Dear Members,
Attached is the November 2024 edition of the SAR newsletter, along with important information about the upcoming SAR Biennial taking place in 2025. Your engagement and contributions to the Society are deeply appreciated, and we are thrilled to continue building a collaborative and supportive community together. This month’s newsletter is slightly longer than usual and includes several important announcements. For those attending the AAA conference in Tampa, I look forward to the opportunity to meet some of you there!
As always, if you have any questions, suggestions, or contributions for future newsletters, please feel free to reach out. Thank you for your ongoing support, and I look forward to connecting with you at our upcoming events and activities.
Best,
Shahana Munazir
PhD Candidate in Anthropology, UW-Madison
Society for the Anthropology of Religion
Section of the American Anthropological Association
17th November 2024
News and Announcements
SAR Business Meeting at the AAA Conference 2024
To SAR members as well as All Others interested in the Anthropology of Religion who are attending AAA in Tampa:
Please come to the Society for the Anthropology of Religion Business Meeting on Friday Nov. 22 @ 7:30 pm in Tampa Marriott Water St. Florida Salon 6
There will be catered finger food for the Business Meeting. Plus, we will award the Clifford Geertz book prize and Honorable Mentions, and Student Paper Prizes, and discuss our Biennial SAR Conference at UC Santa Barbara.
We will also welcome our newly elected SAR Board members-at-large: Neena Mahadev, Hanna Gould, Cymene Howe, Naomi Haynes (2nd term), Britt Havorson (2nd term), and our new President-Elect, Amira Mittermaier.
SAR sponsored panels at AAA Tampa, FL 2024
SAR has sponsored three amazing panels at AAA. Please see the details:
(1) Back to Spacetime: How Does it Change Our Understanding of Religion?
11/20/2024 10:15 AM-11:45 AM
TCC 114 Oral Presentation Session
Anthropologists in the 1980s and 1990s proposed that we gain a richer understanding of human worlds if we do not separate space and time but instead combine them as one analytical concept: “spacetime.” For example, Nancy Munn, in The Fame of Gawa (1986), was interested in how people move objects from one spatiotemporal plane to another, thus transforming their value in the process, and Alfred Gell, in The Anthropology of Time (1992), suggested that humans’ “temporal maps” are akin to a “Garden of Forking Paths” (borrowing the title of one of Borges’ short stories): “temporal cognition consists in charting the paths that lead from one possible world to another.” And yet, the robust conversations that developed soon afterward in the anthropology of religion, including in the anthropology of Christianity and Islam, repeatedly separated space and temporality as two distinct analytical lenses. How would our understanding change if we returned to the “unitary analytic concept” (Munn, p. 274) of spacetime? Can we return to spacetime in a way that accounts for both its unity and for the way that it is engaged by religious practitioners positioned differently in relation, for example, to gender, class, or authority? How might keeping the unity of spacetime in view alter what we understand about religion, or about the way that religious adherents conceive of their worlds? In this panel, we return to spacetime to examine how unified visions of space and time are experienced, built by, read through, or differentially engaged by religious actors. Individual papers examine the efforts of holistic healers in North America to expand time-space through work with energies; the new prayer practices of Protestant feminists in Norway who used silent speech to stake their own claim to the reality of spacetime; the spatial form of the Orthodox veneration of ancestors, evoking both pasts and futures and siting memory in space; the echoic spacetime produced through the acoustics of the Islamic call to prayer in Morocco; and Zimbabwean Baptist concerns with punctuality as a way of producing spiritual value in the spacetime of worship, though with classed and racialized implications.
(2) Enacting and Contesting Religion in Public Institutional Life
11/20/2024 04:15 PM-05:45 PM
TCC 119 Oral Presentation Session
In many places, major public institutions like hospitals and prisons are sometimes the settings for both the beginning and end of life. As such, they have long been sites of tension between religious enactments and secular frames and sensibilities. Drawing on this year’s theme of “praxis,” this panel seeks to explore in fine-grained ethnographic detail this particular, often fraught seam between the “religious” and the “secular.” In particular, we are interested in the ways that the boundaries and content of the religious and the secular are challenged, reinforced, or remade at this moral interface. What kinds of practices end up counting as “religion” and which do not, in what contexts? What kinds of affects and relationships are authorized in or exiled from public spaces as various forms of “religion” are explicitly embraced? What kinds of subjects and selves do these evocations and enactments both assume and help produce? What do local discourses and debates about “religion” tell us about the shifting forms of belonging and exclusion that operate within these various public systems? And finally, to what extent does this attention to “religion” in everyday institutional life conform to or upend anthropological accounts of how either secularism or secularity is expected to work? The organizers/chairs of this panel examine these questions in public institutions in a French secular context. But this panel seeks a more comparative approach, focusing particularly on the ways that certain needs, desires, or practices appear and/or disappear as “religious” requirements or sensibilities in contexts as diverse as Chile, India, South Korea, and France. Ethnographic objects analyzed through our papers include hospitals, temples, schools, and universities; and panelists’ interlocutors include chaplains, physicians, priests, lay clergy, patients and tourists.
