Panel abstract

The relatively rapid embrace of the legality of gay marriage in much of the secular West has transformed the religious topography of marriage and sexuality not just in what is considered legal, but also in what is understood as ethical. The advent of new forms of marriage has meant that older arguments against legal LGBTQ unions are no longer seen as acceptable, and often understood as intolerant. But at the same time, the expansion of the language of toleration has opened up new rhetorical strategies, and new tactical possibilities, both for those who question or oppose gay marriage and those who, operating under a religious remit, wish to defend these new forms of marriage or even expand. This panel will present case studies drawn from three different regions (France, the United Kingdom, and the Intermountain West of the United States) and three distinct modes of Christianity (Catholicism, Evangelical Protestantism, and Mormonism). Together, they will explore how religiously motivated actors are dealing with the challenges and opportunities associated with the ethics and politics of love after gay marriage.

Nofit Itzhak (Universitat Rovira i Virgili): Religion, Gay Marriage, and the Political Promise of Love

The public opposition to the legalization of gay marriage and adoption in France surprised many in its scope and force. While the rhetoric employed by opponents to the law did not rely on any religious arguments, the driving force behind the demonstrations was largely Catholic. In a sense, the opposition to the law gave birth to a new publicly and politically engaged Catholic activism in France, culminating among other things in the formation of La Manif Pour Tous, a movement expressly dedicated to combating any legal advancements related to LGBT rights in the country, but also internationally. Based on fieldwork with members of a Catholic charismatic community that were highly invested in opposing the law, this paper examines the interplay between the ethics and politics of love, as it unfolded in the course of Catholic activism. Specifically, I consider how the political opposition to the legalization of gay marriage is reconciled with an ethic of love that underscores the importance of an encounter with otherness, and the manners in which this very stress on alterity is used to negotiate competing definition of difference, based either in identity or in behavior. I use this discussion to consider some questions regarding the political promise of love.

Méadhbh McIvor (Oxford): "Other, Write In": Evangelical Activism and Contested Sexual Identities in English Law

The 2010s saw a sea-change in the legal recognition of LGBTQ+ persons in the UK, including the growing visibility of those who identify beyond the tripartite system of heterosexual, gay/lesbian, or bisexual. While this shift is often associated with progressive politics and the questioning of heteronormativity, non-majoritarian sexualities also include self-identifications premised upon an opposition to sexual liberalism, including being “ex-gay.” Indeed, while the UK Parliament was preparing to legislate marriage rights for same-sex couples, ex-gay activists were launching their own campaign for state recognition. Drawing on fieldwork with evangelical Christian activists in London, UK, this paper uses a court case in which the “legality” of ex-gay sexuality was contested to discuss the law’s simultaneous desire and inability to render contested identities legally legible. In seeking recognition as a sexual minority, ex-gay evangelicals reveal the inadequacy of modern law’s efforts to regulate difference as either “innate” or “chosen.” As such, this activism, which is typically analyzed in terms of evangelicalism’s commitment to heteronormativity, works to denaturalize the concept of sexual orientation(s)—including the heterosexuality ex-gay Christians pursue.

Jon Bialecki (UCSD): Queer Polygamy and Spiritual Wifery

Faithful LGBTQ Mormons face a dilemma that exceeds the widely held (but not universal) religious animus directed towards them by their co-believers. Many have heterosexual marriage partners, unions that they entered into either because they were in denial about core elements of their sexuality, or because they hoped that entering into these marriages would "cure" them. They find themselves faced with the unenviable options of either dissolving these marriages (a prospect made even more painful because these families frequently include young children) or alienating themselves from an aspect of sexuality that is often understood in American culture to be constitutive of their identity. There are some, though, that militate for a third option that has one foot in contemporary queer theory, and one foot in Mormon religious history: queer polygamy. Predicated on the idea of sacralizing non-monogamous bonds, this idea preserves familial ties while making polyamoury religiously legible. But this idea also relies on a doctrine that serves as a stressor in many Mormon families, and the object of Mormon feminist ire: Polygany, while currently not approved by the Church as an earthly practice, is understood to be a valid marital form in the post-mortal Spirit World. This paper will chart the tensions and resonances between LGBTQ Mormon religious aspiration that seeks to extend the definition of marriage and family, and a Mormon feminist desire to constrict that very same definition.

Panel abstract

In this book discussion panel we will discuss the contents and insights of our research in the recently published book "Anthropological Perspectives on the Religious Uses of Mobile Apps" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). This edited volume deploys digital ethnography in varied contexts to explore the cultural roles of mobile apps that focus on religious practice and communities, as well as those used for religious purposes (whether or not they were originally developed for that purpose). Combining analyses of local contexts with insights and methods from the global subfield of digital anthropology, the contributors of the book recognize the complex ways that in-app and on-ground worlds interact in a wide range of communities and traditions. While some of the case studies emphasize the cultural significance of use in local contexts and relationships to pre-existing knowledge networks and/or non-digital relationships of power, others explore the globalizing and democratizing influences of mobile apps as communication technologies. From Catholic confession apps to Jewish Kaddish assistance apps and Muslim halal food apps, this work shows how religious-themed mobile apps create complex sites for potential new forms of religious expression, worship, discussion, and practices.

Abstracts

Suzanne van Geuns (Toronto): Scripts, Scores, and Sexual Strategy: Algorithms and Self-Fashioning in Seduction Instructions

In a post entitled ‘What’s your cold approach algorithm?’, one seduction forum user explains his step-by-step process for determining whether to approach a woman. On another forum, a user encourages men to ‘figure out the female algorithm,’ because feeding it the ‘correct inputs’ will make women agree to sex. Seduction forums offer instructions to men who want to have sex with women. These instructions gloss hesitation on the part of women as ‘noncompliance’: a problem for men to overcome. To solve this problem – to ‘seduce’ – men should no longer give heed to their own clumsy intuition or to women’s voices. Instead, they should plan out conversational scripts and assign attractiveness scores, artificializing their own social intelligence by exchanging instinct for instruction. Seduction instructions knit together the problem-solving allure of algorithms and an explicitly normative vision for how men should be and act in the world. This confluence illuminates how users find and then employ transformative religious potentialities in seemingly secular technologies. My ethnographic account tracks references to algorithms across a broad archive of forums and blogs to ask: how does the algorithm become a religious resource for self-transformation? Focusing on algorithmic seduction, I situate computation in the anthropology of religion/secularism, and push the burgeoning subfield of ethics in AI toward a conception of ethics that includes political self-fashioning. My research shows how the aspiration toward a secular male ideal – in which sexual ‘success’ results from information and strategy – springs from an imaginary that is as religious as it is computational.

Jan Lorenz (Adam Mickiewicz University): Beyond Pragmatism and Authentication: Transcendence in Conversions to Judaism in Contemporary Poland

In anthropological scholarship “giyur,” conversion to Judaism, is typically portrayed as a transition driven by immanent concerns like legitimization for the sake of marriage, authentication of one’s identity or, in specific instances, a strategy of collective emancipation. Even in terms of its theological and jurisprudential justification within Judaism, questions of orthopraxy in worship, morality and daily conduct take precedence, whereas questions of belief or mystical experience are usually considered ancillary. Giyur in Poland is informed by the aforementioned concerns and aims, but it can neither be seen exclusively as a pragmatic and secular enterprise in the guise of a religious form, nor considered solely the enactment of theologically prescribed process of learning and communal integration. For some converts this transition is a conclusion to a quest of reorienting one’s relation to the divine or involves experiences that could be described as noetic. These drives and pursuits are nonetheless inextricably linked with wider social and religious context of contemporary Poland and the haunting chapters of its history.

