In Theology, Empowerment, and Prison Ministry Meins G.S. Coetsier offers a new account of Karl Rahner's theological anthropology and the prison pastorate with a contemporary expansion for meaning, ...seeking an antidote to the suffering of those incarcerated with a "theology of empowerment.".
In this article I engage with the conceptual difficulties that studying Christianity poses for anthropology, revisiting and expanding on the critical moves made in the development of the subfield, ...especially in debates among Robbins, Haynes, Cannell, Garriott, and O’Neill. In particular, I consider the theoretical challenges and the political implications involved in elaborating an adequate concept of Christianity or the Christian. I argue that studying Christianity as a “tradition” implicates the anthropologist in much more than the study of “a religion,” and while Asad’s approach to the study of Islam is methodologically sound, applying it to the case of Christianity involves specific challenges. I use my reading of these methodological and conceptual challenges to critically consider the ways in which anthropology engages with alterity as an epistemological or ethical ground and the political implications of this engagement. Finally, I offer some methodological insights drawn from my study of Pentecostal Christianity that might assist the researcher in studying these specific forms of Christian practice today.
This article examines the annual public procession in Lima, Peru, of the Señor de los Milagros (Lord of Miracles) in relation to issues at the intersection of Catholic Christianity, media, and ...political authority. Through a theopolitical lens alert to the intermeshing of political sovereignty and authority with theological (Catholic) worldviews, I inquire into media and the Señor de los Milagros procession along three key intersecting themes that link scales of local and global Catholicism: performance, identity/belonging, and control. Key to my argument is the idea of the miraculous (lo milagroso), a culturally resonant register of embodied affective experience with compelling power, which points to how senses of belonging, authority, and ‘proper’ Catholic subjecthoods are intensified by Catholicism's diffusion through new mediatic forms, especially in church‐generated productions. A consideration of media technologies, mediation, and Catholicism nuances theoretical assumptions within the anthropology of Christianity, and also suggests that the anthropology of religion should attend more closely to mediation and mediatization as newer media infrastructures – channelling flows of information, images, and affects – extend ‘the religious’ into other social spheres.
Abstrait
Le catholicisme médi(atis)é : saint, spectacle et théopolitique à Lima, au Pérou
Résumé
Le présent article est consacré à la procession publique annuelle du Seigneur des Miracles, « el Señor de los Milagros », à Lima (Pérou), et aborde des questions qui se situent à l'intersection du christianisme catholique, des médias et de l'autorité politique. À travers un prisme théopolitique attentif à l'imbrication de la souveraineté et de l'autorité politiques dans la vision du monde théologique (catholique), l'autrice interroge les médias et la procession du Señor de los Milagros sur trois grands axes qui se recoupent, faisant le lien entre les échelles du catholicisme local et mondial : représentation, identité/appartenance et contrôle. Au centre de son argumentation, elle place l'idée du miraculeux (lo milagroso), un registre culturellement évocateur d'expérience affective incarnée, doté d'une puissance considérable, qui montre comment les notions d'appartenance, d'autorité et de sujétion catholique « convenable » sont intensifiées par la diffusion du catholicisme par l'intermédiaire de nouvelles formes médiatiques, en particulier dans des productions issues de l’Église. La prise en considération des technologies médiatiques, de la médiation et du catholicisme nuance les hypothèses théoriques de l'anthropologie du christianisme et suggère aussi que l'anthropologie des religions aurait intérêt à s'intéresser davantage à la médiation et à la médiatisation, à l'heure où de nouvelles infrastructures médiatiques transportant des flux d'informations, d'images et d'affects, élargissent « le religieux » vers d'autres sphères sociales.
Drawing on dream stories from a Sufi community in Egypt, this article probes the limits of the paradigm of self-cultivation which has come to be widely employed in the anthropology of Islam. While ...the concept of self-cultivation has complicated the equation of agency and resistance, its emphasis on intentionality and deliberate action obscures other modes of religiosity that centre neither on acting within nor on acting against but on being acted upon. Far from reaffirming a self-cultivating subject, narratives of visitational and divinely inspired dreams are profound reminders of the unpredictability of divine interventions and the contingency of life itself. Through an analysis of Egyptian dream narratives and in conversation with anthropological literatures on an ethics of passion, this article traces a relational understanding of subjectivity which poses an even more radical challenge to the liberal model of the autonomous self than do practices of self-cultivation. À partir des récits de rêves d'une communauté soufie égyptienne, le présent article explore les limites du paradigme du développement personnel que l'on rencontre largement aujourd'hui dans l'anthropologie de l'islam. En même temps que ce concept de culture de soi compliquait l'équation de l'agency et de la résistance, l'accent mis sur l'intentionnalité et l'action délibérée a occulté d'autres modes de religiosité qui ne sont centrés ni sur l'action « dans », ni sur l'action « contre » mais sur le fait de subir une action. Au lieu de corroborer l'idée d'un sujet qui se cultiverait lui-même, les récits de rêves de visitation et d'inspiration divine rappellent fortement l'imprévisibilité des interventions divines et la contingence de la vie humaine. Par l'analyse de ces récits de rêves recueillis en Égypte et en dialogue avec la littérature anthropologique consacrée à l'éthique de la passion, cet article retrace une appréhension relationnelle de la subjectivité qui remet en question le modèle libéral du soi autonome, encore plus radicalement que ne le font les pratiques de développement personnel.
