For abstracts and more information related to this panel, go to the Invited Sessions page.

Abstracts

Emma Nolan-Thomas (Michigan): Ruqya Rituals as Historical Therapeutics: Expelling Jinn and Disavowing Colonial Inheritance in Contemporary Indonesia

In this paper, I examine contemporary practices of Qur’anic healing (ruqya) in Indonesia, where an ongoing movement to revive Islamic medicine has been gaining in popularity in recent decades. Drawing on one year of fieldwork with Islamic medicine patients and practitioners, I examine how ruqya ritual practices are used not only to enact the expulsion of possessing spirits (jinn), but also to heal the self through a reworking of history. I begin with one ruqya practitioner’s observation that “jinn possession is often caused by histories of colonization,” where contemporary cases of jinn possession are the result of ancestral bargains with jinn made in the time of Dutch colonization. Drawing on multiple ruqya case studies, I trace how, rather than merely narrating patient histories for therapeutic purposes, ruqya in these contexts constitutes an act of genealogical severance and re-alignment: cutting certain ancestral ties while forging new connections. Furthermore, I show that this happens on multiple temporal scales, as patients’ work to refashion their personal and familial histories becomes intertwined with broader Islamic reform movements’ projects of transfiguring collective Islamic identities. Building on a recent efflorescence of anthropological studies of Qur’anic healing, many of which have been informed by the ethical turn, I argue that in contemporary Indonesia, ruqya constitutes a kind of historical therapeutics, or history as therapy. In so doing, I strive to highlight broader political and post-colonial dimensions of contemporary Islamic healing practices.

Ulil Amri (Gonzaga): Reciting Ayatul Kursi while following Covid-19 protocols: The use of invisible protection as a weapon in Indonesia’s pandemic response

Indonesia’s poor Covid-19 response that caused a high mortality rate in the country has pushed Indonesians to react to this pandemic differently. While following government’s Covid-19 protocols, they are also activating religious forces. This paper portrays the use of scientific and religious equipment in tackling Covid-19 in Indonesia. Although Indonesians wear masks, maintain social distance, and strengthen their immune systems, they rely mainly on Ayatul Kursi (Qur’anic verses). Ayatul Kursi is believed to provide invisible weapon as well as protection (like shield or mask) from Covid-19 virus attacks. Drawing on the notion of “ontic shift”, this paper argues that the extraordinary quality of the virus has inspired Indonesians to build extraordinary coping strategies in dealing with Covid-19 pandemic. This new social practice enriches contemporary understanding on socio-medical actions in today’s pandemic era.

Timo Kallinen (Eastern Finland): Paranormal Postcoloniality: Science, divination, and decolonization in newly independent Ghana

In present-day Ghana many traditional diviner-healers claim to diagnose and treat illnesses that have a ‘spiritual’ cause. Conversely, illnesses with ‘natural’ causes should be referred to biomedical practitioners. This view appears to be founded on the Western distinction between natural and supernatural. Furthermore, the national and regional level associations formed by diviner-healers are called Psychic and Traditional Healers Associations, with the term ‘psychic’ referring to extrasensory perception and having its origins in the culture of modern parapsychology. How have Ghanaian diviner-healers come to conceptualize their identity in these terms? In my paper I suggest that these notions can be traced to the nationalist project of creating the category of ‘African medicine’ during the years after the independence of Ghana. At the time, it was established that conventional scientific methods were insufficient for explaining the ‘total therapeutic process’ of traditional medicine. Some ideas and practices, for example, treatments based on medicinal plants, were considered analogous with those of Western biomedicine, but others, such as divination, were associated with paranormal phenomena. The study of ‘psychicism’ was encouraged by the government in order to understand the latter. This definition of medicine and healing not only emphasized the cultural distinctiveness of the new nation, but also its ability chart new intellectual territories beyond the grasp of colonial science. By comparing these developments to corresponding processes in India I will draw attention to important questions concerning the status of indigenous forms of knowledge in relation to modern science in postcolonial nation-states.

Susannah Crockford (Ghent): Right to Refuse: Religion, Spirituality, and the Ethics of Denial

Refusal to adhere to mainstream social norms is a staple of religious affiliation, and often claimed as a symbolic marker of the sincerity of internally-held principles. Yet in recent years, there has been a proliferation of religiously-inflected denial of not only norms but also scientific theory, public health measures, and law. Based on long-term ethnographic engagement in the Southwest and Southern United States, this paper traces various flavors of denial: climate, covid, and vaccination. Examination of material from fieldwork periods from 2012 through to 2020 allows for historical comparison of the evolution of different forms of denial. Utilizing the concept of an “epistemological crisis” (Hariman et al 2020) fomenting in America, the manifold ways in which denial and refusal are understood, embodied, and publicized come into view. Denial of the existence of climate change and COVID-19 unites religious groups that otherwise seem disparate. Juxtaposing the examples of those involved in new age spirituality in Arizona with conservative Christians in Arizona, Louisiana, and Missouri, this paper charts why adherents refuse to wear masks, stop driving SUVs, or get vaccinations. What ethics of denial are involved in the refusal to acknowledge let alone mitigate environmental and public health crises? What work is being done by the category of ‘religion’ in such refusals? The actions of small groups gain outsized consequences in the context of climate change and pandemics, so how and why such groups come to deny these crises and refuse to take action to manage their effects demands anthropological attention.

