July 2022 Newsletter

Hello everyone,

Thank you to everyone who has shared their new publications (congratulations!) and CFPs. If you have not got your email responded, please bear with me for a moment. I will respond to them (hopefully) soon, but I hope that your publications and CFPs have been included in our newsletter for this month. If I missed your publications/CFPs/events, please let me know.

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 websiteFacebook, 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 would 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!

In the meantime, I hope that everyone is having a great summer!

Thank you,

Febi R. Ramadhan
SAR Communication Liaison
PhD Candidate, Northwestern University

Society News

**SAR Student Paper Prize Deadline Extension**

The Society for the Anthropology of Religion (SAR) is pleased to announce its graduate student paper prize competition, which is aimed towards encouraging emerging scholars to write compelling ethnographies on religion. This prize is intended to foster theoretically significant, ethnographically rich work by students at an early stage of their career. 

The prize includes a cash award of $250 for the winning paper, which might be recommended for publication in Religion and Society. There will also be a $100 cash award for the runner up. SAR will continue its mentorship program that will pair select graduate student finalists with faculty mentors. Finalists will have an opportunity to meet with their mentor at the 2022 AAA meetings in Seattle to obtain feedback on revising their papers for publication.

At the time of submission, authors must be graduate students in anthropology or a related field in a university anywhere in the world and must be a member of SAR. Finalists will be notified early in the fall semester and paired with a faculty mentor before the 2022 AAA meetings. Winners will be publicly announced at a special mentorship reception, where finalists will be invited to present their work with commentary from their mentors. Winners and finalists will also be recognized at the SAR business meeting. 

Interested graduate students are invited to submit their previously unpublished, original and polished work to Alisa Perkins (alias.perkins@wmich.edu ) and Candace Lukasik (cblukasik@wustl.edu) by July 31, 2022. Papers must be written in English, and should be no more than 30 double-spaced pages, including abstract, bibliography, and notes, and in 12-point font. Please write SAR Paper Prize Submission in the subject line of the email. Limit of one submission per person. Students who competed in the competition last year cannot reapply.

We look forward to receiving your submissions! 

New Books and Articles

Hungarian Catholic Intellectuals in Contemporary Romania: Reforming Apostles
Marc Roscoe Loustau
Palgrave MacMillan, 2022

Pentecostal Insight in a Segregated US City: Designs for Vitality
Frederick Klaits with LaShekia Chatman and Michael Richbart
Bloomsbury, 2022

Critical Terms for the Ethnography of Religion
Brendan Jamal Thornton and Eric Hoenes del Pinal (guest editors)
Special Issue of Fieldwork in Religion, 2022

What does it mean to be a person? Different cultures have different answers
Robert Launay
The Conversation, 2022

God in/of the Ordinary
Febi R. Ramadhan
Otherwise Magazine, 2022

Indigenous Religious Traditions
Seth Schermerhorn (editors)
New academic journal; will be launching in 2023

Call for Paper

For the Indigenous Religious Traditions journal’s inaugural Call for Papers, we especially encourage contributions that take stock and set agendas for where we today in the study of Indigenous religious traditions, including the following:

There are a great number of Indigenous groups in the world (370-500 million individuals belonging to around 5,000 distinct groups in more than 90 countries according to the United Nations, Amnesty International, and UNESCO). Why is this important to recognize?

1.      What exactly do we mean by “indigenous”; why do we use it; and why should we
acknowledge the terms used in other areas of the world (First Peoples, Aboriginal, etc.). The United Nations famously refuses to define “indigenous peoples” because as per the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, “self-identification as indigenous is considered a fundamental criterion. The Declaration refers to their right to determine their own identity or membership in accordance with their customs and traditions.” Be that as it may, we can draw attention to the ways that different groups determine this point. Why is this important to recognize? How might the forms of recognition overlap or differ? How are they changing? What are the variables that shape recognition (tourism, heritage, the arts, education, the media, jurisprudence, censuses, INGOs such as UNESCO, etc.)?

2.      Why “religious traditions” and not “Indigenous religions”?

3.      What term(s), if any, do Indigenous peoples have in their respective languages for the set of beliefs and practices that might be termed “religion” in English? What could an analysis of such terms contribute to our general understanding of religion, or to the ongoing debate on how to best define it, given the considerable diversity of this human activity? The Kanaka ʻŌiwi (i.e., “Hawaiians”) provide a striking example of how an Indigenous people’s rationale for, or understanding of “religion”, can differ markedly from Christian understandings of the same. The Hawaiian word for Kanaka ʻŌiwi “religion” is “Hoʻomana” (noun) and hoʻomana (verb)—to generate, bestow, increase mana.

4.      The religion vs. spirituality debate. Why is it important to recognize what Indigenous peoples do as religion? What is at stake?

5.      The role and impact of scholars and academia in what we recognize now as coloniality within academia.

The editor of IRT seeks papers that engage with these issues. We also invite the submission of book reviews on related titles published within the past 3 years. Completed articles (approximately 6,000-9,000 words, written in English) are due by September 1, 2023. Publication of the inaugural issue is planned for July 2023. Submitted articles must include an abstract, keywords, a short biography, the author’s affiliation and use Chicago Manual of Style, 17th edition. Questions regarding this issue and any other aspect of IRT may be directed to Seth Schermerhorn (jscherme@hamilton.edu).

Employment Opportunities

Lecturer in the Study of Religion (Fixed Term)
Department of Theology and Religion, Durham University
Closing Date: July 31, 2022