Sylvia Chiffoleau

 

s_chiffoleau

Chercheuse CNRS

CNRS researcher

LARHRA

Personal page

Biography

Sylvia Chiffoleau is a researcher at the CNRS since 1994. She was based at the Ifpo in Damascus between 2002 and 2006 and at the Ifpo in Beirut from 2011 to 2013. She is currently affiliated to the Laboratoire de Recherche historique Rhône-Alpes (LARHRA) in Lyon (France). Her field of study is the history of modern Arab societies (19th-20th centuries). She has published in 2015 a book about the pilgrimage to Mecca during the colonial period: Le Voyage à La Mecque. Un pèlerinage mondial en terre d’islam (Paris, Belin).

Research project

Her contribution is part of the 2nd axis. It focuses on the pilgrimage to Mecca at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. Although the Muslim pilgrimage does not represent a forced migration, it could be considered as a matrix for a certain kind of migration. First, pilgrims in motion relied on kinship and mainly on intellectual or scholars networks. Second, the pilgrimage was also an occasion for permanent migration, often for religious reasons (hijra). On another level, the pilgrimage is also a paradigmatic example of temporary organization for a huge amount of people.

Keywords

pilgrimage, Mecca, religious migration, network of holy places, temporary settlement