Abstracts

Nehemia Stern (Ariel University of Samaria) Military Virtue and Personal Piety: The Mesillat Yesharim in Israeli Religious Nationalist Thought

Does there exist a relationship between the military virtues of self-sacrifice, courage, and comradeship on the one hand, and the cultivation of religious, personal, and pietistic ethics on the other? This paper will explore this question by looking at the ways in which the Mesillat Yesharim – an 18th century Jewish pietistic and ethical tract – is studied and interpreted within the premilitary rabbinic academies of Israel’s national religious sector. I argue that this text serves as a social and hermeneutic medium through which national religious young men and women are able to navigate between the competing responsibilities that characterize their social, political, and theological positionality within Israel. On the one hand popular interpretations of the sacred text call upon adherents to transcend their own personal interests in a bid to serve the Jewish people and the State of Israel through military service. On the other hand, this sacred ‘responsibility’ for the statist and militant structures of Jewish sovereignty is balanced by the romantic ideals of self-exploration, and personal development. When seen through this social-hermeneutic context the Mesillat Yesharim serves as a pietistic and ethical vehicle through which young men and women, facing years of national service, work through some of the conflicting fidelities of their own moral worlds. In a broader sense, this paper explores the ways in which sacred textual interpretations can shine a light on the moral ambiguities inherent in the social arena of political and ethnic conflict.

Alana Sá Leitão Souza (Federal Pernambuco): Moving between ethics and politics through “revolt” and “intelligent faith”

The Universal Church of the Kingdom of God in Brazil is well known, among other things, for its capacity to organize its members as political subjects during Brazilian electoral processes. In the present work, I want to explore this process of ethical constitution by the UCKG, largely through their emic concepts of “revolt” and “intelligent faith”. These words are not only part of the vocabulary taught to the faithful, they are also part of the constitution of the born-again self that is a member of this church. As told to me by Mrs. Maria, one of my interlocutors, “I learned the word, revolt. I knew the word before, but not in that way, of not accepting things the way they are, and that changed everything”. These words are important parts of UCKG’s leaders’ and members’ answer to the question “how to live?” (Lambek, 2015), but also part of a system of ethics that is both transcendental and mundane. Thus, in this work I will agree with Daswani’s (2015) ideas about the role that immanence and imminence play simultaneously in the lives of born-again Christians. These concepts will be used to understand not only the political approaches of UCKG’s members, but of the church itself.

Jordan Haug (Brigham Young): How to Win Friends and Influence People at Church, for Example

Recent debates in the anthropology of religion have focused on ethical deliberation in religious practice and the political dimensions of religious belonging, but what if we did not treat these as separate problems? What if ethical deliberation was political? What if religious belief and practice was a political critique of the foundations of sociality? Pentecostal Christians on the island of Misima, Papua New Guinea, regularly ask themselves such questions. Pentecostal Misimans regularly consider their religious practice as an embodied critique of both Methodist and Misiman forms of sociality. Inspired by practices suggested in American self-help manuals, such as Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936), Misiman Pentecostals argue that regular iconoclasm against widely held norms of sociality is an essential part of their ethical subject-formation and a profoundly political act. Their iconoclastic politics cuts to the core of traditional Misiman alliance making and critiques Misiman concepts of the person and the Christian individual. They agree that winning friends and influencing people may be a fundamental concern for all Misimans, who live at the Southeastern edge of the Kula Ring. However, these iconoclastic Misimans radically dissent in how one ought to go about such a project. The political ramifications of this dissent have been significant. By considering how Pentecostal Misimans consider their ethical and political lives as intertwined, this paper suggests that foregrounding critique in religious life may help anthropologists better appreciate how the ethical implies the political, not just the other way around.

Roberta Ricucci (Torino): Religious transmission in the diaspora: Religious socialization among immigrant Filipinos families in Italy

Debates about religious diversity in Europe and, even more generally, debates about cultural diversity tend to focus explicitly or implicitly on the position of Islam and Muslims, especially among second generations. But the issue of accomodating religious diversity concerns all the religions represented in Europe. Thus, I present a paper showing the preliminary results of interviews with parents and their children from the Philippines on their relations with religious identity. The focus is on religious socialization and its outcomes among these Catholic children with a migratory background: they are at the same time welcomed as Catholic and unwelcomed as migrants and foreigners. How do they interact/develop their religious identity? Are they looking for a different (compared to their Italian peers) relationship with religion, one that is spiritual, or one that requires regular meetings, or do they want to get away from this? Are these generations looking for ICT religious tools and points of contact with the church, less visible and “non-inserted” in the integration process among peers? Or, on the contrary, do they choose, strategically, to improve the Catholic part of their identity to succeed better in the integration process in a Catholic country? Through ethnographic fieldwork in one of the main Filipino chaplaincies in Italy, the paper will explore how parents try to educate their children religiously and to what extent their children display their religiosity in a country where the number of nuns is increasing, especially among young people.

Panel abstract

Beginning from the premise that wonder is generative of knowledge whose interpretations are not separable from the ethical and political, this roundtable explores the generous possibilities that emerge from exploring wonder as a strategy for managing the present; for living within precarity; and for harnessing notions of self-discipline in order to achieve desired aesthetic, ontological, performative, and ritual objectives.

Questions that arise include: can a focus on affect connect questions of ontology and experience with the making of an ethical life; how are wonder experiences generative of knowledge production; from text, performance, and ethnography, how does wonder offer ways to trace an ethics and politics from an individual experiencing of wonder?

This roundtable brings together participants from anthropology (Gold, Kim, Srinivas, Vasudevan), history (Hancock), religion (Allocco, Clark, Elison, Lucia, Narayanan, Sarma) and South Asian cultures and languages (Graves, Kamath), into a conversation about wonder. All are contributors to the forthcoming volume, Wonder in South Asia: an Anthology (SUNY Press), edited by Tulasi Srinivas. The participants bring interests that span the geographies and communities of India. They ask of their interlocutors-- is wonder a means to an end, or the achievement of the end itself?

In addition to establishing definitions and sketching specific South Asian understandings of wonder, the roundtable engages the unanticipated benefits and theoretical limitations of an affective approach to understanding text, performance, and the sensorial, aesthetic, ethical and political. Wonder moments rest on the willingness of subject and analyst to embrace the corporeally located self who is already enmeshed in ideological fields. This roundtable is an opportunity to probe the connections between affective experiences of wonder and the interpretations of ‘what happened’ to the making of the South Asian religious subject.

