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- Convenors:
-
Timo Kaartinen
(University of Helsinki)
Dorothea Schulz (University of Münster)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Sessions:
- Thursday 28 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 Thursday 28 July, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
Based on how one becomes a prophet on Malaita, I advocate for a two-pronged approach to recognise both the agency of impersonal forces and the agency of the (self-altering) individual in the changing of society.
Paper long abstract:
An outpouring of the Holy Spirit or ‘fire in the islands’ dramatically transformed evangelical Christianity on the island of Malaita in Solomon Islands in the early 1970s. Perhaps most powerful was the emergence of a series of revelations from God about the vital future role of Malaita during the end times, prompting a number of people to become charismatic leaders. One of them, Reverend Michael Maeliau, successfully established a movement around what he calls the revelation of the glory of the Lord. In this paper, I reconstruct the process in which Maeliau changed from being a South Sea Evangelical Church minister and aspiring black theologian to a visionary ‘captain’ of a movement and, with a sense of being part of an ever growing temporal and geographical field, to become a broker between Malaita’s past, present and future and biblical and present-day Israel. I argue that it is healthy for anthropology to keep ambiguity in place when looking at self-alteration and I advocate for a two-pronged approach to recognise both the agency of impersonal forces and the agency of the (self-altering) individual in the changing of society.
Paper short abstract:
This paper ethnographically explores the lived affective tension of social entrepreneurs of education in Delhi, India, as they attempt to become both consistent selves trustworthy of financial investment, and relational, self-aware persons who practice ethical self-transformation.
Paper long abstract:
India’s Education Reform Movement NGOs aim to improve education of marginalised children by teaching them to self-reflect, discover their ‘true’ selves, and develop leadership ‘skills’ needed to ‘actualise’ this self in the world. In the logic of the Movement, it is the individual who has the power to change their social and economic reality by developing the self-discipline and self-confidence to do so. But before the children are taught this self-focused route to self-actualisation, the middle-class providers of this education must themselves be trained.
Educators joining one of India’s largest education NGOs complete a five-week residential program where they locate their ‘inner light’ through self-reflection and use it to compound their commitment for ‘ending education inequity’. After a two-year teaching fellowship with this parent NGO, fellows are encouraged to set-up their own ‘social enterprises’ which seemingly allow them to perform ethical selfhood par excellence: by becoming social entrepreneurs they both do good (increase education parity) and do good quickly (through the ‘start-up’ logic of speed).
This paper presents an intimate ethnographic analysis of a Delhi-based NGO founder as he inhabits the tension of becoming a successful entrepreneur (growing his organisation, gaining funding) and a ‘social’ activist (performing ethicality, showing self-awareness). The paper explores how a neoliberal demand to present a consistent and trustworthy self (towards funders and others) relates to the founders’ commitment to a socially committed and relational self. It will discuss the affective tensions this duality raises and how it influences Delhi’s educational entrepreneurs’ journey in ethical self-transformation.
Paper short abstract:
My paper discusses conversion in the Russian Baptist community. I focus on the process of unlearning the old ways of living and the way this facilitates the construction of ethical narratives. Such narratives are primarily manifested through gender order, family values, and sex.
Paper long abstract:
My paper discusses conversion in the Russian Baptist community. Russian Baptists are evangelicals, which means that they emphasize inerrancy and the literal reading of the Bible and the personal conversion of every believer (Bebbington 1989). Conversion is regarded as a process of growing in faith up to the point of total surrender to Christ, acknowledgement of one's sinful nature, and accepting Christ's atonement sacrifice on the cross.
During my fieldwork in the rehabilitation ministry for addicted people, I identified conversion as a process of interiorizing the text of the Bible (the Russian Synodal translation) as the language of not merely liturgy and worship, but also communication, thought, and reasoning. This is a life-long process, and the further one engages with this process, the stronger one is considered to be in faith.