Tuomas Järvenpää (Eastern Finland): Cultural Innovation in Finnish Evangelical Rap Music: An Ethnolifehistorical Account of Roni Samuel’s Music Career

“Christian rap” is one of the best-selling subgenres of Contemporary Christian Music, which is a genre that caters explicitly for evangelical Christian audiences globally. As a secular musical genre rap has often voiced counter-narratives to dominant hegemonies with the transgressive representations of underprivileged ethnic, racial and class positions. Historically, the Christian institutions have been reluctant to embrace such innovations from secular music genres leading to the general “aesthetic timidness” of evangelical popular music. The paper examines the relationship between the transgressive aesthetics of hip-hop and evangelical popular music in Finland. The paper focuses on one of the central vocalists of Finnish evangelical rap, Roni Samuel, and asks what aesthetic innovations he has made in in different stages of his musical career in the years 20011–2019. The paper situates these innovations with the wider social changes of evangelical popular music scene in Finland, which, I argue, gradually began to embrace and enforce the transgressive aesthetics of rap music as a form of evangelical outreach during the aforementioned years. Methodologically, the paper draws from the multimodal analysis of Roni Samuel’s musical work and media appearances as well as from research interviews, which the author has conducted with the music artist.

Nichole Baumer (Denver): Evangelical Beliefs Versus the Secular World: Shifting Perceptions of Self and Society in Evangelical Conversion Narratives

US American adults converting to evangelical Christianity experience a disruption between their pre-evangelical and their post-evangelical selves and social worlds. Almost immediately upon converting, these adherents find themselves in opposition to a newly discovered secular world. Their adopted evangelical worldviews inevitably cause tangible shifts in the perceptions of themselves, as well as bringing them into conflict with many aspects of their social worlds. In this paper, I analyze the narratives of six adult converts to evangelical Christianity to better understand the impact their conversions had upon their awareness of themselves and their interactions with the secular world. I address the ways that evangelical conversions lead to personality shifts and temperament changes that impact converts’ relationships with their social worlds. I also identify how an evangelical belief system brings with it specific ethical beliefs that set converts on a collision course with the non-evangelical members of their social groups. These narratives demonstrate the many ways that evangelical conversion experiences can lead to clashes with converts’ pre-evangelical social worlds.

Panel abstract

Much of the anthropology of pilgrimage has focused on the efforts of the religious subject to attain states of authentic engagement with sites. An alternative strategy has identified what are assumed to be more fundamental political, economic, or social motivations for ostensibly sacred travel. As a consequence, pilgrimage practices risk either being purified out of plausible existence or dissolved into other social formations, such as market transactions or state sovereignties. More productive work is likely to emerge from two related approaches, which are beginning to emerge in the field of pilgrimage studies. One involves a widening of ethnographic perspectives as to what counts as the appropriate field of study. This research goes far beyond shrines or even binaries of shrines and homes in assessing the institutions and practices salient not only to pilgrimage rituals, but also to e.g. pilgrimage-related infrastructures, regional-place-making, and varieties of governance. The other entails a recognition that pilgrimage practices may therefore be notable not for their ‘purity’ or ‘impurity’ of ritual behaviour, but precisely because of their ready articulations with other spheres of social action, ranging from trade, to migration, to the remaking of relations of gender and kinship. We welcome presentations relating to theoretical, methodological, and ethnographic issues raised by the themes raised above, and remain open to ensuring a maximum of dialogue among presenters on our panel. While we plan to have an overall discussant for the panel, individual presentations will only be ten minutes long, leaving ten minutes time for other panelists to comment on how a given paper speaks to their own work. In this way, we intend to build dialogue into the presentation period, as well as the subsequent question period.

Emrah Yildiz (Northwestern): Scaling Sovereignties: Subjectivation in Traffic on the way to Sayyida Zainab

My first book follows a ziyarat (saint visitation) route, from bus stations in Iran through a bazaar in Gaziantep, Turkey to the Sayyida Zainab shrine near Damascus, Syria. Known as Hajj-e Fuqara’ (the pilgrimage of the poor) in Iran, this route has shuttled Iranian pilgrims as well as contraband goods such as oil, sugar and tobacco, across the three countries since the 1979 Revolution in Iran. My work departs from the premise that Hajj-e Fuqara’ can be productively understood as a region- and subject-making route. Along Hajj-e Fuqara’, ritual emerges as a traffic built out of multiple cycles of religious, political and economic exchanges and their attendant subject positions. Once we connect pilgrims’ multiple positions to one another along the spatial and temporal trajectory formed by the pilgrimage route, we generate a processual approach to subject formation—or what I refer to as subjectivation in traffic. Such an approach, I argue, offers a generative method to examine a moving analytical object like pilgrimage. Once we reconceptualize pilgrimage itself as historical, geographical and conceptual traffic—spun by pilgrims from Iran, Antep bazaar merchants, contraband couriers and Damascene shrine heirs for over four decades—the attendant subjectivation has important implications for otherwise bracketed questions of sovereignty in the study of Islam (relegated to the putatively separate category of politics). Following pilgrimage as a traffic in subjectivation, I conclude by proposing a dynamic and scalar understanding of sovereignty, from the interpersonal to the transregional, as a part and parcel of that subjectivation.

Kholoud Al-Ajarma (Edinburgh): Hajj and Moroccan National Identity

Although the pilgrimage to Mecca takes place away from Morocco and is often seen by pilgrims as an event that unites pilgrims beyond national, social, cultural, political, and linguistic boundaries, the pilgrimage is not isolated from local social, national, and political settings. In Morocco, the pilgrimage experience plays a significant role in shaping individual’s identification with their home country and their sense of national belonging. This sense of belonging, I argue, is not exclusively shaped by the experiences of pilgrims themselves but also by nationalistic discourses of the central government and official institutions including the mosque and state media. To address this complex process of national belonging, I first analyze the speeches of king Mohammed VI addressing Moroccan pilgrims between 2014 and 2018 reflecting on how the king uses the religious occasion to address social, national, and political agendas in his speeches; secondly, I focus on how pilgrimage is portrayed in mosques and state-media coverage during the pilgrimage to influence a nationalistic discourse; and thirdly, I consider the symbolic importance of being Moroccan in Mecca, where that particular national identity itself is contested.

Jeanne Kormina (HSE University): Between Repentance and Resurrection: Historiopraxy in Processions of the Cross

This paper is based on on-going fieldwork with a group of people (historical activists) involved in debates about the authenticity of the remains of “royal martyrs” Tsar Nikolas II and his family, killed near Ekaterinburg (Russia) in 1918 and unearthed in 1991 and 2007. The paper discusses varieties of discourse of “repentance” and “resurrection” central in commemorating the regicide, and focuses on a particular Orthodox Christian form of commemoration, Processions of the Cross. Historical imagination suggests that to achieve resurrection (vozrozhdenie) of the nation, the people have to repent (pokayanie) the collective sin of regicide; this is the prerequisite for coming back to historical “normality”--that is, to continuation of the passage of time interrupted by the Soviet period.

The main Tsar Procession of the Cross has taken place every year since the beginning of the 2000s on the day of the regicide in July. It attracts thousands of local inhabitants as well as pilgrims who march 20 km from the place of the massacre in the city center to the clandestine grave of the martyrs outside the city. However, there are also other, minor Processions of the Cross, organized by religious activists to mark certain parts of the “Golgotha way”. I will focus on one such initiative. A well-educated woman with a PhD in philosophy, V. leads her Procession of the Cross every Sunday at noon, marking the last 7 km of the “Tsar way”. V. both continues a tradition established by her predecessor and spiritual teacher and responses to a calling from God. I argue that the Processions of cross form a powerful example of historiopraxy (Coleman), which converts the logics of historicism (linear history) and topological history (Charles Stewart) into religious aesthetic forms and bodily practices.

Evgenia Mesaritou (Toronto) Performing Political Subjectivities: Greek Cypriot pilgrimages to the Christian Orthodox monastery of Apostolos Andreas

Focusing on Greek Cypriot pilgrimages to the Christian Orthodox monastery of Apostolos Andreas in Turkish-occupied Karpass (Cyprus), I examine the apparently non-religious performative acts which enable and are enabled by the pilgrimage, arguing that these are even more important that the performance of devotion. Framed and affected by the ongoing division of Cyprus, these ‘non-religious’ actions, include crossing the checkpoints, showing IDs at the cross-points, and refraining from consumption. They illustrate the ethical dilemmas of Greek Cypriots who travel to the occupied areas and become an expression of their political subjectivity. At the same time, they make the journey to the monastery a politically loaded and at times painful journey of return to (a lost) place and time. Such a construction of pilgrimage challenges Euro-American understandings of Christian pilgrimage as a transformative (Ross 2011: xliii), spiritually elevating and rejuvenating journey that is associated with penance (Turner and Turner 2011[1978]: 7), expanding our view as to what counts as an appropriate field in pilgrimage studies.

