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- Convenors:
-
Alessandro Gusman
(University of Turin)
Henni Alava (University of Jyväskylä)
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- Formats:
- Panel
- Stream:
- Religion
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 23 June, -
Time zone: Europe/Helsinki
Short Abstract:
To advance anthropological theorising on rules, the panel explores the tensions between religious groups' exclusion and their members' desires for inclusion; how other categories of belonging overlap with religion; and how norms at different scales, from state/religion to individual, are negotiated.
Long Abstract:
Inspired by Durkheim, anthropologists long conceived of morality as a set of rules that becomes explicit in rituals, which shapes the actions and thoughts of individuals, so that they become functioning members of society. In recent decades, Foucault-inspired anthropology has turned to consider the relationship between social rules, freedom, and individual self-fashioning (Robbins 2004; Mahmood 2005). In the field of religion, this relationship has been expressed in terms of the dialectic between religious "grand schemes" and "ordinary lives" (Schielke and Debevec 2012). Such ethnographic studies have revealed the ways in which people negotiate and re-arrange beliefs and norms set by religious institutions in order to navigate their everyday lives.
In this panel, we invite researchers to explore three main questions. First, what leads people to aspire to belong in religious communities whose norms exclude them, and how do they navigate the tensions inherent in such aspirations? Second, how does religious rule-making, bending and breaking relate to other fields of often tense negotiations over belonging and identity, such as ethnicity, citizenship, gender, sexuality, race or class? Third, how does scale play out in the processes of rule-making, bending and breaking: from those inscribed in national legislation or religious bodies, to those affirmed by individual religious or family communities; and those individuals internalise to differing degrees within themselves. We invite empirically grounded papers that reflect on these and other related questions from diverse theoretical perspectives, which will contribute to developing a comparative analysis across cases.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 23 June, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork from two different urban settings in Africa, we argue how the making and breaking of religiously-informed sexual norms are inextricably linked in processes of self-fashioning among young women in urban Africa.
Paper long abstract:
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork from two different urban settings in Africa, we argue how the making and breaking of (religious) norms are inextricably linked in processes of self-fashioning among young women in urban Africa. Self-fashioning implies ‘technologies of the self’ (Foucault 1988) in which a dual process of making-cum-breaking vis-à-vis (sexual) norms include a (re-) fashioning of such norms. The first case is a wedding between two young Senegalese women in Dakar in 2020. Organising such an event in a country where same-sex relations are criminalised represents a rather bold breaking of the rules. On closer inspection, however, the event reveals a re-appropriation of the grand scheme of heteronormative marriage. By creating new rules and roles within a queer community, these women refashioned its meaning, thereby re-imagining dominant ideas about identity, citizenship and social mobility. The second case concerns an appearance of a young woman on a public YouTube channel of a Pentecostal pastor in Botswana, who was interviewed about the sexual violence she once experienced. Emulating a counseling-session, both the Pentecostal leader and the young woman deliberately broke with local cultural norms of silence and discretion about such matters. As also the mother of the woman was invited to the interview, it reveals how, contrary to the extended family, the Pentecostal norm of opening up about intimate matters privileges the nuclear family for doing so. Both cases demonstrate processes of cultural change that revolve around the productive interrelationship between the making and breaking of norms in diverse religious contexts.
Paper short abstract:
Through an emic approach at the notion of jihad, often relegated by scholars to its extra-ordinary and radicalized meaning, this presentation intends to highlight the ordinary, familiar, and generative dimension of this ethical and religious concept of the Islamic piety for Senegalese youth.
Paper long abstract:
In Senegal, the religious imagination gathers and produces important forms of social belonging and moral repertories among youth. Instead of thinking about it in terms of codes of behavior extrinsic to the subject or of pre-established rules of conduct, it is necessary to look at the way in which these imaginaries are intertwined with lived and embodied experiences of piety capable of generating “orientations toward the future” (Bryant and Knight 2019). Piety refers to something more than prayer or public and visible sign of faith (Soares 2004). It involves a daily cultivation of attitudes, virtues and ethical principles (Mahmood 2005; Hamdy 2009; Janson 2013, Faubion ; Laidlaw 2014). The transformative nature of imaginaries and piety also encompasses a deep political dimension: it proposes ways out of the sense of abjection and marginality of many young people (Ferguson 2006) while trying to craft a respectable adulthood, which does not require a material counterpart. This “struggle with the self” (Pandolfo 2007) is often expressed in the notion of jianté in wolof, jihad. The term contains the double and ambivalent meaning of sacrifice and liberation, “subjection that liberates” (Audrain 2004). Through an emic approach at the notion of jihad, often relegated by scholars to its extra-ordinary and radicalized meaning, this presentation intends to highlight the ordinary, familiar, and generative dimension of this ethical and religious concept of the Islamic piety for Senegalese youth.
