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- Convenors:
-
Timo Kaartinen
(University of Helsinki)
Dorothea Schulz (University of Münster)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 27 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
The topic of this panel is ethical and religious learning. Reflecting on Charles Taylor's notion of the buffered self, we explore how people learn to manage the buffer between the mind and the world in pursuing self-transformation.
Long Abstract:
Charles Taylor has described modernity as an ethic of freedom and order that seeks to buffer the self from the contingency of the external world. To be a buffered subject is to have closed the porous boundary between one's inner and outer experience. Managing this buffer, learning to maintain it through self-discipline and to break through it in acts of devotion, is a recurring topic in contemporary discourses of religious conversion and piety.
A question raised in recent anthropology of Islam and Christianity is how religious practitioners learn to make the buffer porous and engage with spiritual agents, allowing external forces to enter and transform their self-experience. For some people, devotional acts like prayer or Quranic recitation represent a vehicle for learning to commune with God. Whether or not such inner experience is shared with others, consistent ethical life requires one to reconcile it with the ethical coordinates, boundaries, and responsibilities mandated by the social world.
To explore such issues, this panel invites papers that focus on the practices and ideologies of religious and ethical self-transformation. Our aim is to go beyond a view in which contemporary religiosity is merely a private affair of self-transformation and discipline, and to affirm it as a way of addressing the desires and displacements of the contemporary world. While the panel draws from recent discussions in the anthropology of Islam and Christianity, it is open to papers about the management of the self/world buffer in other social formations as well.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 27 July, 2022, -Toomas Gross (University of Helsinki)
Paper short abstract:
Multi-day festivals have become a common form of spiritual events during which, using Taylor’s terms, one’s “buffered” self is rendered more “porous” through various collective and embodied practices and rituals that constitute a mode of ethical self-fashioning and learning.
Paper long abstract:
Multi-day festivals have become a common form of spiritual events that bring together heterogeneous crowds of adherents to emergent religions, practitioners and aficionados of fringe knowledge, self-seekers, and many others. In the example of such spiritual festivals in Estonia, this paper approaches these events as embodied sites of ethical self-fashioning and learning. The festival grounds and different workshops organised during these events are aimed to constitute an imagined space of “trust,” “harmony,” “acceptance,” and “safety” where the participants can collectively engage in various mental and physical activities that enable them to “open up” to themselves, to others, and to the world. Gendered, mainly heteronormative body, is at the center of such activities and rituals, sometimes referred to as “processes,” that are essentially acts of embodied learning. These acts are generally performed in unison with other bodies, through synchronised movement and sound, dance, touch, or, at the very least, through purposeful eye-contact with others. Taylor’s distinction between the “buffered” and the “porous” self is useful for conceptualising the essence of these embodied “processes.” While the “modern buffered self” is characterised by a firm boundary between the mind and the body, as well as between the self and the other, the “porous self” is opened up to both inner and outer world. Rendering one’s “buffered” self a “porous” one is an act of ethical self-fashioning that is considered to lead to a more “authentic” way of coexistence and is sometimes also framed by festival participants in terms “magic” and “becoming a tribe.”
Tea Virtanen (University of Helsinki)
Paper short abstract:
Drawing on Charles Taylor’s distinction between buffered and porous selves, the paper looks at three ontologically distinct experiences in the life world of the Tijani Mbororo of Cameroon, each experience involving a different degree of permeability of the boundary between mind and world.
Paper long abstract:
Charles Taylor’s (2007) notion of buffered and porous selves refers to a distinction between two ways of understanding the boundary between what lies in one’s mind and outside it. While, in Taylor’s view, the self was earlier conceptualised as porous, that is, open and thus vulnerable to spirits, demons, and cosmic forces, the modern era has brought about a new sense of invulnerable, bounded self. Whereas Taylor’s classification was to capture the way selves are experienced in different social worlds (Luhrmann 2020), the ethnography of this paper illustrates how differing understandings of self can also determine the ways people conceptualise their different experiences within the same social universe. Drawing on Taylor’s notion of the buffered/porous self, and in line with the panel’s religio-ethical focus, I look at three ontologically distinct experiences in the life world of the Muslim Tijani Mbororo (Fulani) of Cameroon. These are 1) falling into jasbu, a divine trance state, often taking place during the Tijaniyya worship practice called zikiri (dhikr), 2) being possessed by evil spirits, and 3) the daily observing of pulaaku, the Fulani code of ideal public behaviour that focuses on self-mastering and aims at creating an autonomous self. The paper reflects on how the Tijani Mbororo conceptualise and deal with the challenges posed by the mentioned religio-culturally framed phenomena, each of which being shaped by distinct external forces and involving a different degree of permeability of the self/outside boundary.