Abstracts

Tuhina Ganguly (Shiv Nadar): Toward Decolonising Religion: New Thought and ‘the First Hindu American’

In May 1913, an Indian Bengali man, Akhoy Kumar Mozumdar, appeared in several newspapers in the US. Although not deemed headline worthy, nonetheless being the first Hindu immigrant to receive American citizenship garnered some attention. Mozumdar founded ‘Christian Yoga’ in the US and became a proponent of New Thought, only to have his citizenship revoked in 1926. Mozumdar remains little known in scholarship today, perhaps because of his small following. In this paper, I argue that it is important to pay attention to people of ‘small stature’ as a step toward decolonising the study of religion. By ‘small stature’, I refer to those who are vulnerable to discrimination in a given society and who have remained unimportant in scholarship. Mozumdar, as a Hindu immigrant, is particularly relevant here. Further, I shall enquire into his ideas to ask if these in themselves can be considered decolonising. Despite not converting to Christianity, Mozumdar spoke authoritatively on Christianity, and combined precepts of New Thought with 20th century Hindu ideas (themselves a complex mix of transcultural concepts and ideas). When juxtaposed with his claims to be a high-caste Hindu and therefore of Aryan race to meet the criterion of ‘naturalisation’ and the revocation of his citizenship, there emerges a complex case of the intersections of race and religion. Paying attention to these will highlight how religious actors with ‘small stature’ have historically challenged singular, hegemonic religious narratives from within, and how we as scholars can recuperate their voices to tell a different story.

Justin Haruyama (UC Davis): African Critiques of Liberalism: Christianity, the Curse of Ham, and Hierarchy in and beyond Zambia

Genesis chapter 9 tells the story of how Noah punished the disobedience of his son Ham by cursing Ham’s descendants to be the servants of Noah’s other two sons and their descendants. For centuries, this story was interpreted by Europeans to justify the brutal enslavement of African people. More problematically from an anthropological perspective, today this story, and its suggestion that Africans are destined by God to be the servants of whites, continues to be repeated by many black people in Zambia as a literally-true historical account. Taking Veran’s notion of disconcertment to consider the seemingly-irreconcilable difference between my Zambian interlocutors’ articulation of the Curse of Ham story and my own views as a liberal anthropologist, I attempt to build partial connections across this ethical difference. One of the main lines of connection I extend is to understand the Curse of Ham story expressed by my Zambian interlocutors as a critique on my own liberal fetishes of egalitarianism and equality, insofar as in a radically unequal world these fetishes really amount to, or at least facilitate, separation and alienation between persons. Instead, I try to understand the Curse of Ham story as a call for connection and relationship, even if this relationship takes an inegalitarian patron-client form. In the end, however, I leave the expression of the Curse of Ham story by my Zambian interlocutors as an unbracketed ellipsis: a stark moral challenge that I can partially connect to but never fully encapsulate within my own understandings of the world.

Anja Kublitz (Aalborg): The Rhythm of Rupture: Attunement among Danish Jihadists

Among my interlocutors, the Arab Spring of 2011 was received as a miracle that cut through the existing political order and called upon them to radically change their lives. From one day to the next, they gave up on their criminal careers, turned towards God and decided to travel to the Middle East to take up arms. The majority of young Danish jihadists have grown up in the context of Danish housing projects and in the shadow of their parents’ failed revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa. Based on long-term fieldwork among immigrants in Denmark, this paper explores how my interlocutors attune to the recursive ruptures that always are new again. I argue that sometimes people’s lives are so marked by ruptures that any continuity has collapsed; sometimes ruptures only come as rhythms: as continuous repetition of potential radical change.

Maria Turek (Toronto): Considerations for Decolonizing Indigenous Histories in China’s Tibetan Borderlands

The Tibetan kingdom of Nangchen (1300—1951) was located in what is today the Yushu Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, China’s Qinghai province. Famous for many Tantric Buddhist lineages, vibrant religious traditions, and a distinct collective identity, Nangchen is a major site for the study of Buddhist societies. In spite of this prominence, the kingdom remains largely unexamined by Western scholarship, mostly due to the legacy of colonialism and colonial epistemologies, which have thus far dominated the study of this region. This paper is part of a larger project which aims at decolonizing the local narrative. My presentation will outline some of the complexities, entanglements, and disappointments of this work. I will ask about the functionality and limitations of the concept of Indigeneity as it is applied to Nangchen society. The focus on the native Nangchen voice presents an ethical responsibility and an opportunity to further our historical knowledge well beyond the region. I will also argue that studying Nangchen’s social organization complicates our understanding of subalternity. Particularly, I will inquire into the role of historical elites in the consistent proliferation of Indigenous local identity in the presence of consecutive colonial projects, including the current domination by the Chinese state. My first example will show how Indigenous practices of historiography, rooted in monastic orthodoxy and Buddhist imagination, are linked to local conceptions of social hierarchy. I will also discuss rituals of place-making to illustrate how Nangchen elites exercised stewardship over ancestral and spiritual relations to the native land.

