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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, -Morgan Clarke (University of Oxford)
Paper short abstract:
This paper describes how British Shi‘i Muslims try to reconcile the rules of Islam with the competing demands of life in a non-Muslim society. Anthropological attention has largely focused on how rules are often bent or broken. I discuss instead how people go to great lengths to observe them.
Paper long abstract:
The Islamic sharia is a notable example of a ‘ruly’ approach to living well. The religious rules of Islam form an important part of many Muslims’ understanding of good religious practice and projects of virtuous self-fashioning. Religious norms such as those of modest dress and dietary restrictions also form a key element of Muslim identity, especially in minority contexts. In this paper, I draw on current fieldwork in the UK to provide ethnographic insight into how Shi‘i Muslims from a South Asian diaspora community conceive of the obligations of the sharia and how they reconcile them with the competing demands of life in a non-Muslim society. While much anthropological attention has been devoted to the ways in which rules are often bent or broken, I discuss how people go to great lengths to observe them, as well as justify those occasions when they cannot, focusing on two key sources of dilemma: whether to shake hands or otherwise have physical contact with the opposite sex; and when one can and cannot eat food offered by non-Muslims. Building on this ethnographic foundation, placed alongside my previous work on Islam in Lebanon, I argue that anthropology’s theoretical resources for discussing the complexities of rules and the nuances of their observance need expanding. I present a number of such resources drawn from philosophy and moral theology, as an illustration of my longer-term project to develop a new and distinctive approach to the anthropology of rules.
Vinod Sartape (MIT World Peace University, Pune)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores how Ravidasis counter social exclusion in Sikhism while representing themselves as a distinct 'dharmik' cult, and how their new identity helps them maintain the essence (belongingness) of Sikhism while denouncing the latter's cultural and religious dominance.
Paper long abstract:
Religion is a vehicle of social change in India. It is even a potential means to the people of lower classes to counter social exclusion while establishing their own dharmik (religious) identity. The religions they adopted failed to treat them as equals due to the element of caste hierarchy in those converted faiths. As a result, the lower castes began to construct the religious models of their own cultural belonging. The Chamars (ex-untouchables) have become a distinct dharmik community by adopting their own saint, Ravidas and his caste-free social vision. The assertion of Ravidas, a medieval poet and reformer, is instrumental in establishing 'Ravidasia' as a dharmik identity. This new religious alternative allows the community in fashioning its own social norms, rules and rituals while countering the dominant social and ritual practices of Sikhism. However, the alternative religiosity though aimed at countering social exclusion in Sikhism, it does not intend to discard the founding principles of Sikhism. While claiming to be Ravidasis, the community also finds an expression of 'belongingness' to Sikhism because of the latter's doctrinal foundation that reflects Ravidas' egalitarian vision. The creation of new religious model while at the same time desiring to 'belong' to another cult is a complex feature of the diaspora Ravidasis. Based on my ethnographic field work amongst the Ravidasis and Sikhs in the UK, this paper explores the socio-religious tension between the two communities and the way the idea of 'belongingness' counters social exclusion and caste inequality in everyday life.
Alicja Zaremba (University of Wrocław)
Paper short abstract:
The paper follows the issue of LGBT+ people’s experiences with religion and/or spirituality, exploring how they are conceptualising and constructing their narratives, while considering the larger picture of very specific spiritual landscape of Poland.
Paper long abstract:
Considering contemporary spiritual landscape of Poland, one can observe the historically conditioned domination of the Catholic Church, established and visible especially since socio-economical transformation of 1989. When the Church moved from the countercultural positions of heterodoxy to the well respected by the state orthodoxy (Concordate in 1993), it started providing its members a broad access to institutional structures, as well as having a real impact on forming their morals from a very young age.
The attitude of the Catholic Church in Poland differs from that in the world – it is largely against liberalisation. It also demonstrates hostility towards LGBT + people, for example seeing them as representatives of "gender ideology", "LGBT ideology" – created concepts that frame i.e. non-heterosexuality and non-cisnormativity as ruinous to social order.