Paper short abstract:
Traditional chieftaincy has assumed an increasingly negative character in Ghanaian Christian discourses due to its links with ancestral religion. My paper explores how Christian chiefs evaluate the acceptability of traditional culture from a Christian perspective in order to find reconciliation.
Paper long abstract:
Ethnographic studies focusing on traditional chieftaincy in Ghana, West Africa, have revolved around issues such as succession rules, installation rituals, or competition for positions of power. However, becoming and being a chief in a predominantly Christian society, like present-day Ghana, raises new kinds of moral concerns. Many churches, particularly those that belong to the Pentecostal-Charismatic movement, reject traditional ritual life aimed at ancestors and other kinds of spirits as immoral. Since chiefs are fundamentally ritual leaders, who perform sacrifices on behalf of their communities, chieftaincy has assumed an increasingly negative character in Pentecostal discourses. Moreover, since chiefs are identified as reincarnations of their royal ancestors, they personify the spirit world that the Pentecostals demonize. Although some members of royal lineages who have become ‘born-again’ Christians waive their succession rights, many chiefs are practicing Christians and as such they have to evaluate the acceptability of different forms of traditional culture from the perspective of the normative ethics of Christianity. In such circumstances, succession to a traditional office cannot be studied solely from the point of view of social reproduction or political contention as the ethnographers of the previous generations have mostly done. It must be looked also from the perspective of the reasoning and decision making of those people who assume and occupy chiefly offices. My paper will explore the moral, theological, and historical deliberations of my field interlocutors that have led to the conviction that they can be chiefs and good Christians at the same time.
Paper long abstract:
Black Panther, a film directed by Ryan Coogler, has been hailed for its afro-futuristic expressions. It put a different kind of blackness on the big screen worldwide. The amazing technology of imaginary city of Wakanda is unmatched by any other nation in the world. Technological success, however, hides an upending family drama which pits two heirs of the throne against each other. King T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman) had to face Erik Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan). Until he arrived at Wakanda, the existence of Killmonger was a well-guarded secret that only the ancestors knew about. Killmonger abandoned left in America and eventually became a killing machine and international mercenary in America’s foreign wars. When he irrupts in Wakanda, it is to claim the throne and, in the process, destroys the cultural memory that nurtured the imaginary city: the heart-shaped herb and governed life and death flows in Wakanda. In order to avenge his negated identity, Killmonger commits a sacrilege by burning the fields where was planted the Heart-Shape Flower, the most ancient of gift of the Panther Goddess to her people and the guarantor of peace, prosperity, and rulemaking in Wakanda. Self-fashioning à la Killmonger steals and burns the indigenous sacred knowledge of Black people in order to collectively refashion them into technical selves only, the machines of war and peace. What does it mean to predicate one’s identity on the death of the sublime? This essay mobilizes the concept of “double consciousness” advanced by W.E.B. Dubois to reflect on the entanglement of reverence for the machine and technology with blasphemy and derision of indigenous spiritualities in the cinematic construction of Wakanda.
Paper short abstract:
Gender-specific group activities are common in Pentecostal churches, and play a role in the construction of masculinity, femininity and gender relations. Through two case studies, we show how people are harmed by the imposition of rules, yet perform conformity so as to achieve benefits of belonging.
Paper long abstract:
Gender-specific group activities for the moulding of 'godly' men and women are commonplace in Pentecostal churches. Through moral modelling, emphasis on body care, appearance and self-control, such groups epitomise churches' role in the construction of masculinity, femininity and gender relations (Van Klinken, 2013).
In this paper we draw on our fieldworks in Uganda to discuss such gendered classes, in which hierarchical divisions often appear less visible than in congregational meetings through the language of brotherhood and sisterhood (Maxwell, 2000), as arenas for the making and breaking of boundaries. Creation of "new forms of community" (Freeman, 2012) has been considered one of the main strengths of Pentecostal churches worldwide, yet tensions and fractures are also inherent to these communities and their strict normative teachings. To maintain group norms, individuals may be excluded, or choose to exclude parts of their lives from the group's view in order to fit.
Through case studies of a man excluded from a group for breaking its rules, and a woman striving to fit the rules of another, we highlight how although rule-maintenance in such groups can wreak violence on members' lives, it does not necessarily do so: instead of being harmed by the imposition of strict rules, many Pentecostals criticise rules as unrealistic and hypocritical, yet perform conformity so as to achieve other benefits of belonging. Following Burchardt (2020), we consider this to be due to how such groups allow for aspirations to transgress other boundaries, such as those of social class and ethnicity.