Panel abstract

This roundtable draws together five anthropologists working on topics related to volunteerism and humanitarianism, broadly conceived, across sites defined by Islam (Mittermaier), Christianity (Scherz, Kaell), Hinduism (Kim), and Buddhism (Aulino). For each of us, “love” is productive to think with as it shapes people’s lives. Yet a vast array of words, each with its own rich meaning, are collapsed into what we call “love” in English (Trawick 1992). This is especially true in the field of religion, where rich theologies and cosmologies lie behind seemingly simple statements. Taking a much needed comparative approach, together we ask what animates love? How is it received and perceived? What kinds of bonds and frictions can it engender? How are its effects imagined? How is it understood to move between human beings and other presences, such as God?

Our collective goal is to explore how “love” is conceived and talked about across varied sites. We find that love can be connected to values such as generosity and care in India (Kim) or pity in Thailand (Aulino). Love is a euphemism for money among U.S. Christians (Kaell), and is multiplied through more than 11 vernacular terms in Egypt (Mittermaier). Kim and Scherz emphasize the reception of love among recipients of aid. Aulino, Mittermaier, and Kaell focus on those who deliver aid via volunteerism or engaged charitable support.

A common theme concerns human connection. Kim underlines how unexpected love can forge new relations; the surprise that a Muslim villager in Kutch, India, felt when offered aid by BAPS Hindus has reordered ways of thinking about others, leading to more intimate relations, albeit within the framework of what is acceptable to the Muslim villagers. Scherz explores the intimate relations between Christians who give and receive love at a small evangelical church in Tennessee. Her interlocutors are inspired by the Bible, but also neuroscience: they expect that love can have physiological effects to restart addicts’ endogenous opioid system and help them kick their habit. Aulino emphasizes another set of relations in Thailand, this time related to what she argues are commonsense correlations between love and pity. As a result, Thai volunteerism reflects hierarchies conditioned and habituated by social worlds. Love, she reminds us, is a socially conditioned feeling as much as a universal touchstone.

Kaell and Mittermaier turn to how love-talk, and the relations it creates, can foster human-divine connection. Kaell traces how U.S. Christian sponsors hope that, if recipients of aid cannot understand why a faraway American would help them, they will credit God with sending love their way and come to realize their own relation to a universal creator. Distance and the impossibility of human relations is, in fact, integral to creating channels for love to extend outside the family and encompass a global ‘human family.’ Mittermaier explores how love-talk in Egypt makes God central, while offering a ground in which contrasting forms of religiosity are set and defined against each other. Among pious Resala volunteers, giving is explicitly couched as ‘loveless’ – that is, done out of duty to God. Yet God remains an object of love and longing, even in this seemingly loveless context. By contrast, Sufi volunteers emphasize love as the central through-line in all their work. They, too, emphasize a particular orientation toward God, driven by love rather than fear of hell, or desire for paradise.

This roundtable models a comparative approach to the study of giving in religious contexts. The conversation speaks to the recent surge in studies related to religion and volunteerism, humanitarianism and NGO work, including monographs by Scherz (2014), Aulino (2019), Mittermaier (2019), and Kaell (2020). During the panel, we will be guided by a subset of the questions posed above, with each participant offering a short informal thought. Each participant will also include mention of one study they have found helpful to think with in order to spur discussion with the audience and connect our respective projects. Examples include Liisa Malkki’s work on objects of aid as creating “enchanted connectivity” (The Need to Help, 2015: 108); Jane Bennett’s notion of “energetic ethics” that connect affect and action to stir up a strong bodily response (The Enchantment of Modern Life, 2001: 131-158); Lisa Stevenson’s concept of “song” as transformative aspiration (Life Beside Itself 2014); and Anna Julia Cooper’s Black Feminist Love Politics (May 2007). Throughout, we take “love” as a generative domain for both interlocutor and ethnographer.

Abstracts

Yeon-ju Bae (Michigan): The ethical politics of self and nature in a Korean Buddhist return-to-the-farm village

This paper explores the ethical negotiation of self and nature in a South Korean village where a Buddhist temple had initiated a return-to-the-farm movement for organic farming since the Asian Financial Crisis. Educated urbanites who had participated in democratic movements against capitalistic hierarchy have moved into this village, and found themselves living with long-established farmers holding very different values. These local farmers who have long been marginalized still aspire to mainstream values and rely on kin-based hierarchy. This paper examines how these different groups come to recognize one another and negotiate their ethical stances. I look at three ethnographic vignettes from my fieldwork conducted between 2018 and 2020. First, the “potato field incident” in which a local staff member put pesticides onto the temple fields which should have been organic. The activists strive to resolve the issue through the Buddhist egalitarian consensus seeking. Second, an annual hamlet meeting during which residents argue whether they would allow a newly moved-in family to connect to a common water pipe. Newcomers approach the issue as a matter of following democratic principles. Third, I discuss various accounts from locals and newcomers in which they see their agricultural practice through the other’s perspective. While the villagers appear to show different stances drawing on religious or political values, they may come to recognize others’ perspectives, resulting in taking ambivalent stances on themselves. By situating the village dynamics in the broader Korean context, this paper illustrates the ways in which emergent cultural meanings are created through the politics of ethical stance-taking.

Benedikt Pontzen: Relating Religions: Lived Religious Diversity in Asante, Ghana’

In an increasingly interconnected world, religious diversity and encounters are an integral part of many people’s lives. This is also the case in Asante where “traditional”, Muslim, and Christian actors and discourses assert their presence in public and domestic life. In their encounters, differences and distinctions matter and so do the relations that various actors make across their traditions with the multiple entanglements, bricolages, and ambiguities that result from that. As various actors encounter, converse, and interact with one another, religious traditions in Asante relate in multiple and frequently asymmetrical ways. Yet, much of the established Eurocentric research conceptualizes religions in Abrahamic terms as discrete and coherent entities, so that religious diversity and encounters are predominantly considered along the lines of an either/or. Thereby, the multiple both/ands of lived religious diversity, everyday encounters, and contact zones elude the empirical record and the work of theory which misses out on important aspects of the complex dynamics by which various actors in Asante navigate and negotiate their religiously diverse lifeworlds. Opting for an either/or and both/and approach, I trace and explore these dynamics from a relational angle and readjust our work of theory as my interlocutors and I converse, translate, and think across traditions. In the process, African voices and concepts partake in the work of theory and contribute to decolonizing academic knowledge production. Thereby, we compose inter- and pluriversal theories from diverse sources and histories that are better suited to apprehend the multiple relations and complexities of lived religious diversity.

Aftab Jassal (UCSD): The Lives of Storytellers: Caste, Calling, and Performance in Uttarakhand, India

In the Himalayan state of Uttarakhand, deities, ancestors, and other nonhuman actors interact with human persons in a ritual performance tradition known as jagar. These rituals involve narrative performance, divine embodiment, and verbal and physical interaction between humans and divinities. Through storytelling, drumming, and other devotional practices, the jagar performers who conduct these rituals “call” or invite divinities to enter and inhabit the bodies of human mediums and enter into dialogue with ritual participants. However, while jagar performers call the gods to place, performers themselves are also called to place by the gods. In narrating their own lives, jagar performers, the vast majority of whom belong to low-caste, or Dalit, communities, talked with me about how they wrestled with forms of affliction, loss, and physical and social dislocation before being summoned to serve as jagar priests. As such, jagar performers bear the scars of generational violence and marginalization, but mediating between humans and deities through jagar also becomes a means of working through these forms of structural violence. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in Uttarakhand between 2010 and 2018, this paper records how jagar performers narrate their own pasts and reflect on their social position and religious work. Thus, the ritual performance of jagar is not merely about mediating human-divine relations, but also becomes a critical technology through which low-caste persons find their place in a highly stratified world.