To all intents and purposes, the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland, the Brethren of Gamrie, and the Orange Order each claim a monopoly over theological truth, believing that they are right and ...that everyone else is wrong. Such a position is hardly exceptional – strong versions of pluralism take precisely this same monopolistic stance, calling, in effect, for a rejection of anything that rejects anything. Through an examination of such exceptionalist logics, this article seeks to provoke the anthropology of religion to ask certain questions about the social life of theological truth claims. Importantly, by asking anthropological questions (what makes a truth claim ‘stick’; what difference does it make in the world?), the anthropologist of religion is likely to encounter theological questions posed in response. Where does truth come from? What makes it true? What does such truth demand? While answering a question with another question is not always very revealing, this article suggests that in this case it might be, especially if some genuine attempt is made to answer the latter theological questions as a route to answering the former anthropological ones. More specifically, this article argues that anthropology might learn something about the nature of religious change, and changes to religious beliefs, if it first attempts to makes sense of (in this case, Protestant Fundamentalist) theological critiques of doctrinal change.
The book and its producers, and its users are the centre of Anouk Cohen's research. Mainly led in Morocco, her research focuses on three complementary dimensions of the book: as an active indicator ...of relations to the norm implied by diverse representations of language as a process of creation and device for interaction; lastly. as a vector of social transformations, above all religious transformations. At the crossroads of an anthropology of knowledge and anthropology of religions, Anouk Cohen envisions the book as a field of actions and experiences involving practices techniques, and savoir-faire. After having studied the fabrication of literary, practical, and religious books, categories often mixed together, she strives to strengthen the analysis around a single book: the Quran. Based on an ethnographic approach of the book "in the making," her current research explores the Quran from the point of view of the operations and individuals who construct the text as an object rather than from the point of view of its content, to which one most often attaches its meaning.
This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on bloomsburycollections.com Taking its cue from the study of ‘lived religion’, Secular Bodies, ...Affects and Emotions shows how the idea of a secular public is equally marked by a display and cultivation of affect and emotions. Whereas it is widely agreed that religion is often saturated by emotion, the secular is usually treated as a neutral background serving as the domain of public, rational deliberation. This book demonstrates that secularity and secularism are also upheld by bodily practices and emotional attachments. Drawing on empirical case studies, this is the first book to ask and explore whether a secular body exists. Building on the work of Talal Asad, the book argues that the secular is not an absence of religion, but a positive entity that comes about through its co-constitutive relationship with religion. And, once we attune ourselves to recognizing its operations as grammar which structures social practice, writing an anthropology of the secular could become a new possibility.
A groundbreaking anthropological analysis of Islam as experienced by Muslims, By Noon Prayer builds a conceptual model of Islam as a whole, while travelling along a comparative path of biblical, ...Egyptological, ethnographic, poetic, scriptural and visual materials. Grounded in long-term observation of Arabo-Islamic culture and society, the study captures the rhythm of Islam weaving through the lives of Muslim women and men.Examples of the rhythmic nature of Islam can be seen in all aspects of Muslims' everyday lives. Muslims break their Ramadan fast upon the sun setting, and they receive Ramadan by sighting the new moon. Prayer for their dead is by noon and burial is before sunset. This is space and time in Islam - moon, sun, dawn and sunset are all part of a unique and unified rhythm, interweaving the sacred and the ordinary, nature and culture in a pattern that is characteristically Islamic.
This article explores the ritual creation of a distinct form of pious masculinity among Pakistani Tablighis, practitioners of the transnational Islamic piety movement, the Tablighi Jamaat. Pakistani ...Tablighis practice a ritualized form of face-to-face preaching (dawat) that they claim cultivates the pious virtues that allow them to live ethically with kin, neighbors, and fellow citizens. I argue that dawat entails a reflexive ethical stance on male agency and represents an effort to manage the growing problem of male violence in Pakistani life. I conclude by arguing that constructions of "religious violence" so prevalent in the age of the Global War on Terror are underpinned by liberal–secular assumptions about ritual as an absence of critical thought and hierarchy as intrinsically violent. This liberal–secular framework not only rationalizes secular power, it also elides the ethical work that Tablighis are doing to address the violent afflictions of postcolonial modernity in Pakistan.