Jonathan Miles-Watson (Durham): Pilgrimage, Health and Wellbeing: Ethical Dilemmas of Walking Durham’s New Saint’s Trails

Early in 2020 a set of ‘Saints Trails’, newly laid in the North East of England, were unveiled by the local Tourist Board. Four days before the official launch, a national lockdown was imposed in response to the global pandemic. This presentation will outline the ways that the lockdown restrictions both generated ethical dilemmas and opened new possibilities, involving the Tourist Board, the Church and my own entanglements (as resident, educator and anthropologist). The ‘Saints Trails’ project was always a complex attempt to reshape human behavior; the trails aimed to transform global understanding of the region, moving it from an industrially scarred landscape to a historically authentic, yet suitably ‘postmodern’, ‘open’, sacred landscape. At the same time the trails promised to generate a more prosperous and meaningful way of life for residents. The pandemic shifted attention from Durham’s famous Cathedral, as a formal pilgrimage destination, toward what Coleman (2019) has termed ‘adjacent’ areas of action. Building on Coleman’s understanding, I explore the importance of a local shift in terminology (from ‘pilgrimage’ to ‘trails’) and the consequence of this shift for wider, global, pilgrimage studies. I consider tensions between the need for connections (with self, environment and the sacred) and the imperative to restrict free movement during a pandemic. My argument points beyond our current predicament toward a lasting shift in our understanding of the way that local wayfinders and international pilgrims are brought into a common meshwork of synchronous and asynchronous relations with each other, nature and the sacred.

Abstracts

Elizabeth Bounds (Emory): Am I My Sister’s Redeemer? Ethical Subjectivity Inside A Women's Prison

For women in prison there is a constant pressure to "account for themselves," that is to perform continuously a type of responsibility shaped by discourses of blame and stigmatization. From their founding, US prisons have been institutions in which legal responsibility for a given action was institutionally performed not only through confinement and direct punishment, but also through efforts to shape certain personal characteristics or virtues. Moral models of responsibility have had a long history as part of efforts to control the poor and dispossessed. While in earlier US history, these virtues were explicitly tied to the possibility of Christian redemption, they are now connected to forms of individual behavior and institutional obedience. To suggest an alternative form of virtue, I turn to the ways incarcerated women engage and resist this responsibilization, both in how they understand themselves and also how they engage their sister prisoners. Based on ethnographic study of a theological program inside a women's prison in the southern United States, I will suggest ways women (re)create themselves as responsible ethical subjects in these theological spaces on the margins of carceral power.

Alexis Rolando Chavez (Chicago): Reflections on the Banlieues and the Anthropology of Islam

This paper is about Maghrebi and West African Muslim young men who do not adhere to religious prescriptions but maintain a fidelity to the Muslim tradition. Since they are inconsistent practitioners and partake in practices typically considered "deviant" by religious teachings, their affinity with the Muslim tradition has often been dismissed as cultural. This paper asks: Why, and in what ways, has being a Muslim been posited as a practice-based category – inhabited only by people who perform the prescribed rituals and practices? What are the conceptual moves required in order to study other religious subjectivities? This paper will draw on French films and two summers of ethnographic research.

Adam Dunstan (Kenai Peninsula College): The Politics (and Pageantry) of Place: Latter-day Saint (Mormon) Internationalization, Sacred Space, and the Hill Cumorah Pageant

Sacred space is commonly thought of as space set apart; we might equally think of it as space which sets apart. What are we to make then of mythic landscapes whose real-world locations remain ambiguous? What particularities are employed to anchor such landscapes onto specific modern political entities - and when are such projects abandoned? The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints recently announced the end of several outdoor pageants in the US which take place at historic sites. Drawing on ethnographic and discursive observations at one such site (the Hill Cumorah in New York), I argue that the cancellation of the pageants in part reflects significant shifts in how an institution which has sought to present itself as prototypically “American” in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is attempting to reconfigure itself as a global faith in the twenty-first. Building on recent scholarship regarding the political nature of sacred landscapes, I explore the discursive and spatial practices by which a specific version of the Book of Mormon ‘Promised Land’ narrative is emplaced onto the US, in so doing forging a discursive continuity between Book of Mormon peoples and the modern US. This articulates a moral geography wherein inhabitancy in the land implicitly places people under divine covenant (whether chosen or not). The Hill Cumorah is a space both sacred and sacralising – setting apart the US as a ‘promised land’ – a project now under contestation as the LDS Church becomes increasingly global in terms of its demographics and discourses.

Thomas Fearon (Goldsmiths): The campus as a battleground: Charismatic Christian ethics and the cosmo-politics of space in, on, and of university campuses in the UK

Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork with young Christians, of mostly African heritage, this paper will consider where a Christian ethic of proselytization becomes entangled with the politics of space and representation on university campuses in the UK. Embedded in the historical legacy of Christian movements on university campuses in west-Africa during the 1970’s and 80’s, young student Christians in the UK (who are members of global church ministries emanating from this geographic region) practice a spiritual ethics which seeks to transform the campus as an institution, as well as fellow students. To create spiritual spaces to meet, hold services, and evangelise to fellow students, members of these church ministries aim to form student societies to formalise their representation on campus. However, tensions emerge for the young Christians when the secular university challenges and obstructs their spiritual endeavours. For the young Christians, the horizon of the university campus emerges as a spiritual battleground, encouraging a cosmo-political praxis (Marshall 2009) and the strategic use of the campus as a space to challenge and carve out spaces of representation. The ethico-political practices of these young Christian students highlight a set of relations within university campuses in the UK, which will allow me in this paper to question how young Christians interpret and engage in the politics of representation through the ethics of Charismatic Christian faith. Furthermore, the responses of church members show how these young diasporic Christians articulate and cultivate spaces for self-representation through their cosmo-political praxis on campus.

Laurel Zwissler (Central Michigan): Reverse-Engineering “Religion”: The Political Non-Theism of The Satanic Temple

The Satanic Temple formed in 2013 to intervene with insider leverage in American church/state conflicts by claiming standing as a religion. TST participants theatrically wade into heavily contested religious freedom issues, including well-publicized stunts of inserting a large Baphomet statue into debates over public displays of Ten Commandments monuments (Wexler 2019, Lane 2019, Laycock 2020). Members explicitly understand their mission as the secularization of society. TST walks a delicate line in identifying as a religion for whom a deeply-held value is the necessity of removing religion from civic space. As an important lynchpin of their legal strategy against Christian dominance in public politics, members insist that TST is not a parody of religion, but is instead a legitimate religion, with specific beliefs, ethical tenets, and ritual practices. Beliefs include “non-theism,” that is hailing Satan not as an actual deity but as a symbol of rebellion, and the notion that individual bodily autonomy is “invioble.” Ritual practices run from intellectual discussions and public protests, through initiatory Unbaptism ceremonies and celebratory Black Masses. Based on fieldwork with TST members in a mid-western, “Bible-belt” state in the USA, this project deploys the creative secular activism of TST to engage theory around the religious and the secular. Following Mahmood (2016), Jakobsen (2020), Puar (2007), and Scott (2011), I ask how Western constructions of these categories lead those protesting against one to construct the other in specific ways, especially as related to raced and gendered notions of political citizenship.

