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Being Godless
Originally published as a special issue of Social Analysis, volume 59, issue 2
The Varieties of Atheism
Thoughtful essays to revive dialogue about atheism beyond belief. The Varieties of Atheism reveals the diverse nonreligious experiences obscured by the combative intellectualism of Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens. In fact, contributors contend that narrowly defining atheism as the belief that there is no god misunderstands religious and nonreligious persons altogether. The essays show that, just as religion exceeds doctrine, atheism also encompasses every dimension of human life: from imagination and feeling to community and ethics. Contributors offer new, expansive perspectives on atheism’s diverse history and possible futures. By recovering lines of affinity and tension between particular atheists and particular religious traditions, this book paves the way for fruitful conversation between religious and non-religious people in our secular age.
Nonbelievers, Apostates, and Atheists in the Muslim World
Nonbelievers, Apostates, and Atheists in the Muslim World offers a contemporary, cross-cultural look at nonbelief and nonreligion in Islam. Providing historical, conceptual, statistical, and ethnographic data on nonbelievers from Morocco to Egypt, Turkey, and Bangladesh, it explores the unique nature and challenges of nonreligion for Muslims. It includes 11 chapters by experts on nonbelief, nonreligion, and atheism in an array of Muslim-majority countries. The book features multiple disciplines and offers both ethnographic and statistical information on this important, growing, but neglected population. It explores the unique nature of nonreligion in Islam, illustrating that nonbelief is spe...
Theorizing Relations in Indigenous South America
Whether invented, discovered, implicit, or directly addressed, relations remain the main focus of most anthropological inquiries. These relations, once conceptualized in ethnographic fieldwork as self-evident connections between discrete social units, have been increasingly explored through local ontological theories. This collected volume explores how ethnographies of indigenous South America have helped to inspire this analytic shift, demonstrating the continued importance of ethnographic diversity. Most importantly, this volume asserts that comparative ethnographic research can help illustrate complex questions surrounding relations vis-à-vis the homogenizing effects of modern coloniality.
Going to Pentecost
Co-authored by three anthropologists with long–term expertise studying Pentecostalism in Vanuatu, Angola, and Papua New Guinea/the Trobriand Islands respectively, Going to Pentecost offers a comparative study of Pentecostalism in Africa and Melanesia, focusing on key issues as economy, urban sociality, and healing. More than an ordinary comparative book, it recognizes the changing nature of religion in the contemporary world – in particular the emergence of “non-territorial” religion (which is no longer specific to places or cultures) – and represents an experimental approach to the study of global religious movements in general and Pentecostalism in particular.
Utopian Encounters
This volume is an experiment: an enquiry into the possibilities and potentialities of a prospective anthropology of utopia. With different ethnographic contributions studying «empirical utopias» across the world (from ecotopias to religious havens, transnational policies, retirement homes and community agriculture), it looks beyond the commonsense understanding of utopia as a desire, an expectation, a form of imagination stemming from Western political thought. In the process, the volume explores the dynamic dialectic between human imagination and concrete action.
The Social Life of Spirits
Spirits can be haunters, informants, possessors, and transformers of the living, but more than anything anthropologists have understood them as representations of something else—symbols that articulate facets of human experience in much the same way works of art do. The Social Life of Spirits challenges this notion. By stripping symbolism from the way we think about the spirit world, the contributors of this book uncover a livelier, more diverse environment of entities—with their own histories, motivations, and social interactions—providing a new understanding of spirits not as symbols, but as agents. The contributors tour the spiritual globe—the globe of nonthings—in essays on topics ranging from the Holy Ghost in southern Africa to spirits of the “people of the streets” in Rio de Janeiro to dragons and magic in Britain. Avoiding a reliance on religion and belief systems to explain the significance of spirits, they reimagine spirits in a rich network of social trajectories, ultimately arguing for a new ontological ground upon which to examine the intangible world and its interactions with the tangible one.
Affective Trajectories
The contributors to Affective Trajectories examine the mutual and highly complex entwinements between religion and affect in urban Africa in the early twenty-first century. Drawing on ethnographic research throughout the continent and in African diasporic communities abroad, they trace the myriad ways religious ideas, practices, and materialities interact with affect to configure life in urban spaces. Whether examining the affective force of the built urban environment or how religious practices contribute to new forms of attachment, identification, and place-making, they illustrate the force of affect as it is shaped by temporality and spatiality in the religious lives of individuals and co...
Domestic Demons and the Intimate Uncanny
This book explores local cultural discourses and practices relating to manifestations and experiences of the demonic, the spectral and the uncanny, probing into their effects on people’s domestic and intimate spheres of life. The chapters examine the uncanny in a cross-cultural manner, involving empirically rich case studies from sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and Europe. They use an interdisciplinary and comparative approach to show how people are affected by their intimate interactions with spiritual beings. While several chapters focus on the tensions between public and private spheres that emerge in the context of spiritual encounters, others explore what kind of relationships betwe...
Romani Chronicles of COVID-19
A ground-breaking volume that gathers the testimonies of NGO workers, street vendors, activists, scholars, health professionals, and creative writers to chronicle the devastating impact of COVID-19 on Romani communities globally. The contributors reveal how the pandemic has exacerbated Romani disenfranchisement and document the resilience and creativity with which Romanies have responded to the crisis. Deploying innovative textual formats, and including poignant personal reflections, memoirs, scholarly analyses, and diary excerpts, the volume provides a roadmap for collaboration and dialogue at a time of global emergency. This is the most significant chronicle of Romani stories about the COVID crisis ever assembled. From the Introduction: The contributions include memoirs, opinion essays, transcriptions of conversations or interviews, ethnographic analyses, and a compelling short story by Romani writer Iveta Kokyová, as well as pieces that stride the boundaries between one or more of these genres, or that fit into none.
