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- Convenors:
-
Loretta Lou
(Durham University)
Sergio Gonzalez Varela (University of Warsaw)
Sitna Quiroz (Durham University)
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- Chair:
-
Loretta Lou
(Durham University)
- Formats:
- Roundtable
Short Abstract
This roundtable asks: What can spirituality offer in an increasingly divided world? Bringing together anthropologists across subfields, we explore spirituality as a set of relational, embodied, and world-making practices that may open new pathways toward collective healing and coexistence.
Long Abstract
In an age of political polarisation, ecological crisis, and deepening religious divides, “spirituality” is often either dismissed as an individualised pursuit of meaning and wellness; or, conversely, blamed for fuelling “superstition,” commodification, and cultural appropriation. Yet across diverse ethnographic contexts, research shows that spiritual practices - from mindfulness and ancestor remembrance to tarot reading and ecological ritual - are emerging as vital resources for healing wounded selves and polarised communities. This roundtable asks: What can spirituality offer in an increasingly divided world? Bringing together anthropologists across subfields, we explore spirituality not only as a personal quest for meanings but as a set of relational, embodied, and world-making practices that may open new pathways toward collective healing and coexistence. How do people across societies engage spirituality to navigate moral injury, loss, and disconnection? What kinds of ethical, affective, and political communities arise from these practices? And how might anthropology, as a discipline attuned to lived pluralism, help reimagine spirituality as a bridge between differences?
Accepted contributions
Session 1Contribution short abstract
Many scholars suggest that the global diffusion of Artificial Intelligence could create a dehumanized world in which we become increasingly reliant on machines for decision-making. In this discussion I suggest that sensuous ethnography is an important way confront these existential challenges.
Contribution long abstract
Many scholars have suggested that the rapid global diffusion of Artificial Intelligence (AI) may well create a dehumanized world in which we become increasingly reliant on machines for decision-making about finances, medical conditions, and even interpersonal relations. The AI wave, as Mustafa Suleyman (2025) suggests, needs to be contained so that it does not overwhelm humanity, creating a dystopian future in which machine intelligence eclipses human intelligence. In this contribution, I suggest that no matter the power of AI to produce, for example, a summary of one's life, it cannot reproduce one's sensory orientation to the world. It cannot capture the pleasures of walking in nature, dancing, sipping a fine wine, eating a good meal, or, for that matter, the deep feelings associated with love and loss. Anthropologists who write or film sensuous ethnographies that are filled with evocations of space and place, the sonority of dialogue, and the idiosyncrasies of character, can produce accessible works (in text or film) that remind us what it means to be a human being in the age of AI. In this discussion, I suggest that ethnographers are in a unique position to address the existential challenges of the coming wave of AI. By not losing touch of our sensuous experiences, we can recapture our humanity.
Contribution short abstract
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in contemporary Iran, this talk explores beliefs in jinn and personal encounters with them, often through dreams. It focuses on how such encounters are perceived by individuals across gender, ethnic, and religious backgrounds.
Contribution long abstract
In contemporary Iran, jinn—referred to as az ma behtaroon: از ما بهترون (literally "better than us")—are believed to possess extraordinary abilities: they can travel across time and space, perceive what humans cannot, and access knowledge beyond human reach. These beings sometimes intervene in human lives, acting as protectors or as intermediaries between the human and non-human realms. They communicate through messages, offer glimpses of the future, and enable individuals to see things that are otherwise hidden. These interactions often occur through vivid dreams, whether by night or day. While some may regard these beliefs as remnants of folklore, for many Iranians, jinn remain an integral part of daily life and are felt or seen in various forms—whether as humans, smoke shape creatures or animals. During my ethnographic fieldwork, my interlocutors shared personal stories of encounters with jinn in different contexts and manifestations and the results of these encounters which varied from illnesses to activating their third eyes. In this talk, I dive into the relevance of jinn beliefs in contemporary Iran and the way these encounters with jinn are perceived by individuals from different genders, ethnicities, and religious backgrounds.
Key words: Contemporary Iran, Human-Non-Human relation, spirit mediumship
Contribution short abstract
What can we learn from witchcraft about ecological care, via a design anthropology lens? By unpacking witchcraft's praxical transgression of binaries to maintain networks of worldly and otherworldly relations, we engage emerging academic theory and everyday practice in more-than-human relationality.