Panel abstract

The papers on this panel hinge on the claim that the same resources that orient people in their religious practices of ethical subjectivation also influence their orientation towards the political projects they confront. Rather than abandon their objects of ethical orientation in order to engage with the demands of the political, many renew their ethical commitments through processes of resignification. Can the labor of ethical self-making offer adequate resources for people to grapple with the political? The papers here contend that the answers depend on how people conceive of the political and the stakes involved for them: as an affective claim on the nation; as the juridical realm of identity and rights; as modes of consensus on the political good; as specific ideological commitments; as active contestation for power to shape institutions; etc. In confronting the political, people often contend with other, possibly incommensurable, conceptions of the common good and means of realizing them. How do religious subjects grapple with such plurality? How does a particular apprehension and interpretation of a changing world transform the self-making practices through which people seek to inhabit the world more fully and less violently? And what role do gender and ethnicity play in these reframings? The papers attend to a range of phenomena: Deina Rabie identifies shifts in religious media, the socio-political contexts of those changes, and Emirati women’s responses to both; Anusha Hariharan explores Tamil Christian women’s reinterpretation of religious doctrine for social justice work; Harini Kumar analyzes the imbrication of religious and charitable labor as embodied by a Muslim women’s organization; Krishantha Fedricks examines the boundaries between the this-worldly and other-worldly commitments of a new transnational movement of televangelist Sri Lankan Buddhists; and Aniruddhan Vasudevan discusses the conflicts that can arise between thirunangai transgender women’s collective ethical commitments and their political wellbeing.

Aniruddhan Vasudevan (Princeton): Other-Regarding Ethics in a Hostile Word: Thirunangai trans women in southern India

This paper is an examination of value conflicts that may arise between ethical practice and political interests. It draws on ethnographic work on the ethical life of a group of thirunangai transgender women in southern India who evince a strong attachment to goddess Angalamman, a powerful regional deity. For this group of thirunangais, attachment and commitment to the goddess is not only a shared practice of devotion and a means for sacred legitimization of transfeminine identity. It is also a significant locus of ethical impulse and orientation. The most salient ethical impulse epitomized by goddess Angalamman, and in turn embodied by her thirunangai devotees, is the capacity to intervene in another's crisis and to stake all of one's resources, including one's social wellbeing, in helping others. Anger at injustice figures as a key emotion within this ethical universe, but it is hedged with limits that range from instrumental concerns (for personal and communal well-being) to altogether other-regarding ethical values. Why is crisis a paradigmatic ethical scene for thirunangais in Chennai? What models of ethical action, restraint, and solidarity are available to them through their attachment to goddess Angalamman? Through an ethnographic example involving police violence and thirunangais’ protest response, this paper brings out the value conflicts that might arise between ethical and political domains, the stakes involved in recognizing those disjunctures, and the tragic choices they may present to socially and politically marginalized actors.

Anusha Hariharan (North Carolina): Pedagogies for Change: Learning to Cultivate the Ethical Self

This paper examines how feminist activists in Tamil Nadu draw on a combination of theological and secular resources to cultivate ethical dispositions that allow them to collectively orient themselves toward social justice political action. Having been politicized within Christian Socialist networks such as the All-India Catholic University Federation (AICUF) and the Young Christian Students (YCS) in southern India, feminist activists draw on Christian Liberation Theology, Marxism, feminism and feminist theology and collectively make sense of these resources in fashioning ethical and political subjectivities. They do so in the spaces of workshops and “reality camps” organized by these networks that engage the ethical transformation of the body and soul just as much as forging a space for intellectual critical thinking. Drawing on two years of ethnographic and archival research, this paper engages the following questions: what role do Christian pedagogic spaces play in fostering possibilities for ethical self-cultivation among feminist activists? How do feminist activists draw on and reinterpret theological and secular resources to make ethical sense of their political intents and actions, and why? How does the activist’s body feature both as a site and a conduit in the cultivation of ethical disposition that shapes feminist responses to inequality and justice, that prompt them to discern desirable forms of political action?

Harini Kumar (Chicago): Charity as Ethical Critique: Muslim Women’s Religious Labor in South India

This paper explores how a Muslim women’s group in Tamil Nadu, South India, approach ethical conduct through the transformations they hope to bring about both in their charitable and religious work. It analyzes their activities as possible sites of political potential. The Ibadah Women’s Welfare Trust in Chennai was established in 2012 for the purpose of carrying out charitable activities for the poor, especially destitute women. They also place specific emphasis on educating and empowering women to be self-sufficient by providing basic computer and tailoring courses. The Ibadah Muslim Women’s Association was simultaneously set up to promote religious activities that range from janazah (Islamic funeral rituals) demonstrations to religious sermons (bayan) to organizing workshops that approach counseling from an Islamic perspective. These activities offer us an understanding of how their labor is both entrenched in an Islamic moral theology, as well as an attempt to fill a gap left by ostensibly secular institutions that have failed to look after the needs of the marginalized. If we understand the political to be the means through which a collective existence is constituted in a movement toward an ethical life, what are the processes and (bodily) practices necessary for its formation? Following the line of argument inaugurated by Saba Mahmood, that political potentials are deeply tied to ethical practices, I suggest that the Ibadah women’s sociality, religiosity, and charitable labor point to spaces and instances of political efficacy that are not readily apparent or directly stated, but discernible through their everyday practices.

Deina Rabie (Texas): Tea and the Adhān in Al-Zaab

Amid its superdiverse population, the United Arab Emirate’s call to prayer, the adhān, functions at the intersection of Arabic and Islamic sound aesthetics to identify the country as an Arab, Muslim nation state while forming discrete ethno-class publics, situated around its numerous urban mosque calls. In this paper, I examine how members of an Emirati family organize their lives around the adhān to reinforce discourses of gendered ethnonational socialization, modesty, and homosociality within their cloistered urban tribal enclave. I conceptualize the adhān as an orienting soundmark and a speech act that conjures a series of scaled chronotopes for its listeners. At each prayer event, there exist two main chronotopes that emplace Emirates in several nested time-space domains: One opens up a portal to communicate directly with God and engage in continual ethical self-formation outside of worldly time, and the other positions Emiratis in the iterative constitution of their nation, community, and family. Yet, as suburbanization in the UAE leads to a shift away from extended family living in urban tribal enclaves, supported by welfare citizenship, to two-income nuclear family homes in multiethnic suburbs, the marked reduction of the adhān in new suburban developments becomes a synecdoche for processes of change and Emiratis’ ambivalence towards them.

Krishantha Fedricks (Texas): Being a True Buddhist in Post-War Sri Lanka

Discussions of Sri Lankan Buddhism and ethno-religious nationalism frequently focus on the roles of politicized Buddhist religious groups during periods of ethnic and political clashes such as British colonialism, Sinhalese Tamil civil-war, and anti-Islam politics in post-war Sri Lanka. This leaves out religious groups that propagate anti-political, pacifistic Buddhist values. How do such groups respond to larger political dynamics? Are alternate forms of Buddhist ethical subjectivity possible in response to the changes in socio-political realms? This paper investigates these possibilities by looking closely at a new transnational movement of televangelist Buddhists that forms part of the Mahamevnāwa Monastery. This movement proclaims its support for a “True Buddhist State” that is governed by “True Buddhist Doctrine” (dhamma), encouraging its citizens to liberate themselves from suffering by attaining nirvana in this life. Mahamevnāwa believes that most everyday Buddhists fail to live up to the Noble Eightfold Path to nirvana because they don’t fully understand the Buddha’s true teachings and that Buddhist monks are too involved in nationalist politics and materialistic rituals to attend to this vital work. Therefore, the movement emphasizes that a “True Buddhist” should seek to attain nirvana to end worldly suffering, not pursue nationalist aims, and do so in this lifetime, not in the afterlife. By examining Mahamevnāwa Buddhist discourses and strategies for a “True Buddhist” practice, and the way they are related to the nation, nationalism, and political liberation, this paper will show how new forms of ethno-religious subjectivities are created in response to changing socio-political realities.

Panel abstract

This panel brings together an interdisciplinary collection of scholars to engage a recently published ethnography by anthropologist Sophie Bjork-James, 'The Divine Institution: White Evangelicalism's Politics of the Family' (Rutgers U Press, 2021). Five scholars will present 10-minute critiques of the book, followed by a 10-minute response from the author. Key themes addressed by the book include: the racialized and gendered dimensions of contemporary white evangelicalism; the social life of scriptures in megachurch contexts; and, the social and political lives of Christian nationalism.