Abstracts

Jordan Christina Ruth Mullard (Durham): Anti-racism and Anti-casteism: Using ‘conversion’ as a disruptive metaphor

My research builds on Gyanendra Pandey’s (2013) metaphor of ‘conversion’ to explore the role religious sentiment plays in describing both anti-caste movements in India and anti-race movements in America and the UK. This conversion is both literal, seen in the mass conversions to Christianity, Buddhism and Islam following India’s independence in 1947, but is also a structural conversion out of the caste system. Whilst Pandey suggests that in America and elsewhere, people of African descent were instead using ‘conversion’ to opt into dominant white societies such as through Christianity, my research highlights that the conversion metaphor contains an inherently disruptive element. For example, Christianity, like Hinduism has also been a site of generative practice for people of colour and Dalits respectively, reconstructing past sanctions into reimagined and reclaimed forms. This paper explores the role of reimagining a local Hindu Saint as an anti-caste activist among the Dalit community I worked with in Rajasthan and compares it to the global movement of Pan-Africanism. Using a combination of ethnographic and historical sources, I posit that we can usefully use conversion as an analytical framework through a lens of disruption. I argue, this enables us to explore both the reimagining of past ethical commensality on the one hand as well as articulations for a shared ethical destiny characterised as liberation from racism and casteism on the other.

CL Nash (Leeds): The Decolonized God: Black Epistemic Contestation of Religious Racism

My work investigates the power dynamic which exists in the very terminology of “religious epistemology.” By amplifying the religious knowledge production of Black (African descended) women, broadly, my research challenges assumptions that Black women are merely receptacles of knowledge and not producers of knowledge. Yet, their lack of authority is evident in religious academia where Black women are often not represented in the texts used or research supported by the Academy. Moreover, the lack of Black women in higher religious education, as professors or lecturers, demonstrates an unwillingness to decolonize western universities.

By centering the basic concept of epistemology as “knowledge production,” this work, in its entirety, examines: 1) the epistemological heritage of the oppressed and its relevance for theological inquiry today; 2) the historical and contemporary means by which knowledge production is perceived as an elite right belonging to one group and elusive for others; 3) diversification of epistemological authority as part and parcel for decolonizing God. In the interest of time, I will focus on the third point presented. Using a womanist approach that interprets this concern through the lens of race/ethnicity, gender and class, I evaluate power dynamics through the triangle of: power, truth and right, as previously theorized by Michel Foucault. I will also buttress this argument with critical race theory such as Charles Mills’ The Racial Contract. I query the ethical implications if we continue to colonize religious epistemology. Black minds matter, too.

Cameron Warner (Aarhus): Caste and Contemporary Buddhism in Nepal

Based on twenty years of fieldwork in Nepal, this paper focuses on the demographic shift in Himalayan Buddhist communities from domination by exiled Tibetans towards Nepali castes (jat) who originate from lower altitudes and the racialized attitudes and discourses such shifts provoke. Inspired by John Hartigan's (2013) work on the social and biological construction of race in a Mexican genomics laboratory, how might we nuance cultural anthropology's current paradigm through the lens of caste among Buddhists in Nepal? How might it be expanded to incorporate conflicts over institutionalized religion or nationality (as separate from race or ethnicity)? This paper will draw insights from four cases: 1) a Tibetan abbot who openly expresses a hierarchical view of Nepali castes that places young monks from higher altitude natal villages as inherently superior to candidates from middle-altitude districts, 2) Tibetan parents who have opted to send their children to Tibetan-majority schools in India to keep them away from children from Nepali ethnic groups, 3) Tibetan abbots who actively recruit children from less-represented and more impoverished castes, and 4) lay communities that actively encourage the breakdown of caste barriers and practices of purity and pollution.

Leah Mernaugh (KU Leuven): Yoga in and out of context: The ethical bind of the evangelical yoga practitioner

The ethical religious subject faces tension when spiritual priorities clash with sociopolitical discourses. Such is the double bind experienced by American evangelical Christians who practice yoga. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the Pacific Northwest during summer 2019, this project explores the interaction of two ethical tensions that confront evangelical yoga practitioners: on one hand, many feel the need to sterilize yoga of any lingering Hindu or “Eastern” elements in order to reconcile Christian concerns about dabbling with other deities; on the other hand, they are also sensitive to broader discourses around cultural appropriation, which warn that stripping yoga of its cultural context is offensive and unacceptable. This study describes three ways in which yoga-practicing evangelicals circumvent both pitfalls by re-articulating the relationship between yoga and Hinduism: (1) yoga as having mixed-up roots, (2) yoga as predating Hinduism, and (3) yoga as a gift to the West.

Panel abstract

Noting the slant toward ethical subject-making in conceptions of religion past and present, one of the interventions of Experiments with Power (Crosson 2020) is to show how such a bias rehearses the racialized exclusion of certain practices from the category of religion. Defined as various forms of “not-religion,” these practices have been classified as instrumental rather than ethical, forming religion’s constitutive moral/racial shadow in popular and scholarly contexts. Drawing on the “science” of African Caribbean religions under conditions of police brutality and two concepts formulated amidst a strikingly familiar impasse between liberal “rule of law” and fascist violence (Weber’s “ethics of responsibility” and Benjamin’s “divine violence”), Experiments with Power offers an alternate image of religious practice as a field of ethical experimentation. This approach builds on previous work in the anthropology of religion focusing on ethical debates and struggles rather than shared norms, questioning a surprisingly resilient moral distinction between instrumental politics and value-rational ethics (or, in different terms, magic and religion). Ethical experimentation shows the limits of both virtue and duty ethics in situations of power, foregrounding questions of partial sovereignty, divine violence, and agential responsibility.

Rather than simply rehashing these arguments, this roundtable takes these interventions as a point of departure for considering the politics of ethical dissensus in the panelists’ divergent areas of concern. Leniqueca Welcome considers the work of ethics under conditions of racialized police brutality, Jolyon Thomas focuses on the disciplinary power of Buddhist public education programs in Japan, Alexander Rocklin looks at ethical debates in the making of Hinduism, and N. Fadeke Castor focuses on the politics of ethics in Yoruba-inspired religious practices. Drawing on the criminalization and moral stigmatization of African-identified religious practices as experiments with power, Brent Crosson responds. The roundtable participants explore how divisions between instrumental magic and ethical religion, on the one hand, and politics and religion, on the other, are policed or obviated in their work. At around ten minutes each, these roundtable comments will leave time for substantive discussion amongst panelists and audience.

