Religion and Society is a journal that fosters varieties of dialogue. Commentaries, conversations, and responses populate our pages and sometimes extend across volumes. In this issue, we present a portrait of a historian who has exemplified the productive powers of dialogue throughout his work and life. Peter Brown's vivid observations on his encounters with anthropologists—on page and in person—are complemented by reflections from a younger generation of scholars as they highlight his continuing influence as teacher, writer, and thinker. In his contribution, Brown is munificent in highlighting the productive results of encounters with E. E. Evans-Pritchard's Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande (1937) and Mary Douglas's Natural Symbols (1970) in relation to his understandings of rationality and the links between religion and society. He also provides intriguing hints as to the suggestive interplays between biography, institutional location, and the academic imagination, referring for instance to the effect of reading Max Gluckman's Custom and Conflict in Africa in a pub on a Saturday afternoon in 1957, beneath the ancient tower of New College, Oxford. For a historian of Brown's scope and boldness, the experience seems to have led to a striking form of cultural and disciplinary dialogue between the (then) African ethnographic present and the European Dark Age, as well as between history and anthropology.

I spent the first years of my life in Sudan where my father worked for the Sudan railways. I was proud to have a Daddy whose railway network stretched, over hundreds of miles, from the borders of Egypt to the savannahs and the great green swamps of the southern Nile. One of my first childhood memories is from 1937 when, at the ripe age of two, I respectfully fed my Mickey Mouse handkerchief to the resident hippopotamus in the Khartoum zoo.

In this 2023 Roy Rappaport lecture, I take up Shahab Ahmed's What is Islam? as a point of entry to inquire into larger themes and questions—salient, hidden, to-be-pursued—in the study of religion and Islam. While Ahmed's book has been hailed as “a new way of looking at Islam,” I demonstrate how his definitional enterprise is unoriginal because the problématique of Islamic orthodoxy it is tied to belongs to the long-standing Orientalist objectification of Islam. The first section summarizes Ahmed's thesis. Taking the question of alcohol and Islam—one among six questions his book is organized around—as paradigmatic of his larger thesis, I argue that this question is markedly Christian and one already broached. Here I show how Ahmed disregards rich, diverse debate on alcohol to sustain his question as an “outright contradiction” between Islam as sharī‘a or principle and Islam as historical phenomena. In the third section, I comparatively outline an interim “pre-text,” a term central to his definition of Islam, of Ahmed's own text. In the conclusion, I iterate why my critique of Ahmed is foundational. I end by suggesting how anthropological-sociological study of Islam can become richer when analyzed not in terms of being Islamic, as Ahmed adjectively does, but in terms of becoming Muslim, as a verb.

As an admirer of the work of both Irfan Ahmad and the late Shahab Ahmed, I find this sh‘er by the Urdu poet Amjad Islam ‘Amjad’ to be an apt opening for my comments on Irfan sahab's Rappaport Lecture, which is a trenchant critique of Shahab Ahmed's seminal work, What is Islam? For in this brief essay, while I agree with some of Irfan Ahmad's critiques, and explore how they open new ground for Islamic studies, I do not wish to discard the valuable insights that Shahab Ahmed's book has brought to the larger field of Islamic studies and to my own understandings of Islam. This essay, then, is an attempt at synthesis, at reconciling Ahmad and Ahmed.

This article will explore three ethnographies—of Brazilian Umbanda, Cuban espiritismo, and Chilean ufology—whose cosmoses are variably self-referential, paradoxical, and absurd. I follow their anti-logics and argue that they exhibit, firstly, an excess, and secondly, a resistance to interpretation. Taking my concept of excess from Marisol de la Cadena, and of resisting interpretation from Susan Sontag, I argue that a radical version of resisting interpretation must go beyond experience and describe ontological evacuation itself—a ‘nothingness’ that holds all possibilities simultaneously; or an excess that contradicts either-or logics. I suggest we look at both the horror narrative and apophatic mysticism, which resist thought itself, as well as language, for a heuristic that is able to deal with ethnographies that defy logics of meaning or common sense.

Productive capacity of religious rituals is essential for production in historical and contemporary Buddhist economies, and ritualized and collectivized consumption of resources is essential for reproduction of such economies. By taking an ethnographic approach to a contemporary Buddhist community, this article contributes toward critically examining the overreliance on scriptural sources in the study of Buddhist economics. The predominant use of textual principles for describing and theorizing Buddhist economic principles and practices has led to the erroneous labeling of Buddhism as an ‘uneconomic’ religion. By examining a diasporic Bhutanese Buddhist community and its community-building processes, one can identify productive tensions between doctrinal principles and quotidian economic imperatives. The article unpacks how these tensions are resolved in generative and pragmatic ways through discursive solidarity practices between charismatic Buddhist figures and their faithful adherents. In doing so, this article heuristically theorizes new ways of describing Buddhist economy, and the people's pragmatic everyday strategies and outcomes.

Since 1965, the number of American Catholic nuns has declined sharply. Contemporary media have portrayed this demographic decline through the lens of moral failure yet the sisters consistently describe experiences of peace, awe, and hope. The present article draws on ethnographic data gathered in a Franciscan convent in the United States over the past 15 years to ask why Catholic sisters seem to be able to find peace despite an uncertain future while others experience distress. We find that a lifetime of religious training has taught the sisters to experience time and death in fundamentally different ways than mainstream Americans. We suggest that the sisters’ specific hope practices, which we call timeless hope, involve skills developed through religious practice that can be understood as a form of religious intelligence.

This article foregrounds transcendence and its definitions to formalize the term's value as a viable analytic for anthropology. It notes the proliferation of transcendences (plural) in anthropological literature and proposes a working typology of transcendence that recognizes the different scales within analysis on which transcendence is being used. Drawing upon this scalar-aware typology, it reviews existing scholarship in the field of anthropology of material religion, characterized by a detailed theoretical treatment of transcendence. Finally, this article redraws attention to the situatedness of transcendence in the history of anthropology and its attendant Christian legacy, in other words the scale of anthropology itself. It concludes that the most promising value of transcendence as an analytic lies in attending to the tensions between different scales in analysis.

The 2003 publication of Talal Asad's Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity was a landmark in contemporary anthropology. An intervention into late modern debates over secularism, the book subjected triumphalist narratives to critical scrutiny while reworking their fundamental elements. It articulated unregarded questions, reframing the terms of secularist discourse with reference to the powers they harness and disable. And amid the multitude of contemporary polemics over the religious and the secular, it worked “back from our present to the contingencies that have come together to give us our certainties” (Asad 2003: 16).

Two decades after the publication of Talal Asad's Formations of the Secular (2003), secularism is in a global state of crisis. From the standpoint of secularism's liberal proponents, the rising tide of right-wing populisms from the United States and Brazil to Eastern Europe and India threatens liberal freedoms and democracy all over the world. In an age when liberal democracies struggle to uphold the rule of law and multiculturalism is losing its popular mandate to neofascist aspirations of nationhood, the vanguards of the liberal order have found renewed faith in the redemptive promise of secularism. Far from engaging in an honest reckoning of the consequences of neoliberal governance in perpetuating economic inequalities, class divides, racial resentment, and xenophobia, liberal elites are ever more convinced of the need to rehabilitate secularism as a bulwark against the scourge of authoritarian populism and religious obscurantism. It would seem that the last thing we need at this crucial historical juncture is a critique of secular formations of individual freedom, multicultural assimilation, democratic representation, just war, and human rights, among others. To those who find it imperative to salvage secularism, such critiques are not only untimely but also play into the hands of nefarious interests bent on sabotaging liberal democracy. Recourse to fearmongering becomes an effective tactic of shutting down critiques of secularism: if you are so suspicious and disparaging of the liberal freedoms you enjoy under the secular state, would you rather live in a theocracy or tolerate another right-wing demagogue in the White House?

In a provocative section entitled “A Reading of Origins: Myth, Truth, and Power” in Chapter 1 of Formations of the Secular, Talal Asad cites European Enlightenment attitudes toward mythology:

But as Jean Starobinski reminds us, myth was more than a decorative language or a satirical one for taking a distance from the heroic as a social idea. In the great tragedies and operas of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, myths provided the material through which the psychology of the human passions could be explored. (2003: 29)

The intervention of Chapter 2 in Formations of the Secular (Asad 2003), “Thinking about Agency and Pain,” hinges on formulating pain as a species of action. This specification is also a means of theorizing the temporality of formations themselves, the temporalization of form. The modern concept of agency, it turns out, is a force of temporal homogenization or, more simply, a spatialization of time that necessarily mistakes pain for an ahistorical null point.

Like the rest of us on the AAA panel for which these remarks were originally prepared, I experienced the months since 7 October 2023 as a reminder of the horrific realities of this hellish world, in which we inhabit a time not only of utter depravity, of dispossession, of abandonment, and of brutal destruction, but also of indifference and mass cruelty. The third chapter of Formations of the Secular reflects directly on the themes of cruelty and torture. The chapter spells out four connected points at its beginning: (1) “the modern history of ‘torture’ is not only a record of the progressive prohibition of cruel, inhuman, and degrading practices. It is also part of a secular story of how one becomes truly human”; (2) “Cross-cultural” measures of “making moral and legal judgments about pain and suffering” are conditioned by historical and cultural senses; (3) “New ways of conceptualizing suffering . . . and sufferer . . . are increasingly universal in scope but particular in prescriptive content”; and (4) “The modern dedication to eliminating pain and suffering conflicts with other commitments and values” (individual, state) (Asad 2003: 101). Here Asad is not just pointing out that the scales are weighted—that some suffering is weighed differently than other types; certain kinds of anguish do not register at all in secular liberal discourses while others are seen as necessary and adequate to the civilizing process or to becoming proper human subjects—but that the frame of measurement itself, the possibility of deploying comparison of disparate kinds of suffering, has “become central to cross-cultural judgment in modern thought and practice” (ibid.: 109). He asks us to pay attention to the very presumption that “subjective experiences of pain can be objectively compared” (ibid.: 108), even though in themselves they are “incommensurable” (ibid.: 109).

As Talal Asad elaborates in Chapter 4 of Formations of the Secular (2003), “Redeeming the ‘Human’ through Human Rights,” human rights discourse has long been criticized for failing to attend to the systematic and modular relations between violence and redress. Defining the ‘human’ in human rights is dependent upon its adjudication by independent states (or those states honoring signed treaties) and the remedies those states can supply. The ‘human’ of human rights cannot be separated from its practical translation in context. My comments on this chapter of Formations of the Secular focus on the politics of transnational scale and how it mediates forms of injury. Specifically, these comments unfold parts of Asad's argument through the contemporary geopolitics of concern for Middle Eastern Christians (particularly centered around the discourse of ‘Christian persecution’) and if and how it fits into the idea of human rights. The main aims of the chapter center around how, “in a secular system like human rights, responsibility is assigned for it” (ibid.: 129). Human rights are not a simple set of principles to uphold universally—a standard list one can be for or against. Instead, one must critically attend to the field of violence that makes the discourse of and need for human rights possible (or impossible) in the first place (Mahmood 2006: 8). Put another way, some forms of violence become the substance of human rights discourse and some contexts of injury disconnect human rights discourse from its frames of translation altogether.

Europe is not merely the name of a geopolitical space or natural territory. Rather, as Talal Asad illustrates in “Muslims as a ‘Religious Minority’ in Europe” (Chapter 5 of Formations of the Secular, 2003), it is a project that coheres and unifies, swallows and expels. Thus Asad observes: Muslims are “included within and excluded from Europe at one and the same time in a special way” (ibid.: 159). The transformation of Muslims into a ‘minority’—an in-between status before assimilation into the Western family, or decisive expulsion from it—enacts this double movement. But Asad's intervention in Formations is not a call for the inclusion of Muslims and the (ex-)colonized; it is to question ‘inclusion’ per se. Perhaps this is why Asad describes his own claim, that Muslims cannot be represented in Europe, as “ironic” (Azad 2015). Not because Muslims can in fact be ‘included,’ but because their meaningful presence—the ability to live a “particular [way] of life continuously, co-operatively, and unselfconsciously” (Asad 2003: 178)—would mean the end of the very order that produces inclusion and exclusion, majority and minority: the end of Europe.

In the summer of 2013, Yemen saw national dialogues regarding what political form of governance could potentially braid the historical and colonial divisions of North and South, communist and republican, and myriad Islamic reform movements. While I was conducting fieldwork on medical practices, a story about a quarrel, a murder, and government ambivalence circulated in my family circle. The story unfolds within the central highlands of Yemen, in the villages of the Ibb province. It speaks to the failure of the absorption of Islamic law by the nation-state, the failure of the centralization of governance, and the complexity of adjudication in Islamic law. The proceeding events reflect what Asad considers the challenges of secularism and the nation-state vis-à-vis traditions such as Islam. Here he returns us to the questions of power in relation to collective representation, liberties, justice, and governance.

Lengthy, incisive, and erudite, Formations of the Secular's final essay telescopes inward like a book within a book. Its sober title, “Reconfigurations of Law and Ethics in Colonial Egypt,” is followed by fifty-one pages of compact argumentation and elaborate engagements with legal historians, scholars of Islam, and Nahda luminaries. The chapter discusses the subtle and yet transformative work of Western imperialism by examining several legal reforms advocated for and enacted throughout the long nineteenth century. In what follows, I reflect on the critical relationship that Asad's essay maintains with the academic discipline that made it possible, namely anthropology. More than the essay's reception within anthropological circles, it is how Asad strategically navigates the discipline's limitations and possibilities that interests me here.

This special section contributes to debates on religion and the city by focusing on the ritual body. The collection of articles reveals the bodily and sensory ways in which religious rituals relate to, impact, and co-construct the city. Bodies are means and sites of religious and gender performativity, as well as sites of regulation and negotiation. Exploring diverse ways of inhabiting and experiencing the city, the collection reflects upon the urban as created though embodied ritual practices, experiences, and memories. The examples of Chinese Protestant calisthenics in Nanping and Fuzhou, transgender funeral performances in Ho Chi Minh City, divine possession in Singapore, and Hindu fire-walking in London and Singapore provide diverse insights into the roles gendered bodies play in urban rituals.

This article explores how Protestants have developed Christian calisthenics in contemporary China. Chinese society has demonstrated a renewed interest in calisthenics practiced in public space. Millions of practitioners gather early mornings or evenings to stretch, dance, and exercise outdoors. Female Christians are developing their religious version of these exercises. In tune with loud Christian hymns, they perform together on sidewalks to praise their Lord and cultivate their health. This article argues that Christian dancers use their bodies to renegotiate the spatial, congregational, and political definition of their religion. While religious and public authorities tend to formalize public expressions of Christianity, Christian dancers emphasize the importance of health, the polymorphic nature of their religion, and the ubiquitous presence of their God.

Transgender funeral performance in southern Vietnam adopts the historical and cultural legacy of male cross-dressing performance, incorporating elements of present-day pop music with erotic overtones. This article explores how transgender funeral performers gain access to urban spaces and create for themselves a niche in the entertainment business. The article addresses how this practice configures in the articulation of social differences among various strata of urban people in Ho Chi Minh City, which has seen rapid political-economic transformations in recent years. The practice itself offers a nuanced portrayal of the relationship between everyday practices and state governance, between subcultures and mainstream culture.

This article traces the entanglements of kinship and religion by reflecting on diaspora Tamil women's lives in the global city of Singapore. It makes an intervention in the studies of diasporic religiosity by emphasizing the subjective and embodied experiences of devotion, sorcery, and divine possessions. The scholarship on Hinduism in Singapore has uncovered contestations and negotiations of plural identities in the multicultural city-state, amid ongoing shifts in urban landscapes and policy directives. The gendered dimensions of everyday religious practices and rituals foregrounded in this article shift the attention of extant scholarship on diaspora religion away from public spheres, migrant adaptation, and transnational networks to the ways that they intersect in intimate lives. The article situates the Tamil women's life stories, drawn from ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2017–2019, by examining female selfhood, transgressive sacrality, and hidden religious topographies, and offers possibilities of theorizing urban religiosity through women's intimate and embodied experiences.

Hindu ritual practices, which some may consider extreme, are evident in an innovative, refigured form in Britain. This article examines what part bodies play as sites of urban religious negotiations, taking the example of Thimithee, or religious fire-walking rituals carried out by groups of Mauritian Tamils during annual Hindu festivals in London. I engage specifically with newly-settled diasporic Tamil groups where ritual customs such as fire walking, body piercing and walking on machetes are part of festival celebrations. Do such bodily practices help confirm and reinscribe faith in being Hindu in the diaspora? How does the urban locale provide an aspirational and imaginative space where different faith groups support each other in creating new pathways, new friendships, and new dependencies?

This article contributes to debates on the relation between religion and the city by focusing on bodily experiences of religious rituals and the urban. Approaching religion as corporeal, and acknowledging the importance of bodies in experiencing and creating cities, I focus on embodied religious practices and the role of ritual bodies in the creation of urban memory. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork on the Hindu fire-walking festival in Singapore between 2019 and 2022, I reveal the gendered body and the translocal dimensions of the festival as key in experiencing the religious and the urban, in creating urban memory through religious rituals, and in the ways the religious and the urban co-constitute one another.

CORWIN, Anna I., Embracing Age: How Catholic Nuns Became Models of Aging Well, 202 pp., bibliography, index. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2021. Hardback, $150. ISBN: 9781978822283.

