muslim subjectivities, drawing on ethnographic insights from Christian-Muslim couples in the Netherlands. Who gets to define such notions and categories, under what conditions, and how are they then ‘lived’? By understanding these categories as situated within a relationship between broader regimes of structural control—legal, sovereign, and discursive—and as floating signifiers that generate relational meanings depending on time, place, setting, and purpose, I look at the conditions of possibility for these categorizations to function and explore what it means to destabilize their presence as fixed referents. Ethnographic research frequently takes self-identification as a given, but the contradictions and ambiguities in lived experiences challenge static classifications. How should the researcher navigate moments when interlocutors’ definitions and categorizations diverge from their own, or when categories such as “Muslim” and “religious” are not shared or stabilized in the interview context? Should the researcher go along with self-identifications, push against them, focus on non-verbal cues and other modes of expression, or recognize them as symptomatic of a deeper structural impossibility? And what kind of social and political effects do such decisions have? The stakes of these methodological questions are heightened in the case of Muslims in European contexts, where they are often under scrutiny, and in intimate interreligious dynamics, such as those between Muslims and (secular) Christians, these stakes are particularly pronounced. This paper resists the impulse to render minoritized Muslim subjects merely as objects of analysis through the binary of sameness/difference; instead, it interrogates the methodological imperatives of defining and naming—by whom, for whom, and to what end—and examines how such definitions inscribe and delimit particular forms of life.