Russian Baptist conversion is a multi-faceted phenomenon. I will discuss it from an ethical standpoint — as a process of unlearning the old ways of living. My current research focuses on gender order, family values, and sex as ethical affordances (Keane 2016) — moral potentialities that essentialize particular human experiences but do not strictly determine behavior. I will demonstrate how juxtapositions between the old ways and the new Christian life, as well as the process of unlearning sinful behavior, facilitate the construction of the Russian Baptist ethical narrative.
Bebbington, David. 1989. Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s. Baker Book House.
Keane, Webb. 2016. Ethical Life: Its Natural and Social Histories. Princeton University Press.
Paper short abstract:
This paper studies narratives and practices of ethical self-making in one of the biggest Russian new religious movements, the Last Testament Church. Based on ethnography among the LTC members, the paper shows how ethical selves are informed by emotions and cultivated by emotion manage-ment.
Paper long abstract:
This paper examines post-conversion narratives and practices of self-transformation among members of the Last Testament Church (Tserkov´ poslednego zaveta), one of the biggest new religious movements born in Russia in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Building on the experience of societal-wide moral breakdown and visions of earthly paradise, created by morally self-perfected humans, the LTC suggests its adherents to see themselves as active and responsible moral agents creating their own realities amidst different possibilities of experiencing their existence. In order to reach more meaningfulness, happiness, and beauty in life, a believer is called to “completely transform oneself”. The “work on oneself” aims at replacing one´s egoistic and individualistic tendencies with godly altruism and desire for “dissolving into the collective stream”. In other words, Vissarionites aim at breaking free from their physical boundedness and creating collective consciousness.
This paper discusses the role emotions play in Vissarionites´ self-transformation narratives and practices. The paper suggests that, by attaching their emotions with moral value, Vissarionites become able to experience, interpret, channel, and perform their self-transformation processes in a meaningful and coherent way. However, the moral weight given to emotions also gives rise to heightened ethical sensibilities and confusion among believers as people are not always sure what to make of their emotional experi-ences. The so-called “moral and ethical discussions”, triggered by emotional insecurities, are constant among Vissarionites.
Observations and findings presented in this paper are based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out in the LTC Siberian community in years 2015-2018.
Paper short abstract:
My presentation will explore the role that learning and socialization in articulation with a local theory of mind has for interpreting and guiding the ayahuasca ritual experience for ethical self-transformation. It is based on my ongoing ethnographic work with indigenous and mestizo populations in the Peruvian Amazon.
Paper long abstract:
Ayahuasca rituals are the purposeful drinking of the ayahuasca psychoactive brew to induce strong visionary and bodily experiences. The brew is composed by combining the ayahuasca vine (Banisteriopsis caapi) with other hallucinogenic plants -e.g. chacruna (Psychotria viridis) or changropanga (Diplopterys cabrerana)- and has been used by indigenous and mestizo people of the Amazon for shamanic initiation, bolstering of social bonds, healing, decision making, countering/exercising witchcraft, among other purposes.
Currently, the internationalization of psychedelics has enabled the consumption of ayahuasca outside local contexts. In this regard, research has focused on aspects related to the instrumentalization/therapeutic potential of ayahuasca, or the “default” animist perspective from which Amazonian people consume and interpret their experiences with ayahuasca. However, reduced attention has been placed on how learning and socialization processes shape the degree of skill to interpret and render efficacy to the ritual experience, and further, connect such experiences with desirable behaviors and norms.
Following Tanya Lurhmann’s discussion on the anthropological theory of mind, my presentation will explore how indigenous and mestizo people mediate and develop the capacities for rendering their ritual experiences effective for self-transformation. My objective is to analyze how the perceived effectiveness of ayahuasca elicits ethical affordances for guiding everyday behavior in their respective contexts.
My data is based on my ongoing ethnographic fieldwork (03.2022-02.2023), with indigenous communities -awajún, quechua-lamista- and mestizo people in urban/periurban spaces in San Martin, Peru. My observations are supported by qualitative techniques in the form of thematic, semi-structured interviews, and field notes.