ANDRÉS, Rafael Ruiz, La secularización en España: Rupturas y cambios religiosos desde la sociología histórica, 328 pp. Madrid: Cátedra, 2022. Paperback, €15.67 (ISBN: 9788437643908). EPub, €10.92 (ISBN: 9788437643915).

SNODGRASS, Jeffrey, The Avatar Faculty: Ecstatic Transformations in Religion and Video Games, 200 pp., ills., bibliography, index. Oakland: University of California Press, 2023. Hardback, $95.00. ISBN: 9780520384354.

BERES, Derek, Matthew REMSKI, and Julian WALKER, Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat, 370 pp., acknowledgments, notes, index. New York: PublicAffairs, 2023. $30. ISBN: 9781541702981.

COPEMAN, Jacob, Arkotong LONGKUMER, and Koonal DUGGAL, eds., Gurus and Media: Sound, Image, Machine, Text, and the Digital, xvii, 453 pp., 55 color plates, index. London: UCL Press, 2023. Paperback, $60. ISBN: 978-18-00-08555-8.

GAITANIDIS, Ioannis, Spirituality and Alternativity in Contemporary Japan: Beyond Religion?, xii, 245 pp., 8 b/w ills., 3 graphs, bibliography, index. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023. Hardback, $115. ISBN: 9781350262614. Paperback, $35.95. ISBN: 9781350262652.

MOHAN, Urmila, ed., The Efficacy of Intimacy and Belief in Worldmaking Practices, 242 pp., 43 b/w ills. New York: Routledge, 2024. Hardback, £135. ISBN: 9781032498812. E-book, £35.99. ISBN: 9781003409731.

ESPÍRITO SANTO, Diana, Spirited Histories: Technologies, Media, and Trauma in Paranormal Chile, 212 pp., 11 b/w ills., bibliography, index. London: Routledge, 2024. Paperback, $54.99. ISBN: 9780367691813.

PÉREZ, Elizabeth, The Gut: A Black Atlantic Alimentary Tract, 84 pp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023. Paperback, £17.00. ISBN: 9781009031530. E-book, £17.00. ISBN: 978-1-009-03311-4.

PALMIÉ, Stephan, Thinking with Ngangas: What Afro-Cuban Ritual Can Tell Us about Scientific Practice and Vice Versa, 288 pp. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023. Cloth, $99. ISBN: 978-0-226-82592-2. Paperback, $30. ISBN: 978-0-226-82594-6. E-book, $29.99. ISBN: 978-0-226-82593-9.

SUHR, Christian, dir., Light Upon Light. 78 mins. In Arabic, English, and Danish with English and French subtitles, 2023. Available through Documentary Educational Resources.

One of the most exhilarating aspects of the anthropology of religion is that our field spans so many contexts – by definition – in such a way that we can never take either theory or method for granted. Our discipline consistently asks us to consider epistemological questions about the acquisition and the presentation of argument and knowledge: both the ways we go about deriving our material and the lenses through which we interpret it must always be assessed. Our ethnographies are our method, and our contexts, all in one. This year's issue takes up all these themes – our theoretical approaches; our fieldwork; and the data or the stories that we collect, translate, analyse, and present – with sophistication and depth, in ways that we hope can push our discipline farther.

My BA was a double major in anthropology and what was then called ‘Oriental languages’, and my MA and PhD were in anthropology, all at the University of California, Berkeley. Berkeley instilled in me a strong sense of politics and power dynamics and a penchant for social critique in my work. My PhD advisers were Jack Potter, a cultural Marxist who had done fieldwork on peasants in rural Hong Kong and Guangdong Province in China; Paul Rabinow, a philosophical anthropologist and early science and technology studies scholar who hosted Michel Foucault at Berkeley and introduced me to the world of French theory; and Robert Bellah, a sociologist of Japanese religion and American civil religion. As an immigrant originally born in Taiwan but who had grown up in multiple countries, I was very drawn to knowledge about Mainland China, the land from where both my parents fled the Communists. In the late 1970s, there was still very little knowledge about China in the outside world, but I was lucky to go there on a new graduate student exchange program between Berkeley and Beijing universities in 1981.

Afro-Brazilian LGBTQ evangelicals stand betwixt and between as negotiators with evangelical and LGBTQ communities in Brazilian society. Finding full acceptance in neither community, these religious actors engage in interpretive endeavors that represent the ‘wonky’ potentiality of ‘Black queer religious hermeneutics’. At a LGBTQ-led evangelical church in São Paulo, Brazil, Afro-Brazilian believers’ theological orientations reveal how they can disturb queer theoretical frameworks that emphasize ‘resistance’ and ‘empowerment’. Such emphases can foreclose analytical possibilities in a myopic attempt to focus on queerness as the orienting experiential framework of sexual and gender minorities. Instead, this article offers the possibility for understanding the roles of religiosity and materiality as the primary grounds of analysis, eschewing an overreliance on abstraction and subversion as analytical frames.

This article examines the claim, which several important scholars have seemed to endorse, that belief is a historically and culturally contingent mental state. This claim has radical implications, and I try to reconstruct the assumptions about belief that could motivate it and consider whether these assumptions are well founded. I focus particularly on Malcolm Ruel's essay “Christians as believers” but also discuss the work of Rodney Needham, Jean Pouillon, Joel Robbins, Jonathan Mair, and Ethan Shagan. I argue that the assumptions about belief that underlie the claims for its historical and/or cultural contingency are misplaced, and that we have not been given compelling reasons to think that the ascription of beliefs could be anachronistic or ethnocentric.

In what follows, Jon Bialecki, an anthropologist of Christianity, and Eloise Meneses, a Christian anthropologist, discuss the matter of ontological differences between anthropologists and how these might be crossed effectively to further the work of the discipline. An analogy is made to computers that must communicate with one another across incompatible operating systems. The discussion begins with a proposal from Eloise that involves entertaining the possibility of schools of thought rooted in differing ontologies.

This response acknowledges Ananda Abeysekara's review of Rewriting Buddhism: Pali Literature and Monastic Reform in Sri Lanka, 1157–1270, and expresses openness to reflecting on the analytical vocabulary Abeysekara found problematic. It also expands and clarifies the book's criticisms of prevailing views on medieval monastic reform in Sri Lanka and their relationship with monastic literary production.

Exemplarity is one of those startlingly interesting ideas that deserves to be up there with ‘power’ as a foundational concept for the social sciences. Exemplarity is memory, learning, and mimesis; it is self-recognition in the Other, and therefore key to theory of mind. One of the curious things about exemplarity is how pervasively we encounter it in its multiple, material, and ideational forms; as copies, repetitions, iterations, duplications, models, seriations, similes, icons—the list goes on. Examples (of some sort) can always be found.

This introduction engages with recent scholarship on what has been dubbed ‘lived’ forms of nonreligion. It aims to profile the anthropology of the secular and nonreligion, no longer treating it as a subdiscipline or ‘emerging trend’ but as a substantial contribution to general debates in anthropology. Drawing on the ethnographic contributions to this special issue, we explore how novel approaches to embodiment, materiality, moral sensibilities, conceptual distinctions, and everyday practices signal new pathways for an anthropology of nonreligion that can lead beyond hitherto dominant concerns with the political governance of religion(s). Critically engaging with the notion of ‘lived’ nonreligion, we highlight the potential of ethnographic approaches to provide a uniquely anthropological perspective on secularism, irreligion, atheism, skepticism, and related phenomena.

Looking at the diverse experiences of former Muslims shows that becoming and being nonreligious encompasses more than a rational one-time decision that can be studied from a mere ontological-cognitive perspective. It is deeply linked to personal experiences, relations, and emotions. While previous research has often focused on organized, coherent, and cognitive forms of nonreligion, more and more scholars have started to embrace material, embodied, and emotional aspects in their studies on nonreligion. This ongoing development can be described as turning toward a lived nonreligion framework that pays more attention to the everyday experiences of ‘ordinary’ nonbelievers. Applying this approach to the experiences of young Moroccan nonbelievers, I explore the extent to which the lived nonreligion framework manages to capture the ethnographic complexity that their narratives offer.

People in South Asia who neither believe in god(s) nor engage in religious practices nevertheless often self-identify as Muslims or Hindus rather than—or in addition to—identifying as atheists. The situational and contextual dynamics generating such positionings have implications for the conceptualization of nonreligion and secular lives. Based on ethnographic research in India and Bangladesh and focusing on two individuals, we attend to embodied and more ambivalent modes of nonreligiosity. This enables us to understand nonreligion as situated social practices and beyond what is typically captured with the term ‘religion’. Studying nonreligion also where it is not visible as articulated conviction or identity not only contributes to accounting for the diversity of nonreligious configurations but also offers significant complementary insights.

This article explores the concept of resistance and hegemony in relation to atheism and nonreligion in Turkey. It highlights how the dominant discourse in Turkey commonly denies the existence of atheism and nonreligion while promoting the country's Sunni Muslim identity as synonymous with being Turkish. Still, the article argues that a significant number of people in Turkey have left Islam in recent years. Leaving Islam can be risky and met with discrimination, hate speech, and even physical violence. The study highlights the difficult situation faced by nonbelievers who must navigate between personal convictions and societal expectations. It contends that being atheist and choosing not to conform to dominant religious norms represents a form of discursive resistance against the Sunni Islamic hegemony in Turkey. The article concludes by asserting that the nonperformance of religious rituals can be seen as a form of resistance and a challenge to the ruling elite's claim to power.

Drawing on theories of moral exemplarism and ethnographic research with an atheist movement in South India, this article explores how narratives of idealism and the Telugu concept of ‘ādarśam.’ signal a distinct register of moral experience. By foregrounding the role of concrete interpersonal and affective relationships, the article complicates methodological approaches to the ethics of nonreligion that concentrate on forms of moral reasoning based on semiotic or ontological distinctions between religion and nonreligion. Rather than positing idealism as an intrinsic attribute of nonreligion, the article investigates ethnographically how atheist activists draw on different moral registers and ambivalent investments in the making and policing of boundaries between religion and nonreligion for making moral judgments and working out what it means to lead an idealist life.

This project is based on fieldwork with members of The Satanic Temple (TST) in a mid-western, ‘Bible-belt’ state in the USA. Formed in 2013, TST identifies as a religion centered on eradicating Christian dominance of public space and is notorious for inserting a large Baphomet statue into debates around displays of Ten Commandments monuments. Members insist that TST is not a parody, but is a legitimate religion, with specific beliefs, ethical values, and practices, albeit a religion aimed at defending the nonreligious. Core beliefs include “non-theism,” hailing Satan not as an actual deity but as a symbol of rebellion against oppression. This article explores how TST's constructions of the religious and the secular lead their protests against one to produce the other in specific ways, at times implicitly supporting Protestant normativity.

This article outlines a conceptual dyad that maps onto a widespread preoccupation with the untangling and elimination of religious traces among avowedly nonreligious people: clarification and disposal. Clarification denotes the reworking of morality, ceremonial conduct, and artistic expression as endeavors that are essentially human or cultural and therefore only incidental to religious traditions. Disposal refers to practices that aim to remove that which is deemed religious and irrational. We suggest that dilemmas of clarification and disposal are felt by all self-consciously nonreligious people. Combining ethnographic research in India and a comparative engagement with findings from elsewhere, the article also demonstrates how clarification and disposal offer a corrective contribution to analytical languages in the study of nonreligion.

ALTNURME, Riho, ed., Old Religion, New Spirituality: Implications of Secularisation and Individualisation in Estonia. xii, 185 pp., 6 tables, 1 map, references, index. Leiden: Brill, 2023. Paperback, $54. ISBN: 978-90-04-52446-0.

CHAMEL, Jean, and Yael DANSAC, eds., Relating with More-than-Humans: Interbeing Rituality in a Living World. xvi, 254 pp., 25 b/w ills., index London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022. Hardback, $129. ISBN: 978-3-031-10293-6.

CHATTERJEE, Moyukh, Composing Violence: The Limits of Exposure and the Making of Minorities, 184 pp., 6 ills., bibliography, index. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2023. Paperback, $24.95. ISBN: 978-1-4780-1966-4.

De JONG, Ferdinand, and José MAPRIL, eds., The Future of Religious Heritage. Entangled Temporalities of the Sacred and the Secular, 244 pp., 6 b/w ills., bibliography, index. London: Routledge, 2023. Hardback, $160. ISBN: 978-1-03-202194-2.

KING, Rebekka, ed., Key Categories in the Study of Religion: Contexts and Critiques, 246 pp., 4 b/w figs., references, index. Sheffield: Equinox Publishing, 2022. Paperback, $35. ISBN: 978-1-78179-966-6.

KHOJA-MOOLJI, Shenila, Rebuilding Community: Displaced Women and the Making of a Shia Ismaili Muslim Sociality, 280 pp., 32 b/w ills., bibliography, index. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023. Paperback, $29.95, ISBN: 978-0-19-764203-0.

LAZZARETTI, Vera, and Kathinka FRØYSTAD, eds., Beyond Courtrooms and Street Violence: Rethinking Religious Offence and Its Containment, 114 pp., illustrations, bibliography, index. London: Routledge, 2022. Hardback, $136. ISBN: 978-1-03-225265-0.

O'BRIEN-KOP, Karen, Rethinking ‘Classical Yoga’ and Buddhism: Meditation, Metaphors and Materiality, 280 pp., 10 b/w ills., appendices, bibliography, index. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023. Paperback, $39.95. ISBN: 978-1-350-23003-3.

Author's response to Zoë Slatoff's book review of Rethinking ‘Classical Yoga’ and Buddhism: Meditation, Metaphors and Materiality

ORELLANA, Marjorie Elaine Faulstich, Mindful Ethnography: Mind, Heart and Activity for Transformative Social Research, 186 pp, 4 b/w ills. London: Routledge, 2020. Paperback, $59.95, ISBN: 978-1-138-36104-1.

TATEO, Giuseppe, Under the Sign of the Cross: The People's Salvation Cathedral and the Church-Building Industry in Postsocialist Romania, 256 pp., 28 ills., bibliography, index. New York: Berghahn Books, 2020. Hardback, $135. ISBN 978-1-78920-858-0.

Dana RAPPOPORT, dir., Death of the One Who Knows. 82 mins. In Toraja and Indonesian, with English subtitles. Sulawesi, Indonesia (Le Miroir, Gabriel Chabanier; Planimonteur; Centre Asie du Sud-Est), 2021. Available through Documentary Educational Resources.

Religion and Society has always been a journal designed to reflect but also to question the grounds on which the anthropology of religion is based. We have promoted a flexible format over the last 13 years, encouraging different styles of writing and modes of academic address. In this sense, the journal is dedicated to both exploring the possibilities and exposing the current limitations of anthropological research. All of these aims, including their remit to query what we study and how we do so, are fully evident in this volume, which contains, even by our own standards, an unusually wide range of approaches, formats, and challenges to our field.

In an article as relevant now as when it was written, Aleida Assmann (1996: 94) asks: “How in a world of divided creeds is one to find out which is the true belief?” She draws from Gotthold Lessing's character Nathan the Wise to say (ibid.: 95):

There are two possible solutions to the problem, that of the fundamentalist and that of the sage. The fundamentalist overcomes the problem of multiplicity by a return to the One. Truth can be restored only if rivals are eliminated and false pretenders unmasked. Truth and order are founded on the tyranny of the One. The solution of the sage is founded on the metaphysics of absence … Under these conditions, multiplicity cannot be overcome. It has to be endured, tolerated. It is a permanent reminder of the fact that absolute truth is not for this world as we know it. To put it in a paradoxical way: it is the discovery of enlightenment that we are all groping in the dark.

Drawing on ethnographic and historical material from Melanesia and beyond, this article explores movements of religious intensification within Christianity. The morphology of religious intensification is defined by a multiplicity of localized upsurges laterally interconnected by means of decentralized packs of inspired participants. Charismatic intensification is above all an intensification of affect produced through the workings and movements of the Holy Spirit. In contrast to the ‘domesticated affect’ of institutionalized Pentecostalism, religious intensification trades in ‘wild affect’—improvised, loosely structured mobilizations of affective outpouring. These contagious upsurges in spiritualized intensity propel participants toward a new metaphysical horizon, namely, the Parousia or Second Coming. The effusion of apocalyptic affect can in many cases be historically explained in terms of the subsidence of the colonial order; as one cosmological meta-narrative collapses, another rushes into the existential breach. Surging toward a new world here produces an unraveling of existing hegemonic teleology and eschatology that function to fix, dominate, and restrict human bodies.

Through a detailed reading of a recent study of medieval Buddhism and politics in Sri Lanka in conjunction with a number of other works, this article explores the troubling legacy of translating the historical questions of subjectivity into the modern language of ‘agency’, ‘autonomy’, ‘innovation’, and ‘creativity’. This legacy cannot easily be separated from the politics of white privilege in post-colonial studies of Buddhism and South Asian religion. The problem with trying to expose creativity, so pervasive in the studies of South Asian religion, is not merely a matter of anachronistic conceptualization of divergent historical forms of religious practice and subjectivity. It is that the very possibility of translating subjectivity into easily digestible aestheticized modes of being (e.g., creativity) is predicated on an uninterrogated assumption about the self-evidence of such concepts independent of temporal forms of power encountered in forms of life.

