Religion and Society

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.