Tonalities of Unbelief: From Identity to Tonality in the Study of Irreligion

In this paper, I argue that an ethnographic approach to questions of non/a-religion requires moving away from the dominant sociological orientation that treats irreligion as a stable cognitive state and self-ascribed identity category and toward an anthropological orientation capable of registering the shifting tonalities of unbelief. Inspired by Andreas Bandak’s (2012) concept of “tonalities of immediacy,” I argue that questions of unbelief are best approached by examining the processes through which unbelief is foregrounded and backgrounded as a salient category in everyday life. In other words, while many people may be non-religious as a simple matter of negation, how and when is non-religion activated and intensified as a set of beliefs, affects, and sensibilities? Here, I focus on the ways that sensory rituals of religion out of place—religious practices designed to appear improperly public in ostensibly secular contexts—produce irreligion, generating the very thing they seek to challenge.