Around David Henig's Remaking Muslim Lives: Everyday Islam in Postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina Urbana, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2020, paperback, 210 pages

This article, which introduces a special collection of articles, is intended to invite scholarly reflection on the study of religion in the present day. We believe that a meaningful conversation about what happens when we engage religion for scholarly purposes forces us to consider the ways in which the very category ‘religion’ shapes our research interests and scholarly communities. A focus on ‘engagements’ is furthermore useful as we seek an open conversation about what is lost and what can be found in the translations and transitions between analytical categories and empirical findings. We contend that much can be learned by exploring what, exactly, is engaging us—and how we engage—in the study of religion. It is therefore the aim of this article and those that follow to participate in joint interdisciplinary thinking about the means, ends, methods, and results of academic analyses that deal with religions and religiosity.

Religion is often viewed as a subset of ‘culture’, that is, the two terms are often used interchangeably. At the same time, it is possible to view religion and culture as clearly distinct, perhaps even opposed to each other. This article ponders the ways in which what counts as religion in the present day is intertwined with a concept of culture. Each has an essentialist and postmodern variant, and how they are related, whether conflated or separated, carries normative claims about each. Bringing together theoretical insights on these two highly debated concepts, this piece offers an analysis of the nested indeterminacies between both and urges analytical attention toward them in the interplay of essentializing and de-essentializing practices.

How can we engage the secular in ways that encourage empirical investigations of its specific and embodied expressions? Locating the secular in particular places and situations invites the scholar to recognize it, to say “there it is.” However, the secular seems difficult to pin down precisely: it quickly expands into everything that is not considered religion in a given context, and the distinctively secular seems to evaporate into nothing. This article explores the slipperiness of the secular, not merely as a conceptual obstacle, but as something that emerges from the way the secular is fundamentally constituted upon the absence of religion rather than any specific forms of presence. It probes what kind of spatial, material, and embodied presence such absence of religion might have, and it suggests that an answer to this question may provide us with a methodological way out of the slipperiness.

This article examines two categories in which claims of special knowledge are central: Gnosticism and conspiracy theories. In both cases, notions of what counts as ‘religion’ come into play in setting their boundaries, with only certain kinds of religious belief deemed as legitimate. Moreover, the category is privileged over the data. While these cases may be extreme, I contend that they point to a major failure of contemporary social sciences—a commitment to categories about data that leave us upholding the episteme that we should be critiquing.

Censuses and surveys represent a two-edged sword. They are both a technology of governance for national and former colonial administrations and a tool of recognition for the minoritized. In this article, I discuss the history of censuses and surveys in a Danish context, arguing that the regional and local history of registration is crucial for understanding how and why religious identity becomes visible and important as a measure for the population. Applying the case of a national survey on religiosity in relation to the Danish Evangelical Lutheran Church in 2020, I ask how religion comes alive through the strategic use of artificial ideal types aimed at mapping a religious mainstream. Surveys introduce a distance to messy religious reality, thereby reducing complexity and richness. Yet this distance also allows the researcher to ask new questions that go beyond the immediate religious experience.

Through personal reflections on my work to date, this article explores how scholars of religion creatively define and redefine our subject matter. It emphasizes two main themes: temporality and the category of religion. Regarding time, I discuss how changing personal and political contexts have spurred my experiments with cross-disciplinary methodologies, as well as my reflections on citational politics and the role of citation in interdisciplinary exchanges. Regarding the category of religion, I consider the impact on my recent work of projects to deconstruct religion further by including secularism and non-religion within Religious Studies departments. Throughout, I ponder how scholars speak to one another, particularly in the interdisciplinary environment of religious studies, about the thing we call ‘religion’.

The study of religion has come a long way since the bad old days of bold, universalizing theory. The claim that religion can be readily recognized across time and place because it has a sort of ‘essence’ is today viewed as preposterous. What we would much rather insist on is the notion that religion as a category is shifting and complex, with vagueness kept at the center of our analyses. In this article, I play devil's advocate by asking what (more) we can possibly gain by continuing to foreground religion's conceptual shiftiness. Reflecting on this collection, I explore how a focus on genealogies and biographies might offer us new insight on the distinction between religiosity and religion. Defining religiosity as a species of attention that inheres in persons, I suggest that writing about and researching religion engages the religiosity of the author, and that religiosity, in turn, may (or may not) bring about definitions or assemblages we might recognize as ‘religion’.

This article argues for a non-normative and pluralistic approach to the study of utopia among Muslim people. The authors employ the contributions to this special section as a starting point to redress a number of ethnocentric biases clouding the relationship between utopia and Islam. They criticize arguments that deny Muslims the ability to produce ‘genuine’ utopias, highlighting commonalities between a religious culture and the secular culture in the West that has endorsed the notion of utopia. At the same time, the contributors show how in scholarly research a normative and prejudicial concept of ‘Islamic utopia’ has obscured the variety of forms that utopianism assumes among Muslim people, particularly the youth. This article envisages an inductive approach that takes into account both the different positionalities from which the concepts of Islam and utopia are appropriated and the diverse political outcomes that are produced.

This article explores how factors such as gender and cross-religious communication frame and yield utopian perspectives in Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain's literature and practice as educator and feminist. The article makes the case that Hossain's body of work envisions utopia in complex, many-layered ways. Early in her creative career, as a member of the Muslim youth herself, Hossain created gender-just utopian visions that also embedded cross-religious dialogue and cooperation. She later became an educator, inspiring youth, particularly Muslim girls and young women, with utopian ideas and practices. The article concludes that analyzing Hossain's writing in utopian frames, as well as examining her writing and work through Ruth Levitas's approach to utopia as method, helps to explain Hossain's inclusion of religion and spirituality in her oeuvre.

In this article I consider the connection between Islam and utopia, using the renewed visibility that Islamic actors and moral economies have gained in the post-revolutionary Tunisian public sphere as a starting point. In particular, based on ethnographic findings from field research in Tunisia, I take into account the interest in Salafism expressed by young Muslims, recently fascinated by the Salafi tradition even if not necessarily joining any formal Salafi organization. The recovery of an original and mythical perfection, rooted in the example of the ancestors (the salaf), that is, the Prophet and his Companions, has been the inspiration on which many young Tunisian Muslims draw in order to shape their subjectivity on the basis of a complex relationship with time and politics.

Despite the existence of a variegated literary tradition and the almost complete absence of field research on the subject, the notion of utopia in the Muslim world is generally associated with an ‘Islamic utopia’ that aims to reinstate the societal model of early Muslims. Based on ethnographic research among young Italian-Bangladeshis, this article suggests that ‘retro-utopia’ and religious repertoires more generally do not represent the only resources used by young people to imagine social change. The interlocutors put forth a variety of images of an ideal society that is ultimately structured according to a realism-messianism polarity. The youth use these images in an endeavor to make sense of their different positionalities and biographical trajectories, and the power relations experienced by themselves and the religious groups with which they are affiliated.

VALERI, Valerio, Classic Concepts in Anthropology, 280 pp., appendix, bibliography. Chicago: HAU Books, 2018. Paperback, $30.00. ISBN 9780990505082.

VIVEIROS DE CASTRO, Eduardo, The Relative Native: Essays on Indigenous Conceptual Worlds, 366 pp., bibliography, index. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Paperback, $35.00. ISBN 9780990505037.

ABRAMSON, Allen, and Martin HOLBRAAD, eds., Framing Cosmologies: The Anthropology of Worlds, 336 pp., bibligraphical references, index. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014. Paperback, $35.00. ISBN 9781526107183.

WEIL, Shalva, ed., The Baghdadi Jews in India: Maintaining Communities, Negotiating Identities and Creating Super-Diversity, 202 pp., illustrations, notes, references. London: Routledge, 2019. eBook, $42.00. ISBN 9780367197872.

STADLER, Nurit, Voices of the Ritual: Devotion to Female Saints and Shrines in the Holy Land, 216 pp., notes, bibliography, index. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Hardback, $110.00. ISBN 9780197501306.

RUFFLE, Karen G., Everyday Shi‘ism in South Asia, 368 pp., illustrations, teaching appendix, glossary. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2021. Paperback, $45.00. ISBN 9781119357148.

“MARIA MAGDALENA” EXHIBITION Museum Catharijneconvent, Utrecht, the Netherlands, 25 June 2021–9 January 2022

ASIMOS, Vivian, Digital Mythology and the Internet's Monster: The Slender Man, 256 pp., figures, diagrams, bibliography, index. London: Bloomsbury, 2021. Hardback, $100.00. ISBN 9781350181441.

MORGAN, David, The Thing about Religion: An Introduction to the Material Study of Religions, 268 pp., illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. Paperback, $24.95. ISBN 9781469662831.

POLTORAK, Mike, dir., The Healer and the Psychiatrist, 2019. Documentary film, Tongan and English, color, 74 min. Distributed by Documentary Educational Resources.

TREMLETT, Paul-François, Towards a New Theory of Religion and Social Change: Sovereignties and Disruptions, 200 pp., figures, notes, references, index. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. Hardback, $110.00. ISBN 9781474272568.

KENDALL, Laurel, Mediums and Magical Things: Statues, Paintings, and Masks in Asian Places, 280 pp., illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. Oakland: University of California Press, 2021. Paperback, $34.95. ISBN 9780520298675.

LANG, Natalie, Religion and Pride: Hindus in Search of Recognition in La Réunion, 234 pp., illustrations, glossary, index. New York: Berghahn Books, 2021. Hardback, $135.00. ISBN 9781800730274.

JOHNSON, Andrew Alan, Mekong Dreaming: Life and Death Along a Changing River, 208 pp., illustrations, notes, references, index. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020. Hardback, $99.95. ISBN 9781478009771.

Perhaps it is no coincidence that as we approach two years of a COVID-adjusted world, this volume of Religion and Society turns its sights to horizons, imaginaries, and lenses of legibility. What does this new world look like, and from what vantage point might we best approach it? And how might these new ways of seeing imply new ways of acting in community, in concert, over time, and across space—or how might we see our old ways of acting anew?

The study of religion is a challenge. It means trying to understand the energies and visions that have created, undergirded, and sometimes disrupted the great civilizations and cultures of the world. It means studying the history and diversity of the ways people have shaped worlds of meaning in response to or relation to what they may call the ‘transcendent’, or in response to science and technology, or in response to other traditions of meaning. It means studying the many ways people have given an account of the transcendent and the ways some traditions have gotten along quite well without an understanding of the transcendent. It means studying the symbolic, interpretive, scriptural forms over which traditions of faith and practice have argued through the centuries and continue to argue today. It means studying the construction of words like ‘religion’, ‘faith’, ‘tradition’, ‘theology’, and ‘spirituality’.

Amid a moment of crisis, how might the anthropology of religion shift its focus from ethics to politics? This 2021 Rappaport Lecture, delivered at the Society for the Anthropology of Religion (SAR) Biennial Meeting on 15 May 2021, begins by highlighting three ways in which our field has taken on politics in recent years: by troubling the distinction between ethics and politics, by thinking religion together with pressing political issues, and by taking a critical look at our conceptual horizons. Elaborating on this third way, it proposes that the anthropology of religion needs to move beyond the human horizon by ethnographically grappling with something bigger, namely, God. Prompted by a reflection on the phrase Allāhu akbar (God is the greatest), the lecture maps the challenges posed by a god greater than the human imagination and considers a range of writing strategies that might help make our texts more hospitable to such a figure. Bringing Islam into the conversation about the relationship between theology and anthropology, it suggests that the figure of God directs us toward the evasive and unknowable—that which exceeds our grasp and analysis.

In one of his last great provocations, Marshall Sahlins describes the ‘original political society’ as a society where supposedly ‘egalitarian’ relations between humans are subordinated to the government of metahuman beings. He argues that this government is ‘a state’, but what kind of state does he mean? Even if metahumans are hierarchically organized and have power over human beings, they lack two capacities commonly attributed to political states: systematic means to make populations legible and coercive means to identity the intentions of others. The nascent forms of state legibility and public mind reading that are present in Sahlins's original political society are not unified and tied to particular agents. A discussion of the limitations of state and mind legibility points to the fundamental correlations between those two forms of legibility and their co-implication in whatever might be called ‘the state’.

This article delves into the spectral and affective reserves of Zikr, the Sufi exercise of godly remembrance. It explores how performances of religious longing broaden the moral experience of a post-migrant Berlin by offering contemporary believers critically thin zones of hypersocial contact with Islamic holy figures. Zikr emerges as a key interface of felt and material worlds: through acts of remembrance, subliminal figures and migrant inheritances are made contemporaneous while suppressed civic-political matters find a spectral, more-than-visual presence in Berlin. Sufi haunting thus achieves, amid enduring conditions of migration, a provisional positioning of the not-here and the not-now as an also-here. Such remembrance affords migrants a greater awareness of being distinctly historical as well as the critical means to look past conditions of the present.

This article examines how sociological totemism mediates the co-existence of animism and an emerging naturalism among the Makushi in Surama Village (Guyana) within contexts of interactions with outsiders. Since the 1830s, such contexts have varied from missionization to eco-tourism, which Surama developed in the 1990s and which has since significantly increased. Eco-tourism currently facilitates access to employment, goods, outside knowledge, and international allies in Surama. In the present, villagers seek to fête and propitiate the leaders of outside groups and organizations to ensure the continued provision of these desiderata. Such practices are linked to shamanic relations with the ‘masters’ or ‘owners’ of animals, plants, and other aspects of the landscape. This article argues that these notions of mastery and ownership produce totemic homologies when applied to the intra-social relations of outsiders in Surama. The resulting homologies facilitate the emergence of a nascent naturalism that indicates ongoing ontological transformation in Surama.

This article examines how the language and logics of the Christian Right in South Korea contributed to the propagation of anti-asylum sentiment during the Yemeni refugee crisis in 2018. By analyzing the Christian Right's historical origins in anti-communism and its moral opposition to anti-discrimination law, it shows how the anti-asylum movement owed much of its support to a conservative Protestant view of international refugee rights, seen through the lens of minority rights at home. Ultimately, it argues that overlaps between religious and national ideologies of anti-communism activate conservative Protestant linkages between moral boundaries and border security.

This article is about Russian Baptists’ perception of their faith as a text. I argue that they practice their lived faith by interiorizing the language of the Russian Synodal Translation of the Bible as their ‘language of reasoning’. I support this claim by analyzing two aspects of faith: as an act of conversion and as a process of living a Christian life. To illustrate the mechanism of sustaining faith, I use the case of a rehabilitation ministry for addicted people to unpack narratives of conversion, gender order, and family life. Biblical literalism is the basis of the Russian Baptist faith narrative, and in this article I scrutinize the mechanism of its construction.

How should instructors conceptualize an introductory course on the academic study of religion? This article combines an abstract and broader review of different conceptualizations of such courses with hands-on discussions of two exemplary teaching models. The ‘case study model’ applies different approaches within the study of religion to a single case study in order to exemplify and compare their potentials and limitations. The ‘monograph model’ illustrates how an ethnography is used as a reference point for a discussion of the history of and current strands within the study of religion. Both models are particularly well suited to facilitate the combination of an overview of key themes, approaches, terms, and scholars with a close study of the intricate and captivating empirical reality of ‘lived religion(s)’.

In this introduction, we bring together diverse anthropological considerations of community, belonging, and belief to argue for a reconsideration of the notion of ‘sharedness’ that often underlies these concepts. Scholars have long critiqued the use of ‘community’ for its broad application and vagueness, and most now recognize communities to be newly emerging rather than pre-existing. Despite this critical approach to scholarly uses of ‘community’, forms of unity often continue to be viewed as undergirded by a seemingly more self-evident idea of sharedness, in practice, belief or purpose. In this special section, we question this self-evidency to focus on how sharedness itself needs to be discursively and semiotically co-constructed and fostered by people who imagine themselves as belonging to communities of apparent mixed beliefs and practices. We propose that a focus on discourse and semiosis can provide insights into the innovative ways in which individuals negotiate, co-construct, and enact sharedness.

How do people create their religious selves and a religious culture through their everyday practices and discourses? This article examines residents of two rural daaras (Sufi religious communities) in Senegal and their focus on labor and tolerance as religious practice. It uses concepts of tradition, performativity, and citation to trace the themes of labor and tolerance through historical, political, and present-day applications in Senegal. How do common ways of talking about and practicing labor and tolerance unite a religiously diverse population, both in the daaras and more broadly in Senegal? The daaras’ shaykh and residents cite Murid teachings to inform their practices and discussions of labor and tolerance, and have developed the daaras to consciously embed those values in everyday life. These shared practices and discourses form a cultural milieu in which people intentionally participate in the interests of a unified community that can work toward both spiritual and environmental purposes.

This article examines the role of language as a key metaphor and medium of occult sociality among contemporary Western astrologers. I argue that the ‘symbolic language’ attributed to celestial objects and patterns informs everyday speech acts and reinforces shared commitments to the authority of astrological tradition, in the relative absence of conventional structures of belief and belonging. At the same time, the flexibility and versatility of horoscopic symbols authorize diverse and idiosyncratic adaptations, creating patterns of discord and fragmentation often framed as characteristic of the astrology community. I argue that the tension between notions of metaphysical community and professionalization, on the one hand, and the virtues of epistemological individualism and eclecticism, on the other, is a constitutive tension at the heart of Western metaphysical practice. This approach complicates straightforward models of community as consensus, and at the same time challenges common stereotypes about the atomizing effects of alternative spiritualities.