Isaac Friesen (Toronto): Everyday Traditions: The Politics of Plasticity in Provincial Egypt

There is considerable debate in the anthropological literature about the extent to which people’s everyday lives align with the traditions and politics they follow. On the one hand, scholars such as Samuli Schielke highlight how ordinary people’s lives are marked by pragmatism, ambivalence and flexibility. Scholars such as Nadia Fadil and Mayanthi Fernando, on the other hand, show how Islamic traditions should not be seen as separate, abstract and otherworldly moral systems. The frequent blur of religious, political and social borders in my provincial Egyptian fieldsite shows how enjoining both sides of this debate can open up new fruitful perspectives. My paper examines the large-scale attendance of a Coptic-run language program by Muslim adults whose religious identities are steeped in rational, modernist versions of Islam. Through an analysis of participant observation data collected over several years of research, I will first examine the variably inclusive and exclusive discourses that permeate both the Coptic Church and modernist Islamic groups outside of the program’s classroom. Secondly, I will illuminate how and when those discourses manifest inside the classroom. My historicist framework bridges the aforementioned anthropological divide by extending the qualities of fluidity, pragmatism and flexibility to powerful traditions and institutions. The paper concludes that there is fluidity, pragmatism and flexibility down and up hierarchies of power, and this is why politics and power relations unfold in such unpredictable ways. The everyday, I conclude, must be seen as part and parcel to powerful traditions and institutions, and vice versa.

Panel abstract

This panel explores the embroilment of subject-making in ongoing political projects and grassroots social initiatives that deploy unstable interpretations of enduring religious traditions. Our interlocutors consist of grassroots actors pursuing aspirational projects which hold a prominent ethical dimension, but often interrogate and contest the label of ‘religious’; this includes projects as diverse as Buddhist-derived insight (vipassanā) meditation among Israeli Jews and middle-class Chinese citizens retooling Daoist ascetic techniques to enhance their personal-nationalistic efficacy. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in China, France, Israel and Russia, we set out to 1) examine the co-imbrication between ethical subjectivities and encompassing socio-political forces across liberal and non-liberal contexts, and 2) investigate the foundations and thrusts of ethical strivings in what we call “unstable locations”. Specifically, we set out to address the following questions: • How do actors who self-define, or would be recognized by others, as belonging to particular religious traditions, operate in volatile political and/or economic environments? How do they inform and organise their ethical projects? • How do personal choices at the intersection of religions and politics elucidate abiding socio-moral imaginaries? In what ways does the self become a site of contestation between countervailing aspirations and injunctions? • What theoretical resources can facilitate bridging the analysis of religious and political forms of life? What can be gleaned from examining the theological and cosmological logics informing grassroots subject-making?

Teo Benussi (Berkeley): Ethics/emancipation: outlining an Autonomist theory of post-Soviet Islamic piety

This position paper advances a conceptual framework aimed at capturing the political dimension of grassroots ascetical quietism. This is done by bringing Autonomist theory to bear on ethnographic material pertaining to Muslim piety movements in post-Soviet Russia. The emancipatory and prefigurative potential of collective projects of self-formation – in this case, what I call Tatarstan’s ‘halal milieu’ – are explored through Agamben-derived notions of ethical form-of-life and Rule/Law. I will argue that a) an Autonomism-inspired analytical toolbox is helpful to conceptualise the biopolitical friction between ethical projects (however quietist) and dominant moral/political orders; b) Autonomist literature has the potential to broaden anthropological conversations on virtue beyond existing fault lines (notably between ‘traditionist’ and ‘liberal’ orientations and the secular/religious great divide); and c) this school of thought can help us envision a radical, politically engaged anthropology of ethics.

Danny Cardoza (Cambridge): Acute serenity as evangelism under political duress: Or, the King of the North’s imprisonment of a Danish Jehovah’s Witness

Some 34 governments around the world have criminalized Jehovah’s Witness evangelism. This criminalization usually centers around banning Witnesses preaching door-to-door and other ‘public’ practices of evangelism. This has enormous consequences because evangelism forms the key ethical project of Jehovah’s Witnesses as being ‘makers of disciples’, a complex project of self- and other-cultivation. In places ‘under ban’ this project is forcibly, often violently, truncated. But Witnesses are not enraged nor deterred by the ‘political duress’. Instead, Witnesses under duress are acutely serene because they understand the duress as coterminous with making disciples, a disposition based in a hermeneutical understanding of Biblical prophecy. For example, in 2017 the Russian Federation’s Supreme Court ruled to criminalize Witness practice and confiscated all Witness property and assets, beginning a string of arrests, surveillance, raids by armed, balaclava-clad state agents, and reports of torture and police brutality. One widely publicized arrest was of Dennis Christensen, a Jehovah’s Witness from Denmark imprisoned in Russia and sentenced to six years in a penal colony for ‘organizing the activities of an extremist organization’. Christensen, despite the severity of the charges and verdict has remained peaceful and content, smiling behind bars. To explain this serenity, I will put the current political duress in perspective by analyzing Witness eschatology, particularly an understanding of Russia as the ‘King of the North’, painting a different picture of the political duress than the one non-Witnesses might paint (concerned with a different configuration of ‘politics’), revealing how Christensen’s ‘suffering’ is itself a form of evangelism.

Camille Lardy (Cambridge): Catholic Political Theologies for a Time of Ecological Crisis: Negotiating an Efficacious "Care for Our Common Home"

This paper examines young French Catholics’ changing investments in the political and discursive protection of Nature, and proposes the lens of political theology to explore such transformations in religious actors’ “worldly” commitments. Drawing on fieldwork among ecologically-minded Catholic intellectuals in Lyon, France, it shows how grassroots efforts to “Care for Our Common Home” prompt profound personal re-examinations, and yet prioritize pragmatic efficacy over pious conviction. I situate my discussion of “political theologies” in the aftermath of the publication by Pope Francis of Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home (2015): an encyclical letter calling on the global Catholic Church to develop solutions to climate change and worldwide inequality. Spurred to contribute to the formation and maintenance of a good world, my interlocutors’ prefigurative efforts to become good ecological Catholics cross-cut their prior modes of engagement with secular politics, but also longstanding imaginaries of “lapsed” and “practicing” Catholicism: a spectrum commonly predicated on ritual attendance, now re-indexed toward ecological praxis. Attempting to promote Catholic environmentalism efficaciously to the widest possible audience, my interlocutors negotiate an uneasy middle-ground between conservative pious Catholics and secular green radicals by presenting it as a “world-oriented” religious praxis: self-formation not for the sake of the (pious) self, but for the sake of the world. This paper therefore suggests that a comparative anthropological analysis of articulations between religious and political ethics must attend flexibly to idiosyncratic teleological encompassments – such as, here, the subsumption of personal teloi into a desired Common Good.

Ori Mautner (Cambridge): Sanctifying the profane: Buddhist-derived meditation and the ethics and politics of redemption among orthodox Israeli Jews

Several anthropologists have recently called for integrating the anthropology of ethics and that of politics. In this paper, I suggest that one worthwhile way of doing so is examining how interlocutors in the field link self-cultivation to political action. By these terms I mean the work that people conduct in order to become certain kinds of subjects, and their attempts either to transform or maintain their society, community or state. I illustrate this point by discussing how orthodox-Jewish Israeli practitioners of Buddhist-derived meditation relate self-cultivation to political action. Such people use Buddhist practices for repairing one’s psyche (nefesh)—the lowest level of one’s interiority, connected to the physical body. And rectifying oneself in this way, they believe, is a prerequisite for accessing the more advanced inner capability of the soul (neshamah), and thereby arriving at intimacy with God. But orthodox meditators’ action that contributes to the individual’s spiritual improvement is understood to take place following earlier Jewish activity aimed at facilitating the Jewish people’s redemption. Specifically, orthodox meditators take personal salvation through meditation to rely on the state of Israel’s political, economic and military success, with Israel’s mundane wellbeing being a prerequisite for the spiritual redemption of individual Jews (and in turn, of the entire world). Central to this ethical-political project, then, is a Jewish theological logic in which strengthening lower and mundane levels (both the psyche and the state) is a prerequisite for making full use of higher levels (the soul’s ability to encounter God, the world’s salvation).

