Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality,
and to see the links to virtual rooms.
Log in
- Convenors:
-
Meadhbh McIvor
(University of Oxford)
Michael Edwards (University of Sydney)
Send message to Convenors
- Discussant:
-
Fenella Cannell
(London School of Economics)
- Stream:
- Morality and Legality
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 31 March, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel will explore the workings of grace and its entanglements with religious, political, economic, and ecological registers of responsibility and obligation in both Christian and non-Christian settings.
Long Abstract:
Writing in the early 1990s, Julian Pitt-Rivers declared that "surely the anthropology of religion can no more ignore Western theology than the anthropology of law can ignore Western jurisprudence?" (1992, 215). The burgeoning anthropology of Christianity has, to some extent, rectified this lack, and scholars of Christianity are increasingly likely to engage with the theologies and soteriologies that shape their interlocutors' lives. Yet despite its central role in many Christian, and, arguably, non-Christian traditions, the concept of "grace" remains curiously under-theorised in anthropology. This panel seeks to explore grace in cross-cultural perspective. As that which exceeds dynamics of responsibility grounded in reciprocity and obligation - "always something extra" (Pitt-Rivers 1992, 217) - attending to grace promises to shed light on longstanding concerns with power, agency, and change, as well as on newer questions of time, ethics, and affect. Papers may engage with, but are not limited to, the following: What are the processes through which individuals and communities attract, accept, possess, distribute, reject, or exhaust grace? Across what spatial and temporal scales does grace function? In what forms is grace recognised, mobilised, or marginalised? Is grace translatable across different domains and, if so, through what material and immaterial means? How do the "moral ambitions" of grace (Elisha, 2008) animate or frustrate social, economic, or political action? In what ways does grace interact with alternate registers of responsibility, including karma, debt, and law - especially in encounters across difference?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 31 March, 2021, -Neena Mahadev (Yale-NUS College)
Paper short abstract:
Through ethnography of recent dissent by Catholic and Protestant activists, and through a partial reading of the postcolonial archive of contributors to contextually-grounded Liberation Theology, I explore the theo-politics of grace that fuels the habits and habitus of Sri Lanka's ecumenical left.
Paper long abstract:
Through ethnography of recent peaceful dissent spearheaded by Catholic and Protestant activists, and through a partial reading of the postcolonial archive of contributors to contextually-grounded Liberation Theology, I explore the theo-politics of grace that fuels the habits and habitus of Sri Lanka's ecumenical left. Pluralistic and indigenized forms of Christianity emerged in the era of decolonisation and nationalisation, and were further emboldened by Vatican II. Distinguishing ecumenical Christian pluralism from evangelical Christian expansion in the region, I analyze how political economic bi-polarities inhere in Sri Lanka's Christianities. In drawing out these contrasts, and by examining where left pluralism stood within the convulsive era of class and ethnic-based insurrections, I parse out the "catholicity," civic nationalism, and even post-nationalist self-conceptions that grace Sri Lanka's ecumenical Christian left.
Chris Wingfield (University of East Anglia)
Paper short abstract:
This paper will consider the long-term and long-distance histories of objects collected by the London Missionary Society, in terms of their capacity to reveal unfolding dynamics underlying encounters between European concepts of grace and analogous concepts such as mana.
Paper long abstract:
In 1973, Gregory Bateson suggested that 'if art is somehow expressive of something like grace... then the success of this expression might well be recognisable across cultural barriers'. This observation developed in conversation with Edmund Leach, but was ultimately prompted by the consideration of A'a, a Polynesian sculpture in the British Museum, originally collected by the London Missionary Society. A'a went on to prompt similar theorising by Alfred Gell in Art and Agency, having previously inspired the modernist artists Pablo Picasso and Henry Moore, as well as the poet and critic William Empson.
This paper will explore how the recognition of grace in charismatic objects, ultimately collected by missionaries to evidence of their displacement, played a role in simulating a series artistic, literary and theoretical responses in Europe. Nevertheless, consideration of these responses suggests that it has frequently been difficult to move beyond mere recognition when it comes engaging with the operation of grace.
While the actions of London Missionary Society missionaries were premised on a theological understanding of grace as a one-way transfer, or gift, the biographies of the artefacts they collected are suggestive of a process that operated over the longer-term as more of a two-way exchange, in which alternative, competing conceptions of grace framed many underlying encounters and exchanges.
Gareth Breen (UCL)
Paper short abstract:
Is the grace of the divine beings of popular religion and that of the Christian God in Taiwan the same kind of grace? In this paper I argue that it is not. Furthermore, I show how the grace of the latter displaced that of the former for followers of the famous preachers Watchman Nee and Witness Lee.
Paper long abstract:
Is the grace of the divine beings of “Chinese Popular Religion” and that of the Christian God in Taiwan the same kind of grace? In this paper I argue that it is not. Furthermore, I show how the grace of the latter displaced that of the former for a group of Chinese and Taiwanese Christians, followers of the famous preachers Watchman Nee (倪柝聲) and Witness Lee (李常受), over the past century. While the “something extra” of the grace of popular religious deities in China and Taiwan lies in the “interest-free” time lag between a divine favour and its human repayment, there is nothing that the God of this Christian group can give without you first giving yourself to God. Grace here lies in the gift of subtraction (of ‘self’, desire’, ‘sin’) rather than addition (money, health, progeny). Taking my cue from conversations with members of this group between 2015 and 2019, I relate these two kinds of grace to two alternative modes of identification: the first being more temporal, grounded in feelings of indebtedness (to gods, ancestors, nations, parents) the other more spatial, characterised by feelings of displacement (from global and spiritual centres). Divine grace in each case placates as well as feeds these feelings. I conclude by exploring the resurgence of the grace of indebtedness in the lives of group members as manifest in their controversial cemetery-building project, centred around the second burial of Witness Lee, in Los Angeles, a project called “Grace Terrace” (恩典陵園).
Julian Sommerschuh
Paper short abstract:
I explain the ambivalence of kinship as a result of kinship exchange being animated by the logic of grace. Grace is key to the cultivation of loving kinship relations - even as it also threatens to undermine those same bonds.
Paper long abstract:
Why is kinship often not only a realm of love but also of intense conflict and negative sentiments? This paper examines the ambivalence of kinship among Aari in highland southwestern Ethiopia. Expanding Julian Pitt-Rivers' work on the perils of grace, I show that kinship failure in Aari is a product of the mode of exchange common among kin. Animated by the ideal of grace, exchange among kin produces love when it succeeds but 'sadness' when it fails. And occasional failure is inevitable since the ideal of grace is both incompatible with other ideals and self-defeating. Sadness can therefore be avoided only by avoiding to exchange with kin altogether.