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

Panel abstract

What does a critical concern for gender do to re-focus discussions of ethics in African Christianities? Anthropological work that addresses the role of gender in religious life has examined such matters as patriarchy, gender roles, institutional power and power relations, spurred on in important ways by works in feminist anthropology. In particular, this scholarship has also taken account of non-liberal religious traditions and the ways in which they have allowed for expressions of gendered agency. Yet power in gender and gendered relations are intimately connected to, and sometimes even mapped onto, other social phenomena like class, morality, sexuality, race, ethnicity and the body. In this panel, we put our regional specialties on African Christianities in conversation with one another around morality and gender politics, with a goal of contributing to a broader critical conversation on ethics. We explore the ways in which an attention to gender, relations of gender, and gendered religious practice might help us see something new about the construction of ethics in various Christianities across Africa, in particular by examining their intersection with various economic, social, and political transformations whether in intimate or broader terms.

Naomi Richman (London): Deviance and Desire: Sexual moralism and Demonic Fantasy in the Nigerian Deliverance Stories

Fantastical stories of witches and mermaids circulate in Nigeria’s booming Deliverance churches. On one level, this set of written and oral narratives appeal to Born Again Christians in search of more robust explanations for suffering and misfortune than those offered by the Prosperity churches. But beyond theodicy - what do these stories reveal about the interplay between cultural notions of sexuality, morality and desire? And how does a shift towards ‘politics’ and away from ‘ethics’ facilitate new anthropological understandings of these religious concepts, and the way they play out in social dynamics between gendered Deliverance subjects?

Emerging out of ethnographic fieldwork at one of Nigeria’s largest Deliverance churches, this paper investigates the politics of gender and sexual desire in the Deliverance stories, by way of exploring representations of demonic female figures like the witch. I argue that certain fantasies and phobias of female sexual deviance, linked to the gendered propensity for demonic possession, serve as a basis for the Deliverance churches’ efforts at strict control of women and their sexualities. As a result, the sexual moralism embedded in these larger-than-life tales produce new understandings of sexual difference and establish proper ‘Christian’ relations between the sexes.

Anna-Riikka Kauppinen (Cambridge): Body Beautiful for God’s Glory: The Material Ethics of Christian Femininity in Ghana’s Fashion Industry

This paper investigates the concepts of beauty among young Charismatic Pentecostal Christian women and men running a fashion agency in Ghana’s capital Accra. Branded as “The only Christ focused modelling agency”, the enterprise came into existence in 2014 to provide a Christian alternative for Ghana’s fashion industry. The company was led by a professional female model who had experienced an ethical conflict between her Christian faith and what she described as ‘immoral’ practices of mainstream fashion. She vowed to curate each fashion show for ‘God’s glory’, asking her male and female models to imagine Jesus as one of the audience members. Drawing on fieldwork around the preparation towards their first fashion show held in a church, this paper zooms into the detailed practices of styling and beautifying ‘Christ-like’ female and male bodies who can represent God on fashion stage.

While a ‘Christ-focused’ modelling agency might seem like a logical outcome of the decades of the growth of Charismatic Pentecostal Christianity in Ghana, when Christianity has become a practice of brand distinction, I disentangle the semiotic connections between bodily beauty, ethical substance, and respectable femininity in relation to a longer history of Akan moral and linguistic ideas of ‘moral purity’. In so doing, this paper considers the Christian fashion agency within a broader social landscape of the centrality of beauty in Ghanaian urban performances of respectable Christian femininity and masculinity. Proposing an approach to Christian ethics that centres beauty as a key material practice, the case of Christian modelling illuminates the gendered, beautified bodily surface as a potent religious medium.

Leanne Williams Green (Cambridge): Teaching Gender, Teaching Class: Morality between Generations in Zimbabwean Baptist Christianity

For Baptist Christians in Zimbabwe’s capital city, confronting moral dilemmas is a regular occurrence. These middle-class urbanites anticipate that they will, on a daily basis, face ethical choices that require concentrated spiritual reflection, prayer, and discussion with others about what is required of them. Yet during fifteen months of fieldwork with this group, I learned that gendered responsibilities are distinct for not generating a similar sense of moral dilemma. Living as gendered Baptist selves is a matter of moral pedagogy rather than of moral deliberation; gendered morality is taught and learned rather than tested and debated. Why is this the case?

In this paper, I argue that a commitment to gender taken as given produces a sense of morality as similarly given, but neither is comprehensible apart from social class. Young women in Baptist congregations attempt to recapture skills of ‘homecraft’ alongside professional careers as a means to perform care and leadership for their household and community. A historical marriage of class and gender relations in Zimbabwe has undermined presumptions about opposed domestic and market spheres. My argument extends these accounts to claim that intergenerational class dynamics are likewise key to understanding the relation between gender and morality.

Panel abstract

This panel attends to the politically authorizing role of material forms in Christian communities and institutions. Specifically, the presenters will examine documents and weapons as authoritative materials that not only possess dramatic and shifting social lives (Appadurai 1988), but are also entangled in political action by virtue of their ubiquity and banality (Hetherington 2011; Harvey and Knox 2015). Drawing on ethnographic and archival work in Israel/Palestine, Mexico, the United States, and Europe – and bringing together the diverse Christian perspectives of evangelicalism, Catholicism, and mainline Protestantism – the papers play across two forms of authority. First, authorization: the production of and interaction with weapons and bureaucratic documents to establish (and undermine) dominant political narratives emerging from church institutions and Christian nationalisms. Second, authorship: practices of attribution and responsibility that contribute decisively to notions of agency in Christian institutions. In placing the authorization of “official” state and church authority in conversation with everyday processes of attribution and responsibility, panel authors argue that documents and weapons are critically contested materials that bear the characteristic anonymous and collective authorship of bureaucracies (Hull 2008, 2012).

While anthropologists have sought to “get inside” and “reveal state bureaucracies’ secrets” (Graeber 2015; Herzfeld 1992; Verdery 2014), especially hidden internal contestations over attributing individual authorship (Dandurand 2019), this panel examines how Christians do the work of reauthoring church and state materials in the everyday spaces that lie in the long shadow cast by the social domains of state and ecclesiastical configurations. In drawing on their ethnographic research in bureaucratically penumbral settings like bedrooms, shrines, art galleries, and refugee camps, the presenters demonstrate that church and state produced and sanctioned objects are open to reauthorization through everyday processes of individual and relational authorship between divine and human beings. This reveals that beyond ascribing social value and shaping social relations (Appadurai 1988), material objects can act as ethical agents in their endorsement or critique of dominant religious and political frameworks.

Marc Loustau (Holy Cross): Redocumenting Apparitions: Social Action between the Anthropology of Bureaucracy and a Second Wave of Apparition Studies

I use an ethnographic portrait of a Transylvanian Hungarian Catholic visionary and her documents to convene a dialogue between the anthropology of bureaucracy and the anthropological study of apparitions. I describe how a retired secretary, Mariska, produced and circulated text, non-text, and electronic documents of her visions of the Virgin Mary. Mariska’s comfort with documentation distinguished her from the Catholic Church’s famous nineteenth-century illiterate seers. She also used documents to engage with transnationally mobile exemplars of contemporary European Catholic visionary culture. The politics of ethno-religious assimilation, domestic consumption, and familial authority further animated and destabilized Mariska’s document-based social action. Amid calls to expand the anthropology of bureaucracy beyond state governance, this dialogue can generate accounts of documents’ role in evangelism as social action. A second wave of apparition studies can draw on the anthropology of bureaucracy to move beyond narrow tropes and track documents’ involvements in these disparate social contexts.