Abstracts

Henni Alava (Jyväskylä): Embeddedness: a political anthropology of Christianity in northern Uganda

Since their introduction by Italian and British missionaries in the early 1900s, the Catholic and Anglican Churches have played notable roles in the social development and political dynamics of the Acholi region of Uganda. Church provision of services and public leadership became particularly pronounced during the northern Ugandan war (1986-2006). This paper illustrates the ‘political anthropology of Christianity’ that has emerged from tacking, since 2012, between ethnographic fieldwork at a Catholic and an Anglican parish in eastern Acholi, and a variety of readings illuminating the nature of politics and Christianity from these standpoints. Engaging with anthropological debates about hope, suffering and the good; narrative and utopian studies; and African political theology, I suggest that to understand the political role of churches and the influence of Christianity on politics, it is necessary to re-think the ‘and’ in ‘Christianity and politics’. The means I offer for this task is the notion of ‘embeddedness’: Christianity – and churches as its institutionalised forms – is not separate from the social reality it has sought and seeks to transform. Rather, churches are socially, politically, materially, and cosmologically embedded, whereby the narratives they promote, both in public and in their members’ lives, are likewise embedded. Taking this idea of embedded political narratives as its starting point, the paper outlines how mainline churches’ narratives of peace have emerged; how they have been enacted by institutions and in the lives of communities and individuals; and how they have reached their limits, amid the afterlives of war in Acholi.

Connie Gagliardi (Toronto): The Christian Icon’s “TheoPolitics” of Aesthetics and the Palestinian Iconographer's Craft

Christian icons are theological, aesthetic material images that bear liturgical potential. They are ignited in the oscillating space between their positive, cataphatic power, as they irrupt in time and space; and their negative, apophatic power, ignited by divine withdrawal and the revelation of mystery. Icons are thus at once anthropological and ethical for the Christian beholder who gazes upon them. They bear a political project that is fundamentally about salvation and redemption. This paper considers the icon and its “politics of aesthetics” from the seams of Empire and Crusade, as they are crafted by contemporary Palestinian Christian iconographers of Bethlehem and Jerusalem. For the Palestinian iconographer, who crafts icons for the icon program of a Jerusalem church, he is tasked with bringing about the anthropological and ethical image, igniting its political project for the Palestinian Christian ecclesia. The stakes of such a project are high, as this paper will demonstrate ethnographically and visually. The institutional Church has long played a key role in “reconfiguring regimes of the senses through specific forms of power, labour and life” (McAllister & Napolitano 2020). But the icon bears the theopolitical potential to escape all signification, convention, and appropriation. The Palestinian iconographer is thus a conduit for a greater ethical and political project that is beyond any temporal and earthly design.

Nicholas William Howe Bukowski (Toronto): Offside and Out of Sight: Soccer, Marginality and the Spatiality of Evangelical Christian Political Formations

This paper addresses the question: what directions do the politics and political formations of evangelical Christianity take if we start from the margins, from outside of marked religious practice? Specifically, this paper is interested in the role of soccer in the development of political formations within an evangelical Christian church, North Shore Alliance, in North Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada who play in a Christian soccer league in Greater Vancouver. The soccer field, as a space of “raw emotion” with a particular intensity and medium for the expression of their “heart”, becomes a site for the establishment of close bonds between players rooted in a greater project of relational “deep community”. In doing so, the soccer field becomes a site for the literal playing out of a political vision of evangelical relationality. Importantly, these immersive relational bonds ideally fold back into the main body of the church as part of a greater redistributive project rooted in a desire for greater inter-connection and inter-dependence between church members. Starting with the church soccer team, as at the margins of the geography and landscape of this particular church in North Vancouver, leads to a different political direction that contrasts with the more standard individualistic and conservative assumptions about the politics of evangelical Christianity. This leads to further questions: how do different spaces afford and condition different political possibilities within evangelical Christianity? How do questions of the markedness of religious practice contribute to assumptions about evangelical politics and more broadly, how evangelical Christianity is constructed as a “religion”?

Pamela Sari (Purdue): "High-Level Politics": Gospel of the Kingdom Church in Central Java, Indonesia

This paper is based on an ethnographic study of the Gospel of the Kingdom Church, a Charismatic Mennonite Christian congregation in Central Java, Indonesia. The paper follows the church’s 25-year history and growth from 25 members in 1991 to more than 15,000 members in 2016 - a history marked by redefinition of the church’s transnational religious networks. Through consistent theological exploration and practices of what church leaders define as “high-level politics,” Gospel of the Kingdom church sustains their transnational networks with both predominanty-White Evangelical partner organizations and Indonesian immigrant churches in the United States. Each partnership allows Gospel church to curate approaches in negotiating their political and religious contributions in the context of local struggles against poverty and religious intolerance in a predominantly Muslim community.

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

Panel abstract

“The ethical turn” in anthropology of religion has aimed to overcome the limits of deterministic critiques of political power and socioeconomic mappings and over simplistic lenses of functionality and causality by paying attention to the authoritative ethico-legal normative discourses as well as the spiritual and moral dimensions of being a religious subject (Asad, Mahmood 2005; Hirschkind 2006; Bowen 1993, 2003; Messick 1993; Lambek 1992; Peletz 2002; Soares 2005). However, one of the shortcomings of this literature has been the overemphasis on the totalizing effects of religious normative discourses at the expense of overlapping and/or contradicting value pluralism of the life-worlds in any given society. In considering case studies from Indonesia, Turkey, Vietnam, and Afghanistan, we seek to understand the reconfiguring of piety – neither as simply reduced to a geopolitical strategy, nor as religion cloistered in a separate sphere of society—but as a cultivation of ethical subjectivity that is inseparable from the politics of the broader social forces such as state, market, religious institutions, civil society, kinship, education, and professional life. As living traditions, religious discourses, practices, and institutions are fluid, historically situated, and deeply embedded in various global and local social imaginaries, political discourses, and cultural values that are further filtered through the intersecting fields of ethnicity, gender, and class. As Robert Hefner puts it, “ethical meaning emerges from ‘diverse and often far-flung materials’ linked in ongoing and multi-sited ‘entanglements’ (Lempert 2013, 373; cf. Simon 2009; Zigon 2014, 753)” (Hefner 2016, 5). This panel considers sites where politics and ethics become entangled: in the linkages between national and ethnic identity; in mulling possibilities for community continuity in a conflict zone; in interpersonal interactions undertaken in the shadows of perceived religious borders; and in the private spaces of a home within the context of moral emulation. In taking up case studies in a variety of cultural contexts and across different scales, we seek to gain an understanding of the ways in which ethical projects re-inscribe religious and political realities.

Feyza Burak-Adli (Northwestern) The Sufi Ethics of Neoliberal Aesthetics: Female Religious Authority, Gender, and Class in Turkey

Rifaiyye is an upper middle-class Turkish Sufi order led by an unveiled female Sufi master named Cemalnur Sargut. The Rifai tradition requires cultivating a certain kind of Muslim selfhood through “spiritual exercises” (Hadot 1995; Mahmood 2005; Hirschkind 2006). However, the forms of practices and the means of self-formation differ from most mainstream Islamic traditions. One of the differences is the centrality of, not the textual sources, but moral exemplars as the main resource of Islamic piety.

The Rifai masters imagine Sufism as an “art of living” (Hadot 1995) aimed at developing greater capacities to see, hear, and love God in the fluid context of everyday life. As such, Rifai practices are not only historically and socio-politically situated, but also entangled in the web of gendered social relations within the upper middle-class habitus. This paper will demonstrate the intersections of gender, class, and religious ethics in shaping Rifai moral selfhood through one of the unique ways in which Shaykha Cemalnur trains her students as a female religious authority: namely, by decorating their luxury houses. Drawing on long-term fieldwork research, I will explore the religious implications of her creative and aesthetic interventions into her followers’ private spheres as part of their spiritual training.

Annika Schmeding (Harvard): Patterns of Evasion – The Religio-Ethical implications of Sufi Survival strategies during times of War and Insecurity

When everyday life is characterized over a prolonged period of time by war and insecurity, daily decision making concerning one’s religious community are also shaped by ethical considerations in how to respond to uncertainty, insecurity and targeted violence. What is the mid-to-longer term impact of intensified violence, migration and war-time cooperation on Islamic practices and Muslim communities such as Sufis in Afghanistan? How do they assess the impact of the larger national politics onto their own communities of believers and the ways war-time decision making structured and reconstituted their group?