Abstracts

Chaplin Chris: The return of the state? Islamic mobilisation and national belonging amongst Indonesia’s Salafi Community

Over the past 30 years, Indonesia has witnessed the rapid growth of a number of transnational Islamic revivalist movements. These have had a considerable impact on political culture, as the literature suggests the popularity of these movements correlate with increasingly sectarian views across society and corrosion of more traditional understandings of Indonesian citizenship. Yet I offer an ethnographically informed counter-argument based on an examination of Salafi activism in two Indonesian cities. Expanding upon anthropological studies focused on the creation of Islamic subject-hood, I focus on the collective engagements necessary in reconciling between Islamic orthodoxies and contemporary social dilemmas. As I explain, the ethical boundaries of Salafi selfhood are necessarily linked to the bonds one forged with one’s co-religionists in a specific environment, which in turn have a performative and discursive influence on Salafi mobilisation. This has led Salafi activists to flavour their proselytisation campaigns with nationalist tropes, Indonesian symbols, cultural clothing, and popular film imagery; all of which paint the movement as inherently modern, aspirational, and - ultimately - Indonesian. These manoeuvres have proved successful in attracting new members, but they also point to a blurring of the boundaries between religious propagation and secular activism, as well as between universal faith and national belonging. In fact, as I conclude, the state continues to be the performative arena through which Salafism – and transnational movements more broadly – come into fruition. Ultimately, this raises questions as to the extent that Salafism can truly be perceived as either decontextualised or fully global.

Hector Guazon (University of the Philippines): Politics of Aspirations: Inflections in the Formation of Missionaries of a Religious Institute in the Philippines

Why, even in the most tough and tragic conditions of their initiation program, do young men still direct their lives to a Catholic male religious institute and to aspiring to be missionary-priests in this contemporary world? These young men, or 'formands', who I refer in this study are foreign nationals who are in their last stage of initiation called “internship”, where they are immersed in their country of mission, i.e., the Philippines. In my previous study, I found the agentic subjectivities of both formators and formands as generating individual or small group strategies, hence, generative of institutional crisis. Yet, even with similar data gathered through interviews showing their deepening consciousness on the misgivings of their institution, what is striking is the seeming decisiveness and determination of the formands to hurdle their initiation. To address the issue, I use the alternative frame which Robbins’ calls “the anthropology of the good” (2017) and Appadurai’s “anthropology of aspiration and possibilities” (2016). I think this is an apt framework to make sense of the formands’ investment and engagement with the good as outcome and further direction of their missionary mobilities along with the aspirations they bear, while not ignoring the wider contexts of power and inequalities. This culturally inflected aspiration unveils the particularities in the crafting of the constitution of the good, understood as brotherhood and justice for the marginalized, which Catholic missionaries direct their lives and engagements to. It exposes “religious imagination” and notions of “calling”, “gift”, “blessing”, “care”, “hope”, and “time”, which also serve as pathways to having a sense of control in scenarios of failed ideations and institutional mistakes and improving social chances of preferred futures over the undesired ones in the world they refer as mission.

Anastasia Badder (University of Luxembourg): Becoming Highly Mobile: Liberalism and Modernity in Luxembourg's Liberal Jewish Community

The synagogue in Esch (Luxembourg) is Liberal, but its members come from a range of backgrounds and many are unsure about what Liberal Judaism is or entails. This is not particularly concerning for most; for many members, this synagogue (and Luxembourg) are stopovers on international trajectories and they anticipate that they and/or their children will move on in the future. Key to enabling this anticipated mobility is ensuring that they are and their children learn how to be modern, liberal Jews. This liberalness is not the Liberalness of the synagogue. It is focused on constructing a transportable Jewishness and distinguishing themselves from 'religious' Jews, whom they deem unwilling and unable to participate appropriately in the secular world and its political and economic projects. Becoming a good global mover and a good member of the Jewish community means becoming one who is responsible for the traditional knowledge (but not necessarily practice) that guarantees collective continuity while enacting individual agency as one moves through the desirable secular world. However, visions of this world reiterate assumptions about class, race, and modernity that exclude many people and moral projects. This tension leads to occasional uncertainties about one's place in this world, but never to deeper questions about the politics underlying it. Based on 21 months of fieldwork, this paper explores the ways families of Esch's Liberal synagogue work to make themselves modern, liberal Jews in anticipation of mobile futures and some of the assumptions about race, class, and modernity that undergird that process.

Yasemin Ipek (George Mason): Tawakkul: Precarious Muslim Lebanese and Hope

In the context of severe crisis, precarious Muslims from low-income communities in Beirut commonly emphasized that practicing trust in Allah helped them cope with the constant deferral of their individual and collective dreams. They encouraged each other to have tawakkul—a form of faithful hopefulness that centers on trusting in Allah’s plans. When and how tawakkul was invoked, and to what effects? I contextualize Muslim practices of hope in Lebanon within the multilayered local and transnational histories. Precarious pious Muslim Lebanese had diverse dreams and plans that were situated in class-specific, gendered and religious dynamics. I argue that their cultivation of hope was not merely a survival strategy or escapism but a performative practice constitutive of political subjectivity. Muslim Lebanese have been increasingly politicized, in particular after the October protests of 2019. Many anthropological works have celebrated secular conceptions of hope and criticized faith-based hopefulness for leading to a withdrawal from political life. Although several seminal works have examined the relationship between Christianity and hope, there are very few works on Muslim notions of hope. Focusing on unemployed young Muslim Lebanese, I examine Islamic hope as an active ethical work by attending to embodied pedagogies, moral trainings, and visual and sensory experiences. I do not look at Islam as the main determinant of subjectivity and I study it as a political subjectivity situated within multilayered everyday practices that are not necessarily shaped by scripture norms, but are instead shaped in conversation with other moralities.