This article contemplates the construction of sharedness that underlies the success of alternative lifestyle communities in Eastern Africa. In Kenya, a new tourism niche market that focuses on yoga, mindfulness, and alternative medicine is flourishing. Tourists travel to East Africa to practice yoga, but also to introduce local communities to ‘alternative lifestyles’. By considering Western and Kenyan practitioners’ discourses about the benefits of alternative healing, mindfulness, and yoga, I explore the significance of sharedness to the emergence of communities that are structured around not just physical practice, but also an envisioned joint purpose. I argue that discursively constructing shared purpose, in the face of seemingly evident differences, is central to Western expats’ validation and commercialization of these initiatives. I also demonstrate that local participants equally, although along different lines, feel compelled to construct a particular kind of sharedness to justify their yoga practice to themselves and their own communities.

This article analyzes how congregants in a lay-led Reconstructionist synagogue discursively contest and perform sharedness through active engagement, interpretation, and public disagreements about how to create and sustain Jewish community. I argue that such ‘wrestling with tradition’—that is, questioning, negotiating, and (re)creating traditions in the context of countercultural and eclectic Jewish community—is achieved through collaborative and often conflictual discursive engagement with Jewish tradition. ‘Wrestling with tradition’ does not involve shared beliefs, shared Halakhah (Jewish laws and rituals), or even a shared spiritual practice. Instead, it is in the discursive ‘wrestling’—for example, in debating rather than necessarily following Halakhah—that a communal enactment of sharedness persists in affective and intellectual engagement with Jewish tradition.

This article draws on in-depth ethnographic research with the Layene (People of God), a little-studied Sufi Muslim community based in Dakar, the present-day Senegalese capital. My analysis of everyday and ritual performances serves as a way to understand what it means to be Layene, a community guided by particular (re)interpretations of equality, community ethics, and religious practice and discourse. I focus primarily on how the Layene reinterpret the Wolof concept of teraanga (hospitality/prestation) as constituting a kind of ‘radical sharedness’, which is viewed as the ethical foundation of the Layene faith. My study uses ethnographic research with Layene community members, discourse analysis of written and spoken Layene sermons and sikr (invocations of God), and content from Layene community websites to examine how specific ritual performances bring about religious communion as well as social change.

To share/sharing/shared/a share of/to share with. What do we create when we share objects, embodied experiences, languages, or ideas with others? Intimacy? Ties of obligation? A sense of belonging to something despite differences of investments and position? In this special section, Hillewaert and Tetreault experiment with reimagining the notion of ‘sharedness’. They have assembled a set of articles that use the term when describing less hegemonically spiritual and religious communities from a variety of places, traditions, and social formations. Some contributors focus on communities marginalized by more dominantly recognized state or institutional religiosity (Riley, Cochrane, Tetreault). Others ask what constitutes the grounds for defining religious/spiritual communities at all (Hillewaert, Elisha). The majority of the communities discussed probably fit most comfortably in scholarship on new religious movements or New Age scholarship (Elisha). What links these contributions is a focus on processes by which participants’ sharedness is achieved despite their differences of belief, practice, or both, which might seem to threaten their existence as a collectivity. That is, the authors consider how difference rather than sameness becomes the grounds for creating a sense of joint purpose. They also emphasize that sharedness is a jumping-off point, a category for ethnographic investigation specifically through attention to language, materiality, and embodiment. This contrasts to assumptions that community of any sort necessarily relies on or emerges from participants’ sameness.

CANTÓN-DELGADO, Manuela, et al., Evangelical Gypsies in Spain: “The Bible Is Our Promised Land,” 290 pp., bibliography, index. Lexington Books, 2020. Hardback, $95.00. ISBN 9781498580939.

COTTER, Christopher R., The Critical Study of Non-Religion: Discourse, Identification and Locality, 264 pp., illustrations, notes, references. London: Bloomsbury, 2020. Hardback, $115.00. ISBN 9781350095243.

CUNHA, Ana Stela, and Edemar MIQUETA, dirs., Mandou me chamar, eu vim!, 2021. Documentary film, Portuguese, color, 61 min. Sponsored by IBRAM (Brazilian Institute of Museums) and SYNC Cultural.

DAHL, Shayne, and Satoshi WATANABE, dirs., The Buddha Mummies of North Japan, 2017. Documentary film, color, 20 min. https://www.kanopy.com/product/buddha-mummies-north-japan. https://vimeo.com/ondemand/buddhamummies.

FAUSTO, Carlos, Art Effects: Image, Agency, and Ritual in Amazonia, 420 pp., photographs, illustrations, maps, tables, references, index. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2020. Hardback, $80.00. ISBN 9781496220448.

FEDELE, Anna, and Kim E. KNIBBE, eds., Secular Societies, Spiritual Selves? The Gendered Triangle of Religion, Secularity and Spirituality, 254 pp., illustrations, references, index. London: Routledge, 2020. eBook, $49.00. ISBN 9780815349754.

FERARO, Shai, and Ethan DOYLE WHITE, eds., Magic and Witchery in the Modern West: Celebrating the Twentieth Anniversary of the ‘Triumph of the Moon,’ 278 pp., references, index. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. eBook, $70.00. ISBN 9783030155490.

GARZÓN VALLEJO, Iván, Rebeldes, románticos y profetas: La responsabilidad de sacerdotes, políticos e intelectuales en el conflicto armado colombiano, 212 pp., references. Bogotá: University of La Sabana and Ariel, 2020. Kindle, $4.99. ISBN 9789584287168.

HALPERIN, David J., Intimate Alien: The Hidden Story of the UFO, 304 pp., illustrations, notes, index. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2020. Hardback, $26.00. ISBN 9781503607088.

OCHOA, Todd Ramón, A Party for Lazarus: Six Generations of Ancestral Devotion in a Cuban Town, 336 pp., notes, bibliography, index. Oakland: University of California Press, 2020. Hardback, $85.00. ISBN 9780520315983.

PALMISANO, Stefania, and Nicola PANNOFINO, Contemporary Spiritualities: Enchanted Worlds of Nature, Wellbeing and Mystery in Italy, 180 pp., figures, tables, references, index. New York: Routledge, 2021. Kindle, $44.00. ISBN 9780429019722.

ROBBINS, Joel, Theology and the Anthropology of Christian Life, 208 pp., references, index. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. Hardback, $35.00. ISBN 9780198845041.

SILVIO, Teri, Puppets, Gods, and Brands: Theorizing the Age of Animation from Taiwan, 290 pp., illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2019. Paperback, $35.00. ISBN 9780824881160.

YELLE, Robert A., and Lorenz TREIN, eds., Narratives of Disenchantment and Secularization: Critiquing Max Weber's Idea of Modernity, 272 pp., notes, bibliography, index. London: Bloomsbury, 2021. Hardback, $115.00. ISBN 9781350145641.

The central task of our journal is to present outstanding work on religion. Through our focus on individual scholars in the Portrait section, we are also able to consider how such work is produced, and our hope is to reveal the intellectual, institutional, political, and personal factors behind research that has helped us to revive and reconstruct our field. The subject of this year's Portrait, Talal Asad, has famously addressed questions about the category of religion in unusually productive and provocative ways. Published here for the first time, Asad's autobiographical observations take the reader through some of the key relationships and events of his life, from a remarkable childhood during which he witnessed the violence of Partition first-hand, to what happened in 1950 when he arrived in London from Pakistan and began to discern the problems behind “the local version of modern civilization into which [he] was being unevenly assimilated,” to the process of becoming an anthropologist and an ethnographer.

Autobiographical Reflections on Anthropology and Religion, Talal Asad

For Talal, Jonathan Boyarin

On Anthropology as Translation, Nadia Fadil

Friendship and Time in the Work of Talal Asad, Hussein Ali Agrama

Talal Asad’s Challenge to Religious Studies, Donovan O. Schaefer

Finding Talal Asad in and beyond Buddhist Studies: Agency and Race in Modern Pasts, Ananda Abeysekara

Purity and Danger, published in 1966, remains Dame Mary Douglas's most famous book and “The Abominations of Leviticus” its most widely read chapter. In 2005, only two years before her death and in preparation for the Hebrew translation of Purity and Danger, which appeared in 2010, Douglas wrote a preface for that publication. With the likely interests of the Hebrew reader in mind, the preface expresses Douglas's final reflections on the history of her engagement with “The Abominations of Leviticus.” It includes a restatement of her conclusions in light of Valerio Valeri's work, in which she found the preferred approach to the questions she had asked over the years. This article presents Douglas's preface after setting it in the context of her contributions.

Tibetan Buddhist prophecies of decline are largely unattended when it comes to practitioners’ lived experiences. This article considers such narratives through a focus on a community of American Buddhists in California. The relationship between Buddhist narratives of degenerating future and the American landscape is played out through the creation and distribution of sacred objects, which are potent containers for—and portents of—prophetic futures. Ruptures in time and landscape become, through the frame of prophecy, imaginative spaces where the American topography is drawn into Tibetan history and prophetic future. Narratives of decline, this article argues, also find common ground with salient American rhetoric of preparedness and are therefore far from fringe beliefs, but a more widely available way of thinking through quotidian life.

Drawing on observations of the performances of street preachers in the United States—as well as the texts that inform them—this article explores the concept of rhythm within and beyond the anthropology of religion. More specifically, it develops an expansive concept of rhythm as multiple and interactive, focusing not on a singular rhythm, but on the rhythmic translations that shape the practice of street preaching. First, I argue that the material rhythms of urban infrastructure constrain the narrative rhythms of the street preacher's sermon, producing a distinct homiletics. I then suggest that the ideological rhythms of war animate the narrative rhythms of the street preacher's sermon, linking military strategies with tactics of evangelism. Examining the material, narrative, and ideological rhythms of streets, sermons, and military doctrine, this article advances an analytic framework whereby the intersecting rhythmic tensions that shape performance can be registered.

The No Dakota Access Pipeline resistance movement provides a poignant example of the way in which cultural, spiritual, and oral traditions remain authoritative in the lives of American Indian peoples, specifically the Lakota people. Confronted with restrictions of their religious freedoms and of access to clean drinking water due to construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), members of Lakota communities engaged with traditions specific to their communities to inform and structure the No DAPL resistance movement. A series of interviews conducted on the Cheyenne River Sioux Nation with tribal members reveal that Lakota spiritual traditions have been integral to every aspect of the movement, including the motivations for, organization of, and understanding of the future of the movement.

Imagine a divided mountain-scape. A line of ceasefire. Fog. Imagine coming to a clearing. In a mist-covered, militarized order of here and t/here, affection makes way where vision or bodies cannot. Mothers call out to daughters; sons identify their mothers’ voices in two-way traffics of sound. So long as the vocal exchange lasts, somewhere along the disputed territory of the Golan Heights, an Elsewhere opens.

How is access to the Elsewhere facilitated through affective pedagogy in a contemporary Sufi setting in Germany? This article draws analytical lessons from Inayati healing seminars that took place in the summer of 2013. Participants were instructed to feel the Elsewhere of ‘inner space’ in the material/corporeal realities by attuning to breath, sonic resonance, collective movement, and attentive listening. The affective pedagogy of the teacher extended the spatial-temporal coordinates of the Elsewhere (as framed by Mittermaier) to include ‘fleeting affects’ among its unknown elements. These pedagogic tactics entangled religious and secular life-worlds with aesthetic and therapeutic traditions. Learning to feel the unknown affects emanating from the Elsewhere in this setting aimed to provide existential resources to cope with the everyday struggles of post-secular life.

How do Protestants engage with Elsewheres, such as God and other parts of the world? While anthropologists of Christianity have focused on the problems of presence and ‘mediating’ God, this article considers instead the concept of ‘responding’ to God/Elsewheres. In examining Lutheran women in early-twentieth-century Norway who held monthly mission meetings, I begin with their decision to remove crafts from their meetings, which created a different blend of sound and silence. I argue that, in their view, quiet listening was the most proper response to calls from Elsewhere and thus allowed them to have the most far-reaching effects. In other words, their right affect would affect Elsewheres. We gain a fuller anthropological description of this complex engagement with God/Elsewheres if we include their understanding of the responsibility to respond.

Drawing on a study of Shi‘i ritual lamentation in Lebanon, this article examines how religious actors and pious publics employ literary, recitational, theatrical, and socio-technological methods to cultivate imaginal engagements with the other-worldly. These methods are analyzed, demonstrating how they locate pious Shi‘is in religious meta-narratives that transcend the linearity of time, taking place simultaneously in the Elsewhere and in the here-and-now. I argue that this produces transposable and lasting dispositions that constitute the Shi‘i self, immerses subjects in this-worldly-oriented modes of religiosity, and bestows upon Shi‘i politics and the imagined community a profound emotional legitimacy. I posit that cultivated engagements with the Elsewhere are constitutive experiences in modes of religiosity that emphasize a symbiosis between human action and metaphysical intervention, thus complicating the question of agency and intentional action.

Casting the fallen soldiers of the Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988) as ‘martyrs’ plays a crucial role in the legitimation discourse of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The government has succeeded in integrating many ‘martyr families’ into a state-revering political cult. This ethnographic study draws on theories of affect and atmosphere to investigate how practices around saintly dreams and their materialization in photographs and gravestones of martyrs have challenged the state narratives and discourses. I approach the veneration of martyrs through both affective and narrative sources and explore gravestones as new saintly localities. These localities are spaces of divinely intermediation with intimate connection to the transcendental realm. The multifaceted atmosphere of these sites offers nonconformist and heterogeneous entanglements in which dream-images of martyrs allow for the momentary subversion of the state's political cult.

Drawing on ethnographic research in a Nigerian-based Pentecostal church in Berlin, this article explores the discussions that emerged when my scholarly representations of the congregants’ aesthetic engagements with the Elsewhere diverged from the church leadership's expectations. More specifically, it interrogates my representational practice in relation to the stakes of the diasporic congregation, which is operating at the political margin of Berlin's widely diverse religious landscape. In exploring the collision of my analytical focus on the affect-charged elements of the believers’ routines of connecting to the Elsewhere with the church's emphasis on affective discipline and moderation, the article demonstrates how aesthetic practices that engage with the Elsewhere not only have a religious but inevitably also a political bearing.

We are all connected to multiple Elsewheres: the place(s) where we grew up, the place we would rather be, the places that haunt us, the places where the dead dwell, the sites of empire. Geographical Elsewheres can be a source of fear. In the wake of Europe's so-called migrant crisis and border-crossing pandemic viruses, a moral and racist panic feeds off the supposed collapse of those ‘other places’ into ‘our society’. But other places can also be sites of fascination and longing. Think of the long history of travel accounts, or the long-standing desire to reach beyond the planetary horizon. The dream of a mission to Mars. Anything but the depressing here and now!

COVID-19, Religious Markets, and the Black Church, Marla Frederick

Can You See the Big Picture? COVID-19 and Telescoping Truth, Yunus Doğan Telliel

Learning from Religious Diasporas in Pandemic Times, Heather Mellquist Lehto

Andía, Juan Javier Rivera, ed., Non-Humans in Amerindian South America: Ethnographies of Indigenous Cosmologies, Rituals and Songs, 396 pp., illustrations, bibliography, index. New York: Berghahn Books, 2018. Hardback, $135.00. ISBN 9781789200973.

Cassaniti, J. L., Remembering the Present: Mindfulness in Buddhist Asia, 318 pp., glossary, references, index. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018. Paperback, $27.95. ISBN 9781501709173.

Casselberry, Judith, and Elizabeth A. PRITCHARD, eds., Spirit on the Move: Black Women and Pentecostalism in Africa and the Diaspora, 248 pp. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019. Paperback, $25.95. ISBN 9781478000327.

Elison, William, The Neighborhood of Gods: The Sacred and the Visible at the Margins of Mumbai, 336 pp., illustrations, notes, references, index. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. Paperback, $35.00. ISBN 9780226494906.

Hackman, Melissa, Desire Work: Ex-Gay and Pentecostal Masculinity in South Africa, 216 pp., illustrations, notes, references, index. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. Paperback, $24.95. ISBN 9781478000822.

Leite, Naomi, Unorthodox Kin: Portuguese Marranos and the Global Search for Belonging, 344 pp., notes, references, index. Oakland: University of California Press, 2017. $29.95. ISBN 9780520285057.

Li, Geng, Fate Calculation Experts: Diviners Seeking Legitimation in Contemporary China, 158 pp., references, index. New York: Berghahn Books, 2019. Hardback, $120.00. ISBN 9781785339943.

Lynch, Rebbeca, The Devil Is Disorder: Bodies, Spirits and Misfortune in a Trinidadian Village, 282 pp., illustrations, bibliography, index. New York: Berghahn Books, 2020. Hardback, $120.00. ISBN 9781789204872

Matory, J. Lorand, The Fetish Reisited: Marx, Freud, and the Gods Black People Make, 392 pp., illustrations, bibliographical references, index. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. Paperback, $29.95. ISBN 9781478001058.

Pansters, Wil G., ed., La Santa Muerte in Mexico: History, Devotion, and Society, 230 pp., illustrations, bibliography, index. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2019. Hardback, $65.00. ISBN 9780826360816.

Pierini, Emily, Jaguars of the Dawn: Spirit Mediumship in the Brazilian Vale do Amanhecer, 290 pp., illustrations, bibliography, index. New York: Berghahn Books, 2020. Hardback, $135.00. ISBN 9781789205657.

Pitarch, Pedro, and José Antonio KELLY, eds., The Culture of Invention in the Americas: Anthropological Experiments with Roy Wagner, 288 pp. Canon Pyon: Sean Kingston Publishing, 2019. Hardback, $90.00. ISBN 9781912385027.