In this talk I focus on the unlikely cooperation between a mystic Sufi community from one of the oldest khanaqahs in Kabul, Afghanistan, with a low-level religious cleric (mullah) in order to preserve their Sufi lodge and shield their community. Based on 22-months of ethnographic in-country field research and oral community histories, the talk reflects the religio-ethical implications of socially navigating terrains of war (Vigh, 2007; Montgomery 2016). Combining insights from research in conflicts and authoritarian states with the anthropology of Islam and ethics, the talk offers insights into the ethical impact of survival strategies of marginal religious groups.

Dat Manh Nguyen (NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies): Untethering Vietnamese Buddhism: Anti-China Sentiments and the Reconfiguration of Buddhist Subjectivity in Late-Socialist Vietnam

Since the late 2000s, there has been a rise in anti-China sentiments across Vietnam, manifesting in various public protests (Vu 2014; Kerkvliet 2019). In conjunction with public debates about Vietnamese sovereignty, heightened anti-China sentiments have raised important questions about Vietnamese cultural identity. Among many Buddhist communities in Vietnam, these questions have resulted in endeavors to carve out a “Vietnamese” Buddhism that maintains critical distance from Chinese Buddhism and religious traditions. The Three-Teaching formulation (tam giáo) of Confucianism-Daoism-Buddhism, traditionally revered in many East Asian societies, has recently come under scrutiny by many Vietnamese Buddhists.

In this paper, I explore the linkages between ethics and national/ethnic identity by examining recent efforts by urban Buddhist institutions to formulate a distinct Vietnamese Buddhism. Drawing on twenty months of ethnographic research on lay Buddhist educational programs in Ho Chi Minh City, the paper explores how anti-China sentiments are embedded in and reinforced by new projects to reconfigure Buddhist subjectivity and community. I argue that the recent endeavors of urban Buddhist institutions to transform Vietnamese Buddhism need to be understood in relation to not only shifting geopolitics, but also changing conceptions of religious piety in late-socialist Vietnam.

Emily Hertzman (NUS): ‘Unity in Diversity’: Moral and Political Platforms for Building Inter-Ethnic Affinity

To the anthropology of ethics this paper provides an empirical case study of the ways that different aspects of people life worlds including their political engagements, public religious worship, the negotiation of individual and group subjectivities are mutually constituted in dynamic inter-ethnic contexts. Bhinneka Tunggal Ika, commonly translated as ‘Unity in Diversity’ is the Indonesian motto and the first of five principles enshrined in the national ideology (Pancasila), which provides a blueprint for ideal social and political harmony in the mulit-ethnic, -lingual and -religious nation. Amongst this diversity, Chinese Indonesians occupy a unique position which affords them both historic and contemporary forms of privilege and exclusion based on real and imagined foreign origins and loyalties, colonial racial categories, and entrepreneurial minority status. Having faced systematic discrimination under the assimilationist laws enacted during the Suharto regime (1968-1998), Chinese Indonesians, over the past two decades, have been experiencing a major cultural reawakening. This period is marked by the reemergence and rapid proliferation of Chinese schools, Chinese language press, associations, politicians and political parties and the reemergence of Chinese religious life into a freer public sphere, not to mention the changing subjectivities produced by a sudden shift from cultural repression, political neutralization, scapegoating and stereotyping to measurably increased cultural freedom and social inclusion.

In this paper, I focus on the double move of the reentry of Chinese Indonesians into both politics and into public religious life, arguing that while the entry into politics engendered local competition with new interethnic dimensions, the public displays of piety and exuberant religiosity among Chinese religion practitioners resonates with the religiosity of others, complies with the need for religiosity outlined in the national ideology, and thus becomes an area of social life in which systems of morality, while based in different religious traditions, become a platform to create affinities across ethnic boundaries.

Erica M. Larson (NUS): Religious “Exchange” among Indonesian University Students: Borders as Sites of Ethical and Political Entanglement

This paper considers how inter-religious interactions become sites of ethical and political entanglement through an examination of inter-religious dialogue initiatives among Indonesian university students in the majority-Protestant province of North Sulawesi. The province, which has a national reputation for its commitment to religious harmony, also promotes a strong identity as a Christian place, with some groups promoting an exclusivist normative frame projecting Muslims as outsiders and ethnic Minahasan Christians as insiders whose presence guarantees peace. Considering these religious “borders,” seemingly fortified by political discourse, I focus on both the approach of the program and the experience of individual Christian and Muslim participants in their attempts to understand religious others participating in a “religious exchange program” that brings together Protestant, Catholic , and Muslim university students for inter-religious dialogue. While an emerging anthropology of ethics has tended to focus on the ways in which individuals deepen their own piety within a particular religious tradition (Mahmood 2006; Hirschkind 2006; Simon 2014; Kloos 2018), this analysis focuses on how individuals seek to engage one another across religious traditions and forge an ethical framework for living together in difference. In this sense, the inter-religious initiative can be understood as a pedagogical project of “ethics across borders” (Mair and Evans 2015), attempting to build up a normative expectation of religious coexistence through shared experience rather than imposing a singular framework for approaching religious difference.

Panel abstract

Until the last decade, Orthodox Christianity has been viewed through the lens of alterity in the social sciences. Thus, we are still reckoning with the lack of scholarship on how Orthodox life worlds are created, (inter)connected, sustained, and remapped, between local and global contexts. Orthodox Christian lifeworlds, from homelands to diasporas, are enmeshed in broader discussions on the role of religion in 21st century public life. This panel examines the material, social, and political nature of the faith as it relates to transnational alliances, geopolitical predicaments, power dynamics (whether they be national, institutional, and/or imperial), as well as everyday lived experiences that commingle with these larger scales. Elena Kravchenko’s paper explores the intersection of Orthodoxy and race in the context of African American veneration and prayers of intercession to the Theotokos in light of racial injustice. In the context of Palestine, Clayton Goodgame examines Orthodoxy under Israeli occupation, through analysis of institutional and local strategies of resistance. Carolyn Ramzy’s paper on Coptic Orthodox music explores how colonial powers and imperial formations continue to shape how Copts between homeland and diaspora engage their musical heritage. The final two papers, from Christopher Sheklian and Jacob Lassin investigate Russia’s geopolitical power. Sheklian demonstrates how the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan in Artsakh exhibits the fragile limit of Orthodox Christian solidarity, while Lassin explores how the Moscow Patriarchate imagines Orthodox solidarity online, molding Russian Orthodox believers into a decidedly conservative worldview. The panel will richly explore these diverse postcolonial and imperial contexts of Orthodox Christian power and politics.

Elena Kravchenko (Washington U): African American Engagements with the Theotokos: Cultivating Religious and Political Commitments through Orthodox Practice

This paper is an ethnographic case study that describes how African American practitioners of Orthodoxy pray to, tell stories about, and produce and venerate icons of the Theotokos (The Mother of God). I argue that by visualizing the violence against Black people in the iconographic representations of the Theotokos, by telling stories about Theotokos’ intervention during a lynching, and by bringing the icons of the Theotokos to the Black Lives Matter protests, the practitioners follow the well-established Orthodox tradition of requesting the support of the holy Mother of God in the matters of everyday life. Like so many other Orthodox Christians – who have and continue to pray to the Theotokos to heal their diseases and injuries, to keep them safe during travel, and to protect them from various injustices – with the help of icons, narratives, and processions, African Americans request Theotokos’ aid in and draw attention to the issues directly affecting their lives. These practices help the practitioners to cultivate both religious and political identities because these practices become appealing to African American Christians on theological basis and as an avenue for challenging hierarchical ideas of race in America. Utilizing Judith Weisenfeld’s analytical term “religio-racial” identities, I conclude that this case study helps scholars to move away from the analytical models which either reduce religion to something else – race and politics – or completely ignore how race and politics affect religion, and towards the models that position religion, race, and politics, as interconnected and co-constituted.