Panel abstract

The politics of citation has recently garnered substantial attention and discussion within the academy. In anthropology, Daniel Souleles (2020) has described citation as a “complicated gift,” and Jules Weiss (2018) has noted that this gift can result in both celebration and erasure. The Cite Black Women campaign, spearheaded by Christen A. Smith (2021), has advocated for “a radical praxis of citation that acknowledges and honors Black women’s transnational intellectual production.” Indeed, citation records demonstrate a clear tendency to under-reference the work of women, as well as Black scholars, indigenous writers and people of color (Mott and Cockayne 2017).

We wish to reflect on how these issues of citation affect and influence our work in the anthropology of religion. Who is citable or visible and who is elided or not imagined as central to a particular set of topics on religion and why is that the case? Can we excavate lost or missed directions of knowledge generation through paths not chosen, scholarly routes not taken? What does it mean to engage in an ethical praxis of citation in the anthropology of religion?

The four papers address these questions from different angles: Using the example of the anthropology of Christianity, Daswani’s paper explores how this subfield is embedded in an androcentric and Eurocentric field of citation that gravitates toward certain kinds of bodies and toward telling certain kinds of stories. Halvorson’s paper examines how a decolonizing approach to citation in the anthropology of Christianity would involve taking seriously and citing “ethnohistorical” interlocutors as knowledge producers. Hovland’s paper asks what a feminist praxis of citation would look like when relating to a historically male-dominated tradition. Finally, Pérez draws our attention to the long-lasting effects of citational erasure of BIPOC and religious studies scholars, and makes the case for diversifying our scholarship and syllabi.

Girish Daswani (Toronto): The Whiteness of Citation: A Story in an Anthropology of Christianity

If universities are post/colonial and hierarchical institutions that define what constitutes knowledge, then our citational practices become one important way that colonialism continues to live in and through us. Citational practices are an extension of Eurocentric and androcentric assumptions about the world – what I call institutional Whiteness. Writing about a “politics of citation,” Sara Ahmed describes “citation as a rather successful reproductive technology, a way of reproducing the world around certain bodies.” Using the example of an Anthropology of Christianity, I speak about how this subfield is embedded in an androcentric and Eurocentric field of citation that gravitates toward certain kinds of bodies and toward telling certain kinds of stories, to the exclusion of others. My own trajectory of citation – as a scholar of Christianity – reflects a path of dependency on which an academic career and publishing opportunities hang, and through which Whiteness becomes un/intentionally reproduced. Changing our citational practices to include BIPOC, female, non-European thinkers helps decentre the post/colonial academy as the primary site of knowledge production and dissemination. Some have argued that we should extend “respect” to our intellectual ancestors, even when we want to critique them, and that a “tradition” is a legacy that remains in conversation with itself. In this talk, I respond that in remembering our intellectual ancestors, we need to situate them in (settler) colonial and exclusionary traditions and that nothing will change if we continue to think through the straightjacket of “tradition”.

Britt Halvorson (Colby): Referring Back: Reading Citation Politics in an Anti-Colonial Christian Archive

This paper examines what lessons an early twentieth century Malagasy Christian anti-colonial activist’s citation practice can offer current conversations in the anthropology of Christianity. It draws on archival and ethnographic research on a Malagasy Lutheran cleric and anti-colonial activist, Eugene Rateaver (1884-1961). Rateaver was a politically engaged Malagasy Lutheran pastor who completed his academic study in the U.S., before returning to Madagascar in the 1920s. However, after claims of moral impropriety that may have been politically motivated by his anti-colonial work, Rateaver was excommunicated from the white American-controlled church in 1936-37, a shocking event still remembered and retold in various ways by Malagasy and American church members today. In this essay, I go back into Rateaver’s 1911 master’s thesis on French colonial policy in Madagascar and examine much later family history writing by his living U.S.-based descendants. By placing these “ethnohistorical” sources in dialogue with current efforts to critically examine citation, I ask: How did Rateaver himself approach citation as a political act, considering his position as a colonial subject writing against French occupation and a figure on the margins of the institutional church? How do his living family members now cite him as an ancestor-figure, caught up in major social and political transformations that bore serious consequences for him and his family? The paper ultimately advocates for a decolonizing citation practice that takes seriously “ethnohistorical” interlocutors as knowledge producers and for the imaginative recovery of lost possibilities.

Ingie Hovland (Georgia): How to Cite Wittgenstein? Connecting Language, Gender, and Authority

In my work on women and words in Christianity I have found Ludwig Wittgenstein’s thoughts on connections between language-use and form/s of life useful. His residences in Cambridge and his periodic retreats to a wooden cabin on a fjord in Norway during the first half of the twentieth century overlapped with the activities of the Norwegian “mission feminists” I am researching. These Lutheran women in Oslo were experimenting with new ways of using language – speaking, listening, reading, writing – to raise the status of (white) women in Christian groups. At the same time Wittgenstein, in his cabin, was contributing to the tradition of analytic philosophy, a tradition largely carried on by and for (white) men and in the broader picture part of the tight bonds between men, language, and authority in Northern Europe that the “mission feminists” were attempting to challenge. Wittgenstein also disapproved of women using academic language in general and referred to the one young woman scholar he was able to work with in Cambridge (Elizabeth Anscombe) as “an old man.” But does this matter for how I use academic language to discuss his ideas about language? Or: what does it mean for me to cite him on the other side of the Atlantic a century later? This paper is an attempt to think about the triangular conversation I am setting up between myself, the “mission feminists,” and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Elizabeth Pérez (UCSB): Sorry Cites: The Necropolitics of Citation in the Anthropology of Religion