Sara Williams (Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary): The Ethical Life of the Political Souvenir

On a sweltering July morning, I meandered through a graveyard in Bethlehem compulsively looking for empty tear gas canisters. With me was Walter Brynjolfson, a Canadian evangelical graduate student at Palestinian Bethlehem Bible College. I had tagged along on his weekly search for discarded weapons of war, from which he made “peace parcels:” Christmas ornaments, Advent candle holders, and other religious souvenirs. “Part of my goal for going to Bethlehem in the first place was a bit entrepreneurial,” Walter told progressive evangelical icons Shane Claiborne and Tony Campolo on their Red Letter Christians podcast. “I had a bit of a calling in my life to try to develop empathy in the hearts of Christians in the West for the different parts of the persecuted church around the world.” By turning “swords into plowshares” and selling them to Holy Land pilgrims and Christians abroad, Walter was not only marketing a religious commodity carrying a political and moral message. He was also attempting to use “political souvenirs” to instill an ethical disposition – empathy – for a politically marginalized group of Christians halfway across the world. In this paper, I trace the journey of Walter’s “peace parcels” through collection and creation, marketing and sale, and use in U.S. contexts. In so doing, I draw together scholarship in the anthropology of ethics, material culture, and global evangelicalism to argue that just as “things” lead social lives, so too can they lead ethical lives through processes of global circulation that give external expression to religious virtue.

Ellen Ott Marshal (Emory): Moral Agency Through Metalwork

This paper begins with a description of Christian artists, metalworkers, and activists who “beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks” (Isaiah 2:4). Organizations such as RAWTools, Inc. place metalwork at the center of their activism for gun violence prevention. More than a symbolic transformation, these activists use the repurposed weapons to encourage local communities to trade guns for nonviolent alternatives. The second part of the paper focuses on Pedro Reyes who transformed 1,527 confiscated weapons into 1,527 shovels for his project Palas por Pisolas. An internationally acclaimed sculptor, Reyes uses his art to levy a political argument against the nations that manufacture weapons. Rather than focusing on the one who uses the weapon, Reyes re-directs attention to the nations and manufacturers that produce, distribute, and profit from them. His art is an indictment of the military industrial complex as a continuation of colonial power. Taken together, these community-based and internationally-recognized metalworkers utilize biblical imagery to transform objects of destruction into objects of creation. In doing so, they generate possibilities within a seemingly intransigent reality, the interlocking systems that produce and distribute guns. They also constitute an example of moral agency under constraint defined here as claiming a creative power to pursue a good under conditions that thwart its realization. These artists transform objects of destruction to be used for creative purposes. In doing so, they create generative possibilities within structures of violence that do not change.

Ingie Hovland (Georgia): “Really Our Work”: A Protestant Woman’s Attempt to Use Material Bureaucracy to Create Ethical Value

One evening in July 1907, a disappointed 72-year old woman, Bolette Gjør, sat on a train in Norway. That day she had attended one of the first annual meetings of the Norwegian Women’s National Council, an organization intended to further the cause of the new political women’s movement that was just becoming known in Northern Europe. She had requested membership in the National Council for a cobbled-together network of Christian women that she represented, and which she had called the Mission Ring. She needed 38 votes to be accepted as a member; she received 37. She was then censured by the man in charge of the organization for which she worked, the Norwegian Missionary Society. I will follow this particular story of Bolette Gjør through the lens of the paperwork that clustered around her as she pursued what she considered an ethical project of raising up Christian women – the paperwork of formal correspondence, meeting minutes, a magazine, collective public statements. I will ask how the concepts of authorship and authority relate to these material-linguistic authorizing forms. In conclusion, I suggest that this failed bureaucratic attempt to create ethical value can help us think about how material-linguistic objects act as ethical agents.

Panel abstract

Anthropological approaches to contemporary religious formations have long emphasized what we can call (borrowing a distinction from Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’) their founding and preserving powers. These concerns offer a scholarly analytics of origin and change, of innovation or conformity, of continuity or rupture: the vagaries of survival. In this panel, in contrast, we foreground the power of destruction yielded but not synonymous with, destructive political projects, ecological collapse, and economic exploitation. How is this power registered within distinct religious traditions? If the destructive character seeks even to erase the traces of destruction, what forms of gentleness and care can be practiced there?

The first paper is situated in a Saudi Arabian hospital, where medical practitioners negotiate the Islamic tradition through Amana, the ‘Divine trust’, which grounds medical practice in a heterotopic relationship with God. The next paper turns to the breadmaking practices among Syrians refugees living in Tripoli by taking breadmaking as a site of mourning and experimentation. The third paper focuses on commensality in Lebanon’s agricultural valley as a pious mitigation and political mediation of a complex of social antagonisms.

The panel closes with a two-part reflection. The first traces two articulations of the Orthodox Christian tradition in Lebanon vis-à-vis destruction: the efforts of Orthodox youth to repair Beirut and the withdrawal of Orthodox ascetics to abandoned monasteries in Lebanon’s hinterland. The final paper and second part of the joint presentation turns to two ‘lands of estrangement’: the difficulty of Islamic practice when severed from communal life in Canada or under suspicion in Jordan prompts a reflection on the duality of exile and on a prophetic hadith that salutes the estranged.

Taken together, these papers offer a vantage for reconceptualizing the work of negativity in religious life. Ultimately, they yield an ambivalent account of the destruction of experience.

Ashwak Hauter (Irvine): Amana (Divine Trust): Justice in Medical Practice between the Legal and the Ethical

This talk chronicles the initiative of younger biomedical physicians, trained in the West but practicing medicine in a Saudi Arabian hospital, to reform hospital policies on ethical practices in order to reinforce accountability. Physicians within the hospital argue that physicians’ ethics toward their medical practice, treatment of patients, and the community is ultimately grounded in their relationship with God, as a form of divine trust, understood through the theological concept, amana. Amana is reception of the will to act, but also entails the obligation to reciprocate this divine gift and provide space for the other individuals to also act willfully. Since the amana system made a physician’s practice and ethical action dependent on their din (piety, faith), these physicians were wary of risks, which was provoked by an anxiety of a devolving Muslim world and estrangment of the tradition. The initiative for a punitive system to discipline and punish was met with opposition by older physicians that envision accountability, justice, and address of harm within a framework that is grounded in the relationship between desire, the law, and the unknowability of the Good. This focus on ethics as amana, which aims to reproduce the space of desire for individuals to willfully act as an obligation of divine trust rethinks ethics as the securing of the Good. It brings to light new forms of thinking around the adjudication of justice, accountability, and community reintegration.

Brent Eng (Berkeley): Life and Experimentation at the Bakery

This paper analyzes the blessed nature of bread and flour to explore how a bakery in Tripoli, Lebanon might be understood as a site of mourning. Based on fieldwork, the paper aims to analyze the sociality of a Tripoli bakery where, born in an encounter with the experience of violence, an experimentation with possible imaginations of life becomes possible. At stake in the ritualized techniques of bread-making, as well as the circuit of relationships that gravitate around bread’s production, is not only an ethics of divine orientation amongst the bakery workers, but an active confrontation with the vicissitudes of finitude—all of which takes place in proximity to the ongoing destruction of Syria and economic collapse of Lebanon.

China Sajadian (CUNY): “The World is Gone (al-dunya rahit)”: Commensality in the End of Times

Based on long-term fieldwork in the Lebanese-Syrian borderlands, this paper analyzes the ethical valences of food giving and preparation among displaced Syrian farmworkers, focusing on mouneh (seasonal fruit and vegetable preserves). In the context of economic recession, wartime displacement, and extraordinary uncertainty, the sharing of mouneh forms a vital substance through which rahma (divine mercy, ties-of-the-womb) is tenuously forged between rural Syrians and Lebanese in what is understood within Islamic eschatology as the end of times (akher al-zaman). At the same time, insofar as the giving of mouneh constitutes a material basis of pious commensality across hierarchies of class, gender, citizenship, sect, and regional origin in rural Lebanon, this paper shows how its production is embedded in unequal property relations. Specifically, it tracks how Syrian farmworkers -- contending with proletarianization due to wartime loss of seasonal access to their land in Syria -- secure mouneh through recourse to precarious forms of gleaning rights, debt-patronage relations, sharecropping arrangements, and the unremunerated squeezing of women’s household labor. By tracing the contradictory ethical and material obligations through which the ingredients of mouneh are harvested, prepared, and distributed, this paper offers a broader reflection of the eschatological significance of commensality and the politics of food giving, wherein the pious obligation to give abundantly exists in tension with entrenched agrarian inequalities.