Carolyn Ramzy (Carleton): Decolonizing Coptic (Music) Studies

In this paper, I consider the rising ambivalences of situating Coptic (music) studies within their lived encounters of Western colonialism and continued cultural imperialism. In many ways, Coptic (music) studies are the direct result of colonial encounters, as Western scholars categorized, transcribed, and studied Copts as colonial subjects. In turned, Copts have depended on such scholarship to strategized their subalterned status as the modern and singing “sons of the Pharaohs” (Leeder 1916), effectively distancing themselves and their music culture from Muslim Egyptians. Yet, to champion Coptic (music) studies without examining their colonialist roots may only serve to reinforce the imperial genealogies that started the study of Coptic (music) culture as a discipline. More importantly, to dismiss ongoing experiences of coloniality, both in Egypt and in Copts’ new North American homelands further exacerbate the gendered and classed exclusions of non-canonical voices, in this case, Coptic women’s voices in liturgical settings. Only by situating Coptic music scholarship and contemporary music culture within these larger contexts can we truly reckon with how European powers, extractive (scholarly) wealth, and Eurocentric imperial structures continue to shape the ways in which Copts engage with their rich musical heritage, either as pious believers or as scholars both from within and outside of the community.

Christopher Sheklian (Radboud): The Limits of Orthodox Christian Solidarity in Transcaucasia

In November 2020, after two months of a devasting war fought over the unrecognized Republic of Artsakh, an ethnically Armenian enclave within the internationally recognized territory of the Republic of Azerbaijan, Nikol Pashinyan, the Prime Minister of the Republic of Armenia, accepted a ceasefire brokered by President Vladmir Putin of Russia. Early in the war, some Armenians expected Russia to come to the aid of Artsakh, given their joint membership in the Collective Security Treaty Organization—Russia’s post-Soviet answer to NATO. Russia, on the other hand, noted that as long as the fighting remained in the unrecognized Republic of Artsakh, there were technically no treaty obligations. The ceasefire ceded huge amounts of territory to Azerbaijan, with the remaining portions of Artsakh under the protection of Russian peacekeeping forces. This paper interrogates how the war in Artsakh (also called Nagorno-Karabakh) has revealed the limits of a presumed Christian, and specifically Orthodox solidarity. While the Armenian Apostolic Church and other conservative elements of Armenian society have explicitly adopted the positions on “traditional values” promoted worldwide by the Russian Orthodox Church (Stoeckl 2016) and there has been long been a subset of Armenians who believe that Christian ties would lead to Russian protection for Armenia, the war in Artsakh demonstrated that other geopolitical priorities clearly take precedence for Russia. If Russia was willing to use the “soft power” of Orthodox solidarity to bind Armenia to its post-imperial projects, the war in Artsakh demonstrates the fragile limit of that solidarity.

Jacob Lassin (Arizona State): Elitsy.ru, a Russian Orthodox Social Media Network, as Virtual Hub of an Online Religious Conservative Community

As social networks and media have become more and more significant facets of everyday life across the globe, the Russian Orthodox Church searched for ways to engage with this popular medium. Their response was the creation of a dedicated social networking site, Elitsy.ru, the first social media network for Orthodox Christians. Along with the creation of this site which allows for connecting with friends, sharing articles, videos, and other content, and joining groups devoted to certain interests, the site is also home to a dedicated news outlet, ElitsyMedia. In this presentation, I will investigate the content of ElitsyMedia to understand how the Moscow Patriarchate uses social media to build an online community of Russian Orthodox believers with a decidedly conservative worldview. Through this research, I outline the discourse that ElitsyMedia generates through its online content and how this message is interpreted and disseminated by users of the social network. I find that the materials published on ElitsyMedia echo some of the most stridently right-wing positions present in contemporary Russian political rhetoric, making the content on ElitsyMedia some of the most directly political material that the Patriarchate publishes. I contend that, through ElitsyMedia, the Russian Orthodox Church is making a concentrated effort to create a politically active, conservative public. The curation of online material and the creation of a dedicated space for these believers to meet, learn, and interact, the Church is consciously creating a social media “echo chamber” whose importance and potential for political action is only intensifying in the era of the pandemic.

Clayton Goodgame (LSE): The Politics of Form

The Orthodox tradition holds a unique position in the history of Palestinian nationalism. In the 19th century, the Arab Orthodox renaissance (al-nahda al-Urthudhuksiyya al-ʿArabiyya) played a major role in the spread of Pan-Arab nationalism and the Palestinian national movement. Satiʿ al-Husri, a prominent Arab nationalist writer, for example called the nationalization of the Syrian Orthodox Church “the first real victory for Arab nationalism”. Later, Orthodox Christians helped to galvanize the national movement in Palestine, first in relation to their own Church, which was (and still is) controlled by a Greek monastic hierarchy, and then in relation to the British Mandate. Orthodox Palestinians have since been a significant part of most major left-wing parties in Israel and Palestine, the PLO, and the grassroots organizing of the First Intifada. The other Church traditions, by contrast, have been all but absent in national-level politics. The Palestinians who make up their membership are not demographically different from the Orthodox, and unlike the Orthodox, many of them even have Palestinian Church hierarchies. And yet, for some reason, they remain removed from direct political activity. This paper seeks to examine the political activism of Orthodox nationalists alongside the local politics of a single Palestinian parish in order to better understand the relationship between Orthodox religious experience and Orthodox politics. Drawing on the work of Khaled Furani on the political forms of Palestinian poetry, the paper seeks to identify the linkages between the forms of Orthodox prayer and ritual on the one hand, and the kinds of publicness and political action they hep to generate on the other.

Panel abstract

Drawing on the potential of joy to transform or reinscribe social orders, panelists think through the dynamics of joy being publicized, distorted, concealed, the ways in which people categorize and choreograph experiences of joy, and joy’s affective, sensory, bodily, and institutional dimensions. Panelists address the everyday politics, manifestations, and potential risks of joy—in Washington D.C.'s Museum of the Bible and among its designers in California, in Romani neighborhoods and alongside American missionaries in Bulgaria, within communities of Brazilian migrants in Washington D.C., and in relation to anti-Blackness and systemic racial injustice. By attending to both the potentialities and limits of joy, panelists explore joy as political, intimate, entertaining, public, social, distortable, indeterminate, and transformative.

Candace Jordan (Princeton): Joy Comes In the Mo(u)rning: The Politics of Joy and the Problem of Anti-Blackness

In a national climate reckoning with relationships deformed by racial injustice and a pandemic that exacerbates gender, racial, and economic inequities, resentment and anger flourish. Demonstrated anger picks out these violations toward the end of disrupting routine perceptual and epistemic practices (such as ignorance) and better calibrating others’ responses to injustice. While anger and righteous indignation are valuable affective responses to injustice, crucially retrieved in past and present African American freedom struggles, joy has served a similar epistemic and evaluative function. Joy articulated against the backdrop of black suffering and death is an articulation of freedom and hope, advancing normative claims about personal dignity. This paper explores the potential of joy, when publicized, to transform social relationships deformed by racial injustice. This paper argues that joy articulates social standing and explores how its idiosyncratic expression can generate responsibilities, entitlements, and duties for others (and in what those responsibilities consist). This paper addresses the following concerns. Joy can be misdirected and blind us to injustice. What resources can mediate this concern? Who or what adjudicates among competing claims to epistemic authority concerning the just relationships to which joy can point (joy’s referent)? What are the potential risks to racially marginalized communities of publicizing joy? What advantage—morally, politically---might joy have over cool, targeted anger or fiery rage when the injustices it responds to are horrific and durable? Feminist and critical race theories, in conversation with religious ethics and social criticism, are fruitful sites of ethical inquiry that enrich this work.