Contribution long abstract
Witchcraft ontologies center practices of ecological relationality that create and maintain other(ed) worlds, simultaneously transgressing Western one-world binarism. For example, human/more-than-human, material/immaterial, good/evil, or man/woman. Yet the variability of practices under the umbrella of ‘witchcraft’ reveals a homogenization of complexity that often results in neatly pitting ‘new age’ witchcraft against Western Enlightenment disenchantment (Sheedy 2023), or cleaving relationships between Indigenous, Afro-descendent, and white Western practices, leaving gaps for appropriation (Fisk 2017).
A design anthropology perspective can engage these complexities by exploring how witches co-design with our ecologies, through the materiality of magical (design) practice. For example, a witch’s altar creates and maintains a network of worldy and otherworldly (im/material) relations through a thoughtful design process, which accounts for the witch’s own relationality to more-than-human beings and non-beings.
Though under-theorized, this relationship to the more-than-human aligns with praxis at the intersections of new materialism and Indigenous Knowledges. Indeed, the magic of witchcraft is recognition of and manifestation in the moment of intra-action (Barad 2003). Still, much of what is being proposed through new materialism is related to and in some instances far behind relationality understood by Indigenous theorists (Roseik et al 2020). In turn, research on more-than-human worlds and kinship is divided and limited.
This proposal asks that we take to task institutionalized academic practices of romanticization, projectification, and objectification that de-legitimate witchcraft as epistemology and praxis. Instead, we might learn from everyday witchcraft practice to move across binaries and work in intersections, embracing the worldly and otherworldly as ecological care.
Contribution short abstract
Based on ethnographic engagement in Waltham Cross and neighbouring boroughs in London, the paper examines how spirituality becomes a key resource through which African domiciliary carers make sense of insecurity, waiting, and moral strain within a deeply polarised political climate in the UK.
Contribution long abstract
This paper explores how African domiciliary care workers in the UK navigate everyday life within a deeply polarised political climate. Ongoing public debates around immigration, welfare, and the future of social care, shaped by competing political imaginaries associated with Labour, Conservative, and Reform discourses, have rendered migrant presence increasingly uncertain. For care workers whose right to remain is continually discussed but rarely centred, political instability becomes an intimate condition of daily life.
Based on ethnographic engagement in Waltham Cross and neighbouring boroughs in London, the paper examines how spirituality becomes a key resource through which carers make sense of insecurity, waiting, and moral strain. Practices such as prayer, faith talk, and trust in divine timing feature prominently in participants' interpretations of employment precarity, visa uncertainty, and the emotional demands of care work.
Rather than approaching spirituality solely as resistance or withdrawal, the paper attends to its ambivalence. Faith emerges both as a means of sustaining resilience and as a mode of acceptance that reframes limited agency within a larger moral horizon. In this sense, spirituality does not stand outside politics but is lived within it, shaping how uncertainty is endured and narrated.
Keywords: Spirituality; migrant care work; political polarisation; precarity; UK social care
Contribution short abstract
Drawing on ethnography of China’s Body Mind Spirit milieu, this contribution asks how spiritual healing responds to conflict and moral breakdowns —sometimes smoothing division, sometimes sedimenting critique and uneasy coexistence.
Contribution long abstract
This roundtable contribution draws on ethnographic research in China’s Body Mind Spirit (shen xin ling) milieu to open a conversation about spirituality in an increasingly polarized world. Rather than asking whether spirituality heals or divides, I ask: what kinds of coexistence does spiritual healing make possible under conditions of moral breakdowns, political constraint, and geopolitical tension?
In urban China, spiritual practices framed through metaphors of flow, blockage, and release promise repair—of the self, the family, and the nation. Emotional release workshops, lineage healing, and spiritual self-cultivation seek to restore harmony by keeping affect in motion. Yet these same practices unfold amid deep fractures: between individual suffering and collective obligation, care and governance, global spiritual imaginaries and nationalist affect.
Attending ethnographically to moments of fatigue, ambivalence, and emotional residue, I suggest that spirituality does not simply resolve division. It also absorbs and redistributes it. What cannot be healed—exhaustion with positivity, unease with gendered and familial demands, quiet mistrust of moral authority—settles as affective sediment. These sediments mark sites of moral injury, but also generate fragile ethical relations: forms of coexistence based less on consensus than on shared endurance, mutual attunement, and partial repair.
By foregrounding spirituality as an affective infrastructure shaped by—and responding to—polarization, this intervention invites dialogue with other ethnographic contexts represented in the roundtable. It asks how spirituality helps people live with difference when political, moral, and geopolitical divisions cannot be transcended, only inhabited.