Rambelli, Fabio, ed., Spirits and Animism in Contemporary Japan: The Invisible Empire, 240 pp., illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. Hardback, $153.00. ISBN 9781350097094.

Richman, Karen E., Migration and Vodou, 384 pp., illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2018. Paperback, $28.95. ISBN 9780813064864.

Vitebsky, Piers, Living without the Dead: Loss and Redemption in a Jungle Cosmos, 380 pp., illustrations, glossary, references, index. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. Paperback, $25.00. ISBN 9780226475622.

This volume of Religion and Society is a special one. First, with this edition we celebrate our 10th anniversary. While our personnel have changed to some degree, our remit has remained largely the same. We present theoretically and methodologically challenging studies of religion through a variety of formats that place religion at the center of analysis and enable those who study religious phenomena to engage in debate and dialogue with each other. In recent years, our approach has also cemented ties with the Society for the Anthropology of Religion, a subsection of the American Anthropological Association. Over the entirety of the last decade, we have continued to publish exceptional interdisciplinary scholarship in social and cultural analyses of religion.

A Portrait in Scenes by Amira Mittermaier

For Saba by Susan Harding

Recollections of a Friendship by Michael Lambek

I was very honored by the invitation to deliver the 2019 Rappaport Lecture, which forms the basis of this article. The theme of the Society for the Anthropology of Religion's conference for which it was written, “The Politics of Religious Knowledge and Ignorance,” is one that is very close to the heart of Roy Rappaport's work. After all, the foundation of his magisterial theory of the role of ritual in the development of humanity is our species’ radical inability, once language allowed expression to take on a life of its own, to know whether others are lying to us or not, and ritual's ability to address the problem of radical social ignorance that this incapacity sets before us by creating certainty about who people are and what commitments they have taken on (Rappaport 1999). For Rappaport, ritual and religion were both from the start fundamentally entangled with issues of knowledge and ignorance.

This article describes how an iconic mystical Sufi ritual of body wounding, zarf, was stripped of its mystical credentials and conventional efficacy amid tensions between Rifai reformists and traditionalists in a small Roma neighborhood in Skopje, Macedonia. The death of a sorcerer and a funeral event-series set the scene for acts of ‘anti-wonder’ and demystification by the Rifai reformists. Despite the history of socialist secularism and inadvertently secularizing Islamic reforms in the region, demystification signaled not the loss of enchantment per se, but a competition for legitimate forms of wonder. In addition to accounting for socio-historical context and relational forms of Islam, the real challenge is how to see a demystified ritual for its explicit intellectual capacity to stimulate speculation about itself.

Amid growing interest in mindfulness studies focusing on Buddhist and Buddhism-derived practices, this article argues for a comparative and ethnographic approach to analogous practices in different religious traditions and to their vernacular significance in the everyday lives of practitioners. The Jewish contemplative tradition identified with Chabad Hasidism is worth consideration in this context because of its long-standing indigenous tradition of contemplative practice, the recent adoption of ‘mindfulness’ practices or terminology by some Hasidim, and its many intersections with so-called Buddhist modernism. These intersections include the personal trajectories of individuals who have engaged in both Buddhist and Hasidism-derived mindfulness practices, the shared invocation and adaptation of contemporary psychology, and the promotion of secularized forms of contemplative practice. We argue that ‘Hasidic modernism’ is a better frame than ‘neo-Hasidism’ for comparative purposes, and that Hasidic modernism complicates the taxonomies of secularity in comparable but distinctive ways to those that arise in Buddhist-modernism contexts.

This article explores the tension between Pope Francis as a ‘trickster’ and as a much-needed reformer of the Catholic Church at large. He is an exemplar of the longue durée of an embodied ‘Atlantic Return’ from the Americas to the ‘heart’ of Catholicism (Rome and the Vatican), with its ambivalent, racialized history. Through the mobilization of material religion, sensuous mediations, and the case of the Lampedusa crosses in particular, I engage with an anthropological analysis of Francis as a Criollo and the first-ever Jesuit pope. Examining Francis's papacy overlapping racial and ethico-political dimensions, I identify coordinates around which the rhetorical, affective, and charismatic force of Francis as a Criollo has been actualized—between, most crucially, proximity and distance, as well as pastoral versus theological impulses. This article advances an understanding of Francis that emerges from a study of the conjuncture of affective fields, political theology, racialized aesthetics, and mediatic interface.

The introduction to this special section foregrounds the key distinction between ‘religious plurality’ and ‘interreligious pluralism’. Building from the example of a recent controversy over an exhibition on shared religious sites in Thessaloniki, Greece, we analyze the ways in which advocates and adversaries of pluralism alternately place minority religions at the center or attempt to relegate them to the margins of visual, spatial, and political fields. To establish the conceptual scaffolding that supports this special section, we engage the complex relations that govern the operations of state and civil society, sacrality and secularity, as well as spectacular acts of disavowal that simultaneously coincide with everyday multiplicities in the shared use of space. We conclude with brief summaries of the four articles that site religious plurality and interreligious pluralism in the diverse contexts of Brazil, Russia, Sri Lanka, and the Balkans.

Allegations of religious intolerance push courts to deliberate on questions that are constitutive of the problem space of secularism. In addition to legal opinions on the character and scope of religious freedom vis-à-vis conflicting rights, these arbitrations result in authoritative statements on what constitutes religion, how it may inhabit public space, and, ultimately, what interests and values underpin the national collective. This article analyzes three high-profile court cases alleging religious intolerance against Afro-Brazilian religions that were tried in Brazil during the first two decades of the 2000s. It demonstrates how at this time of rapid religious transformation the adjudication of such cases acted as a key site for the Brazilian legal establishment to redefine the place of religion in the broader context of rights and laws that regulate religion in public spaces.

This article examines several key sites where Russia's civic and religious bodies intersect in pursuit of social justice goals. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among religious communities and social justice organizations in Moscow, the article focuses on the physical, social, and legal spaces where church and state, secular and sacred, civic and personal intersect and the consequences of these intersections for how Russians understand new configurations of church and state, private and public, religious and political. Of particular concern is the emergence of new forms of religious and political pluralism that transcend any one particular space, such as for worship, community life, or political support or protest, and instead reveal shifting practices and ethics of social justice that are more pluralist, progressive, and tolerant than they may appear to be to outside observers.

Since 2009, in the aftermath of Sri Lanka's ethnic war, certain contingents of Sinhala Buddhists have lodged attacks against religious minorities, whom they censure for committing violence against animals in accordance with the dictates of their gods. Considering these interventions against sacrifice in spaces of shared Hindu and Buddhist religiosity, this article examines the economies of derogation, violence, and scapegoating in post-war Sri Lanka. Within Sinhala Buddhism, sacrifice is considered bio-morally impure yet politically efficacious, whereas meritorious Buddhist discipleship is sacrificial only in aspirational, bloodless terms. Nevertheless, both practices fall within the spectrum of Sinhala Buddhist religious life. Majoritarian imperatives concerning post-war blood impinge upon marginal sites of shared religiosity—spaces where the blood of animals is spilled and, ironically, where political potency can be substantively shored up. The article examines the siting of sacrifice and the purifying majoritarian interventions against it, as Buddhists strive to assert sovereignty over religious others.

Over recent decades, Islamic institutions and Muslim communities in the successor nation-states of former Yugoslavia have taken shape against a variegated political and historical topography. In this article, we examine the discourses and politics surrounding Islamic institutions in four post-Yugoslav nation-states: Kosovo, Macedonia, Croatia, and Slovenia. Our analysis moves in two directions. On the one hand, we illuminate the historical legacies and institutional ties that unite Muslims across these four contexts. As we argue, this institutional history continues to mandate a singular, hegemonic model of Sunni-Hanafi Islam that pre-emptively delegitimizes Muslim communities outside of its orbit. On the other hand, we also attend to the contrasting national politics of Islam in each of our four contexts, ranging from Islamophobic anxiety and suspicion to multiculturalism, from a minority politics of differentiation to hegemonic images of ethno-national religiosity.

There are some things we seem to need to learn over and over and over. Among them are the ways in which modern legal efforts to expel the sacred—or, perhaps more pointedly, as Neena Mahadev shows in her article, interventions to end it—condemn us to its constant reproduction. State secularism results not in the evacuation of the sacred but in an almost neurotic picking at the scab of the wound—and the continuous management of what Hussein Agrama (2012: 186) has called the “problem-space of secularism.”

The four articles collected here are exemplary in their fine-grained analysis of this reality, both of the often pathetic inadequacy of regulatory efforts and, even more interestingly, of the glimpses we have of religious life lived in the in-between spaces of formal policing efforts, whether of church or state. The spatial gesture uniting this collection—siting pluralism—proves particularly potent. Sometimes imagined as uncompromisingly singular (i.e., spatial ‘locative’ religion as opposed to utopian portable religion) and at other times as spatial in a plural, less exclusive sense, the spaces/places of these articles are teeming with contradiction and multiplicity.

BIELO, James, Materializing the Bible. Digital project. http://www.materializingthebible.com.

CASSELBERRY, Judith, The Labor of Faith: Gender and Power in Black Apostolic Pentecostalism, 240 pp., notes, index. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017. Paperback, $25.95. ISBN 9780822369035.

CLARK, Emily Suzanne, A Luminous Brotherhood: Afro-Creole Spiritualism in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans, 280 pp., notes, index. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016. Hardback, $34.95. ISBN 9781469628783.

COWAN, Douglas E., America´s Dark Theologian: The Religious Imagination of Stephen King, 272 pp., notes, index. New York: NYU Press, 2018. Hardback, $30.00. ISBN 9781479894734.

DARIEVA, Tsypylma, Florian MüHLFRIED, and Kevin TUITE, eds., Sacred Places, Emerging Spaces: Religious Pluralism in the Post-Soviet Caucasus, 246 pp., illustrations, bibliography, index. New York: Berghahn Books, 2018. Hardback, $90.00. ISBN 9781785337826.

DASWANI, Girish, Looking Back, Moving Forward: Transformation and Ethical Practice in the Ghanaian Church of Pentecost, 280 pages, figures, notes, index. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015. Paperback, $30.95. ISBN 9781442626584.

GIRALDO HERRERA, César E., Microbes and Other Shamanic Beings, 274 pp., index. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Paperback, $99.99. ISBN 9783030100414.

KAELL, Hillary, ed., Everyday Sacred: Religion in Contemporary Quebec, 356 pp., figures, notes, index. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2017. Hardback, $110.00. ISBN 9780773550940.

KRIPAL, Jeffrey J., Secret Body: Erotic and Esoteric Currents in the History of Religions, 448 pp., appendix, notes, index. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. Paperback, $35.00. ISBN 9780226679082.

CABOT, Zayin, Ecologies of Participation: Agents, Shamans, Mystics and Diviners, 352 pp., preface, index. London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018. Hardback, $110.00. ISBN 9781498568159.

LAUTERBACH, Karen, Christianity, Wealth, and Spiritual Power in Ghana, 221 pp., appendix, index. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Paperback, $119.99. ISBN 9783319815299.

LIBERATORE, Giulia, Somali, Muslim, British: Striving in Securitized Britain, 304 pp., figures, index. London: Bloomsbury, 2017. Paperback, $32.50. ISBN 9781350094628.

MANSUR, Marcia, and Marina THOMé, dirs., The Sound of Bells (O Som dos Sinos), documentary film, Portuguese, 70 min. Estúdio Crua, 2016. $320.00. https://store.der.org/the-sound-of-bells-p1012.aspx.

OOSTERBAAN, Martijn, Transmitting the Spirit: Religious Conversion, Media, and Urban Violence, 264 pp., notes, bibliography, index. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017. Paperback, $39.95. ISBN 9780271078441.

SRINIVAS, Tulasi, The Cow in the Elevator: An Anthropology of Wonder, 296 pp., notes, references, index. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. Paperback, $26.95. ISBN 9780822370796.

TANEJA, Anand Vivek, Jinnealogy: Time, Islam and Ecological Thought in the Medieval Ruins of Delhi, 336 pp., illustrations, notes, references, index. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018. Paperback, $30.00. ISBN 9781503603936.

WILCOX, Melissa M., Queer Nuns: Religion, Activism, and Serious Parody, 336 pp., notes, bibliography, index. New York: NYU Press, 2018. Paperback, $30.00. ISBN 9781479820368.

This text proposes a conceptual discussion and a preliminary analysis of a specific situation. In a Brazilian town, a monument representing a Catholic saint has been proposed as a project of ‘religious tourism’. Some of the literature on this subject is examined in order to delineate a perspective that, instead of pointing out its contradictions or ambiguities, allows us to follow the encounters between religion and tourism in their multiple possibilities and meanings. The Brazilian monument is analyzed in order to demonstrate how three different visions converge on it: that of the state, that of the Catholic Church, and that of a group of ‘pilgrims’. In considering these perspectives, the goal is to understand how the various concepts relate to practices of tourism that offer structure and frameworks to promote religious and secular projects.

Scholars have noted the variety of ideological and religious perspectives present in the Tea Party movement. This study addresses why both religious and nonreligious individuals may be involved in the Tea Party despite its cultural connection to ‘traditional’ conservative Christianity. The article explores Tea Party participation and commitment, arguing that group membership is sustained by the party’s ability to create interaction rituals reflective of Christian culture as an acknowledgement of American Christian values. The Tea Party frames its ideology as sacred, thereby establishing group commitment and cohesion. As a result, it is capable of attracting constituents from inside and outside of the Religious Right. By validating the experiences of others and creating a system of interdependency, the Tea Party has the potential to create group solidarity leading to collective action and exceptional political influence.

The Hebrew term ‘kosher’ means ‘fit’ or ‘proper’ and signifies foods conforming to Jewish dietary law (kashrut). Kosher biotechnical production is subject to elaborate rules that have warranted regulation over the last two decades. This article shows how kosher regulation works in biotech production. I argue that while existing studies of kosher production and regulation have emerged mostly from within business studies and the food sciences, the broader institutional picture and the personal relationships between certifiers and businesses that frame these procedures are not yet well understood. Based on empirical research and interaction with biotech companies, I provide an ethnography of how transnational governmentality warrants a product as ‘kosher’ and thereby helps to format and standardize the market. This article builds mainly on fieldwork conducted at the world’s largest producer of enzymes, Novozymes, based in Denmark, which is certified by the leading global kosher certifier, the Orthodox Union.

This article examines discussions of missionaries penned by anthropologists and existing in disciplinary consciousness. Questions of alterity, distance and sameness, the potentially exploitative effects of ethnography, and the uncomfortable colonialist underpinnings of both missionary and anthropological pasts come to the fore in these texts. Drawing on a wealth of journal articles, ethnographic monographs, and edited volumes, I identify, describe, and analyze six predominant discourses on missionaries, including anthropological depictions of missionaries as foils (Discourse One), as intermediaries (Discourse Two), and as present in good or bad manifestations (Discourse Three). Other threads constitute missionaries as data (Discourse Four), conceive of them as methodological ancestors and ethnographic colleagues (Discourse Five), or identify them reflexively as both anthropologists and Christians (Discourse Six). I suggest that missionaries serve as an archetypical foil against which the anthropological discipline emerges. Missionary ethnographers are for anthropologists a necessarily uncanny, repressed, productive other.

Anthropologists have recently shown an increasing concern with secular formations. This exploratory article inquires into the secular formation of anthropology itself by initiating an examination of its relation to theology, deemed anthropology’s disciplinary Other. I argue for recognizing a complex relation, whereby anthropology in some ways forgets theology, in others sustains it, and in still others invites critique by it. Analyzing anthropology from its theological edges may reinvigorate awareness of its ethical dimensions as a secular enterprise, as well as help measure its distance from (or proximity to) dominant projects, such as the Enlightenment and the nation-state, which were crucial for its founding in the modern world. An anthropology critically curious about its inherited alienation from theological modes of reasoning may not only become better at investigating the possibilities that cultural forms can take, but also become aware of new forms that the discipline could itself take.

Religious anthropology and ritual studies have increasingly acknowledged that ritual and religion are subject to criticism. There is still a tendency, however, to argue that doubt, skepticism, and forms of ‘critical reflexivity’ develop somewhere outside the ritual ‘frame’, in connection with external processes. In presenting this special section of Religion and Society, this introduction harks back to past research arising out of structural and performative approaches to rite, introduces the notion of critical reflexivity, and outlines the ways it is used to shed light on overlooked formal aspects of religious rituals. In order to stress the subtle connection between ritual action and (local) reflection on this action as evidenced in situ in the course of performance, linked with internal features of ritual activity, the article evokes two lines of empirical inquiry: institutionalized episodes of ritual assessment and ritual ‘accidents’ that do not necessarily imply ritual ‘failure’.

In Kabye society, the commonest sacrificial rites include a device that may prompt celebrants to question their own ritual practice. As in other West African societies, the acceptance or refusal of an offering by a divinity is read in the death throes of the first chicken to be sacrificed. If the fowl does not die in the expected position, the ceremony is interrupted. Celebrants scrutinize the execution of the rite to identify the mistake that led to the sacrifice’s refusal, and they submit their hypothesis to the divinity. However, the resumption of the rite is not conditioned by the correction of the mistake. It is often sufficient that officiants recognize and reassert the rule that they should have followed. The case of a bull sacrifice demonstrates how the celebrants’ self-critical practice may promote a ritual effectiveness in connection with the dialogical and pragmatic nature of the rite.

