HAMZA ESMILI
حمزة الصميلي
Dia al-Azzawi, My Broken Dream, 2016
I’m an anthropologist of religion based somewhere between Brussels and Casablanca. My work evolves around the themes of collective consciousness, salvation, and the feeling of history. I defended my PhD at the School for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences (EHESS) in 2021. I am currently a Chargé de recherches F.R.S-FNRS at Université libre de Bruxelles. See more here.
MY RESEARCH
After the Arab revolutions
My research journey started with the Arab revolutions and was shaped by notions such as historical consciousness, religious translations, utopia and counter-utopia. It has led me to conduct fieldwork in Morocco (2013-2015), Syria (2016-2017), Iraq (2017) and the Rif region in northern Morocco (2017). See more here.
In the light of Tradition
I have slowly specialized in the social anthropology of religion. My PhD dissertation (EHESS, 2021) was about renewed understandings of the Islamic tradition amongst Maghrebi communities in France. An ethnographic work, it has mostly taken place in Clichy-sous-Bois, where the 2005 banlieues uprisings started. See more here.
Waiting for the Mahdi
My next research project consists in a study of modern and contemporary Mahdism. I am interested in the experience of existential crises and hopes that emerge in such a context. See more here.
