Short Abstract

This panel explores diverse ways of engaging with evil through the figure of the devil. We explore the distinct ontologies of evil and of the human that different devil figures across societies point to, bringing a fresh anthropological perspective into processes of and antidotes to polarization.

Long Abstract

As polarization becomes increasingly invested with strong moral sentiments, this panel explores diverse ways of reflecting on evil, containing it, expelling it, or otherwise negotiating and relating to it. The panel brings an ontological approach, where nonhumans are recognized as agents, to the recent foregrounding of the value of evil as a methodological construct in moral anthropology (Olsen and Csordas 2019) and investigations into the social generativity of the negative (Howland and Powell Davies 2022). We go beyond demonization as a rhetorical instrument to discuss diverse social, economic, political, and ceremonial engagements with the figure of the devil itself, alongside its racialized and gendered dimensions. Applying Viveiros de Castro’s (2004) “controlled equivocation,” we treat “the Devil” as a homonym that points to different referents in the distinct realities that it inhabits. We invite papers exploring the figures of the devil, Satan, Iblis, and related concepts across monotheistic and Indigenous societies from ritual and art to extractivism and the digital frontier, aiming at a cubist-like portrayal of the devil(s) by asking: What ontologies of evil and of the human do these devils point to? How do processes of signification, evaluation, and social creativity coalesce within different devil conceptions? What social, political, economic, and psychic forces are externalized, embodied in, and interacted with through the devil? How can an anthropology of the devil redefine the space between the universal and the absolute versus the relative and relational? Engaging with such poles of negativity could illuminate processes of and antidotes to polarization.

This Panel has 2 pending paper proposals.
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