Being Shia in contemporary Hyderabad: A reflexive retrieval of the everyday

Abstract This article engages reflexivity at two levels—methodological and epistemic—to emphasize two specific issues important for qualitative research in the social sciences. The first methodological point is to demonstrate how the researcher’s habitus plays a critical role in the selection or neglect of evidence that informs knowledge production. The second issue, a theoretical contribution, is to show that important roles played by non-elite actors in the ongoing construction of collective identity can be submerged by “Western” perspectives used to study religious communities and by disproportionate attention paid to macro-structural factors. This paper is produced through a deferred, reflexive interpretation of qualitative data and demonstrates how “ordinary” individuals in Hyderabad, India, play extraordinarily critical roles in shaping their religious communities and collective identity, both in the eyes of in-groups and out-groups. This paper argues that collective identities are constructed, maintained, and reconstructed not only by macrostructural processes, the state, and elites, but equally by mundane actions embedded in the everyday lives of ordinary individuals.