Religion and Society

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.