Such climate doesn’t foster the development of religiosity/spirituality of LGBT+ people in the mainstream. They can be relegated to positions of disruptive elements that must conform or be excluded/punished. Hence, the attitudes in LGBT+ community towards religion and spirituality vary: outright rejection of organised religion, conversion to a different religion, pursuing independent spiritual path.
In this paper I want to explore those various ways of constructing LGBT+ persons spiritualities that meander amid the approaches of mainstream and the LGBT+ community itself. Thus, basing on ethnographic empirical research, I follow the narratives of LGBT+ people experiences of spirituality and/or religiosity: how do they conceptualise and construct their own stories? How does the larger picture of their environs shape those narratives?
Igor Mikeshin (University of Helsinki)
Paper short abstract:
Drawing on the study of the ethical life by Webb Keane, I argue that for the Russian Baptists sex is an ethical affordance. Using the example of "hardcore" converts, I illustrate how sex and gender order constitute the (Russian Baptist) Christian identity.
Paper long abstract:
I study a Baptist community in the northwest Russia. Drawing on my fieldwork in rehabilitation ministry for the addicted people (2014-2015) and the study of gender order and family values (2018-present), I regard sex as an example of what Webb Keane calls "ethical affordances" — "any aspects of people’s experiences and perceptions that they might draw on in the process of making ethical evaluations and decisions, whether consciously or not" (Keane 2016: 27).
Russian Baptists are complementarianists, believing that men and women are equal in value but different in role. They give special importance to relationships between genders as an essential part of the everyday morals. They believe that sex, which is only permissible within marriage, has multiple functions besides the childbearing, such as, joy, physical pleasure, getting to know each other, and spiritual unity. Ultimately, the Russian Baptist gender order and family values are an essential part of their Christian identity, which is manifested in living a Christian life.
Two most illustrative examples of sex as an ethical affordance are the moral transformation of "hardcore" converts and the failure of total submission. The adult converts with prison or addicted experience tend to meticulously follow all the principles of chastity during courtship, engagement, and marriage, because they contrast them to their promiscuous past. The failure of total submission to the Russian Baptist morals, in turn, inevitably lead a convert to a spiritual collapse and a consequent physical relapse. I will provide these claims with ethnographic examples.
Ruth Illman (Åbo Akademi University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper presents everyday Jewish life in Finland based on rich ethnographic data that traces how rules of knowing, being and doing Judaism in Finland today are negotiated and reshaped in rituals and Jewishly perceived practices, which often are hybrid, secular and subjectively appropriated.
Paper long abstract:
This paper presents an ongoing research project that ethnographically examines everyday Jewish life in Finland today, focusing on experiences of knowing, being and doing “Jewish” among mainstream adherents, deeply engaged, critically secular and thoroughly indifferent members of this small but highly diverse minority group. Based on the framework of vernacular religion (Bowman & Valk 2012) the project strives to develop an analytic model for examining religion in day-to-day life that is applicable across contexts and cultures – sensitive to historical data and cultural context but also individual narratives and nuances.
Today, increasing migration, urbanisation and secularisation contest and reshape traditional boundaries of belonging. Thus, static values and conceptions of identity give way to more flexible subjective positions accommodating a variety of religious, secular and cultural influences (af Burén 2015). In our in-depth interviews, many informants express a longing to find religiously and culturally significant models from the past that can be subjectively appropriated today. Thus, they seek ways of expressing their Jewishness that are experienced as historically relevant and liturgically defensible but also individually meaningful, socially cohesive, practically doable, emotionally engaging and distinctly embodied (Illman 2019). Both everyday quandaries and existential questions influence their ways of crafting vernacular religious positions. Focusing specifically on formal and deeply personal rituals described in the data, the paper shows how rules are bent, broken and refashioned e.g. as the traditional boundaries between sacred and secular, gendered practices and ethnic customs, are transgressed and subjective combinations of rituals, performance style, ethics and interpretation are developed.