Introduction

On Concepts, Conversations, and (In)Commensurabilities in Studying Religion

in Religion and Society
Author:
Simon Coleman
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Sondra L. Hausner
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Religion and Society has always been a journal designed to reflect but also to question the grounds on which the anthropology of religion is based. We have promoted a flexible format over the last 13 years, encouraging different styles of writing and modes of academic address. In this sense, the journal is dedicated to both exploring the possibilities and exposing the current limitations of anthropological research. All of these aims, including their remit to query what we study and how we do so, are fully evident in this volume, which contains, even by our own standards, an unusually wide range of approaches, formats, and challenges to our field.

Religion and Society has always been a journal designed to reflect but also to question the grounds on which the anthropology of religion is based. We have promoted a flexible format over the last 13 years, encouraging different styles of writing and modes of academic address. In this sense, the journal is dedicated to both exploring the possibilities and exposing the current limitations of anthropological research. All of these aims, including their remit to query what we study and how we do so, are fully evident in this volume, which contains, even by our own standards, an unusually wide range of approaches, formats, and challenges to our field.

Michael Lambek, the subject of our Portrait section, launches the volume with a personal, illuminating, and probing consideration of his work, its influences, and its evolving themes. While he is one of our era's most prominent anthropologists of religion, Lambek points out that none of his full-length ethnographic works have been dedicated to studying religion “in a formal or narrow sense.” Instead, they have involved a consistent analysis of concepts and practices encountered through fieldwork, resulting in a body of work particularly influenced by his interests in ritual, language, and ethics. For Lambek, hermeneutics is less about reading texts than about tracing ongoing conversations among people, and his approach is sufficiently capacious, both intellectually and methodologically, to reveal not merely the connections but also the incommensurabilities, misunderstandings, and category errors that occur within and between traditions of knowledge and practice. Our two distinguished commentators go further in illustrating how Lambek's work cannot be confined to any simple label of ‘religion’. Bob Hefner writes of how Lambek's influential work on spirit possession has increased cross-cultural understandings of personhood and subjectivity alongside religion understood as a heterogeneous phenomenon, just as his writing in Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte (1993) must be regarded as a core achievement in both the anthropology of Islam and the anthropology of knowledge. Cheryl Mattingly thinks with, through, and alongside Lambek's writings over the last decade or so, reading him as a “virtue ethics scholar” who shows how humans do not deploy concepts as abstract entities so much as they live and struggle with them on a daily basis.

If much of Lambek's work deals with spirit possession and the conceptual and ethical messiness of everyday living, Fraser Macdonald's article on Christian movements explores forms of religious inspiration that move away from “domesticated affect” toward “wildly unruly” forms of revival that constitute attempts to mobilize new metaphysical horizons. In doing so, they promote “contagious upsurges in spiritualized intensity” that are oriented toward the transcendence of the local. Shifting across cultural terrains, Macdonald's fluid, evocative writing provides a potent demonstration of how style of presentation and underlying argument might reinforce each other in powerful ways. He both argues for and illustrates horizontal circulations and interconnections that promote religious intensification.

Equally striking, if very different in purpose, is the mode of address deployed by Ananda Abeysekara in his article on Alastair Gornall's Rewriting Buddhism. His contribution, in an experimental long format, is a polemic that addresses specific forms of describing and analyzing Buddhism. While our Portrait section brings questions of power occasionally to the surface—for instance, with reference to how Talal Asad (the subject of our 2020 Portrait) depicted Clifford Geertz's approach to religion, or how concepts are embedded within relations of force—they come to the fore in this text. Abeysekara highlights what he sees as the problematic ways in which the sub-field of Buddhist studies has participated—unintentionally, perhaps, but still with real effects—in the Orientalist project to produce a particular kind of Buddhism, one that “echoes the legacy of the politics of colonial knowledge production.” Abeysekara traces a genealogy of the concept of creativity, for example, to expose its underlying assumptions and occlusions, and to foreground other, often overlooked dimensions of Buddhist practice in South Asia.

Lambek is himself a contributor to our Author Meets Critics section, which takes the form of a conversation about David Henig's Remaking Muslim Lives: Everyday Islam in Postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina (2020). While commentators pick up on different aspects of this rich work, they collectively emphasize yet another powerful resonance between argument and style of presentation: the book's theoretical exposition emerges through, rather than being presented separately from, its ethnography. In expressing himself in this way, Henig shows his readers how moral values, religious experience, and ethical behaviors are embedded within everyday forms of living. A key point made by Henig and others is that the book demonstrates how acting as a Muslim in post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina is dominated by the ethical question of how to live, rather than the more explicitly expressed identitarian question of who I am.

Two other conversations about religion follow. The Symposium articles gathered by Andreas Bandak and Simon Stjernholm around the theme “Engaging Religion” provide an intriguing point of comparison to the questions of interpretation and hermeneutics raised in the Portrait section. Scholars from within and beyond anthropology produce a thought-provoking set of reflections on what it means to study religion today, where, for instance, key analytical, epistemological, and ethical dilemmas remain in the many gaps of translation between empirical findings and analytical categories. Resonating with the rest of our volume, the Symposium section asks what it is we study when we examine religion and reflects on whether and how religion can ever be seen as detachable from symbols of power. In their wide-ranging introduction, Bandak and Stjernholm also come back to Asad's work, while attempting to expand on it. They suggest the utility of uncovering “plural genealogies” that can inform future research, including those they call “epistemological, tactical, and personal.”

Our special section, “Muslim Youths and Their Utopian Visions,” edited by Eva Gerharz, Andrea Priori, and Max Stille, uses a comparative lens to consider what the future looks like to youth communities in Tunisia and Rome, and in the hands of a South Asian activist. This conversation among scholars takes us back to classic questions raised by the study of religious mobilization and social change. The youths studied by contributors are not engaged in the sweeping and affective challenges to established order explored by Macdonald, but their visions are nonetheless often critical of the political and religious categories maintained by earlier generations. The special section argues that such visions of change may aim to transcend locality through appeal to the ‘non-place’ implied by the word ‘utopia’, but individual characters are always rooted in specific relations of power. More specifically, the editors of this section remind us that when considering the historical-political constellations of religious aspiration and social change, scholars need to reflect on local languages and paradigms in order to understand and access what utopia means to young people on the ground.

As with all our volumes, this one concludes with a Reviews section. Edited by Anastasios Panagiotopoulos and Eugenia Roussou, it presents not so much a conversation as a juxtaposition of reviews of some of the latest works in our field. These reflections reveal the possibilities, the limitations, and both the commensurabilities and the incommensurabilities of studying religion among practitioners in the field of anthropology. Our hope is that, taken as a whole, this volume can speak to our discipline in compelling ways that not only reflect the classic strengths of our field but also enable our collective thinking to move in new directions.

Simon Coleman and Sondra L. Hausner

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