Marginal ethics

May 14, 2021 2:00pm (UTC 19:00)

Panel Abstract

The anthropology of religion has taken a dominant role in anthropological discussion in recent decades in large part through a focus on people who identify in fundamental ways as religious subjects and who engage in practices that are clearly demarcated as part of scriptural religions. Whether it is the pious Muslim women discussed by Saba Mahmood, the devoted converts discussed by Joel Robbins, or the fetish-smashing Calvinists discussed by Webb Keane, these subjects take religion as central to their ethical self-formations and pose religion against other domains of their social lives. But how do theories of ethical self-making, sedimented through these and similar ethnographies, need to be reframed in order to encompass people who may be at best marginal members of religious communities or who are engaged in practices that may only partially take their cues from scriptural religious demands? How do we theorize the partially religious, the formerly religious, or the ways that non-religious subjects engage with those who are self-consciously so? Where might we look outside of the Foucauldian or Asadian models of ethical self-making that have been at the center of anthropological conversations about religion? The papers on this panel tackle these questions through their wide-ranging discussions of Orthodox Jews with life-changing doubts, lapsed Catholics, Mongol rulers trying to manage Muslim populations, or the Confucian piety of online fandom.

Ayala Fader (Fordham): Jewish Life-Changing Doubt, Ethics, and Obligation

Ethnographically studying doubt as it is mediated through bodies, materiality, and language, complicates conceptions of religious lives and ethical self-making. In this presentation I draw on research with ultra-Orthodox Jews in New York who experience life-changing doubt but continue to practice Jewish Orthodoxy to protect their families. Effectively, these hidden heretics (bahaltene apikorsim) separate religious belief and practice. At the same time, many act on their life-changing doubt by secretly exploring worlds beyond their own with fellow-travelers, which included breaking religious commandments. In effect, hidden heretics negotiated competing ethical commitments, making judgements and moral compromises played out in the intimate spheres of family relationships. This relatively small population of Orthodox Jewish doubters raise broader theoretical questions for anthropologists of religion, including 1) shifting the gaze of ethical self-making from the rational individual to gendered dynamics within families around authority, obligation and affect, and 2) recuperating religious belief as complementary to religious practice rather than oppositional, conceptualizing both belief and doubt as “habitual practices of the mind” (Peirce cited in Rutherford 2009), rather than private interiority.

Graham M. Jones (MIT): Varieties of Quasi- and Para-Religious Experience: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Innovations in Civic Piety during COVID-19

In Elementary Forms, Durkheim suggests that scriptural religion is only a special case of a much broader category of social phenomena involving ritualized manipulations of transcendental signifiers. In the past, I’ve analyzed entertainment magic as one such object of quasi-religious elaboration associated, in the modern West, with enactments and of normative secularism. Building on this previous work, this paper discusses collaborative ethnographic research I took part in during the COVID pandemic, comparing novel ritualization of civic participation on social media cross-culturally. In particular, I discuss two case studies: one focuses on networks of far-right COVID denialists in the U.S., the other on cybernationalist responses to the pandemic in mainland China. Highlighting the role of ethical self-fashioning in both cases, I show how American online extremism and Chinese cybernationalism draw creatively from different traditions of piety. Although COVID denialists in the U.S. mobilize cultural repertoires of fundamentalist Protestantism, we found that many—far from rejecting science—embraced the scientific method as a form of ethical self-making that could further a (proximately) anti-mask and (ultimately) anti-State agenda. By contrast, we found that Chinese internet users and State social-media accounts collaboratively co-constructed memes that infused images of State efficacy with enchanting qualities of cuteness, creating a potent syncretism of Confucian piety and celebrity idol worship. Bringing together two examples that showcase para-religious innovation in the production of anti-State and pro-State symbolism, I ultimately offer a broader Durkheimian perspective on social media as a “moral laboratory” (Mattingly) for experiments civic piety during a liminal crisis.

Maya Mayblin (Edinburgh): Passionate Indifference: why anthropologists of religion should care about the religiously passive, indifferent, and opposed.

Religion in all its forms, both at its core and its frontiers, is an ambivalent phenomenon. As many have shown, a site of troubled traffic in concepts and desires and above all, a site of complex cohabitation with people whose relationship to its agreed practices and principles differs - whether by degree or kind - from one’s own. In this paper I explore the politics of census data on Catholic identity to show how religion, particularly in its institutional dimensions, does not reside in the thoughts and actions of its most active members, but rather within the composition of the active to the passive, a composition which includes relations of power but is not reduceable to them. Investigating this compositional dynamic at differing scales (from the household all the way up to the census report) offers us some purchase on the often contentious manner by which institutions reproduce themselves at one remove from the consciously held values of many of the individuals passing through them, the individuals who would appear to make them up. Reflecting on these and other issues raised by a small but important body of literature on religious indifference in Northern Europe, I offer three reasons why anthropologists of religion should be passionate about studying the religiously passive, indifferent, and opposed.

Azfar Moin (Texas): Cosmic Ethics: Why Mongol rule led to Astral Worship in Islam

The Qur’an retells the story of how Abraham tried to worship the Sun, the Moon, and the stars until he realized the vanity of worshipping created things. By the time this story appeared in the Quran in the seventh century, the Rabbinic Jewish expression for idolatry was already “worship of the stars.” That is to say, mature biblical monotheism, of which scriptural Islam was a reflection, was born in a moment of disenchantment, by vehemently rejecting the sacredness and divinity of the cosmos. However, by the sixteenth century, astrology, and astral theurgy had become wildly popular in the imperial courts of the post-Mongol Islamic world. I argue that this return to “cosmotheism” in Islam was, in part, catalyzed by the need for pagan Mongol rulers to find a universal source of justice that was independent of the competing scriptural religions of their subjects. In a strange way, ethics was the undoing of transcendental monotheism.

At the beginning of this session, before the lecture, we will award the 2020 Clifford Geertz Prize in the Anthropology of Religion.

Abstract

At what point did colonized peoples come to be recognized as objects of evangelistic attention? When were their languages recognized as media for the transmission of truth? While missionary histories from different regions vary on these questions, I suggest that the answer is tied closely to colonial fears of “labor trouble”. This is not to say that missionization was simply a mode of moral coercion meant to control colonial populations. Rather I argue that in certain contexts of Protestant missionization, concepts of speaker sincerity and colonial fears of laborers’ duplicity found common expression in belated realizations about how colonial languages might be used for evangelistic purposes. In this presentation I examine the moment that Lutheran missionaries in colonial New Guinea decided to use New Guinea Pidgin English, now known as Tok Pisin, to evangelize their urban laborer workforce, and contrast this historical situation with some other more recent contexts.