Alana Sá Leitão (University of Toronto)
Paper short abstract:
I will discuss the ethical subjectivation process among believers at the Universal Church of the Kingdom Church. Different levels of adherence to the Church contribute to different constitutions of the self along the buffered-porous spectrum. The ethical process involves constitute and of the world.
Paper long abstract:
This paper proposes to discuss the ethical subjectivation process among believers at the Universal Church of the Kingdom Church (UCKG). The UCKG is a Brazilian Pentecostal church founded in 1977 by Edir Macedo. 1% of Brazilians today declare themselves to be part of this church, and the many possibilities for interaction with UCKG beliefs and practices outside of institutional spaces render this church better known than this number shows. Furthermore, different levels of adherence to the Church contribute to different constitutions of the self along the buffered-porous spectrum. What I am proposing is to understand how this church becomes part of Brazilian society and public sphere, and becomes a source of morality and ethics.
The research that constitutes the paper here proposed occurred through fieldwork in three different temples of the UCKG in Brazil. Through my participation, I could see and be part of different ethical exercises. These experiences are part of the process that makes God real to the people who take part in them and enables them to constitute themselves and the world around them while waiting for Him. In Brazilian society in recent years, to engage with the UCKG's ethical project is to engage with a national project. Michael Lambek (2010) indicates that ethics is a way to be in the world, a social action. In this sense, I will argue that the ethical process involves not only a process of constitution of the self in relation to the world, but also of the world itself.
Guido Nicolas Zingari (University of Turin)
Paper short abstract:
This paper aims to analyse the lived experiences of members of a Sufi brotherhood in Senegal. It questions the way in which religious imaginaries mediate between the everyday and the moral, the economic and the spiritual, to express the relationship between subjectivities and freedoms.
Paper long abstract:
The piety turn in religious anthropology has proposed rethinking religious commitment by overcoming the dichotomy between adhesions to beliefs and pushes to autonomy of the subject (Asad 2003, Hirschkind 2006, Mahmood 2005). According to such an approach, the practices and discourses promoted by piety reveal processes of internalization and incorporation of rules aimed at realizing a self-cultivated subject. A recent reflection on the intertwinement of everyday life and religious experiences (Fadil and Fernando 2015, Schielke and Debevec 2012) has questioned the completeness of these processes in light of the unstable nature of the lived experiences of religion in relation to ordinary life. Furthermore, the use of the notion of self remains problematic. It recalls the anthropological concept of person, thus embedding processes of self-cultivation to a social context that cannot be reduced to the religious sphere. And despite the overcoming of the universalism inherent in the secular conception of the self and Freedom, such an approach leaves open the question of the relationship between historical repertories of freedom ad subjectivity reducing the first to an ahistorical dimension of the second (Sopranzetti 2017). This paper aims to analyse the lived experiences of young members of a Sufi brotherhood in Senegal. In particular, it intends to question the notion of djayanté (inner jihad or sacrifice in French) and the way in which religious imaginaries mediate between the banal and the ideal, the everyday and the moral, the economic and the spiritual, to offer an expression of the relationship between subjectivities and freedoms.
Giovanni Cordova (University of Naples Federico II)
Paper short abstract:
Migration is a fertile ground for understanding how devotion connects the inner dimension of the ethical and religious subject to the wider social experience. I will focus on young Sri Lankan Catholics in Southern Italy, examining how devotion feeds civic responsibility and Self-making projects.
Paper long abstract:
Connections between devotion and the wider social context is perhaps more evident in the frame of migration. In a world that is not quite familiar, devotion provides for an alternative cartography of belongings.
Drawing on an ongoing ethnographic research, in this paper I would like to focus on the ethical and religious learning of young Sri Lankan Catholics in Italy’s southern region of Sicily (more precisely in the city of Messina). In particular, I will examine how devotion and the dense set of ritual practices enacted by the Sri Lankan Catholic community (one of the largest foreign communities in Sicily) combines the acquisition of inner ethical dispositions and social and civic responsibilities within the community - witnessed by the greeting “Jesu Pihithai” ("May Jesus bless you") - in the light of Sri Lankan current political scenario and the moral ambivalences brought by migration.
Rather than being rigidly “buffered”, the Catholic Self emerging from weekly Masses, pilgrimages to the main Sicilian catholic shrines, catechism and religious family education does not seem to assume a sharp distinction between the private realm of devotion and the needs for social and cultural reproduction of Sri Lankans living abroad. The religious subjectivity of young catholic Sri Lankans seems rather to extend the space and the role of devotion and ethical learning. Daily acts of worship and the adoption of moral behavior in every-day life trace complex projects of Self-making, balanced between the weight of social bonds and desire for transnational individual affirmation.