Aaron Eldridge (Berkeley): Estrangement and Tradition between Desert and City, Part 1: Abandonment and Withdrawal

This paper, drawing on ethnographic research in Lebanon, contrasts two sites of Orthodox Christian tradition, that is, two articulations of reckoning with the precarity and destruction by which life in the country is marked. The first recounts the recent Beirut blast and the efforts of Orthodox youth in the city to mobilize aid and rebuild destroyed areas of the city and to help the injured and homeless. Here ethical practices of the tradition (love for the neighbor, service for the community) rehabilitate the effects of current and past destruction. In the second site, wherein I trace the return of ascetic communities to abandoned Orthodox Christian sites, destruction is figured differently. Orthodox asceticism cultivates an ambiguous and intimate relationship to destruction that seeks to inhabit ruination as a fissure in the world by which an encounter with God is possible. Taken together, this paper and Basit’s later in this panel trace distinct itineraries of ruin and attempted repair in Orthodox Christianity and Islam. Drawing on Ibn Khaldun and Michel de Certeau, we align these four positions along inverted spatio-temporal axes (desert, city). The result prompts us to ask if a tradition is paradoxically capable of experiencing its own destruction.

Basit Iqbal (McMaster): Estrangement and Tradition between Desert and City, Part 2: Suspicion and Desiccation

This paper contrasts two projects of Islamic pedagogy in north Jordan and northwest Canada, that is, two of the lands of estrangement (bilad al-ghurba) to which Syrian refugees have fled in their displacement. In the former site, traditional practices (charity, neighbourliness, etiquette) gain the traction necessary to re-habilitate political-economic suspicion. In the latter site, despite political-economic relief, such ethical practices fail to redress the desiccation of communal forms. The contrast between these two sites prompts a reflection first on the ambivalence of refuge/exile and then on a prophetic hadith which famously consoles the estranged. Taken together, this paper and Aaron’s earlier in this panel trace distinct itineraries of ruin and attempted repair in Islam and Orthodox Christianity. Drawing on Ibn Khaldun and de Certeau, we align these four positions along inverted spatio-temporal axes (desert, city). The resulting topology modulates what Agamben calls the destruction of experience.

Panel abstract

The violent disintegration of Yugoslavia and the cultural and economic dispossession caused by the collapse of socialism continue to force Muslims in Bosnia and Herzegovina to reconfigure their religious lives and societal values. “Remaking Muslim Lives” draws on a decade of fieldwork to examine the historical, social, and emotional labor undertaken by people to live in an unfinished past--and how doing so shapes the present. In particular, the book questions how contemporary religious imagination, experience, and practice infuse and interact with social forms like family and neighborhood and with the legacies of past ruptures and critical events. The book’s observations and analysis go to the heart of how societal and historical entanglements shape, fracture, and reconfigure religious convictions and conduct.

Panel abstract

This panel brings together researchers whose ethnographic work points toward an expanded understanding of evangelism/proselytization as strategies and practices of suasion (which might include persuasion, dissuasion). We consider these forms of suasion as including but exceeding notions of text-based teaching or argumentation about religious doctrine or the objective of salvation. In this way, we emphasize how suasion is a means through which people communicate rather than being merely an end that people seek to achieve. More specifically, we invite papers that reflect on the ways in which religious subjects’ political stances orient their suasive strategies and acts in socio-historical context.

By focusing on ‘suasion’ we want to provide a vocabulary for comparing parallel practices of religious change. That is, to move the conversation beyond the anthropology of Christianity (i.e., a focus on evangelism). Furthermore, ‘suasion’ is helpful because the analytical and ethnographic category ‘proselytization’ is often difficult for anthropologists to disentangle from notions of ‘coercion’. What are religious subjects’ strategies and acts of suasion? In what theological, philosophical, and historical contexts are they elaborated, discussed, negotiated, enacted, embodied, and so on? How do religious actors themselves engage with questions and concerns regarding the ethics and politics of coercion? Across this panel, the presentations will explore these questions as they relate to conventional discursive as well as non-discursive, symbolic, and self-oriented forms of suasion, spanning Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and Buddhist ethnographic contexts.

Sam Victor (Cambridge): Majority Culture, Minority Witness: The Ethics and Politics of Evangelical Anti-Islamophobia Activism in Tennessee

Drawing on fieldwork amongst members of a predominantly white, suburban evangelical church in Nashville, Tennessee, this paper discusses how churchgoers elaborate and negotiate their suasive strategies and practices, and specifically regarding how they ought to communicate to others that evangelism is a driving moral aspiration of their political solidarity with local Muslim communities.

The church comes from a fundamentalist Protestant tradition that historically emphasized a countercultural detachment from mainstream society through legalistic piety and moralism. However, following broader tendencies in American Evangelicalism, they are changing their posture vis-à-vis the increasingly diverse city around them with the hopes of missionizing American society “from within”. Now permitting themselves to identify as both Christians and Americans, they are uneasy about their own embeddedness in American ways of life. For example, they repudiate consumerism and nationalism as pernicious “cultural idols”, and they embrace ethnic diversity and American liberal principles like the (secular) pluralistic public sphere as being expressive of Christian values.

Furthermore, the churchgoers’ penitent self-awareness as political constituents of “the majority culture” complicates their religious self-understanding as “minority witnesses” of Christian truth claims in a “fallen world”. They strain to lead visibly exceptional lives that would persuasively demonstrate Christian virtue to the non-Christians in their midst, including local Muslim communities experiencing prejudice and violence. This paper will elucidate these tensions ethnographically in the context of churchgoers’ deliberations over religious symbols and sacred/secular space ahead of hosting Muslim guests at an anti-Islamophobia conference that took place in the church’s worship hall.

Danny Cardoza, (Cambridge): ‘Neutrality’ and the politics of preaching Jehovah’s Kingdom ethically: Jehovah’s Witnesses, epiphenomenal lobbying, and coercion

Jehovah’s Witnesses understand evangelism to be a communicative project of cultivating ethical selves and others. This includes text-based pedagogy and verbal strategies of preaching and teaching about the Bible. But Witnesses only understand these strategies as being ethically efficacious (not coercive) if they first cultivate political ‘neutrality’. Neutrality is figured as giving ‘full support to Jehovah’s Kingdom’ through eschewing any form of partisanship to the ‘system of things’, or the violent and oppressive satanic/human structures of religions, states, and economies, including voting and political activism—even when they see the ends as morally justifiable.

This paper explores the ways three Witness lawyers participate in an academic conference (“Religion and Civil Society”) in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan and how they justified their taking part in what they counted as an enterprise squarely located in the system of things. Their deliberations take place both in the presentations they gave, their comments to scholars’ papers, the conversations during meals and breaks, and – ultimately – in arranging an ‘excursion’ for the academics to the Witness Branch Office in Bishkek. These lawyers contended that their actions, though not the typical fare of Witness evangelism, ought to be conceived as such, as they attempted to persuade academics and politicians who might epiphenomenally manipulate legislative change in Central Asia and Russia. They considered their ‘openness’ and ‘willingness’ to participate as more convincing than their words. The moral justifications and evangelistic vision for their participation in an academic conference illuminate how Witnesses conceptualize their ethics and politics of coercion.

Michal Kravel-Tovi (Tel Aviv): Self-Suasion: Agents of Jewish Conversion in Israel Searching for Sincerity

The title of this presentation is intended as ironic. Its irony resides in the fact that while agents of state-run (Orthodox) Jewish conversion in Israel are unequivocally preoccupied with the sincerity of their conversion candidates, they are also troubled by the sincerity of their own religious belief and conduct. This paper will explore how these agents, most of whom hail from religious Zionist circles, engage with self-suasion as an attempt to manage this concern. I will argue that by self-suading themselves, conversion agents labor to reconcile their nationalist and religious commitments with the moral toll that they pay for knowingly facilitating less-than-ideal conversions. It is through self-suasion that these agents (i.e., rabbis, policy-makers, educators, and religious judges) assert that they are not being untrue to themselves and that they are doing more good than harm: benefitting through conversion the greater good of the Israeli state and the Jewish people.

