ed note: as part of a new initiative examining how theory gets made, we are featuring interviews with recent Anthropological Theory authors, inquiring into their writing and thinking process. This interview, with Yulia Egorova (Durham University) about her article “Common Difference: Conceptualising Simultaneity and Racial Sincerity in Jewish-Muslim Relations in the United Kingdom” (2023), is the second of these interviews.

Could you say a bit about your own trajectory and research interests?

Throughout my work I have sought to explore the way difference pertaining to religion, race and ethnicity is constructed in public and political discourses, as well as in the arena of the life sciences and biotechnology. Part of this research focused on the experiences of minoritised groups, and in the past twenty years I have worked with Jewish and, later, Muslim communities in India and the UK. In my earlier publications I looked at the way communities and individuals negotiate the boundaries between what is often conventionally understood as different religious traditions. One outcome of this was an ethnography co-authored by Shahid Perwez and myself, focusing on the Bene Ephraim Jewish congregations of Andhra Pradesh.

My subsequent book project addressed the experiences of Jewish and Muslim groups in South Asia more broadly and discussed how the concept of the minority is constructed and what we can learn from this about the conceptual relationship between the categories of religion and race. When writing this book, I became interested in literature examining the overlapping histories of Jewish and Muslim communities in places where they were a minority, and eventually I turned to the context of the UK. I was also very lucky to have had an opportunity to work closely with Fiaz Ahmed and Ben Kasstan, who have conducted important studies with Muslim and Jewish participants in England and were very generous in introducing me to their respective areas of expertise both in theoretical and ethnographic terms. In 2020 I joined as a co-investigator a project on Muslim-Jewish encounter, diversity and distance in urban Europe. Our team discussions and conversations have very strongly informed my theoretical thinking about every angle of my current research, part of which is presented in the “Common Difference” paper.

What drove you to write this specific article?

This article is one of the outcomes of a broader body of work where I focus on Jewish-Muslim intercommunity dialogue in the UK to address the problematic of solidarity among minoritised groups. Last year I published a chapter in a volume on Jews and Muslims in Europe: Between Discourse and Experience, edited by Sami Everett and Ben Gidley, where I made an attempt to highlight the intersection between solidarity and minority experience. In the AT article I build upon this framework to pursue two further theoretical strands. Firstly, I foreground the complexity of my interlocutors’ thinking about what it means to be part of any particular ethnic and/or religious group, and argue that this complexity, which partly stems from my participants’ experience of belonging to minoritised communities, challenges dominant understandings about intergroup commonalities and divergencies. Secondly, I draw attention to the sincere rather than purely strategic dimensions of interfaith and intercommunity activism among minoritised groups.

In brief, in which set of theoretical discussions the article engages and what is the article’s contribution to those debates?

The article contributes to multi-disciplinary academic literature focused on the relationship between minorities and the state and does so by foregrounding the agentive capacity of minoritised groups, as well as through unsettling binary-based conceptualisations of this relationship. It also builds upon theoretical work in anthropology that has highlighted the plurality of human actants’ thinking. Secondly, it brings in to the analyses of minority-state relations John Jackson’s important theorisation of racial sincerity as an analytical framework which in my view not only pays close attention to the agency of racialised groups but also re-claims their integrity, as it challenges those accounts that over-emphasise the pragmatic dimension of minority activism and practices of self-representation.

Why does theory matter (to you or in a broader sense)? 

When I think about theory in the context of my research, I firstly think about the theoretical thinking of my research participants. I am not denying of course that anthropologists can speak in their own analytical voice, which is what I also tried to do in this paper, however, for me the theorisations of my interlocutors are no less important than analytical frameworks derived from social sciences. Naturally, I engage with different bodies of academic literature in my work and attempt to contribute to them, however, I see this engagement more as a process of putting academic contributions in conversation with the accounts of my interlocutors rather than using academic literature to ‘validate’ these accounts or using the life histories of my research participants to construct a more ‘abstract’ analytic. In other words, I think we all think in theoretical terms and theory matters for everyone.