Elana Resnick (UCSB): Jesus is Always Welcome at My Party: Holy Laughter and Experiences of Joy in Bulgaria

This paper explores the relationship between laughter, the state, and multiple frameworks of joy in Bulgaria. Many Roma in Bulgaria have experienced postsocialism as a spiritual awakening. A large percentage of Bulgarian Roma now attend Evangelical Pentecostal churches, funded in large part by American donors. I focus on various manifestations of joy in cross-cultural settings: American charismatic evangelicals preaching, touring, and spreading Holy Laughter among Romani groups in Romania, Bulgaria, and Turkey. I address Holy Laughter as part of a transnational charismatic evangelical church movement through which I explore manifestations of the body, emotion, the Holy Spirit, and phenomenological experiences of religious “freedom.” I explore the missionary project from my different perspectives—American participant-observer, Bulgarian speaker, an anthropologist working and living in Romani neighborhoods. With these multiple perspectives, I analyze the missionary project as a feedback loop that juxtaposes postsocialist “free” public manifestations of joy with a joyless, socialist past. American missionaries catalyze this tension in ways that they imagine will attract Romani congregants while at the same time appeal to the interests of international Christian mission participants.

Johanna Richlin (Oregon): No Longer Stuck: Evangelical Framings of Joy among Migrants in the United States

This paper explores how undocumented migrants in the United States enacted joy through evangelical religious practice and belonging. Drawn from extensive fieldwork conducted among Brazilian migrants living in Greater Washington D.C., I consider how evangelical religious experience across denominations mitigated migrant distress, and enabled migrants to imagine lives beyond suffering, constraint, and marginalization. The paper progresses in three parts. First, I discuss one of the most common expressions of constraint migrants articulated—that of “feeling stuck.” Alluding to exploitative work, family separation, and living undocumented, migrants expressed feeling paralyzed. Second, I describe how evangelical religiosity transformed this experience by imbuing migrants with an individual and collective feeling of potentiality, the ability to impact their environment by partnering with God. Such potentiality, I offer, generated joy among believers. Third, I consider how migrants across denominations, including Evangelical, Catholic, and Spiritist adherents, mobilized evangelical practices to repudiate “stuckness” and enact joy. Like their Evangelical counterparts, Catholic and Spiritist migrants also asserted novel religious identities in the U.S. defined by intimate encounters with God, sensorial religious experiences, and dense religious sociality, leading to what I call the evangelization of religious experience among migrants. This essay invokes writings on potentiality (Mattingly 2010; Taussig, Hoeyer, and Helmreich 2013), hope (Guyer 2007; Stewart 2007; Ahmed 2010), and intimacy (Bielo 2009; Luhrmann 2004; 2012).

James Bielo (Miami U): The End(s) of Joy: Notes on the Indeterminacy of Choreographed Affect

What are the public uses of joy? This paper asks this question of a museum exhibit: created by a secular experiential design firm, hosted by an evangelical-oriented museum. Washington, D.C.’s Museum of the Bible opened to the public in November 2017 and welcomed two million visitors in its first two years. Largely initiated and funded by conservative evangelicals, the creative labor behind the museum’s permanent exhibitions was completed largely by professional design firms with no investment in Religious Right projects. One of the museum’s most popular, and most celebrated, exhibits is The Hebrew Bible Experience, created by Burbank, California-based BRC Imagination Arts. Drawing on research with the BRC creative team and fieldwork at the museum, this paper considers the multiple ways in which joy is mobilized in the nested contexts of the exhibit space, the museum as a site of religious publicity, and a broader cultural landscape in which religion and entertainment are entangled. In this analysis, the paper grapples with a central tension: the choreographed experience of joy is an organizing affective ambition of BRC’s design work, the experiential industry more broadly, and the museums’ cultural and political ambitions.

Panel abstract

Both religion and politics experience unexpected and unpredictable events that disrupt the order of things. Studies of Christianity have emphasized the importance of theorising the “break with the past” (as B. Meyer, M. Engelke and J. Robbins have done), but what can we learn from those experiences when they conflate the religious and political experiences and events? What kind of connections are possible and where does that leaves us? How different ethical subject-formations respond to unexpected and unpredictable events? And how people respond ethically to those situations? Religion in Latin America is hardly dissociated from politics. What has been missing is a proper perception of the entanglement of religious ethics with the several levels in which politics can be enacted. Hence, this panel takes a fresh look at the confluence of religion and politics by focusing on the effects of disruptive events and their temporalities, allowing a discussion that moves from religious ethics to politics and back. Tapping on the subject of miracles and revolutions, glory and decay of public religious and political figures, and how the moral struggles in the everyday life of believers move them into political action, the intention is not only to bring Latin America and Brazil in particular into the debate of religious ethics but also to expand this discussion theoretically from a specific national case.

Eduardo Dullo (Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul): On Miracles and Revolutions: theopolitics as chronopolitics

The paper explores Carl Schmitt’s argument that political concepts are secularized, i.e. that it is possible to find a correspondence with (Christian) religious concepts. In this particular case, I aim at the suggested correspondence between miracle (and other elements of surprise, such as dreams, prophecies, and revelations) and exception (as in revolutions, coup d’Etat, and uprisings), highlighting their temporality (unpredictability and unexpectedness) and their externality to the social frames of explanation of events. By focusing on political events in Brazil (since 2013) and their “radical unpredictability”, this papers argues that it is necessary to review the accepted secular boundaries of what we mean by “religion" as an object of inquiry and to push discussions of theopolitics into a proper chronopolitics if we are to advance on discussions of multiple secularities or of a plurality of secular ontologies.

Carly Machado (Universidade Federal Rural do Rio de Janeiro): Glory, decay and torment as forms of political and religious experience

In contexts of profound political tension, there are recurring personal trajectories inaugurated by moments of glory, but which, later on, are marked by disruptive events such as scandals, decadence and torment. Brazilian political scene has for several years collected several cases like these. Particularly, cases of glory, scandal, decadence and torment of religious actors in the political arena have a particular potential to bring to the analysis important aspects of the relationship between religion, politics, ethics and morals in Brazilian public scene. This paper aims to analyze the case of Pastora Flordelis, her pentecostal ministry followed by her political ascension, the scandal that affects her life and career, and the direction of her ordeal, with wide and massive repercussions in the public sphere in Brazil. The focus of this analysis is on the discussion between religion, ethics and political action, taking as a central point of the analysis the media dimension of the scandal, and the aesthetics of the policy mobilized in this case.

Cleonardo de Barros Maurício Junior (Universidade Federal de Pernambuco): Breaking with the nonpolitical past? How young charismatic Christians are dealing with the new moral obligation of taking political stances in their everyday lives

Clashes pitting leaders of pentecostalchurches or parliamentarians linked to these churches against social movementsthat demand sexual and reproductive rights have been recurrent in thecontemporary Brazilian political landscape. One of the most vocal opponents of LGBT and feminist demands is the televangelist and pastor of a megachurch, Silas Malafaia who in addition to leading the fight against what he calls "moral trash" at the national level has been urging evangelicals to take a stand against liberal ideas. Insisting that believers should not shut up, since they are entitled to speaking freely, he attempts to link conservative political activism to the ideal pentecostal moral person.

Considering this scenario as a moral breakdown, how have ordinary believers reacted to this exhortation? Taking into account that a new moral code has been impinged on believers, pushing them on talking politics in their everyday lives, how are they ethically committing and/or negotiating over this new demand? Drawing on my fieldwork among the youth of Malafaia’s megachurch, I intend to show how they have faced this challenge by taking a stand on issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage at their universities. My aim is also to shed light on how these young Christians attend this demand fashioning themselves in the intersection among ethics, politics and religion, which lead them to even criticize the public performance of their leaders without necessarily failing to subscribe to the conservative ideals shared with them.

Abstracts

Esra Tunc (UCSB): Investing Capital, Calculating Justice, and Performing Ethical Economics in American Muslim Contexts

This paper looks at the ways in which forms of justice and ethics are being enacted through Muslim investment in the United States. To do so, it relies on archival documents, interviews with the members of Islamic investment companies and digital materials about Islamic investment mainly by these companies in American Muslim contexts. It focuses on the relationship between an Islamic investment company—whose origin goes back to 1973 when immigrant Muslim professionals and Black Muslims established the first two distinct Muslim investment-based companies in the United States—and a newly established Muslim private equity company. The paper argues that the investment of capital in American Muslim contexts has yet to encounter socioeconomic and racial injustices. By interpolating questions of permissibility (halal) and the morality of the market, this paper shows how a particular form of ethical economic becoming takes shape, which my interlocutors associate with sustainability, responsibility, and impact. This purification of wealth and calculations of obligatory Muslim giving (zakat) under the conditions of finance capitalism shows how the investment of capital is being promoted for economic freedom and security while complicating questions of ethics and justice.

