The Anthropology of Belief: Religious Experience, Publics, and Personhood (original) (raw)
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Course description: This course explores these aspects of the study of religion: (1) religion as a system of thought; (2) the practice of religion through ritual; and (3) the nature of the sacred and profane in social life; (4) religion in a modernizing, global context, especially with relationship to politics and the state. The readings span the history of anthropological studies of religion from late 19 th century to early 21 st century views. What is the meaning of religious symbolism and myth? How does religion help to shape and negotiate meaning in different political contexts? Three monographs covered this semester include: (1) a classic work on the ritual process; (2) the influence of taped Islamic sermons on young Egyptian working class men; (2) the study of Christian fundamentalism in the U.S. as expressed by Jerry Falwell's followers.
The Productive Potential of Moral Failure in Lived Islam and Christianity
In: Straying from the Straight Path: How Senses of Failure Invigorate Lived Religion, ed. Daan Beekers and David Kloos, pp. 1-19. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2018
In this introductory chapter we introduce the theme of moral failure, by which we denote the experiences of shortcoming, inadequacy and imperfection that are often at the heart of lived religion. We argue that a critical exploration of senses of failure in everyday religious lives offers a possibility for transcending a dichotomy that has emerged within both the anthropology of Islam and the anthropology of Christianity, that between pursuits of ethical perfection and the ambivalences of everyday life. Much work on religious ethics stresses the opposition between religious and non-religious ethical repertoires, effectively placing experiences of imperfection outside of the domain of religious experience ‘proper’. In contrast, we contend that moral failure is often part and parcel of, and productively contributes to, processes of ethical formation. In this introduction, we outline this dialectics of religious pursuits, which is addressed in different ways by each of the contributions to this special issue.
How does the political subject emerge from processes of mass mediation? In what ways does media commentary shape public perceptions of political issues? How are patterns of political affiliation, identification, and mobilisation tied to the circulation of politically charged media content? Through an ethnographic focus on political media in the US, this module seeks to explore the mediation of politics from a linguistic anthropological perspective. Students will be introduced to key works in the anthropology of language and media as well as to the anthropological analysis of established and emerging genres of political mediation. In the final part of the course, we will consider how social practices of media reflect and embody ideological orientations to ways of knowing and question what this means for how political realities get co-constructed.
Reading Secularism: Religion, Literature, Aesthetics
Comparative Literature, 2013
This special issue considers the place of religion and secularism in the field of literary study. The authors draw from anthropology, history, philosophy, and law, and all share in a common effort to take the category of religion seriously—not necessarily as a term with a fixed descriptive meaning, but as a category that nonetheless has implications for what we do when we read. The six essays trace the interactions of religion, literature, and secularism at distinct historical moments—ranging from early modern Spain to the nineteenth-century United States and interwar Germany and Palestine. They also chart how literature inflects the sensibilities, behaviors, and attitudes of readers. Spanning regions, languages, and methods, the issue bridges questions about reading secularism with critical reflections on the disciplines undergirding its textual traditions.
The Anthropology of Christianity
Religion Compass, 2008
This article surveys the literature that constitutes the newly emergent anthropology of Christianity. Arguing that the development of this sub-discipline was impeded until recently by anthropology's theoretical framing and empirical interests, this article explains that demographic and world-historical forces have made it such that anthropology has had to recently come to terms with Christianity as an ethnographic object. In doing so, anthropology also has had to address its problematic relationship with Christianity, either in the religion's direct effect on the formation of the discipline, or as reflected by Christianity's influence on modernity itself, which has been vital for anthropology as both a category and as a style of cognition. In addition to these meta-theoretical questions, the anthropology of Christianity has become a space in which anthropology has been able to re-examine issues of social and cultural continuity and discontinuity in light of conversion to Christianity. Specifically, the issue of social change (often thought through or against the issue of ‘modernity’) has involved specific ethnographic examinations of fields, such as the relation between linguistic ideology and language use, economic practice, changing formations of gender and race, and the modes through which the person is culturally structured, and how that category of the person stands in relation to the social. Rather than presenting an overarching theoretical narrative, however, this review notes that these issues play out in divergent ways in differently situated communities, especially where Christianity's individuating effect may be muted where is it functions as an anti- or counter-modern force; this dynamic and contingent nature of Christianity underscores that Christianity itself is a heterogeneous object, and thus promises to be an area of rich empirical research and theoretical focus that should be beneficial not only for this sub-discipline, but also for the field of anthropology as a whole.
2019
This book explores the hopeful possibility that emerging geographies of postsecularity are able to contribute significantly to the understanding of how common life may be shared, and how caring for the common goods of social justice, well-being, equality, solidarity, and respect for difference may be imagined and practiced. Drawing on recent geographic theory to recalibrate ideas of the postsecular public sphere, the authors develop the case for postsecularity as a condition of being that is characterised by practices of receptive generosity, rapprochement between religious and secular ethics, and a hopeful re-enchantment and re-shaping of desire towards common life. The authors highlight the contested formation of ethical subjectivity under neoliberalism and the emergence of postsecularity within this process as an ethically-attuned politics which changes relations between religion and secularity, and animates novel, hopeful imaginations, subjectivities, and praxes as alternatives to neoliberal norms. The spaces and subjectivities of emergent postsecularity are examined through a series of innovative case studies, including food banks, drug and alcohol treatment, refugee humanitarian activism in Calais, homeless participatory art projects, community responses to the Christchurch earthquakes in New Zealand, amongst others. The book also traces the global conditions for postsecularity beyond the Western and predominantly Christian-secular nexus of engagement. This is a valuable resource for students in several academic disciplines, including geography, sociology, politics, religious studies, international development, and anthropology. It will be of great interest to secular and faith-based practitioners working in religion, spirituality, politics or more widely in public policy, urban planning, and community development.