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Paper short abstract:

Based on the case of early 19th-century European emigrants in the US, this paper discusses how emigration can be seen as a paragon to study the emergence and formation of shifting plausibility structures in periods of fundamental reorientation.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation locates the emergence of the religious/secular divide in the swampy hinterlands of 1825 South-Western Indiana where encountering emigrant groups from Europe were puzzling over each other's worldviews and convictions. Their classificatory uncertainty was shared by the daily press that, fascinated by the colonies as models for the success or failure of future societies, soon started to argue about the true nature of the emigrant settlements. The interpretative spectrum was wide and featured many voices uttering conceptual uncertainty and confusion. These senses of ambiguity—a breach in expectation and sensed mismatch with former perceptions—announced semantic changes in the epistemological field in which existing terminologies were felt to be no longer sufficient.

Based on the case of early 19th-century European emigrants in the US, I will discuss how emigration can be seen as a paragon to study the emergence and formation of shifting plausibility structures in periods of fundamental reorientation; how people differentiated "religion" from "its other" before the modern religious/secular binary was available to them; and what vernacular classifications and classificatory uncertainties tell us about how modern taxonomies evolve and become plausible.