Kyoim Yun (Kansas): Temple-Stay in South Korea: A Wellness Journey in a Happiness Crisis

This paper examines Temple-Stay, a short-term retreat program held for lay persons at Buddhist monasteries, in the context of the prevailing social malaise and happiness discourse in South Korea. It was initially designed by the Chogye Order, the predominant sect of Korean Buddhism, and the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, to engage foreign visitors during the 2002 World Cup, but proved to be unexpectedly popular with local residents. In a society, where the percentage of the population seeking professional attention for mental health issues remains relatively low, many Koreans have been drawn to this government-subsidized retreat. In fact, Temple-Stay has recently been advertised as “a journey for my happiness” and as a scientifically proven stress reliever. The instrumental use of Buddhist teachings and practices has been criticized by some scholars for misrepresenting the true nature of Buddhism or for appropriating it for profit or other ulterior motivations. How should we make sense of the Buddhist establishment’s own parceling of the monastic experience as a healing commodity? Based on ethnographic research and an examination of the history, marketing, and program content of Temple-Stay, this study shows that its popularity in the early twenty-first century has been due to effective marketing of the program as a healing experience and to the perceived need for such a commodity. It explores both the dangers associated with utilitarian approaches to Buddhism and the opportunities that the Chogye Order’s marketization of the program, in partnership with the Ministry, offers the Buddhist establishment and lay participants.

Kari Henquinet: Michigan Technological University): Missionary, Citizen, and Consumer: A Genealogy of Child Sponsor Ethical Self-Formation

Contemporary studies of child sponsorship programs (Bornstein 2005, McDonic 2004, O’Neill 2013, Ove 2018) emphasize processes of ethical self-formation and packaged consumer experiences of North Americans through sponsorship. Choosing to engage and believe—typically with little knowledge of programs and conditions abroad—that child sponsorship makes a difference, rescues a child, or marks a sponsor as a good person is part of the work child sponsors do as they form a desired ethical identity. Child sponsorship has been a wildly successful fundraising strategy for humanitarian and development organizations since the Cold War period, although its roots go further back to the early 20th century. In this paper, I examine the formative period of child sponsorship’s growth in popularity using the case of evangelical humanitarian giant World Vision in the 1950s and 1960s. I consider ethical self-formation (Foucault 2014, Laidlaw 2014, Mattingly 2014) through child sponsorship in the context of broader American and evangelical narratives of this period, some of which have endured in various forms to the present while others have shifted. In particular using archival sources and oral histories, I analyze ethical self-making through citizen and missionary-style engagement in US and Cold War military and foreign policy focal points of the late colonial period such as Korea, where World Vision’s child sponsorship program was born. World Vision in this period also began to use mass marketing for child sponsorship at the same time that a parallel emerging discourse of development was forming, sowing the seeds of now ubiquitous American consumer experiences like child sponsorship to address global poverty. Enduring notions of rescue, saving, race, and parenting are legible in narratives of and solicitations for child sponsors past and present. During the Cold War, however, North American evangelical child sponsors and World Vision personnel engaged in interwoven processes of ethical self-making as pseudo-missionaries, citizens, and consumers with children abroad. The former two have largely faded for World Vision child sponsors in more recent decades as opportunities for ethical self-making through humanitarian consumerism in a neoliberal landscape have grown.

Rachelle Scott (Tennessee): Ethics, Wealth, and Politics: Competing Narratives of the Dhammakāya Temple

The Dhammakāya Temple (Wat Phra Thammakai) in Pathum Thani, Thailand has emerged as one of Buddhism’s largest new religious movements over the past forty years. The Temple’s phenomenal growth has been linked to its leadership’s ability to apply traditional narratives of merit-making and ethical conduct to a distinct form of Buddhist practice perfectly suited to contemporary life. Temple media promote the ethics and piety of its monastic and lay participants as it faces decades of criticisms for its commercialism of Buddhism, financial malfeasance, and ties to the ousted Shinawatra government. This paper will explore the competing narratives of the Dhammakāya Temple as a successful ethically-oriented modern Buddhist temple and as a financially and politically corrupt new religious movement.

Abstracts

Ruslan Yusupov (Chinese University of Hong Kong): Semiotics of Unity: Chinese Islamic Symbols and the Question of History in the Xi Jinping Era China

Muslim communities in China have for centuries used qingzhen sign to mark the religious safety of their eateries and food in the wider society characterized by the cultural valorization of pork and alcohol. However, the increasing appearance of halal sign alongside qingzhen in the past two decades has recently attracted the suspicion of the current Chinese government. Equating this novel phenomenon to the worrying trend of Arabization and Saudization, it has embarked on an ambitious campaign to clamp down on the proliferation of halal and thus to recuperate the “pristine” Chinese Islam from the otherwise radical influence from abroad. Drawing on the interviews with Chinese Muslims, this paper shows, however, that this campaign loses sight of the Maoist China history during which Islam was instrumentalized to create ethnic Muslim minorities separate from the Han majority. As Islam became ethnicized, qingzhen has lost its religious credibility, the very credibility that the adoption of halal is now aimed at remedying. It then follows that by pitching Arabic signs against Chinese ones, the Chinese state is actually neglecting the period that was critical for its own formation. By looking at how Chinese Muslims enduring through the campaign historicize the claims of the government, this paper thinks about how anthropology might provide critical historical insight that is indispensable for our understanding of contemporary China.

Mikaela Chase (Johns Hopkins): Margin as Center: The Saintly Deaths of Elderly Lay Jain Women by Sallekhana

The many centuries old Jain practice of sallekhana or santhara, a total fast until death, is practiced to this day. Indeed, though no formal survey has been made, evidence suggests that there has been a rise in cases particularly of elderly lay Jain women undertaking the fast in the past 15 years, as awareness of the practice has spread with the rise of social media and the decade-long unfolding of public interest litigation accusing practitioners of committing illegal suicide. While the Supreme Court of India appears to be disinclined to ban the fast, the controversy has been attended by scrutiny of the practice within the Jain community itself, where sectarian divisions and shifting generational and gender roles create new tensions. This paper, based on 18 months of fieldwork in Jaipur and Mumbai, takes up the dual questions of religion at the margins of other domains of social life (where Jainism encounters the realm of legal discourse and ethics), and the question of marginal members of religious communities (where anxieties around the social value of older women’s lives, especially widows, play into the overrepresentation of this demographic among Jains who undertake the fast until death). I examine how elderly women are seen as being particularly vulnerable to social abandonment or pressure to undertake the practice to avoid burdening kin, but how the saintly nature of the fast and its social prestige might paradoxically mark their value, both for their families and in perpetuating the remarkable asceticism that distinguishes the Jain tradition.

Dendup Chophel (Australian National): ‘Buddhicization’ and ritualisation as indicators of development in Bongo, southwest Bhutan

Secularisation and de-ritualisation are often seen as quintessential indicators as well as conditions for progress and development in more formalized and advanced democracies where there is supposed to be a separation of the church and state. In this paper, I will present the case of Bongo, a small village in southwest Bhutan. Conventional modern developmental activities like the building of roads, schools, hospitals, market economy, etc. in Bongo have invariably been accompanied by ritualised political ceremonies, which closely mirror the deep Buddhist ethos that has been entrenched in the community by Bhutan’s Buddhist state with support from local elites. My year-long ethnographic fieldwork in this historically marginal village showed that as pervasive as the Buddhist influence is in Bongo, Buddhism itself has only been implanted into the societal fabric of the village in the last few decades. Previously, a motley mix of animistic practices categorised as ‘folk religion’ has characterised the local belief system (see Tucci, 1980 [1970]). Scholars of the Himalayan region have termed this phenomenon ‘Buddhicization’, which entrenches Buddhism often at the cost of more localised practices and generally enabled by prevalent state policies. In this view, ‘Buddhicization’ was seen as a necessary condition as well as indicator of socio-political and economic progress. This paper demonstrates that the processes of ‘development’ and ‘Buddhicization’ have been inseparably intertwined in Bongo. It argues that the acknowledgement of the inseparability of politics and religion can help us leverage people’s lived experiences and their growth aspirations for both academic and policy purposes.