(3) SAR co-sponsored with the Society for Medical Anthropology
New Book Roundtable: Excited Delirium: Race, Police Violence, and the Invention of a Disease
11/22/2024 10:15 AM-11:45 AM TCC 123
Roundtable/Town Hall – In-Person
In conversation with a new book by Aisha Beliso-De Jesús, this roundtable critically explores the invention of a syndrome used to medicalize deaths at the hands of police violence. Through an anthropological historiography of race, religion, and law enforcement, this work unravels how, in the 1980s, Miami-based medical examiner and self-proclaimed “cult expert” of Afro-Caribbean religions Charles Wetli identified what he called “excited delirium syndrome.” Police and medical examiners soon claimed that Black people with excited delirium exhibited superhuman strength induced from narcotics abuse. It was fatal heart failure that killed them, examiners said, not forceful police restraints. In Excited Delirium, Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús examines this fabricated medical diagnosis and its use to justify and erase police violence against Black and Brown communities. This roundtable will discuss the role of anthropology in revealing the story of excited delirium syndrome’s fabricated diagnosis. It will examine how the criminalization of religion intersects with the complex layers of medicalized state-sanctioned violence against people of color in the United States
SAR Biennial Conference June 2025
The SAR Biennial Conference 2025 will be held from June 21–23, 2025, at the University of California, Santa Barbara, focusing on the theme Religiosities, Ecologies, and Environmentalisms in the Age of the Anthropocene. The conference invites paper, panel, and roundtable proposals on all topics in the anthropology of religion, with a special emphasis on the intersection of religion and environmentalism. A keynote lecture by Prof. Ana Mariella Bacigalupo (SUNY Buffalo) will explore indigenous religious environmentalism in Peru. Submissions are due by January 5, 2025, with notifications by January 30. Registration opens on January 30, with early bird rates available until February 20. Limited dormitory accommodations at UCSB will be available starting February 20, with priority closing on April 15. For more details or to submit proposals, please see the flyer attached with this email.
New Books and Articles
Religious Sounds Beyond the Global North: Senses, Media and Power
November 2024
Carola E. Lorea and Rosalind I.J. Hackett
Amsterdam University Press
Goodbye Religion: The Causes and Consequences of Secularization
October 2024
Ryan T. Cragun and Jesse M. Smith
NYU Press
The Service of Faith: An Ethnography of Mennonites and Development
September 2024 (forthcoming)
Phillip Fountain
McGill-Queen’s University Press
Goddess Beyond Boundaries: Worshipping the Eternal Mother at a North American Hindu Temple
September 2024
Tracy Pintchman
Oxford University Press
Assembling Futures: Economy, Ecology, Democracy, and Religion
Jennifer Quigley and Catherine Keller (edited)
August 2024
Fordham University Press
Ana Mariella Bacigalupo and Fabien Le Bonniec. 2024. “Queering the Spirit of the Law: Mapuche Shamanic Justice in Judge Karen Atala’s LGBT child custody case against the Chilean state.” Journal of Anthropological Research 80(2): 143-176
Call for Proposals and Opportunities
1) The Society for the Anthropology of Religion (SAR) column in Anthropology News invites submissions that convey short stories about religion inspired by fieldwork, popular media, or current events. Accepted submissions will be published in 2024 and 2025.
2) The Department of Religion at the University of Georgia invites applicants for the position of Lecturer in Arabic to begin August 1, 2025. This is a full-time, non-tenure-track appointment.
Apply by November 1st, 2024 for full consideration
3) Equinox Publishing, UK and CrossCurrents (University of North Carolina Press), “Religion and the Work of Art” (Deadline for CrossCurrents: August 31, 2024 | Deadline for Equinox Volume: December 31)