Hello everyone,
SAR newsletter for this month has arrived! We did not publish the newsletter last month due to personal issues at my end: I apologize. I am currently in Indonesia and conducting my dissertation fieldwork, so I couldn’t check my email as often as before. However, if you have any information that you’d like me to circulate to the broader SAR audience, please do not hesitate to email me! I might not be able to reply to your email right away, but I will try my best to include your information in the upcoming newsletter!
As always, we hope to include as many information germane to the anthropology of religion as we could, so please do not hesitate to contact me (febiramadhan2025@u.northwestern.edu) if you have anything to share! We will always look forward to including new books and articles, calls for papers, employment opportunities, awards and prizes, conferences and workshops, publishing opportunities, grant and fellowship opportunities, podcasts, public scholarships, and any other information that you can think of in SAR newsletter to come.
As always, keep up with the most recent SAR news and activities on our website, Facebook, and Twitter pages! You are certainly welcome to engage with these pages and accounts as well. If you are on Twitter and have something that you wouldd like to be retweeted (or you want us to tweet that information), just DM or mention @AnthroReligion. We are here to support any anthropological scholarship on religion from all the subdisciplines, so do not hesitate to reach out to us!
Thank you,
Febi R. Ramadhan
SAR Communication Liaison
PhD Candidate, Northwestern University
Society News
Call for Pitches //// SAR is looking for original, creative pitches that approach religion in the form of an anthropology story, photo essay, graphic ethnography, or short sound or film piece. We welcome pitches on all aspects touching on the politics and practices of religion, from the everyday life of unintended devotion or blasphemous offense to institutional orders of organizing intimacy or collective dissent in the name of religion, moral virtue, or spirituality. We are eager to learn what you have to share and how you communicate to a wide audience through an engaging, conversational style.
Email a 300-word pitch that outlines the story or argument of your piece, and a 50-word author bio to Sawyer French (email: smfrench@uchicago.edu) by February 1, 2023. If proposing a sound or film piece, include a short clip. If proposing a photo essay, include one or two images. If proposing a graphic ethnography piece, include examples of your cartoon or illustration work.
First drafts will be due by March 15, 2023 and will go through a developmental edit with the AN editor. Full anthropology stories or essays are 1,600-2,000 words. Photo essays comprise six-eight high resolution images and a 750-word introductory essay. Sound and film pieces should be no longer than 10 minutes in length. Final pieces will publish in the April or July 2023 issue of the print magazine and on the AN website.
New Publications
Resurrecting the Jew: Nationalism, Philosemitism, and Poland’s Jewish Revival
Genevieve Zubbrzycki
Princeton University Press, 2022
Practicing Sectarianism: Archival and Ethnographic Interventions on Lebanon
Lara Deeb, Tsolin Nalbantian, and Nadya Sbaiti
Stanford University Press, 2022
Journeys to Heaven and Hell: Tours of the Afterlife in the Early Christian Tradition
Bart D. Ehrman
Yale University Press, 2022
Modi’s India: Hindu Nationalism and the Rise of Ethnic Democracy
Christophe Jaffrelot
Princeton University Press, 2023
The Environment and Ecology in Islamic Art and Culture
Radha Dalal, Sean Roberts, and Jochen Sokoly (editors)
Yale University Press, 2023
Muslims on the Margins: Creating Queer Religious Community in North America
Katrina Daly Thompson
New York University Press, 2023
Call for Papers
2023 Society for the Anthropology of Religion Biennial Conference
Theme: Religious Assemblages
By focusing on religious assemblages we call for papers that underscore how, although religion is sometimes marginalized from other aspects of modernity, religious discourses and practices can be dissociated from older historical formations and re-combined with new elements. Among the questions we seek to address are: How are religious practices conjoined to practices that appear on the surface to be irreligious? How is religion evident in domains that claim to be secular or irreligious? How do religious traditions amalgamate influences from other traditions that appear to be discrete? How do actual experiences of lived religion depart from orthodox religious traditions? How are modern institutions and forms invested with spiritual significance? How can greater attention to the ways in which religion infuses myriad aspects of contemporary social life facilitate initiatives of decolonization and indigenization? In addition to research on religion broadly conceived, we seek papers focused on secularism and liberalism, religion at the boundaries of other domains of social life, the relationship between religion and race/ethnicity, indigeneity, class, gender, colonialism, decolonization, and religious formations of white supremacy and ethno-nationalism.
Submission deadline: January 15, 2023
The Spalding Symposium on Indian Religions
Theme: Authority, Lineage, & Schism
The conference includes both religions of South Asian origin wherever in the world they are being practiced, and those of non-South Asian origin present within South Asia. We welcome papers based upon all research methods, including textual, historical, ethnographic, sociological, and philosophical.
Abstract deadline: December 22, 2022
Thirteenth International Conference on Religion & Spirituality in Religion
Theme: Religion in the Public Sphere: From the Ancient Years to the Post-Modern Era
Religion in Society Research Network explores the relationship between religion in society and the changing nature of spirituality. They seek to build an epistemic community where they can make linkages across disciplinary, geographic, and cultural boundaries.