Cambridge Journal of Anthropology

The anthropology of ‘religion’ was once a central topic in anthropology. It persisted through the heady days of structuralism in a seemingly exotic triad of myth, symbolism and ritual, only to emerge with its analytical boundaries in question. In a poststructuralist world, other analytical priorities and formulations then seemed to take over but ethnographies of religion continued to pose interesting questions. We have moved the topic back to centre stage in this issue with an article by Joel Robbins in which he calls for attention to the question of how religions disappear. Aparecida Vilaça, Simon Coleman, and Don Seeman then offer their own comments and critique from within anthropology, along with an historian of religious conversion, Máire Ní Mhaonaigh. Robbins then has a chance to respond, pulling issues together and illuminating further as he does so.

What does it mean for a new religion to arise or take hold among a group of people? What does it mean for a religious tradition to endure? These are questions that are quite commonly addressed, at least implicitly, in the study of religion. Less frequently asked is the question of what it means for a religious tradition to come to an end. This article addresses this question, paying particular attention to the ways people actively dismantle a religious tradition that previously shaped their lives. I also consider what studying the process of religious disappearance can teach us about what it means for a tradition to arise and endure, arguing that a grasp on processes of religious dissolution is necessary for a fully rounded approach to the study of religious change. Throughout the article, I illustrate my arguments with material from the study of Christianity, Judaism and indigenous religious traditions, particularly from Oceania.

What if a Religion Is Not Made to Last? Aparecida Vilaça

The Sense of an Ending Simon Coleman

Constructing Continuity Máire Ní Mhaonaigh

But Whose Categories Are These? Don Seeman

Author's Reply: On Morality, Time and Religious Disappearance Joel Robbins

This article explores the intricate relationship between talk and practice in the anthropology of ethics by focusing on one individual, a temple and consecration priest, in Tamil Nadu, South India. By examining his relations with other people, gods and his ideal and present self, the article suggests that ethical self-cultivation is an ongoing practice and is based on ordinary and extraordinary encounters, evaluations and reflections thereon. It argues that the focus on an individual both allows an intimate and detailed reflection on processes of ethical self-cultivation and offers a window into the wider social world of which the individual forms a part.

Asia's ongoing economic transformation has created a variety of unexpected ruptures, discontinuities and opportunities in the lives of local citizens across the region. The introduction to this special section of the journal frames the contributions that follow with a brief review of current scholarly discussions regarding the interrelated concepts of crisis, risk and uncertainty. It then provides an overview of the articles in this collection and highlights the ways in which they contribute to an understanding of local responses to, and strategies for coping with, risk and uncertainty as multidimensional, interwoven aspects of their daily lives, guided by social, economic and moral considerations.

In urban China, young people are under increasing pressure to embody the ideal of a financially secure 'match'. At the same time, their parents define marriage as 'a family matter' and provide a large part of the starting fund for their children's new family. This situation often leads to inter-generational tensions, which can be fully appreciated only by looking back at the life experiences of the parents. Many members of this older generation were displaced to the countryside to 'learn from the peasant masses'. In their accounts of those times, marriage was a troubling issue as most of them did not want to marry villagers for fear of getting stuck in the countryside. The anxieties of the old and new generations seem to be underpinned by policies promoted by state and market respectively; however, informants point to the state as the main source of responsibility for both change and continuity.

Disputes over marriage rules triggered perhaps the most significant crisis in the history of the Hadhrami diaspora in Indonesia. Once this trade diaspora had become integrated into the colonial economy of the nineteenth century, rules that emphasized endogamy, especially for women, were questioned by those Hadhramis influenced by Islamic reformism, resulting in a schism of the community. This article revisits the marriage issue by looking at current disputes among Hadhramis, and at how the initial crisis has become institutionalized as well as engrained in collective memory. It also examines what upholding these rules implies for young women today, with personal crises triggered by difficulties in finding suitable marriage partners. The article's main argument rests upon a conception of crisis that attends to its latent character, to its longevity and recurrent appearance, and sees it as inherent to the intricacies of Hadhrami marriage.

This article argues that migrant domestic workers in Hanoi practise a form of fictitious kinship to carve out personal spaces away from their rural home. Biographical narratives of domestic workers who are unusually devoted to forging emotional ties with their employers indicate that they tend to have problematic private lives. Beyond emotional labour, the performance of fictitious kinship entails significant personal investment on the part of women, at times generating mutual feelings and relationships between them and certain members of the employers' household. These relationships are crucial to their personal transformations, helping them construct new identities and opening up possibilities for challenging the power hierarchy in their home. Yet such constructed kinship is treacherous and uncertain, not just because of its foundation is their commodified labour, subject to the rules of the market, but also due to the dangers of intimate encounters in the private sphere.

This article examines some of the ruptures and contestations that have emerged in the context of urban restructuring and market redevelopment policies in Hanoi, Vietnam. Public markets have become sites of contestation and struggle over the commoditization and use of public urban space: large plots of state-owned real estate in the inner city are handed over to private investment companies for development, in the process of which small-scale traders are losing their means of economic survival in the marketplace. These forms of accumulation by dispossession likewise reflect processes of social and spatial reconfiguration that exclude the urban poor and other 'uncivilized' subjects from public visibility by creating up-scaled spaces of lifestyle and consumption for the newly emerging classes of high-end consumers. Such processes of dispossession are gendered and impact on different kinds of traders in different ways.

My ethnography of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon (2005–2010) points to a strong disposition towards suspicion associated with refugeeness. This, in turn, highlights politico-moral economies of trust, indexed by honour, that become what I call boundary-maintenance disciplinary practices. The dynamics of suspicion and trust, propelled by social crisis and uprooting, shape all groups, from their social support systems and marriages to collective political, ethnic and religious allegiances. Uprooting tends to be associated with displacement of the subject's social order, bringing about an intensified sense of intra-group bonds and a concomitant suspicion towards those outside this group. This, in turn, heightens a necessity on the part of refugee subjects to reflect and shape networks of trust, expressed in a moral idiom, even when decisions are known to be political. This article analyses some of the dynamic between suspicion and trust in conditions of social crisis and refugeeness.

Philippe Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture (translated by Janet Lloyd). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 488, 2013.