In this presentation, I discuss the under-citation of BIPOC and religious studies scholars by anthropologists of religion. I speculate on the reasons why researchers might refuse to cite their colleagues, preferring to either ignore their intellectual production or summarize their findings without providing any attribution (in effect, plagiarizing it). Drawing from my experience as an editorial assistant at History of Religions, manuscript reviewer, and Latinx ethnographer of religion, I argue that peer reviewing structures as currently configured (including the paucity of BIPOC in referee pools) militate against the “calling out” of scholars for both citational refusal and plagiarism. I hypothesize that the conventions of networking and the uncertainty of the academic job market have exacerbated an existing tendency for junior anthropologists to “cite upward”—that is, to give credit to well-placed senior white scholars to whom they would want to be socially and conceptually connected, while appropriating or neglecting the contributions of BIPOC and religious studies scholars. Achille Mbembe’s idea of necropolitics is invoked to make the case that citation is a matter of life and death for BIPOC in particular. Citational erasure has real-world consequences, ranging from salary stagnation and increased precarity for adjunct and contingent faculty to denial of promotion and tenure. In the absence of institutional mechanisms for holding editors and authors accountable, this compels us to address the “spirit-murdering” effects of under-referencing (as recently asserted by Chicana and Boricua feminist and race scholar Nichole Margarita Garcia) through the diversification of our own scholarship and syllabi.

Panel abstract

Place remains an enduring problematic within anthropology. This irresolution is evinced by contemporary efforts to interrogate what Marc Augé calls the ‘nonplaces’ of supermodernity: built spaces and social places neither marked by history nor concerned with identity. But both place and non-place are formulated as terrains of human signification on which the markings of culture (or the social, or the symbolic) are the only ones that get to count. As many anthropologists of religion have noted, however, places may not be so passive. We propose to ‘train-up’ an alternative—the concept of a ‘no-place’—by testing its affordances for inquiry across a series of cases. Through engaging this concept, we seek to make better sense of the way in which an indifference to place within the constitution of modern space is vital for understanding dominant ways of being in the world today. Following the analytic tracks laid down by the early architects of critical secular studies, we seek to make sense of the way modernity tells “subtraction stories” to cover over the way in which it positively generates disembedded modes of living. From the materialization of abstracted borders into walls in the Sonoran desert, to the tokenization of Brooklyn-styled street food markets, to the “weirdness” of an IKEA parking lot in Emeryville, California, we want to sort through the formative effects generated by the absence of place, which is to say, the active effects of no-places on lives lived. Our cases will examine how no-places exist in the world, what they help illustrate for the anthropology of religion and the secular, and why, for all their impact, they recede from anthropological attention.

Abstracts

C. William Campbell (Victoria): “We shall see that it is all matter”: thinking a materialist ethic with Latter-day Saint spirit-matter

This essay follows three threads to arrive at a speculative response to the problem posed by new materialism: how do we act ethically in a material world rife with life? The first thread elaborates on this problem as presented by materialist thinkers such as Coole & Frost (2010) and Bennett (2010). The second thread traces fragmentary, cosmological doctrines concerning of the nature of the material universe as described by the founding prophet of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Joseph Smith Jr. Additionally, this thread traces various reflections and speculations concerning those fragmentary doctrines as understood by select, subsequent Latter-day Saint interlocutors. The third thread attempts to tease out the distinction between two kinds of life presented in the threads above and posits a new response to the ethical question above.

Celeste Ray (Sewanee: University of the South): Sacred Waters: Transtemporal Veneration and Biocultural Diversity at Ireland’s Holy Wells

Veneration of sacred water sources is a transtemporal and panhuman paradigm. Holy wells are any natural sources of freshwater (most commonly springs, but also ponds, lakes and seepage-fed pools) that are foci for ritual practice and engagement with the supernatural. In Ireland, these sites are commonly dedicated to a saint and their waters are considered curative. Visitation of Irish holy wells involves circumambulation and prayer at secondary thaumaturgical features in the well’s landscape context (particular trees, stones, or archaeological remains called “stations”). Flora and fauna in a well’s environs may be associated with a site’s “cure” and therefore protected so that holy wells and their settings are micro-ecosystems and nodes of biocultural diversity. These numinous landscapes and their associated folk liturgies are further linked to the lore and identity of communities which still gather annually at their local wells on the patron saint’s feast day. Based on field survey at over 1000 well sites and ethnographic research in every county of the Irish Republic, this paper considers the ongoing socio-spatial dialectic of holy wells as sites of biocultural heritage and evolving ritual in contemporary Ireland’s “Post-Catholic” era.

Neena Mahadev (Yale-NUS): Buddhist Territoriality and Pneumatic ‘Encroachment’: Buddhist-Pentecostal rivalries of sovereignty

Based upon ethnographic study of Sri Lankan Pentecostal practices of charismatic conversions, and Sinhala Buddhists’ criticisms of Born-again modalities of religious transmission and transduction, this paper builds upon scholarship emerging at the intersection of studies of religion and of media. Whereas mediums of religious transmission within Pentecostal Christianity are pneumatic (relating to breath and spirit), and haptic (through the materialized touch of the Holy Spirit), the sanctification and legitimization of Buddhist polities rely on very different ritual and political modalities. The upshot is that Sinhala Buddhists take themselves to be “sons of the soil,” whereas Sri Lankan Pentecostals are seen as encroaching upon this soil through their charismatic methods of materializing the spirit, and stamping out the “demons” of religious difference. The analysis relates the differentials in Buddhist and Christian ideologies and “sensational forms” (citing Keane 2007 & Meyer 2009), to highly disputed conceptions of the “ethics” of religious attraction that are provocatively espoused in Sri Lanka.