Seeking to attain balance and well-being through what practitioners call ‘spiritual development’, the ritual practice in Paris of Umbanda—an Afro-Brazilian religion—is emblematic of the orientation that characterizes contemporary spirituality. In this context, regular public mediumistic rituals are aimed at transforming participants into beings open to the teachings of ‘spiritual entities’, which they embody for their own and others’ benefit. In this process, specialists and participants are explicitly and systematically invited to ‘take stock’ or ’share’, that is, to revisit the rituals they perform. This article argues that ‘sharing’, which may also be found in other forms of contemporary spirituality, is not only an exegetical exercise that participants must regularly submit to in order to assess how these rituals affect them. It may also be understood as a ritual device that the efficacy and reproduction of such practices depend upon.

The Alevi cem is a communal ritual that is performed weekly among members of a major religious minority in Turkey. Although formerly celebrated exclusively in rural village communities, this ritual became publicly accessible at the end of the 1980s when Alevi cultural associations were opened in the urban centers of Turkey. Since it was made public, the cem has undergone significant changes in the internal dynamics of its performance and in the formal design of its liturgy. By addressing multiple audiences in its urban milieu, the performance of the cem reveals moments of ritual reflexivity. Based on ethnographic research at a cultural association in Istanbul, this article focuses on a cem performance that led to ruptures and mishaps in the presentation of some ritual acts. We analyze the ritual leader’ s response to these incidents and the theoretical implications of this account for the study of ritual reflexivity.

Tantrists, non-monastic religious specialists of Tibetan Buddhism, constitute a diffuse, non-centralized form of clergy. In an area like Repkong, where they present a high demographic density, large-scale supra-local annual ritual gatherings of tantrists are virtually synonymous with, and crucial for, their collective existence. In the largest of these rituals, the ‘elders’ meeting’ is in effect an institutionalized procedure for evaluating the ritual performance, its conditions and effects, and, if necessary, for adjusting aspects of the ritual. At a recent meeting, the ‘elders’ decided to abandon a powerful and valued but violent and problematical component of the ritual, due to its potential detrimental effects on the fabric of social relations on which the ritual depends for its continued existence. Thus, a highly scripted, ‘liturgy-centered’ ritual (per Atkinson) can be adapted to the social context. The specialists of these textual rituals demonstrate collectively an expertise that extends into the sociological dynamics surrounding the ritual.

Christian nationalism, a long-running and arguably increasingly influential political force, appears to consist mainly of an open set of affectively charged but cognitively underdetermined concepts and images that are capable of being constituted in a number of widely divergent forms. Despite this potential variety, the various instantiations of Christian nationalisms documented by the anthropology of Christianity tend to have similar features, even as they are actualized in quite different milieux and understood as being responses to quite different threats. Drawing on ethnographic work in the United States, this article argues that this recurrent crystallization of Christian nationalism into the specific form under certain conditions—the adoption of a temporally ambivalent eschatology, an ethics oriented around mimesis, and, most of all, an outward-facing ressentiment—works to self-catalyze the production of a racialized Christian nationalism that envisions itself at once as an entitled majority and as an embattled minority.

This article looks into notions of the sky among the Guaycurú aboriginal groups in the Argentine Chaco within the context of the socio-religious changes they have undergone since the eighteenth century. By using ethno-astronomy and anthropology of religion perspectives, and based on our own ethnographic and documentary work, we have analyzed both the continuities and the ruptures in the Guaycurú skies. In doing so, we have found that social relations between humans and non-humans shape the Guaycurú experience of celestial space. These bonds have a strongly political character as they are structured around power asymmetries. The colonial experience, including Christian missions, has imposed modernity on these groups as an overall horizon of possibilities. However, the Guaycurú have sought to redefine modernity, creating their own ‘modernity paths’.

Scholars commonly associate the religiosity of capoeira with the Afro-Brazilian religion of Candomblé, although some consider capoeira to be exclusively a martial art or even a sport. From the vantage point of the leaders of capoeira Angola groups, their individual power comes from a set of magical attributes that go beyond the influence of Afro-Brazilian religions. In this article, I explore an alternative form of spirituality that is based on the existence of spiritual beings such as the ancestors and the dead mestres (leaders). I argue that these entities emerge only in capoeira performances, affecting ritual action in such a way as to constitute an alternative form of religion that co-exists with Candomblé. By focusing on the effects that these spirits have in the configuration of charismatic personal power, it is possible to delineate cosmological attributes that make capoeira a potential religious practice in its own right.

Winter Sleep is the latest film from Nuri Bilge Ceylan, a Turkish director and screenwriter who has received international acclaim. For the purpose of social and cultural analysis, this article critically focuses on the film’s key themes and maneuvers that have diagnostic value from a social theoretical viewpoint. These themes are religion, the relationship between religion and capitalism, and symbolic exchange. Organized around these topics, the article examines the religion-capitalism-symbolic exchange nexus by analyzing the motifs of formation, intervention, and intelligibility as these themes arise. This site of intersection is the conceptual pivot around which the article configures itself. It explores Winter Sleep based on what the film shows and says on screen, how its thought processes emerge, and at what points this thought supports or conflicts with dominant societal opinions.

The anthropology of Buddhism may give the impression of already having a well-established lineage. However, understood as a collective endeavor bringing together specialists from different parts of the Buddhist world in a comparative spirit, it remains very much an emerging project. We outline in this introduction some of the striking features of the beginnings of this subfield, such as how it has undergone a process of emancipation from textualist interpretations of Buddhism, and survey some of its main thematic and analytic orientations, pointing in particular to its most substantial ‘long conversation’, on the structure and dynamics of Buddhist religious fields. Throughout, we focus primarily on the period following an assessment of the subfield made by David Gellner in 1990. Finally, we stress the importance and highlight the promise of a comparative anthropology of Buddhism that builds on a critical, reflexive examination of its central concepts.

The Manaw Seittokpad congregation, an organization of Burmese exorcists with headquarters in Bago, presents some unique features, such as a rigorous registration procedure during the initiation process. Exorcism is linked to superhuman figures, or weikza, at the center of a religious domain often characterized as a form of Buddhist esotericism. Based on observation of rituals during this congregation’s annual conventions in Bago, the initiation process is analyzed with reference to an anthropological understanding of rites of passage and religious conversion. The article shows how undergoing these rites induces healed patients to enter a specific community formed by the members of the congregation. Furthermore, the acquisition of a new ‘truly’ Buddhist identity is understood as a process equivalent to an ‘internal conversion’. Finally, the contrastive use of ritualism is seen as a way to construct the practice of exorcism in the weikza domain as a specific ‘path’ within the Burmese religious field.

A significant strand of anthropological work on Buddhist generosity practices in Therāvādin and Tibetan Buddhist societies has examined their role in reproducing and reinforcing social and economic hierarchies. Inspired by the recent ‘moral turn’ in anthropology, this article addresses the moral dimensions of these practices by analyzing debates, decisions, and judgments about what to sponsor and how to do so during times of accelerated ‘modernizing’ change. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in northeastern Tibet (Amdo) conducted between 2008 and 2015, I focus on a mode of collective sponsorship that has, in different contexts, been considered good, problematic, or even wrong. The moral grounds for such evaluations show that sponsorship is evaluated and experienced not only as a Buddhist practice but also as a social and economic practice with direct consequences for both individuals and communities. The moral stakes of generosity practices are shown to extend beyond individual ethics to the common good.

“To be Burmese is to be Buddhist” is a slogan commonly identified with the dawn of nationalism in the country known today as Myanmar, where violence between Buddhist, Muslim, and ethnic communities has increasingly jeopardized liberalizing reforms. How do contemporary forms of Theravada Buddhist discourse shape ideas of belonging in a multi-religious and ethnically diverse Myanmar following the dissolution of military rule in 2011? How do digital technologies and globalizing communication networks in this nation influence rapidly changing social identities, anxieties, and imaginaries that Brigit Meyer identifies as ‘aesthetic formations’? In this article, I trace diverse genealogies of belonging to show how contemporary constructions of meaning facilitate religious imaginaries that may exacerbate difference by drawing on past ideologies of conflict or may seek to envision a new and diverse Myanmar.

Contextualized in discussions around charisma as originally conceived by Max Weber, this article examines the case of Tsültrim Tarchin, a charismatic adept from Eastern Tibet whose everyday dress consists of a specialized garment, a white cotton robe. Earned as a mark of virtuosity in the Tantric tummo practice and worn as a sign of an ascetic lifestyle, this robe functions as a key instrument in Tsültrim Tarchin’s charismatic actions. More than a repository of power and beyond insignia that signify privilege or superiority, the religious garment I consider in this article does not merely channel the routinized charisma of the lineage. It also effectively augments the master’s personal power through the performativity of its symbolism, while its real potency lies in structuring all meanings within the master’s network of influence.

Anthropological studies of spirit possession in Theravada Buddhist worlds continue to be strongly shaped by many of the theoretical presumptions embedded in the analytic models proposed by the earliest generation of scholars. The ability of subsequent theoretical developments in the discipline to influence analyses of spirit possession, Theravada Buddhism, and the relationship between them has been hindered in recent decades by the limited institutionalization of the anthropology of Buddhism as a shared, comparative research agenda. This article re-examines anthropological models of spirit possession in Theravada Buddhist South and Southeast Asia in light of three theoretical developments in anthropology in the final decades of the twentieth century—the critique of culture, the rise of practice theory, and the historical turn. Incorporating these developments more fully will, it is argued, advance a more analytically robust and empirically nuanced framing of both Buddhism and spirit possession as objects of future anthropological study.

This afterword considers the history of the subfield of the anthropology of Buddhism in light of the essays in this special section of Religion and Society. Anthropologists have sought to combat conventional assumptions about Buddhism and have long made contributions to the study of Buddhism, the state, nationalism, and politics. As part of a maturing field, they have also made contributions through the study of Buddhism to many other subfields of anthropology, including morality, spirit possession, the emotions, and materiality. It is no longer necessary for the anthropology of Buddhism to be overwhelmingly concerned with the authenticity and identity of its subjects.

In this article I discuss ‘the Pentecostal gender paradox’, famously coined by Bernice Martin. I do so by comparing Melanesian and Pentecostal forms of egalitarianism. My argument centers on the contention that in order for this paradox to emerge, specific concepts of equality and gender have to be kept fixed across contexts where they may not necessarily be stable. Pentecostalism has a specific effect on the role of women in the church, such as giving them access to the spirit, while also impacting on the notion of equality and ideas about the nature of gender. I conclude that in Pentecostalism gender is seen as an individual quality and that gender relations are viewed as power relations.

This article is an exploration into how a distinct fascination with the study of religion traverses the biographies of researchers who, through fieldwork, episodically enter into the life-worlds of the peoples they study. In it, I offer up ethnographic and auto-ethnographic reflections on the experiential crossroads and personal biographies that are perhaps as constitutive of religion as they are of the persons who study it. Through a discussion of interconnected events that arose during and outside of my anthropological fieldwork among the Nuosu, a Tibeto-Burman group of Southwest China, I highlight how Nuosu claims to authoring my biography have brought their animistic religion and culture, as well as its international import, further into focus for myself, local scholars, and rural Nuosu persons. My argument pivots around the idea that fieldwork-based researchers and their interlocutors often appropriate each other’s biographies in rather cosmic ways, thus revealing the historically, socially, and personally contingent qualities that are involved in studies of religion.

This article explores mystical belief and disbelief in Jeanne Favret-Saada’s ethnography of Bocage witchcraft in relation to the ontological turn in anthropology. The ethnographic archive provides numerous examples in which natives display seemingly contradictory practices of belief and disbelief when it comes to mystical forces. A common way by which anthropologists deal with such contradictions is to attempt to explicate their social function and cultural significance. In doing so, they perceive belief and disbelief to be cognitive states of clarity. Favret-Saada differs in her approach since she apprehends mystical belief and disbelief to be ambivalent and connected and, as I argue, portrays it as being caught in a perilous arrangement of death. In order to convey these points, I compare her ethnographic work to that of E. E. Evans-Pritchard and Rane Willerslev. The article goes on to analyze Favret-Saada’s minimal ontology of the opaque subject and how it can inform ontological anthropology.

In anthropology, resources are commonly defined in terms of neo-classical theories of action. In order to widen this anthropological definition, a distinction between two ‘fields’ is introduced in this article: the ‘social field’ and the ‘cosmic field’. It is argued that both fields may be completely separate and express a pluralistic configuration of values, or they may form a more or less monistic field. These ideas are applied to a conflict about bauxite-rich mountains in Odisha, India, in which those involved have quite different concepts of resources. It is argued that politicians and mining companies, as well as their national and international opponents, separate and even oppose the social and the cosmic fields on the basis of conflicting values. In contrast, it is argued that for the local people named Dongria Kond, the mining companies endanger a cultural system of exchange and provisioning that maintains an undifferentiated socio-cosmic field based on the value of life-giving ‘wealth’.

This volume of Religion and Society is marked by borders, boundaries, and limits. The borders here are those that make religion operative and politically powerful, as well as those that are enabled and put into place by religious arguments and worldviews. All these dimensions of borders are included in the special section of this volume, coordinated by Valentina Napolitano and Nurit Stadler, entitled “Borderlands and Religion: Materialities, Histories, and the Spatialization of State Sovereignty.” The section includes articles by Alejandro Lugo, Nurit Stadler and Nimrod Luz, Alberto Hernández and Amalia Campos-Delgado, and Alexander D. M. Henley. They dwell upon two of the most notorious and contentious borders in the world: the one that separates Lebanon and Palestine from Israel, and the one that separates the US from Mexico. Both Israel and the US are known for their fenced and walled frontier politics. From these contributions, we learn how borderlands and their religious framing become spaces of political negotiation by affirmation and/or by exclusion: they determine sovereignty, ontology, history.

As the first invitee to this portrait section trained as a scholar of religion and situated in a department of religious studies, I was interested to see how previous scholars trained in anthropology and sociology positioned themselves in relation to ‘religion’ as an object of study. It seems we all do so gingerly. Although my graduate work was in the history of Christianity with a focus on American religious history, since the early 1990s I have self-consciously positioned my historical research in an interdisciplinary space between psychiatry, anthropology, and religious studies in order to explore the contestations surrounding unusual experiences. During the last decade, I have been identifying myself less as a historian and more as an interdisciplinary scholar attempting to bring both humanistic and cognitive social scientific methods to the study of historical experiences and events. From this vantage point, I would argue, as Maurice Bloch (2010) did in the first volume of this journal, that ‘religion’ is not a natural kind but a complex cultural concept and that a theory of religion per se is impossible.

This article is an introduction to the emerging sub-discipline of the archaeology of ritual and religion. It addresses the question of how archaeologists can approach these fields: what are the challenges and opportunities? Using theory and methodology, ritual and religion are explored in the archaeological record by means of so-called framing, and an interpretation is attempted through analogy and 'ethos'. Selected Neolithic sites from the Near East that have yielded rich and important data regarding ritual and religion serve as examples.

In this article I review critical thought about cosmogony in the social sciences and explore the current status of this concept. The latter agenda entails three components. First, I argue that, even where cosmogony is not mentioned, contemporary anthropological projects that reject the essentialist ontology they ascribe to Western modernity in favor of analytical versions of relational non-dualism thereby posit a 'counter-cosmogony' of eternal relational becoming. Second, I show how Viveiros de Castro has made Amazonian cosmogonic myth—understood as counter-cosmogony—iconic of the relational non-dualist ontology he terms 'perspectival multinaturalism'. Observing that this counter-cosmogony now stands in opposition to biblical cosmogony, I conclude by considering the consequences for the study of cosmogony when it becomes a register of what it is about—when it becomes, that is, a form of polemical debate about competing models of cosmogony and the practical implications that they are perceived to entail.

This article proposes a revised definition of glossolalia based on the ritual value of incomprehensible speech, which allows for an approach to meaning emergence in non-human languages and the issue of extreme linguistic alterity. The main social and acoustic features associated with glossolalia will be presented through the case study of a Christian charismatic community in Brazil (the Canção Nova), showing us how linguistic evidence supports different notions of Christian personhood and an iconic-based communication between human and divine beings.

In the introduction to this special section of Religion and Society, we discuss existing and potentially new intersections of border theories and religious studies in relation to two contested regions—US-Mexico and Israel-Palestine (as part of the history of the Levant)—respectively. We argue for a recentering of borderland studies through an analysis of political theologies, affective labor, and differing configurations of religious heritage, traces, and materiality. We thus define 'borderlands' as translocal phenomena that emerge due to situated political/economic and affective junctures and that amplify not only translocal but also transnational prisms. To explore these issues, we put into dialogue studies on religion, borderlands, walls, and historical/contemporary conditions in the context of US-Mexico and Israel-Palestine borders. In particular, we argue for recentering analyses in light of intensifications of state control and growing militarization in contested areas.

This article explores the role of sacred places and pilgrimage centers in the context of contemporary geopolitical strife and border disputes. Following and expanding on the growing body of literature engaged with the contested nature of the sacred, this article argues that sacred sites are becoming more influential in processes of determining physical borders. We scrutinize this phenomenon through the prism of a small parcel of land on the two sides of the Separation Wall that is being constructed between Israel and Palestine. Our analysis focuses on two holy shrines that are dedicated to devotional mothers: the traditional Tomb of Rachel the Matriarch on the way to Bethlehem and Our Lady of the Wall, an emergent Christian site constructed as a reaction to the Wall. We examine the architectural (and material) phenomenology, the experience, and the implications that characterize these two adjacent spatialities, showing how these sites are being used as political tools by various actors to challenge the political, social, and geographical order.

