Hello everyone,
SAR newsletter for this month has arrived! I am sorry for my absence for the last couple of months; I have just finished my fieldwork in Indonesia and was occupied with the hectic process of relocating back to the US. However, as always, thank you so much for everyone who has shared their new publications (congratulations!) and CFPs. If you haven’t 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 this month’s edition. If I missed your publications/CFPs/events, please let me know.
We hope to include as much 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 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
The 2023 Biennial Meetings of the Society for the Anthropology of Religion were held at the University of Victoria from May 12 to 14, 2023. Under the theme of “Religious Assemblages,” the conference was hosted by the Department of Anthropology at the University of Victoria. During the conference, 110 papers were delivered on 29 panels. There were 120 total registrants, three mentoring sessions for junior scholars, four graduate student workshops, and three keynote addresses. A full writeup about the conference, with photos, can be found at https://sar.americananthro.org/sar-2023-recap.
New Books and Articles
World of Worldly Gods: The Persistence and Transformation of Shamanic Bon in Buddhist Bhutan
Kelzang T. Tashi
Oxford University Press, 2023
Aporetic Differences? Equality Entitlements, Religious Schools, and Contours of Protection
Ben Kasstan
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2023
Deploying Fetal Death: “Fetal Burial” Laws and the Necropolitics of Reproduction in Indiana
Risa Cromer and Sophie Bjork-James
PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, 2023
“They have shown me what I need to know”: Spirits, The Eternal Family, and Collective Ethical Responsibility in Utah Mormonism
Erin E. Stiles
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2023
Indigenous Churches: Anthropology of Christianity in Lowland South America
Elise Capredon, Cesar Ceriani Cernadas, and Minna Opas
Palgrave Macmillan, 2022
Call for Application
Embracing Faith and Desire
Autumn School on the Anthropology of Gender, Sexuality and Religion
26-29 September 2023 | FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg
This Autumn School explores the intersections of gender, sexuality and religion from an anthropological lens. In many contemporary societies across the globe these intersections have been both enacted as sites of volatile contestation and creative transformation. On the one hand, the darker side of this relationship often manifests in the controversies and tensions around how religious conservatism hampers gender equality, facilitates gender based violence and reproduces marginalization of people of non-heteronormative and non-cis-normative genders and sexualities. On the other hand, we cannot ignore the facts that for many of those being subjected to these oppressive dimensions of religious discourse, religion has also become a source for not only attaining solace and spiritual joy but also means cultivating personal and collective wellbeing. This four-day Autumn School aims to provide young and emerging scholars (advanced MA-students and PhD-students) in social and cultural anthropology with analytical, theoretical, and methodological tools for the study of gendered and sexualized dynamics in religious contexts. It brings together junior researchers from a variety of global and national contexts with leading scholars from internationally renowned research institutions. This set-up enriches the understanding of the participants of new critical developments in the fields of the anthropology of gender, sexuality, and religion and enables an in-depth theoretical exploration of their individual research projects. In addition to focused lectures, readings, and class discussions, the School will provide graduate students from around the world with opportunities to develop academic writing and presentation skills through collaborative work with senior researchers and leading experts in the field.
Please find further information in the attachment and online:
The deadline for application is 15 June 2023
Please send your applications directly to Viola Thimm: viola.thimm@fau.de and Ferdiansyah Thajib: ferdi.thajib@fau.de