This year AAR President Jin Y. Park asks us to take up the theme of Violence, Nonviolence, and the Margin, noting that “the use of violence is directly related to the hierarchical understanding of beings and valuation of their lives.” Yet such hierarchies—e.g., God/human, human/animal, spirit/nature, insider/outsider, sage/disciple—are endemic to many (all?) religions, raising the question of whether non-violence is fully possible in a religious context. Accordingly, we invite papers and sessions that help us think through any of the following questions: How do religious leaders and believers appeal to sacred texts/media to support (non)violence? How is their appeal to sacred texts/media “directly [or indirectly] related to the hierarchical understanding of beings and valuation of their lives”? Does (religious) hierarchy qua hierarchy devalue some lives in favor of others?
Exorcisms, whether portrayed in ancient texts or practiced in contemporary churches, imply violence. Rooted in an ontological hierarchy which both privileges human life over spirit (i.e., demon) life and also defines the demon as dangerous and worthy of expulsion, exorcisms utilize this hierarchy to justify shockingly violent action against any spirits who threaten the boundaries of this established order (e.g., by possessing a human). Inspired by this year’s AAR theme of “Violence, Nonviolence, and the Margin,” as well as by the ontological implications of critical posthumanism(s), this paper explores how exorcisms perpetuate violence upon a particular figure at the margins of ontology: the demon. Moreover, the paper analyzes the New-Testament roots of this violent response towards the marginal Other, as well as options offered by other traditions (e.g., Candomblé) for interacting with nonhuman spirits in nonviolent, and even cooperative, ways.
Muslim environmental ethics has been largely defined by competing versions of stewardship ethics (i.e. khilāfat al-arḍ), which is based on the Qur’an and is arguably the main ethical modality in the history of the classical Islam sciences at-large (i.e., theology, law, mysticism). While there are some who argue for moving away from this model (Tlili 2015, Gade 2019), the stewardship of the earth model remains the most cited and practically-used model for environmental ethics in global Muslim environmental discourse, activist organizations and environmental justice movements. The arguments against the khilāfa model are important to consider, especially in relation to issues such as anthropocentrism and speciesism. However, there is a need to not only critique the model for its perceived or actual limits, but to reclaim it from a radical ecoliberation theology perspective. In this paper, I argue for an ecoliberation theology approach to the question of Muslim environmental ethics and the stewardship of the earth model, particularly as it relates to human/nonhuman relations and hierarchies of being.
“Violence and Moral Hierarchies of Victims in Buddhist Thought”
This paper illustrates Buddhist hierarchies of moral status that inform ethical approaches to violence. It offers new light on an ancient legend deployed in the current dehumanization of the Rohingya. The arhats’ designation of enemy casualties as mere animals, pasu, in the Mahāvaṃsa’s legend of King Duṭṭhagāmaṇi, derives from Vedic sacrifice, evolves into a standard Dharmaśāstric term for slain warriors, and is the Pāśupata Śaivites’ nomenclature of self-identity. By reference to Vinaya, the theory of the “five Immediates,” Mahāyāna sūtras and tantric sādhanas, we can see that the Buddhist ethics of killing is informed by a sliding scale of inauspiciousness gauged by the moral status of the victim in which harm against saints is the greatest sin possible, but killing those who would harm the Buddha may be no more inauspicious than killing ants.