A double referent connoting both movement and immobility, the border region has been, for more than a century, the setting for those who come to stay, those who try to cross over into the United States, and, more recently, those who are deported from the US. Accordingly, the religious practices in this area flow along with the shifting populations and are transformed by them. From a socio-anthropological perspective, this article examines the main religious figures venerated in the city of Tijuana, located just south of the US-Mexico border, and the social contexts of their devotees, who have come from other parts of Mexico. This religious panorama does not display a homogeneous group of creeds, but rather reflects a variety of regional traditions in which religion is practiced and divine figures are revered.

The colonial view of Levantine society as a mosaic of religions established lasting precedents for communal self-governance and power sharing in modern states. Yet it ironically disguises the extent to which the region's religious geography was reimagined by colonial rule. Principles of religious freedom and minority rights combined with a perception of 'oriental religions' to create a unique and powerful place for religious leaders to govern. The borders that would define national societies in Palestine-Israel, Lebanon, and Syria also remade the boundaries by which the religious mosaic was structured. This article will highlight institutional change in the Maronite Christian and Sunni Muslim communities, showing how each reformulated its religious leadership in response to the creation and enforcement of Lebanon's borders with Palestine and Syria from 1920 to 1948. The 'traditional' religious leaderships of today are in no small part products of the same colonial 'lines in the sand' within which nations were formed.

There is a close relation between satire and secularism as the latter came to emerge in Europe. Secularism, as is well-known, gained strength historically as a reaction to an era of European interreligious violence and massacres. It was not only a desire for the separation of church and state, as the classical formula has it. It was also an attempt to keep religious affect out of politics. This was in the belief that religion, because it is faith rather than reasoned thinking, produces too much of a narcissistic affect—that the faithful are unable to ‘keep their distance’ from what they believe in. It was thought that this narcissism was behind the murderous intensity of religiously driven conflicts. Being able to laugh at yourself literally means being able to not take yourself overly seriously. This, in turn, is crucial for the deintensification of the affects generated by the defense of what one believes in and for the relativization of one’s personal beliefs. Such relativization, as Claude Lévi- Strauss argued, is crucial for thinking oneself comparatively and in relation to others (the opposite of narcissism).

With characteristic playfulness, the subject of this volume’s portrait, Gananath Obeyesekere, calls his contribution a celebration of ‘foolishness’. But this is indeed a fertile foolishness. It implies not only an admission that the ethnographer lacks omniscience, but also a positive freedom to engage passionately in comparison, to avoid disciplinary overspecialization, to understand that the “non-rational is not necessarily irrational,” and to acknowledge the power of art and literature as potential inspirations for our work. Of course, as Obeyesekere admits, the ludic and the ironic also entail risks, as they can provoke anger in others. Nonetheless, his words have many echoes in this volume, particularly in their invocation of the power of the aesthetic combined with the ironic, exemplified by reference to the fool in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. They also provoke thoughtful reflections from our three commentators on Obeyesekere’s work, Douglas Hollan, Luís Quintais, and Unni Wikan.

In my most recent book, The Awakened Ones: Phenomenology of Visionary Experience (2012), I end my wandering mind with mention of my own anticipated end—a farewell, as it were, to an overlong life, much of it devoted to scholarly work on the study of religion in practice. However, I find it hard to divorce practice from a sympathetic understanding that some of us natives think of as Buddhism, for example. As for me, I would like to open our ethnographies and histories to the multiple ways in which we write and to celebrate our work and praise our foolishness, for none of us are omniscient and foolishness is part of our work and our species’ sentience. In much of my work I also celebrate comparison because for me it is hard to accept that as thinking beings we have to confine our thought to some narrow sphere.

This article uses ethnographic studies of Orthodox Christianities as a way to investigate the concept of 'orthodoxy' as it applies to religious worlds. Orthodoxy, we argue, is to be found neither in opposition to popular religion nor solely in institutional churches, but in a set of encompassing relations among clergy and lay people that amounts to a religious world and a shared tradition. These relations are characterized by correctness and deferral—formal modes of relating to authority that are open-ended and non-definitive and so create room for certain kinds of pluralism, heterodoxy, and dissent within an overarching structure of faith and obedience. Attention to the aesthetics of orthodox practice shows how these relations are conditioned in multi-sensory, often non-linguistic ways. Consideration of the national and territorial aspects of Orthodoxy shows how these religious worlds of faith and deferral are also political worlds.

This article addresses a long-standing conundrum in the anthropology of religion concerning the ambiguous status of religious leaders: they are subjects of power in that they are able to exert power over others, yet they are objects of power in that they rely on empowerment through others. Taking African-initiated Pentecostal-charismatic Christianity in Zambia as my example, I argue that church leaders' strategies to stabilize their authority have unintended consequences since these strategies can contribute to the precariousness of their positions. By drawing fundamental distinctions between themselves and members of the laity as regards their own extraordinariness, church leaders raise high expectations about their own capacities that may turn out to be impossible to fulfill. Yet even the opposite strategy of strengthening one's authority by embedding oneself in socio-religious networks can eventually lead to a destabilization of church leaders' authority because it increases their dependence on factors that are beyond their control.

This article examines the relation between secularities, technologies of the self, and citizenship through an ethnography of Islamic education in Portugal. For the Islamic Community of Lisbon, the main institutional representative of Islam in Portugal, religious education is about the formation of religious subjects and the creation of embodied dispositions in relation to Islam. But it is also about being able to explain to others, Muslims and non-Muslims alike, what Islam is. This project for Islamic education has to be understood, I will argue, in the context of the production of a public Islam, secularized and liberal, that is tied to claims to citizenship made in Portuguese society for more than 60 years. While these discursive formations are partly a way to counteract stigma, it is also essential to understand them within the creation of a post-confessional Portuguese society. For members of the Islamic Community of Lisbon, supporting a project of secularization of the public sphere in such a historical context is a way to affirm their belonging.

Opening with a review of leading accounts of the image as an object with agency, this article proposes to study religious images within the webs or networks that endow them with agency. The example of a well-known medieval reliquary serves to show how what I refer to as 'focal objects' participate in the creation of assemblages that engage human and non-human actors in the social construction of the sacred. Focal objects are nodal points that act as interfaces with the network, particularly with invisible agents within it. As participants in a network, images are like masks, offering access to what looks through the mask at viewers engaged in a complex of relations that constructs a visual field or the ecology of an image.

The articles in this special section on pilgrimage and the Holy Lands provide a wide range of perspectives on the practice, representation, and production of sacred space as expressions of knowledge and power. The experience of space of the pilgrim and the politically committed tourist is characterized by distance, impermanence, desire, contestation, and the entwinement of the material and the spiritual. The wealth of historical Christian and Western narratives/images of the Holy Land, the short duration of pilgrimage, the encounter with otherness, the entextualization of sites, and the semiotic nature of tourism all open a gap between the perceptions of pilgrims and those of 'natives'. Although the intertwining of symbolic condensation, legitimation, and power makes these Holy Land sites extremely volatile, many pilgrimages sidestep confrontation with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as inimical to the spirit of pilgrimage. A comparative view of the practices of contemporary Holy Land pilgrims demonstrates how communitas and conflict, openness and isolation are constantly being negotiated.

This article examines how Elad, a religious Zionist settler group, attempts to reanimate biblical tales by transposing biblical text as part of tours for Jewish visitors to the City of David archaeological site in East Jerusalem. Since the early 1990s, Elad has created controversy by settling in the Palestinian neighborhood of Silwan, provoking criticism from Israeli archaeologists and peace activists. In an effort to avoid 'politics' during tours, the group emphasizes a now globalized historicist reading of the Bible, an interpretation popularized by archaeology over the last century and a half. The article considers how transposition from this historicist reading into the here and now is a rhetorical device used to create a biblical realism that does not yet exist in the contested landscape. However, rather than producing an erasure of the Palestinian presence, and in contradiction to the professed desire to refrain from politics, I show that the very communicative situation and multiple framings for producing this biblical realism inevitably remind visitors of the contemporary context.

The movement of money in Christian pilgrimage is a profound mirror of cultural classifications. By examining tips, commissions, and souvenir purchases in Holy Land pilgrimages, I show how the transfer of monies activates a series of multiple, complex relationships between Jewish guides, Palestinian drivers, and Christian pilgrims. I identify the 'colors'—or moral values—of salaries, tips, and commissions that change hands as 'white', 'black', or 'gray' monies and correlate these colors with particular discourses and degrees of transparency. I then illustrate how prayer, rituals, and the citation of scripture may 'bleach' these monies, transforming tips into 'love offerings' and souvenir purchases into aids to spiritual development or charity to local communities, while fostering relationships and conveying messages across religious and cultural lines. Far from being a universal 'acid' that taints human relationships, pilgrimage monies demonstrate how, through the exchange of goods, people are able to create and maintain spiritual values.

The link between US evangelicalism, Zionism, and Middle East policy is well documented, as is its refraction through Christian tourism/pilgrimage in Israel-Palestine. However, the scholarly focus on political Zionism oversimplifies how American Christian pilgrims, mostly older women, actually construe the experience: they see contemporary politics as unrelated, and even antithetical, to the trip's spiritual goals. Building on Liisa Malkki's notion of 'tranquilizing' symbols, this article shows how pilgrims draw on broadly moral cultural tropes to quell political discussions, while still speaking in a moral register about Israelis and Palestinians. It explores how one especially powerful trope—the 'symbolic child'—is deployed during the trip. Tracing this image historically and ethnographically, I argue that pilgrims ground their reactions to Israeli-Palestinian conflict in symbolism with deep resonance for American women, which also speaks to how they engage in politics at home.

This article considers the ways in which Roman Catholic pilgrims on a tour in the Holy Land reacted to displays of emotion, exposing both the fragility and the strength of a religious community struggling with uncertainties concerning belief and practice. Participants focused on a reading of the biblical gospel that, in its original form, omitted the story of Christ's resurrection. The pilgrims were encouraged to identify themselves with the earliest Christians confronted by an empty tomb and to explore the lessons in Mark's gospel for a community of Christians in crisis. The 'empty tomb' is read here as a metaphor for the 'limits of meaning', found in all practices of interpretation, whether exegetical or anthropological. Attention is focused on how various actors responded to each other and to a place, the Holy Land, which challenges the interpretive skills of most, particularly those encouraged to remain open and respectful of the stories and religious traditions of others.

This article focuses on the way in which olive-picking volunteers in Palestine become transformed into 'accidental pilgrims', and unconventional ones at that, by virtue of their participation in the olive harvest. Undergoing the difficulties of mobility that constrain the Palestinians and witnessing holy sites through the eyes and narratives of Palestinian guides, they are exposed to an alternative knowledge and affect regarding the Holy Land, unlike the experience offered by more conventional religious pilgrimage. Several vignettes reflect the diverse backgrounds of olive-picking pilgrims, who come from many different religions, class positions, and nationalities. Drawn together in a communitas of sorts through their shared commitment to learning about Palestine, they try to do what they can to further the Palestinian cause on their return home. Instead of a 'moral geography', they perceive a profoundly 'immoral geography' of occupation and oppression, which has a powerful transformative effect.

In the fall of 2011, I was appointed to the Chair of Religious Studies in the Department of Religious Studies and Theology in the Faculty of Humanities. As I soon realized, my appointment occurred amid major transitions regarding the institutionalization of the study of religion at Utrecht University. This is part of a broader trend of renegotiating the space between ‘theology’ and ‘religious studies’. This trend echoes a wider process of ‘unchurching’: as the number of students of theology declines nationwide, religion in new and unexpected guises has become both a hot item and an intriguing socio-cultural and political phenomenon. Over the past year, as part of the process of adapting to my new post, I have grappled with these complicated institutional transformations.

The fact that you are reading these lines indicates that (1) issue number 4 of Advances in Research: Religion and Society has been published; and that (2) the world did not end, as expected by some, in December 2012. The buzz surrounding the Mayan calendar seemed for us as editors to be an appropriate pretext to conjure a debate concerning the intersection of religion and environmental apocalypticism. The four contributions to this debate reflect, in a critical and engaged fashion, on such intersections and their mediatization. Anna Fedele takes the Mayan calendar controversy as a starting point to argue for a history of apocalyptic prophecies in Western New Age and spiritual movements, in which prophetic success or failure have not depended on empirical confirmations. Terry Leahy draws on his research in Newcastle, Australia, to explain that apocalypticism is not exclusive to religious movements, and in fact circulates in different scientific and political spheres. Stefan Skrimshire also pursues this argument, moving beyond the caricature-filled debates between so-called latter-day prophets who campaign on environmental issues and the political orientations of environmental skeptics, and using this approach to decouple apocalypticism and prophecy. Peter Rudiak-Gould, in turn, explores cataclysmic apocalypse narratives in the context of wider expectations of moral and political change, both within and beyond the religious discourse of sin and repentance. All contributions in this section portray logics and contexts of environmental apocalypticism in sketches that overlap but also exceed religious spheres.

The idea of writing a personal statement regarding my approach to ritual and to present a self-portrait of my own movement into this field is difficult, to say the least. This is particularly so as the idea has too much of an overriding finality to it—an epitaph, after which there is no more. There is the implication that somehow over the 40 or so years that I have been working in the anthropological field of ritual and religion that I have been building a distinct coherent approach. It is tempting to say so, but it would be wrong. I would say that my orientation has taken many different paths. I have always, like most anthropologists, been directed by the problem-at-hand, given the empirical realities in which I found myself and the issue in the subject of anthropology that appeared to me to be particularly problematic at the time. This has sometimes resulted in a critical look at prevailing orientations and has led me in unexpected directions. The ethnographic materials with which I have been recently working, primarily in North Malabar of the Indian state of Kerala, is setting me off on new routes of analytical possibility, at least new for me. This is also the case with my (see Kapferer 2013a, 2013b, 2014) current interest in film and its relevance for the anthropological study of myth and ritual. Such changes in direction are far from unusual in the ethnographically driven circumstance of anthropology in which ethnography is the ground for analytical and theoretical construction (and not the other way around as in other social sciences where theory governs research, see Kapferer 2007).

Talal Asad explains the marginalization of religion in liberal democracies by invoking the modern state's desire to control. This paper argues that, in the Anglophone world, self-conscious secularism played little or no part in the secularization of public life. The expansion of the secular sphere was primarily an unintended consequence of actions by religious impositionists. Far from leading the promotion of the secular, the state had to be pressed by the demands of religious minorities to reduce the powers of established religion. The state provision of secular social services was usually a reaction to the inability of competing religious organizations to continue their provision. As this review of church–state relations in the UK, USA, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand shows, the reduction in the social power of religion owed more to the failure of Christians to agree than to a deliberately secularizing state.

This article raises questions about the study of secularism, from an anthropological perspective. It begins by discussing some general references in the literature on secularism and its counterpart in Latin languages, “laicity”. It then discusses the approach for defining secularism that privileges models and principles, and advocates for an analysis of the devices that produce forms of regulating the religious. The study of configurations of secularism is the outcome of a consideration of all these elements (models, principles, and devices), and has a strategic focus on ways of defining, delimiting, and managing the religious. Three cases are examined in order to illustrate this approach: France, the United States, and Brazil.

This article examines the growing scholarly interest in urban religion, situating the topic in relation to the contemporary analytical significance of cities as sites where processes of social change, such as globalization, transnationalism, and the influence of new media technologies, materialize in interrelated ways. I argue that Georg Simmel's writing on cities offers resources to draw out further the significance of “the urban” in this emerging field. I bring together Simmel's urban analysis with his approach to religion, focusing on Christianities and individuals' relations with sacred figures, and suggest this perspective opens up how forms of religious practice respond to experiences of cultural fragmentation in complex urban environments. Drawing on his analysis of individuals' engagement with the coherence of God, I explore conservative evangelicals' systems of religious intersubjectivity to show how attention to the social effects of relations with sacred figures can deepen understanding of the formation of urban religious subjectivities.

From the 1980s onwards, much research has been carried out in order to analyze and compare the situation and the management of religious plurality in Western countries. While scholars in the social sciences of religion have seized on the question of plurality, those in migration studies have started to pay more and more attention to the religious dimension of migrants and their descent. Although macro-level plurality is more commonly investigated, internal religious plurality is of equal importance. This article provides a critical review of the various approaches of religious pluralism and emphasizes some under-investigated areas such as conflicts and internal plurality.

The year 2012 has been at the center of many millennial theories, commonly referred to under the umbrella term the “2012 phenomenon”. Th ese theories, which predicted important changes for humanity usually related to some kind of environmental apocalypse, are generally described as relating to the end of the Mayan calendar, to the common-era calendar date, 21 December 2012 (21.12.2012), and to “New Age interpretations”.

One could say that in 2012 the scientific study of religion, particularly in its anthropological form, has become one hundred years old. In 1912, Durkheim published The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, perhaps the most influential book in the social study of religion, and certainly in the anthropology of religion, of the entire twentieth century. But this was not the only seminal work published around a century ago. A little earlier than that, in 1909, Arnold van Gennep’s Les rites de passage inaugurated an interest in liminality and ritual that has accompanied our discipline ever since. That same year, Marcel Mauss wrote La prière, an unfinished thesis that started an equally unfinished interest in prayer, one of the central devotional practices in many religions across the globe. In 1910, Lévy-Bruhl published his first explicitly anthropological book, How Natives Think, a problematic ancestor of a debate about rationality and modes of thought that has accompanied anthropology and philosophy ever since. In 1913, Freud tackled the then fashionable topic of totemism in his Totem and Taboo. Around those early years of the century, too, Max Weber was starting to write about charisma, secularization, and rationalization, topics of enduring interest.

