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- Convenors:
-
Bruno Reinhardt
(Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Brazil)
Jean-Michel Landry (Carleton University)
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- Discussant:
-
Charles Hirschkind
(UC Berkeley)
- Formats:
- Panels
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 21 July, -
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
Short Abstract:
What is to be called to a life project or mission? This phenomenon has not yet flourished as a robust subject of anthropological inquiry. This panel invites papers that explore the ethical, temporal, and political dimensions of the Calling at the thresholds of the religious and the secular.
Long Abstract:
What does it mean to be called to a life project or mission? How do different subjects conceive of and inhabit their calling? Similarly to "inspiration", having "a calling" testifies to the complex entanglements of secular and religious grammars in modernity. Its ambiguity is highlighted by Max Weber's famous engagement with beruf - a German word that condenses notions of profession, vocation, and divine calling - both in his work on Protestantism and the Spirit of Capitalism and his essays on science and politics as vocations. A "calling" might entail a transcendental limit to moral deliberation and agency, as in Luther's "Here I stand. I can do no other". Or it might be encompassed and authenticated by traditions and institutions authoritatively. Although the frameworks that make "a calling" intelligible and viable are multiple, this phenomenon has not yet flourished as a robust subject of anthropological inquiry. How, we ask, do culturally or religiously embedded conceptions of the Calling conceive human agency vis-à-vis transcendence, immanence, and imminence? How such process articulates the ontological and ethical predicaments of religious and secular times? Finally, how the affective force of a Calling resonates with or counters the entrepreneurial call of neoliberalism, to which we have all been exposed? We invite papers that explore - ethnographically and comparatively - actualizations of callings that propel religious movements, political organizations, humanitarianism, development, business, labor, the military, and science, as well as their intersections.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 21 July, 2020, -Paper short abstract:
This paper draws on the work of the German playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) to explore how young Muslim clerics struggle to inhabit and pursue an ethical calling under neoliberal economic conditions.
Paper long abstract:
This paper reflects on how deregulated economies pose obstacles to committed Muslims seeking to lead ethical lives informed by the shari'a tradition. It draws on multiyear ethnographical research conducted in Shi'i Lebanon as well as on conversations with small store owners struggling to develop commercial practices that comport with shari'a-derived norms and precepts. Store owners committed to Islamic normativity complain that Lebanon's deregulated market forces them to sell their products (e.g., cellphones and electronic accessories) well below the listed price—a predicament that makes it difficult for them to abide by the principles of fairness and commercial ethics embodied by the shari'a.
While much of the current scholarship on Islamic law focuses on secular state apparatuses and the way they have reconfigured the shari'a (most notably by enforcing it as "family law"), I shift the analytical focus to the market. I argue that neoliberal economics, too, interrupts the shari'a ethical tradition. In doing so, I bring into focus the extent to which the capacity to pursue an ethical life is impacted by social, political and material conditions. To explore this problem, I turn to Bertolt Brecht's literary work: more specifically, those pieces engaging the question of religious ethics in a capitalist world, such as The Good Person of Szechwan (1943) and Saint Joan of the Stockyards (1931).
Paper short abstract:
This presentation approaches the call to pastorship in Ghana through a theo-economic angle, seeking a non-reductionist understanding of the relation between neoliberal immanence and Christian transcendence in contemporary Africa.
Paper long abstract:
This presentation approaches the ministerial call in Ghana through a theo-economic angle, seeking a non-reductionist understanding of the relation between neoliberal immanence and Christian transcendence in contemporary Africa. Expanding upon Max Weber's classic analysis of Beruf in early Protestant Capitalism and contemporary theories about affective labor, I approach Lighthouse Chapel International's (LCI) theology of the calling against the background of its "church labor ethics". I argue that, rather than reacting to the neoliberal economy as an exogenous material force, LCI's organizational structures absorb aspects of neoliberal rationality for distinctively Christian ends. Such synthesis allows the overlapping of a zealous ethics of conviction with managerial professionalism. The tensions between these value systems are both animated and balanced by a minimalist theology of the calling, in which the call to ministry is rendered coeval with desire.
Paper short abstract:
This paper draws from ethnographic research with Bolivian evangelicals to shed light on the calling as a call to kinship. I consider how one mother's concerns with putting money in durable things—especially houses—points to familial, inter-generational duty as a worldly expression of faith.
Paper long abstract:
According to Max Weber, Luther's notion of "the calling" underwent a set of permutations that, eventually, established money-making as an end-in-itself and introduced new concerns with the fulfillment of worldly duties. But what kinds of worldly duties come into play when specific subjects situated within specific religious and also relational traditions mobilize the concept of "calling"? For Weber, this is a term that gradually moved from the domain of priestly duties to a notion of capital gain within the nuclear family. In this talk, I put Weber's thought in dialogue with ethnographic research conducted with evangelical Christians in Bolivia in order to shed light on a less-studied aspect of Weber's thinking on Luther: the problem of kinship. What kinds of duty come into play in people's pursuits of economic accumulation as a means of supporting not only kin but the very concept of the family (as a trans-historical arrangement of relational contiguity through blood and money)? Looking closely at one case, I consider how one mother's concerns with putting money in durable things—especially houses—respond to a notion of familial, inter-generational duty. I am interested in how this ethnographic material troubles the idea of an intractable separation of oikos (household economy geared toward satisfaction) and market (geared toward profit). The pleasure of money-making, I surmise, stems not only from the sheer efficacy of profit but, in addition, corresponds to concerns with fulfilling worldly duties that re/produce families as entities that, with sufficient money and affection, can survive time.
Paper short abstract:
Drawing upon fieldwork with Hasidic diamond brokers in Antwerp, my paper offers a foil to Weber's construction of the "vocation." In this "provisional life," God desires religious subjects to be in a constant state of economic precarity, so they constantly entreat him for temporary provisions.
Paper long abstract:
What is security good for? This would strike many as an odd question. An assumed logic would have it that security—existential, economic, bodily, and otherwise—is understood to be an unequivocal good, the desire for it universally sought, the risk it bears actively guarded against. Often insecurity can be made productive—it can spark radical creativity and invention, offering new horizons of possibility for solidarity, care, and mutual aid. Yet this is always after-the-fact, epiphenomenal byproducts of insecurity; never something to be actively sought after. One presumably does not seek precarity to secure stronger bonds or forms of mutuality and care.
Drawing upon extended fieldwork with precarious Hasidic diamond brokers (being cut out as middlemen in the diamond supply-chain), my paper offers a foil to Weber's construction of the "vocation." In this "provisional life," God desires religious subjects to be in a constant state of economic precarity, so they constantly entreat God for temporary provisions. In this model, insecurity may very well be desired, not in and of itself, but rather as a precondition for being in-relationship with a divine power. That is, relationships built upon forms of dependence, by their very nature, structurally require some expression of insecurity.
This paper is a meditation on life marked by provisionality, in all of its multivalence, that which provides, but never permanently sustains, that which only lasts or is only intended to last for a demarcated amount of time.