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- Convenors:
-
Kathleen Openshaw
(Western Sydney University)
Cristina Rocha (Western Sydney University)
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- Chair:
-
Kathleen Openshaw
(Western Sydney University)
- Format:
- Panel
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 1 December, -
Time zone: Australia/Sydney
Short Abstract:
This panel focuses on the entanglements between religion, materiality and (im)mobility, and calls contributors to more closely consider this nexus, both from an ethnographic and/or theoretical perspective, as it is lived-locally and negotiated globally.
Long Abstract:
In recent years scholars have moved beyond a Westerncentric framework of false binaries that understands religion as immaterial - as private belief in an invisible, omnipresent and transcendent God. Rather, they have sought to understand how religious mediation makes real the presence of immaterial entities in the world through material forms (Houtman and Meyer 2012, p. 6). Certainly, religiosity is manifested in complex and often contradictory relationships involving the material and immaterial, animate and inanimate, human and non-human actors, earthly and supernatural realms and local and global relationships. In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, when populations are mostly immobile, this panel focuses on the entanglements between religion, materiality, digital media and (im)mobility. It calls contributors to consider these connections, both from an ethnographic and/or theoretical perspective, as they are lived locally and negotiated globally.
We hope to address some of these questions:
o How can religious materiality help us understand locally-lived experiences?
o How are Gods and spirits made tangible through the material culture, bodily sensations, texts, media, buildings and other infrastructures?
o How are transnational religions mediated across time and space?
o How does religious mobility fare in a COVID-19 world of lockdowns and closed borders?
o How can Indigenous knowledge help us understand the relationship between human religiosity, more-than-human engagements and (im)mobility?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 1 December, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
Deprived of the ability to receive Buddhist pastoral and spiritual care because of their migration status as well as general travel restrictions, this paper discusses the resourceful fall-back on experimental and virtual religious services among the new Bhutanese migrant community in Australia.
Paper long abstract:
Bhutanese in Australia are among the newest the newest migrant communities. The 2016 Australian national census records 5,953 people with their birthplace as Bhutan. It is expected that the population has at least doubled even though exact figures are not available. Migration for a newly mobile people involves dislocation, disorientation, disillusionment, and a breakaway from everything familiar. Importing native social structures and practices are not practicable among these new migrants who juggle multiple competing priorities like education, work and caring responsibilities. Therefore, Buddhism, which is known to be a fluid, dynamic and highly adaptable religion able to transcend time and space, has given the Bhutanese living in loosely organised communities across major Australian cities a sense of anchor and stability. My paper proposes a preliminary survey of the emerging practices through which the Bhutanese living in Australia organises Buddhist religious activities as a means of bringing a sense of normality, homeliness, and solace. It relies on available public records from registered Buddhist centres, around six, to make sense of these evolving practices. This paper also foregrounds my own experience over the last seven years as an organiser of Buddhist centres and foundations in Canberra. As the pandemic has restricted travel opportunities, particularly among temporary residents and international students, such emerging phenomenon take even more pre-eminence as demonstrated in the recent case of a death in the Bhutanese community, whose last rites according to Buddhist traditions could not be conducted causing much pain and suffering for the family and friends.
Paper short abstract:
Each year, friends of a small Tibetan family in Australia share a celebratory New Year meal involving the ritual invocation of a spirit made tangible through food and offerings. Such ritualised hospitality shows how diasporic kinship is adaptive and mediated through more-than-human engagements.
Paper long abstract:
This paper considers the challenges arising from physical and temporal displacement from homeland, family and tradition within the Australian Tibetan community. Australia is home to a Tibetan population of around 2,000 people, most of whom were resettled from India as humanitarian entrants or family reunification cases. They are a relatively small community within a broader transnational diaspora of approximately 150,000 Tibetans who reside outside of their homeland.
The focus is on a young woman and her father, who for almost 20 years have been separated from family remaining in Tibet. Even as exiles in India, they lived apart for work and education until winning a visa lottery for former political prisoners that brought them to Australia. Resettling in Brisbane together has motivated them to re-enact certain family-based Buddhist ritual traditions through which they forge bonds of kinship and belonging in their new home.
Each year, friends and “orphans” in their extended community are invited to participate in a pre-New Year (Losar) celebration. Together the group prepares and consumes a meal and conduct a ritual that symbolically dispels negativity from the home. This ritual “cleansing” is only possible due to the presence of a spirit – made tangible through food and offerings – who is banished at the meal’s end. It is argued that the ritual enactment of hospitality and kinship in this context powerfully shows how diasporic relationships can be mediated through more-than-human engagements.
Paper short abstract:
Religious objects mediate connections between people and the divine. In this paper I explore the ways in which religious objects are made valuable instruments through ritualisation, while asking how they become carriers of meaning in the personal relation between humans and non-human entities.
Paper long abstract:
Interaction with the spiritual world always requires mediation (Meyer 2009, 2012). Bodies, objects, and technologies are used in everyday religious practices to make the divine present on earth. Mediation, however, also poses a problem for religious actors – especially within Christianity — since immediate contact with God or the Holy Spirit is idealized over mediated access, and bodies, things, and technologies don’t always last.
In this paper, I ask how religious objects become and remain valuable for people as instruments which make the divine present on earth. Using my fieldwork in ‘dechurched’ Roman Catholic churches in the Netherlands which must get rid of their sacred objects before closing down (Cuperus 2019), I will show how items are imbued with ‘sacred value’ which ‘sticks’ to them, even when they are no longer useful as mediators in Holy Mass but are remobilized as art in museums or as kitsch in home decoration.
This paper aims to answer the question how to understand the way in which sacred value or spiritual capital (Openshaw 2019, 2020) becomes imbued in objects, while simultaneously acknowledging that these processes are not merely technical – in the sense of ‘machinal’. I will argue that interaction between human and a range of non-human actors (objects, deities) are not just ritualized processes of authentication (Chidester 2018), but necessarily involve a much more artful and poetic process (Stolow 2014) wherein both person and object become carriers of meaning.
Paper short abstract:
This paper argues that evangelical Christian networks function as penal infastructure in Brazil. Through this framework of infrastructure, it demonstrates that evangelicals are increasingly entangled within the everyday governance and materiality of the nation's carceral project.
Paper long abstract:
This paper contends that evangelical Christian networks increasingly function as penal infrastructure in Brazil. Since the 1990s, the scale and scope of evangelical involvement in the criminal justice system have grown significantly. One clear result is that the capillary relationships which constitute Christian social life now mobilise and co-ordinate resources - food, paint, electricity, water, clothing, and healthcare - within the prison system. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the prison system of Rio de Janeiro from 2014-18, I argue that evangelical networks constitute penal infrastructure to the extent that 1) they gather, co-ordinate and invest resources into various aspects of prison life and governance; 2) they come to support or even substitute the basic processes of punishment; and 3) their labor shifts from emergency responses to more durable support systems. This shift towards infrastructure is ongoing and uneven, marked by conflict and critiqued by evangelicals themselves, as well as other actors within the prison system. Nevertheless, it continues to reshape the Brazilian project of incarceration. The paper also makes a broader claim for thinking with and through infrastructure as a point of entry into questions of religion and punishment in Latin America.