Frederick Lampe (NAU): Religion and Changing Climate: Applying Anthropology to the Anthropocene

People interact with the environment in different ways based upon how they understand their relationship to the non-human world. With the effects of climate change becoming more pronounced, the importance of understanding the different ways people experience and understand their relationship to the cosmos becomes all the more important. For some the earth and its creatures exist for human use and pleasure, while for others humans are a part of a thriving complex of living entities. With the accelerating effects of climate change in the Anthropocene, anthropological research into religion and the environment needs to be a part of larger conversations about the economic, political, technological, and social challenges facing humanity today. This paper reflects on some of the different ways that people understand, experience, and interact with the environment using the example of Nuvatukya’ovi in Northern Arizona, differences reflecting religious language and ideas. These mountains, referred to as the San Francisco Peaks in popular parlance, include the birthplace of Hopi speakers yet attempts to protect them from using reclaimed water to extend the season at a local ski resort have failed. At the heart of these debates and others like them, including Bears Ears Monument, are complex socio-religio ideas about what it means to be human, to be non-human, how humans and non-human worlds relate to one another, and how they interact with and impact one another.

Abstracts

Hamidreza Salehya (Toronto): Ritual, Improvisation, and Selfhood: Agency in Shia Mourning Rituals in Iran

While ethnomusicologists identify improvisation as a critical component of lament performances (e.g., Blum 1998), Iranian performers of Shia mourning rituals do not usually mention improvisation in their discussions of ritual performances. Rather than innovative sonic/musical tactics, these performers emphasize the role of divine intervention and moral self-cultivation in the creation of affective lament performances. Given that improvisation is often presented as the subject’s (semi)volitional “negotiation” within a scene of constraint (Siddall and Waterman 2016), could we also analyze improvisation in terms of one’s “submission” to the Divine’s will, realized through ritual prayers characterized by obligation, fixity, and conventionality? My paper draws on interviews with mourning ritual performers in Tehran, examining how they articulate the aesthetic boundaries of an acceptable lament performance. Inspired by the anthropologists of Islam who define agency and selfhood through actors’ cultural codes (e.g., Mahmood 2005; Mittermaier 2011), my paper investigates new definitions of selfhood to explain how ritual performers’ reliance on formalized ritual prayers and their openness to the possibility of divine intervention may lead them to affect the inner emotional and spiritual states of themselves and their listeners through spontaneous lament performances. Engaging with the works of anthropologists and ethnomusicologists who present improvisation in the Middle Eastern musical traditions as an intersubjective process (e.g., Shannon 2003; Racy 1991), I present how my interlocutors’ discourses define improvisation as an integral element of everyday life whose analysis also requires careful consideration of encounters and decision-makings beyond the moment of musical performance.

Sylvie Littledale (Brigham Young): The Political Foundations of Ritual in Huarochirí Peru

Recent debates in the anthropology of religion have focused on how ritual and religious practice treat ethical debates as an integral part of subject formation. These debates have primarily focused on the role of moral subjectivities in Abrahamic religious traditions, but considering other local traditions may help us better understand how what looks like "the ethical" may be "the political." For example, rather than privileging the ethical dilemmas in subject formation, the annual Champería water ceremony in Huarochirí, Peru, conveys to its participants that the ethical is the political, and, therefore, the individuation of "the self" is a political problem. This Andean ritual combines classical ritual processes with celebrations of communal work, communications with mountain deities, offerings to human ancestors, and veneration of a Catholic cross as indices of the sociopolitical order that makes individuation possible, rather than the other way around. In doing so, ritual participants in Huarochirí claim that the "the good" can only be discovered through the collective interpretation of judgments cast by the mountain deity who holds power over the community's water supply. I argue that this ceremonial context highlights the politics of communal belonging as the purpose of Andean ritual action. Just as a single individual cannot carry out the tasks required to gain the mountain deity's approval, the definition and pursuit of “the good” in Huarochirí is a social problem and, therefore, a political question.

Kelzang Tashi (Independent Scholar): Gendered spaces: female heads and frugal hearth goddesses in central Bhutan

In almost every society, there exist gendered spaces constructed by people’s routine activities. Spatial gender segregation and its association with the status of women in a certain form and distribution is particularly pronounced in home/house spaces. One such space is the kitchen, which is often viewed as a female space, and as a site within which the secondary status of women is perpetuated. In this paper, I will look at the ways in which the kitchen in Bhutanese village society characterised by matrilineal organisation can operate as a site of not just women’s power but also of certain numina’s sacred power dwelling therein. Placed within the debates on the gendering of spaces and their spatial expressions, this paper will examine how the power of hearth goddesses who are exclusively hosted by women heads of household in the kitchen underlies the domestic power of women. It will argue that besides the matrilineage’s house and land ownership, women heads of household draw their power from being hosts for hearth goddesses, thereby sustaining matrilineal practices.

Lee Gensler: (CUNY): “You are perfect just the way you are”: Whiteness, self care, and the crafting of an ethical subject

In this paper, I draw on digital ethnography of Instagram accounts engaged in public displays of self care to explore the ethical subject-making practices of young-adult white women and women-aligned nonbinary people in the United States. The gendered and raced dynamics of self care practices and the broader self care movement present an important terrain on which to investigate whiteness and white liberalism in the United States. And the ritualized and spiritual nature of self care places it at the intersection of therapy, magic, and an expanded understanding of what, exactly, we mean as anthropologists when we talk about religion. There is a long history in anthropology of tracing how rituals are part of the active attempt to fashion oneself as an appropriate type of self within a particular tradition, perhaps best encapsulated in Talal Asad’s work on what he calls the discursive tradition. As Asad himself has explored in his recent work, these concepts are just as valuable in understanding liberalism (and whiteness) as they are in understanding Islam. This paper attempts to contribute to that work by asking what the rituals of self care do for the people who partake in them and what that can tell us about the ethical framework those people are orienting themselves towards. This simultaneously opens up larger questions related to anthropologies of the good and how we as anthropologists can understand ethical systems as well as specific questions about the ethical framework that underlies white liberalism in the United States.