Colonial frontiers, we have long been told, put conventional categories at risk. I grew up on one such frontier, itself an anachronism in the late-twentieth-century world—apartheid South Africa, where many of the key terms of liberal modernity were scandalously, publically violated. Religion was one of them. Some have argued that the act of separating the sacred from the secular is the founding gesture of liberal modern state making (Asad 2003: 13). In this, South Africa was a flagrant exception. There, the line between faith and politics was always overtly contested, always palpably porous. Faith-based arguments were central to politics at its most pragmatic, to competing claims of sovereignty and citizenship, to debates about the nature of civilization or the content of school curricula. As a settler colony, South Africa had long experimented with ways to ‘modernize racial domination’ (Adam 1971) in the interests of capitalist production, frequently with appeals to theology. After 1948, in contrast with the spirit of a decolonizing world, the country fell under the sway of Afrikaner rulers of overtly Calvinist bent. They set about formalizing a racial division of labor that ensured that black populations, the Children of Ham, remained economically subservient and politically marginal.

In the autumn of 2011 and the spring of 2012, the Occupy London protests, informed by the ideal of a moral, territorially defined community, caught the imagination of British and global publics. For a short while, this moral imaginary was mobilized to contest some of the most glaring contradictions of the neo-liberal city. I argue that the Occupy protests in London registered a sense of public outrage at the violation of certain 'sacred' norms associated with what it means to live with others. More concretely, I contend that Occupy London was an experiment initiated to open out questions of community, morality, and politics and to consider how these notions might be put to work. These questions were not merely articulated intellectually among expert interlocutors. They were lived out through the spatially and temporally embodied occupation of urban space.

Religion has been a central object of anthropological inquiry since its earliest days. In contrast, sport has remained an ancillary object of interest at best. Nonetheless, anthropologists have written some provocative analyses that challenge other disciplinary approaches to sport. Principally, those analyses emerged out of anthropological approaches to religion. Concerned with the ways in which anthropology theorizes and analyzes both religion and sport, this article begins by assessing the modern-day myth that 'sport is a religion'. It then compares subject-specific approaches to the relationships between sport and religion. The article then moves to the anthropological focus on ritual as it developed in the study of religion and how those ideas were then applied to analyses of sport. The article concludes with an examination of how the anthropology of sport has moved beyond those initial efforts before discussing various anthropological approaches to sport and religion.

For some decades, the religious rebellion of the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries was characterized by political violence, terrorism, and strident rhetoric. Then in 2011, the events collectively known as Arab Spring seemed to offer a new model: mass movements leading to democratic reform and electoral change. The elections of 2012 swept religious parties and leadership into office in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya. Is this the face of the future of religious rebellion around the world?

Manuel Vásquez begins his book by describing university courses that frustrate his students by being text-based and divorced from real life. He rightly concludes that analyzing sacred texts does not alone explain lived religion and complex issues such as globalization, transnationalism, and hybrid identities. He is writing from a Religious Studies perspective that, as he says, sometimes suffers from an overly theological bias. Moves within the discipline to abandon ‘religion’ for something as equally diverse and difficult to pin down as ‘faith’ do not, he argues, take us any further, particularly because religion really matters to many people and therefore cannot be dismissed just because we scholars find it problematic. To adopt an approach that explores how religion is understood and lived by the people who practice it is, I agree, the most important task for people studying religion. If this serves as a wake-up call for people who still study religion as something, in Vásquez’s words, of angels rather than of people, then the book has done a great job.

Good teaching is a craft. It requires constant honing. While perfection eludes most of us most of the time, our best days are intellectually generative, meaningful, and often quite fun. I intend this essay as a gesture in that same spirit.

In his luminous reflections on the intellectual trajectory that he has traced so far—beginning with the modern and proceeding through the secular toward the global—José Casanova notes that his evolving interests took him away from anthropology and toward sociology. Yet Casanova’s work has remained influential on, and in conversation with, that of many anthropologists, not least as a result of his desire to transcend a “Western-centric view of history and human development” (this volume) as well as his predictions that Pentecostalism may well become the predominant form of Christianity in the twenty-first century. This second volume of Religion and Society presents Casanova—author of the classic Public Religions in the Modern World (1994)—in dialogue with his own past and shifting present, but also responding to the comments of scholars who are themselves anthropologically informed and yet able to represent perspectives from sociology, theology, and religious studies.

José Casanova’s Public Religions in the Modern World (1994) has transformed the study of religion quite considerably. As I recall, the book was received relatively slowly in its first years. Casanova’s thesis gained momentum with the escalating focus on religion after 9/11 and the ensuing publicity for Huntington’s (1996) thesis of an imminent clash of civilizations. While many only then turned to the study of religion, Casanova had already prepared the ground for a global comparative approach with his path-breaking diagnosis of the state of religion in the different modes of modernity. The growing reception of Casanova’s thesis was accompanied by the increasing interest of political science (and politics in general) in religion. In fact, Casanova has shed new light specifically on the role of religion in politics. Furthermore, his thesis on ‘public religion’ has had profound impacts on the long-lasting debate on secularization in the humanities as well as in the public domain. In this respect, there is no doubt that Casanova has contributed a major, classic work to the social study of religion.

In this article we compare the encounter with the supernatural—experiences in which a person senses the immaterial—in Thailand and in the United States. These experiences appear to be shaped by different conceptions of the mind. In the US, there is a sharp, natural division between one's mind and the world; in Thailand, individuals have the moral responsibility to control their minds. These differences appear to explain how people identify and sense the supernatural. In the US, it is an external, responsive agent; in Thailand, it is an energy that escapes from an uncontrolled mind. Here we approach phenomenology—the experience of experience—comparatively, identifying patterns in social expectations that affect the ways in which humans think, feel, and sense. We take an experiential category of life that we know to be universal and use it to analyze cultural concepts that influence the enactment and interpretation of feeling and sensing.

Acknowledging the growing interest in issues of religious transmission, this article reviews two promising yet contradictory approaches to religion that could be described as historicist and universalist. It offers an alternative view premised on their convergence in a pragmatic approach that can link the material, contextual, and institutional dimensions of transmission with corresponding cognitive, perceptive, and emotional processes. This perspective recognizes the historicity of religious transmission and its cognitive underpinnings while attending to the materiality of its semiotic forms. The article focuses on the relationship between time and transmission in recent ethnographies of Christianity that show how Christian temporalities influence perceptions of social continuity or rupture and individuals' becoming in history. Within this frame, it examines the case of Old Believers, an apocalyptic movement that emerged out of a schism in seventeenth-century Russian Orthodoxy, to indicate how a pragmatic approach works in practice.

In recent decades, the ethnography of Jews and Judaism has followed the larger movement in cultural anthropology toward a focus on the margin—the cultural, geographical, and demographic borderlands where questions of group and individual identity are negotiated. The article explores this literature and the questions it raises about the nature of Jewish community and culture. It discusses three areas where marginality has had a particular resonance in Jewish ethnography. Studies of 'marginal Jews' focus on the periphery of traditional Jewish communities, people whose gender, ethnic, and sexual identities lie outside of local normative models. Studies of 'unexpected Jewries' explore a geographical periphery outside the few centers that dominate international Jewish culture and self-understanding. Studies of 'Jews in motion' examine transitional Jews—tourists, immigrants, refugees, and others who bridge the local contexts within which Jewish identities are constructed. These studies reveal Jewish culture to be much more complex, dynamic, and durable than social scientists and Jews themselves have often imagined it.

This article develops the notion of interconnected publics as a means to understand better both the escalation of Hindu political activism in the 1990s in India and its subsequent waning in the new millennium. I argue that the prime visibility of Hindu fundamentalism in the 1990s was a result of the effective—yet tenuous—connection between various spaces for public communication. The emerging 'inter-public' effectively imbricated the private viewing of religious soap operas with public ritual and political debate to produce, for a short historical moment, the image of a vibrant, forceful, and dominant Hindu nation. The aim of this article is to contribute to Indian studies by discussing the essential, yet in the literature mostly neglected, connections between devotional practices, media Hinduism, and political mobilization. At the broader conceptual level, I argue for a theory of inter-publics that interrogates how multiple 'micropublics' link up to create tangible political effects.

This article aims to show how the hegemonic interpretation of Pentecos- talism in Brazil has difficulty recognizing changes caused by these churches to 'local' cultures. We argue that this tendency can be explained by a widespread adherence to structuralist theories of society combined with an unwillingness to accept the reimag- ining of a national culture historically built up by Brazilian social science. We suggest that the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God has been the Pentecostal church most studied by Brazilian researchers because it provides a powerful means to indicate the strength of 'Brazilian culture'. Through our analysis of more recent studies, we point out the salience of these debates to wider questions relating to the emergent anthropology of Christianity, concluding that since neither discontinuities nor continuities can be denied in the field, the focus on one or the other dimension should be seen as a methodological choice rather than an orientation specifically arising from empirical observation.

It is much easier these days to find people who think that Barack Obama was born in Kenya than it is to find Westerners who deny that religion has a peculiar tendency to promote violence. This latter idea is widespread, from the common person in the street to political theorists who assure us that liberal politics arose to save us from the violence that religion would foster if left untamed in the public sphere. The violence of religion is more than a history lesson, we are told; with the rise of Islamic radicalism and other forms of illiberal politics, we are threatened today with the kinds of religious violence that the West successfully domesticated in the early modern period. In this brief essay, I will raise doubts about this prevalent tale that we in the secular age like to tell ourselves.

In the now very rapidly growing literature on Pentecostalism in Africa, Ruth Marshall’s book occupies a special place. In disciplinary terms, most of that literature falls under religious studies or history. The anthropologists came later, particularly those from North America, who had to get over their distaste for a religion that seemed so saturated in the idioms of the US Bible Belt. The originality of Marshall’s book is grounded in its linkage of questions derived from political theory with rich data collected through intensive and sustained fieldwork. But she insists it is not “an ethnography of the movement” (p. 5), so what exactly is it?

I (Peter) remember sitting in a departmental meeting, doodling, preoccupied with the image of a hospital chapel. I had recently been involved in a research project seeking to document and explain the construction of religious/spiritual space in National Health Service (NHS) acute-care hospitals in the north of England. What was becoming more and more obvious was the growing tension between the distinction that staff and patients were making between ‘religion’ and ‘spirituality’. Admittedly, this tension was not especially surprising; indeed, it can be understood, in principle, as a reflection of the ambient climate of religiosity in the UK, as in many other Western countries (Flanagan and Jupp 2007; Heelas 2008; Heelas et al. 2004).

Th e refl ections presented here demonstrate the coherence and continuity of the part of my work that can be labeled as dealing with religion and ritual. Th is of course does not mean that everything I have written on the subject is coherent and continuous. Indeed as time has passed I have learned many things from my readings and experiences, from interacting with colleagues and friends, and from working with others, including the people I have studied and, above all, the PhD students I have supervised. As a result I have had to modify what I thought. Looking back I believe there is an ongoing line of argument in what I have published and this is what I attempt to clarify in what follows.

Following a consideration of the impact of the late twentieth-century spatial turn on the study of religion by geographers, anthropologists, sociologists, historians, and religious studies scholars, two trends are distinguished: the poetics of place and the sacred; and politics, religion, and the contestation of space. Discussion of these reveals substantially different approaches to religion, space, and place—one phenomenological, the other social constructivist. The spatial turn has been extremely fruitful for research on religion, bringing together scholars from a variety of disciplines, and connecting not only to traditional areas such as sacred space and pilgrimage, but to new ones such as embodiment, gender, practice and religious-secular engagements.

Recent cognitive and evolutionary approaches to the study of religion have been seen by many as a naturalistic alternative to conventional anthropological interpretations. Whereas anthropologists have traditionally accounted for the existence of religion in terms of social and cultural determinants, cognitive scientists have emphasized the innate—that is pre-cultural—constraints placed by natural selection on the formation and acquisition of religious ideas. This article provides a critical assessment of the main theoretical proposals put forward by cognitive scientists and suggests possible interactions, perhaps interdependencies, with more standard anthropological sensibilities, especially between cognitive and evolutionary perspectives that see religion as a by-product of innate psychological dispositions and anthropological approaches that take the 'meaningful' nature of religious symbols as their point of departure.

This article reconsiders the connection between 'ritual' and 'emotion' from a pragmatic, relational perspective in which rituals are seen as dynamic interactive contexts and emotions as fairly short-lived emergent properties and integral components of these interactions. It emphasizes ritual's capacity to reallocate social positions by instantiating characteristic patterns of relationship, and the way particular emotions crystallize and express these patterns. In short, ritual emotions are treated as the sensate qualities of ritual relationships. From this standpoint, emotions feature in ceremonial settings not as striking experiences grafted onto practices and representations, but as constitutive aspects of ritual interactions themselves, whose properties of bodily salience and relational reflexivity both reflect and inflect the latter's course in a variety of sensory, expressive, moral, and strategic ways. Four issues relating to ritual and emotion are discussed within the framework of particular ceremonial practices that have been the object of much recent research: (1) the ritual expression of emotions in funerary laments, (2) the waning of cathartic models in the interpretation of rites of affliction, (3) the intense emotional arousal characteristic of initiatory ordeals, and (4) the self-constructive, affective dimensions of contemporary devotional practices.

Since the 1980s, there has existed a field of scholarly inquiry into a range of phenomena termed New Age. The relative lack of ethnographic studies in this field was identified several years ago, in response to research that focused merely on the discourses within alleged key writings. However, the employment of ethnographic methods does not by itself resolve the problems inherent in other modes of research; attention also has to be paid to how ethnography is used in practice. This article examines ethnographies of the New Age in terms of the extent to which they contextualize data within their immediate social frames, by paying attention to actors' practices and interactions, and to the ways in which beliefs and discourses are constructed and contested. The article demonstrates the strong tendency among New Age ethnographic studies to veer from 'the social' and to rest instead on analytically problematic conceptualizations of agency. It argues that epistemological revision is required to form the basis of a more sociologically adequate understanding of the phenomena addressed.

The ethnography of lowland South American societies has occupied a central place in recent debates concerning what has been called the 'ontological turn' in anthropology. The concepts of 'animism' and 'perspectivism', which have been revigorated through studies of Amerindian ontologies, figure increasingly in the ethnographies of non-Amerindian peoples and in anthropological theory more generally. This article traces the theoretical and empirical background of these concepts, beginning with the influence of Lévi-Strauss's work on the anthropology of Philippe Descola and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, and proceeding with their impact on Amazonian ethnography. It then investigates the problems that two alternative traditions—one combining a cognitivist with a pragmaticist approach, the other a phenomenological one—pose to recent studies of Amazonian ontologies that rely on the concepts of animism and perspectivism. The article concludes by considering how animism and perspectivism affect our descriptions of Amerindian society and politics, highlighting the new challenges that studies of Amerindian ontologies have begun to address.

This article explores the reality of translating or vernacularizing practices in relation to the politics of religion and the realities of faith. Taking violence as endemic to the processes of vernacularization and translation, the article articulates an analytic theory of religious faith—the way it is violated, often in the interest of making it legible within neo-liberal universalizing trends. Thinking about these realities involves understanding translations both as productive of cultural change and as manifestations of struggles over power. Many of these struggles are in the interstices among particular principles of individualism, secularism, legal rationality, and evidence. This article seeks to review the assumptions that emerge with these concepts and show their limits.

Many scholars have touched on the relationships between religion and nature since the work of late nineteenth-century anthropologists such as Edward B. Tylor. This is almost inevitable in studying some religions, especially indigenous ones. Nevertheless, only since the 1950s has anthropological research gradually been developing that is intentionally focused on the influence of religion on human ecology and adaptation, part of a recent multidisciplinary field that some call spiritual ecology (Merchant 2005; Sponsel 2001, 2005a, 2007a, 2007b, 2007c; S. Taylor 2006). At last this ecological approach is beginning to receive some attention in textbooks on the anthropology of religion, ecological anthropology, human ecology, and environmental conservation, though it is still uncommon in the anthropological periodicals (Bowie 2006; Marten 2001; Merchant 2005; Russell and Harshbarger 2003; Townsend 2009). This article summarizes a sample of the growing literature and cites other sources to help facilitate the eff orts of those who may find this new subject to be of sufficient interest for further inquiry.

“Why spirits?” asks Emma Cohen (97)—why are concepts of intentional and agentive supernatural beings such as spirits and gods so prevalent cross-culturally? What makes them appealing, contagious, and lasting? And what kinds of assumptions about the world and its workings do they entail and do they generate? In The Mind Possessed, Cohen offers us some answers; to some degree by appealing to her ethnography of the Afro-Brazilian practice of batuque in the Amazon-bordering town of Belém, but mostly by subordinating particularistic concerns to what she considers more general ‘scientific’ ones. However, it may be the questions, rather than the answers, that merit revising.

This article discusses structural, logistical, and administrative issues associated with the use of participant observation assignments in teaching the anthropology of religion. Fieldwork presents extraordinary opportunities for teaching students about the nature of cultural difference, but it also poses pedagogical challenges that require careful planning and supervision. The article reviews problems including the scope and nature of the observation, student preparation and guidance, connecting with fieldsites, presentation formats, issues of ethics and confidentiality, and university administrative considerations.