Diana Hatchett (University of the South): Ethical subjects, value pluralism, and sectarian political cultures

How do religious subjects experience value pluralism in states shaped by sectarian political cultures? This paper examines connections between political projects and ethical self-formation by focusing on contests of values in a private high school in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI). At the heart of ethical life in “Kurdistan Civilizational School” (KCS) is a set of ideas informed by “liberal education” that aims to produce desirable ethical selves and citizen-subjects. Some of the school’s goals and outcomes, however, are at cross purposes with the Kurdistan Region’s state making projects: The founders of KCS envisioned the school as a corrective to entrenched sectarian political cultures said to characterize Iraq, cultures which are reproduced through an education system that separates students according to ethnoreligious identity. Instead, KCS enrolls a diverse student body and educates students according to a shared, theistic ethical code based in moral autonomy, which challenges the patrilineal conferral of ethnoreligious identity and the ethnonationalist messaging in Kurdistan’s education sector. As the conflict of values plays out in the classroom, as well as in the school’s tenuous relationship with the Kurdistani government, anxieties about maintaining civic order threaten to undermine individual or collective “freedoms.” How value pluralism is or is not achieved in the school has important implications for Kurdistani youth’s political futures, especially for youth belonging to ethnoreligious minorities living at the margins of a majority-Muslim society and state.

Panel abstract

This roundtable brings together ethnographers working at the nexus of religion, law, and politics in contemporary India. We focus on institutions—Hindu and Parsi religious and charitable endowments—in order to explore how religious and non-religious subjects engage with one another via the medium of law. How do public charitable trusts structure debates over urban religious practices? How do religious institutions become a medium through which class identity can be produced and publicized? How do competing constitutional principles—gender equality and religious autonomy, for instance—reflect and reshape constitutional principles? In considering these questions, we take seriously the ethical formations of religious subjects who are both dominant and marginal within their own communities. At the same time, we situate their perspectives within and alongside other frameworks, including liberal legality and nation-state politics, in order to better understand the connections between religious practice and other domains of social life.

Abstracts

Benjamin Hollenbach (Michigan): “Politics is a Dirty Word!” Welcoming Queer Congregants in U.S. Mainline Protestantism

Over two years of ethnographic fieldwork in three LGBTQ+-affirming Mainline Protestant churches, I encountered great tension between attacks against and defenses of LGBTQ+ inclusion in church life and ministry. An equally-present tension among congregants was whether to consider the welcoming of queer folks into progressive Christian spaces as a religious undertaking or a political act. Were parishioners who sought greater equity for queer participants following a divine call for justice, and acting in tune with their beliefs? Or, conversely, were they being “political,” setting up an opposing front to the largely anti-LGBTQ+ religious groups and clergy which enjoyed a greater national spotlight under the Trump administration? Parishioners generally viewed the presence of politics in church contexts as negative, divisive, and a generator of unsolvable problems. More than one church member referred to politics as “dirty,” soiling the otherwise-sacred processes of which they were part. This paper explores how, despite congregants defining religion and politics as two separate and opposing domains, the two categories are both inextricably linked and ubiquitous in Mainline Protestant approaches to LGBTQ+ inclusion. While parishioners consistently viewed politics as a separate domain from their religious life, the two domains always seemed to be discussed together in formal interviews and casual conversations. Many affirming Mainliners walked a fine line in arguing that making space for traditionally-marginalized groups within the Church was both a political act and a holy endeavor, rejecting the idea that acts of LGBTQ+ inclusion fell undisputedly into one domain or the other.

Cara Curtis (Emory): “We Could All Just Sort of Step Back”: Care, Frustration, and Religious Resources for Structural Change among Affluent US Mothers

In his acclaimed article calling for an “anthropology of the good,” Joel Robbins (2013) lists “care,” along with “empathy” and “the gift,” as a nascent area of anthropological exploration beyond the then-dominant lens of suffering (p. 457). Yet Robbins cites only two articles about care, and with notable exceptions (e.g. Mattingly, 2014), the intersections between care and everyday ethics have not been richly explored. Yet as feminists have long argued (e.g. Ruddick, 1989) and queer and disability scholars are lifting up anew (e.g. Spade, 2020), care is an ethical practice through and through. Moreover, as an act fully embedded in social and structural systems, it is also inescapably political. My paper draws on fieldwork with mothers’ groups at affluent mainline churches in the US South to illustrate care’s political valence and demonstrate how engagement with both care and lived religious practice can help us better understand everyday ethical life. Specifically, I show how my interlocutors’ frustrations with contemporary mothering expectations, combined with emic religious resources such as the imago Dei, may provide openings toward politically relevant reorientations of their care practice away from deep reliance on systems that reproduce inequality. Despite leaning heavily on their privilege, these women express a desire to move away from some of affluent parenting culture’s greatest excesses: to “step back,” in the words of one woman. Given the extent of both maternal frustration and structural inequality in the United States, which have only increased during COVID-19, these openings call for exploration now more than ever.

Cella Masso-Rivetti (NYU): Human Rights Responses to the McCarrick Report: Toward a Comprehensive Approach to Clergy Sexual Abuse

In this paper, I present options for paths forward for the Catholic Church in response to the clergy sexual abuse that has ravaged the Church, specifically the Church in the United States, and specifically with a focus on the trends brought to light in the recently released McCarrick Report. I present these options from a human rights standpoint and focus on adapting strategies for response to crimes against humanity including trials, truth and reconciliation commissions, reparations, and remembrance. These strategies focus on a paradigm of health and represent survivor-centered approaches, approaches that I argue are essential for the recovery of the Catholic Church from a clergy sexual abuse crisis of such systematic scope and severity that it demands response from the human rights community.

Brooke Schedneck (Rhodes College): Marginal Bodies: The Feminine Performance of Monasticism in Thai Buddhism

A video of a male Thai Buddhist monk dancing in a feminine and sexual way at his temple is debated on all the morning TV shows. A picture of two male Buddhist monks trying on high-heeled women’s shoes in Bangkok goes viral on Facebook. A popular cartoon meme shows male monks with robes tied tightly, wearing makeup, and carrying purses. These marginal bodies, known as katheoi or effeminate males, have generated considerable public discourse through their performance of femininity while in the robes. Why does femininity evoke debate, and in some cases outrage, when connected to bodies in monastic robes? Buddhist monastic bodies are a visible signification of the renunciant lifestyle. Monastic bodies, who are seen to be performing femininity, are widely perceived to be negatively attached to worldly activities like dancing, partying, looking beautiful and decorating oneself. This kind of worldliness stands in stark contrast to the ascetic renunciant ideally living in the temple. Thai lay Buddhists praise bodies and activities that conform to the ideal of this lifestyle, while criticizing those marginal bodies who display femininity. Using social media analysis, Thai news stories from 2010-present day, and Thai Buddhist understandings of gender, this presentation untangles the debate concerning katheoi monks within contemporary Thai Buddhist society. I argue that when femininity is seen as attached to worldliness, sexuality, and beauty, it is deemed incompatible with monasticism. Because of this, I investigate the rhetorical strategies deployed by these marginal figures to argue for their place in Buddhist communities as monastic members.

Panel abstract

In part due to the historical conflation of intelligence with psychometrics, most anthropologists have not seriously engaged the notion of “intelligence,” instead focusing on experience, ways of knowing, attention, and learning. However, recent interdisciplinary scholarship in the field of religious intelligences has brought dynamic inquiry into the notion of intelligence, invigorating interdisciplinary scholarship in diverse intelligences. The proposed roundtable discussion seeks to explore the notion of religious intelligences defined as the affordances gained by virtue of interaction with the divine. Together, we seek to explore two questions: First, we wish to query whether the notion of religious intelligences is a useful category for anthropologists of religion and second, we seek to explore its intersections with existing literature including indigenous scholarship, asking in what ways this conversation may already be foregrounded and/or illuminated in anthropology.