The presentation will investigate two strategies of self-suasion involved therein. First, I will explore how religious conversion agents justify to themselves the necessity, even urgency, of Jewish conversion in large numbers, and the morally superior motives that inform this undertaking. Secondly, I will demonstrate how, in order to prove to themselves that they are not compromising religious law, they help conversion candidates cultivate convincing performances of sincerity.

Géraldine Mossière (Montréal): Self-cultivation and the Demonstration of a Virtuous Self as Strategies for Spreading the Faith among New Muslims

Ever since Islam emerged out of the 7th Century Arabian Peninsula, the traditional way of spreading the faith, da’wa, has taken many forms. Whether by the sword in the Christian dar al hrab (territories to be conquered) or through contact and trade in Asia and Africa, the first conversions were mostly collective. In secular societies shaped by Protestant modes of individualization, conversion often comes as the result of subjectivation processes whereby new believers re-discover themselves as they discover Islam, and in conformity with a neoliberal frame that they, ironically, seek to reform in pursuit of social justice and equity.

In the ethnographic fieldwork I have conducted among new Muslims in France and in Quebec, embracing Islam usually follows from an encounter with a Muslim practitioner whose behaviour stirs curiosity, fascination and attraction all at the same time. As they embrace Islam, new Muslims enter into a process of self-cultivation through which the embodiment of Muslim virtues enables them to demonstrate Muslim ethics that are believed to visibly promote Islam as an ideal everyday way of being. In this presentation, I discuss how the neoliberal age has turned such techniques of self-cultivation and humble demonstration of the self into very efficient strategies for making Islam a desirable model of personal virtue and collective solidarity.

Julia Cassaniti (Washington State): Silent Persuasions

People of various traditions often use language to persuade others to join a religious community, and to follow its teachings in particular ways. This emphasis on discursivity is just one part, however, of the bodily, affective, and intersubjective affordances that push and pull people to participate in religious practice. In this talk I will explore the role of silence as an act of persuasion, focusing on techniques deployed in meditation retreats in Thailand. In meditative trainings of vipassana, popularized by the modern SE Asian mindfulness movement, adherents are taught to scan their bodies as they sit and slowly walk, noticing subtle changes that arise as they do. The phenomenological approach to meditative development, done in silent sessions alone or in groups, serves to cultivate a particular attentive orientation not just toward the body and mind, but also to the idea of mental development itself. Based on ethnographic work conducted in a series of Thai meditation retreats, I will show how meditation leaders craft affective orientations to the meditative tradition through the work of silent practice. Through this ethnographic example I will show how different traditions work to bring people in to religious communities in ways we don’t often think of when we focus solely on discursive acts of persuasion.

Abstracts

Yasmine Lucas (Toronto): Playing in the Uncanny: In Search of the Otherwise of Poland’s Jewish Revival

Since the fall of Communism in 1989, Poland has been experiencing a Jewish revival, led for the most part by non-Jewish Poles. These Poles create, run, and participate in Jewish museums, festivals, restaurants, shops, and artistic and community projects throughout the country. Scholars have argued that, more than reflecting on Jewishness or pre-WWII history per se, Poles of the Jewish revival instrumentalize Jewishness to reconfigure what has become an extremely homogenous, populist nation; the Jewish revival represents a dialectical response to Catholic, sometimes anti-Semitic, Polishness. This response is limited in its impact: by staging their opposition through Jewishness, Poles of the Jewish revival adopt nationality and ethnicity as the terms of individual and group identity, just as conservative Poles do with Polishness. In so doing, they reinforce boundaries between groups. This paper argues that a closer examination of Poles’ engagement with Jewishness suggests subtler, more complex dynamics; participation in Jewish life points to more than a mere dialectical, ideological confrontation. In particular, this paper shows that some Poles are drawn to Jewishness because they are affected by material “traces” of Jewish life. Moreover, some Poles are attracted to Jewish institutions because the latter foster familial atmospheres conducive to “living creatively” (Winnicott 1970). These unsteady, ambiguous interactions trouble the idea that dialectical reactions are most important or noteworthy when it comes to conceptualizing what Elizabeth Povinelli calls the otherwise: an alternative mode of being and thinking that reconfigures what counts as socio-political change.

Jacob Hickman (Brigham Young): Ordinary Politics, Extraordinary Ethics: A Moral Realist Account of How Religious Communities Cope with Existential Threat

This paper provides a moral realist framework that seeks to understand the moral motivations and political work of activists in religious communities who face existential threat. These activists’ understandings of the world, the threats they face, and their responses are underwritten by powerful moral visions of the world-as-it-should-be, juxtaposed against the current state of the world-as-it-is (i.e., “moral world-building” Hickman and Webster In Press). I argue that these moral imaginings are central and fundamental to the political work that these groups undertake. This moral realist position stands in contrast to two major strains of theory in the anthropology of morality—ordinary ethics and phenomenological accounts of moral experience. Both of these positions have productively argued that we need to attend to the banal, everyday, and embodied forms that moral experience takes in the daily routines of ethical actors. However, these positions are largely framed against accounts of deontological ethics that emphasize only the most problematic (and unrealistic) characteristics of deontological frameworks—such as an emphasis on ‘rules.’ A broader focus on moral realism can elucidate the moral motivations at play in these communities. My ethnographic case centers on Hmong religious activists, ranging from leaders of millenarian movements to Hmong who advocate modest changes to traditional ritual practice. These activists undertake seemingly mundane activities—such as establishing bureaucratic structures in their communities—that they imagine to have profound political impacts, rooted in revolutionary moral visions for the world-as-it-should-be. This ethnography reveals the inherent moral realism of these communities’ visions of the world, as well as the mundane political acts that they imagine will revolutionize their positions within the world.

Yunus Doğan Telliel (Worcester Polytechnic Institute): Does Islam Have a Sacred Language?: Religion, Secularism, and Untranslatability

Muslims’ reverence for the Arabic text of the Qur’an is often portrayed as a reflection of the belief that Arabic is a ‘sacred language,’ and therefore, an obstacle for the development of Qur’anic translatability (in comparison, for instance, to Christian enthusiasm for Biblical translatability). This paper argues that this way of thinking about translation, which is also crucial to the self-image of secular humanism, did not emerge on the Islamic intellectual landscape until the late 19th century. The paper also provides a genealogy of the category of ‘sacred language’ and shows that modern notion of untranslatability has come to be seen primarily as a function of linguistic authority rather than an extension of ethico-aesthetic concerns (e.g., affective attachment to the oral rendering of the original, or commitment to the preservation of the text). As such, untranslatability has become, it is argued, a question about the text itself – instead of a set of relationships that bind people and the text to each other. In conclusion, drawing on Walter Benjamin and Emmanuel Levinas, the paper sketches an alternative framework wherein translatability and untranslatability are not simply opposites, but co-constitutive of any act of communication, divine or not.

Claire-Marie Hefner (Florida State): Morality on the Digital Edge: Social Media Usage and Religious Authority among Indonesian Muslim School Girls

Across the Muslim world, the rise of new media and, in particular, the Internet, are credited with having allowed for a greater number and variety of participants in debates about Islamic normativity. This article is an analysis of digital literacy, religious authority, and morality in two Indonesian Islamic boarding schools for girls. I argue that these young women occupy a “digital double-edge”— their (limited) access to the digital world offers cosmopolitan and entrepreneurial opportunities while also exposing them to gendered scrutiny for their engagement with the morally murky space of the Internet. Within the study of Islam and new media, I argue that greater attention to everyday decision-making surrounding what to post, “like,” and share reveals new spaces where young Muslim women lay subtle claim to religious authority as they engage and interpret alternative messages about Islam and gender that they encounter online.