Although they are not often in explicit conversation with each other, several scholarly contributions about the otherwise and grace, respectively, echo each other in striking ways. In this article, ...the author explores some of these echoes. Assembling theoretically various approaches to the otherwise and grace allows him to show that they both tread on similar theopolitical paths, and to identify three points on which they converge: excess, incarnation and turbulence. The article is structured around these three confluences. Each section begins with a description of a particular way of approaching the otherwise, which is then compared with a similar way of approaching grace. Each section concludes with reflections on the spaces of convergence thus identified, and it is argued that they constitute promising sites for the deployment of a ‘theopolitical analytics’ in anthropology.
In this article, I examine the ways in which ideas of martyrdom are employed by Gujjars in Rajasthan to describe their experiences of participating in the 2006 and 2007 Gujjar Andolan (protest), ...serving in the army, and in their telling of the Devnarayan epic. I take as a starting point the manner in which the bodies of Gujjars killed in police firing during the andolan were laid out for 17 days at the site of the andolan while Gujjar men and women recited the Devnarayan epic. The laying out of the martyred bodies then becomes a site for the production of caste belonging and caste love.
Critical approaches to Christian Zionism Younan, Bishop Munib A.; Smith, Robert O.
International journal for the study of the Christian church,
10/2022, Letnik:
22, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
In the context of American religious history up to the time of President Trump, this paper outlines various America Christian attitudes towards the State of Israel, and the roots of contemporary ...Christian Zionism and its influence on recent US policies towards the Holy Land.
In this article, I call for anthropologists of Christianity to do more to address the 'difference' that 1492 has made in Christian institutions, practices, and social worlds. In so doing, I argue the ...most significant condition constraining critical analyses of Christianity is not modernity's secularity, but, what Jared Hickman has called its 'global' condition. I push back against attempts to integrate Christian theology into anthropological analyses in ways that protect religious life from the violence and exploitation found in social worlds. Instead, I argue that analytical tools developed in political theology and theopolitics can help anthropologists to address how, following 1492, Christianity has often been accompanied by attempts to annihilate ontological difference. In addition, anthropologists of Christianity are well positioned to seek out those 'incarnations' that elide the eradication of difference.
Akan spirituality, originally from Ghana, has risen in popularity in the United States since the 1960s and recently has expanded, as shrine houses grow. Akan spiritualists promote reconnecting to ...ancestors and spiritualists in Ghana, and they offer spiritual avenues for pursuing healing and justice, particularly for African Americans and other diasporic Africans. This article draws on extensive collaborative ethnographic research with a prominent shrine house in Maryland and its ties to a key shrine in Larteh, Ghana. It foregrounds two elder priestesses, focusing on their spiritual governance and work in the realms of healing, adjudication, policing, and protection. They serve in these ways within their spiritual communities and sometimes alongside or with state institutions, or as an antidote to them. This article advances a new concept called copresent jurisdictions—here, defined as Akan spiritual assemblages of Abosom (exalted spirits), ancestors, priestesses, priests, and spiritualists who operate with their own spiritual laws and authorities within their sacred communities and in relation to state institutions. It argues that these copresent jurisdictions offer alternative pathways of law, politics, spirituality, and justice within the contexts of imperiled democratic orders. Copresent jurisdictions expand current theoretical debates over theopolitics, postjuristocratic transitions, cosmopolitical assemblages, and transnational copresences.
In the aftermath of the UK loss in the 2020 Euro Football Cup, I analyze a theopolitical force of contemporary black football players, as a sovereignty from below epitomized by the figure of Marcus ...Rashford. Given his meteoric rise in British culture and his prominent social activism against child hunger, Rashford, among the other targets of racial abuse, is a particularly apt exemplar. By integrating anthropological ideas on theopolitics, totemism, charisma, and the sacrality of substance, this paper asks how the iconography, life histories, and social media interventions of young, kingly, Black (mainly Christian) athletes, effect a theopolitical force as an elastic movement of self-referentiality and sovereignty from below that is agonistic rather than antagonistic to the state. Specifically, it explores how these black footballers enliven an exemplar of theopolitical sovereignty that does not decide on letting live or making it die, but on doing a work of undoing injustice.
The recognition of the autocephaly of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) by the Ecumenical Patriarchate in 2019 sparked a debate in the Orthodox world about the legitimacy of such an act. In the ...present study, we aim to explain, through the concept of theopolitics, this event which has caused a schism in the contemporary Orthodox Church. Following a brief introduction to Buber’s concept of theopolitics, we focus on a historical overview, demonstrating that the problems of the Orthodox world do not originate in theological issues, as it might seem at first glance, but primarily in political issues. The case of the autocephaly of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church proves the importance of theopolitics.
This introduction outlines an anthropological concept of ‘theopolitics’ emergent from ethnographic engagements with the oldest site of European colonialism—the (Latin) Americas. Defined as a query ...into the sensorial regimes enabling incarnate forms of power, theopolitics focuses on the sovereignties from below that are immanent in struggles between the universalisms of Christian imperialisms and the autochthonous forces they seek to police and unmake. The articles comprising this special issue advance this query by exploring processes of attunement to the prophetic voices of the dead and life itself, of the elasticity of incarnate forms of political charisma and crowds, and the potencies of precious matter and touch as domains for rethinking relationships among political anthropology, political economy, and political theology beyond a focus on the state.
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