The phrase "Africana Religious Studies" invokes multiple things all at once. It raises the question of diaspora(s), calls our attention to the ways that blackness moves across the globe. But, in this case, “Africana” isn’t merely a modifier. It also articulates a different approach to what “religion” is or might be; it offers a different genealogy, and calls for different questions. Enter Tracey Hucks and Dianne Stewart. Ten years ago, these two powerful thinkers set out to shape and develop a field. They wrote an essay entitled “Africana Religious Studies”; in this essay, they laid the groundwork for a new research agenda in ARS. On this ten-year anniversary of “Africana Religious Studies,” this roundtable panel seeks to consider the new directions of and for scholarship that Hucks’s and Stewart’s groundbreaking essay opened and opens. The panelists will provide brief reflections on how Stewart and Hucks’s article has helped to shape and expand their research.
The list of things we can't seem to talk about together seems to grow. Religious difference and political polarization combine to make disagreements feel too hot to handle in public discussion: abortion, immigration, Christian nationalism, gender and sexuality, religion in the public square, and other subjects. The silences fray our social fabric on campuses, in religious communities, among neighbors, within families.
Dr. Yolanda Pierce, the winner of the 2023 Martin E. Marty Award for the Public Understanding of Religion, will engage a group of religious scholars and community leaders -- talking about how the conversations came to be so dangerous and what we can do about it.
How can scholars working and thriving in the full range of non-tenure track roles be incorporated and supported in the AAR/SBL? Developments over the past 10 years make this an increasingly pressing question, as graduates of religion and biblical studies programs are thriving across a wide range of careers. This session brings together AAR/SBL program chairs to discuss ways in which their work as program chairs and in their own departments has facilitated engagement with all scholars. This session will follow the lighting/roundtable format. Following an initial introduction where panelists share the interventions and status of “non-tenure/alt-ac” career pathways in their respective fields, participants will break into roundtables to map out changes that can be made in their own program units and institutions (or maybe fields).
Identities and spaces are far from stable; they are constructed and reconstructed over time. Also, certain perceptions of cities actually limit, if not deny, the ability of some communities to construct religious spaces. Through case studies from around the world, this panel examines how identities and spaces are constructed through religion in cities. From the labor of women to craft Buddhist spaces in Kyoto to the strategic planting of a national flag in an ethnic Muslim town in China, we consider how individuals navigate secularism and nationalism to offer refuge for their communities. We also question prevailing understandings of cities. While the history of Jain merchants problematizes views of Benares being a Hindu city, interrogating North American pan-Indianism as a settler colonial grammar of place creates possibilities to reconceptualize urban spaces. By exploring how identities and spaces are constructed, we can better understand the intersection of religion and cities.
Papers
The term “pan-Indianism” is recognizable, yet the concept itself is unstable and remains undertheorized. The term has been associated with different time periods, geographic locations, movements, organizations, and practices. Despite this ambiguity, pan-Indianism remains consistently associated with urban spaces. This association is no accident but rather the result of a particular area of scholarship known as Acculturation Studies. In its effort to gauge the levels of assimilation within Indigenous communities, this scholarship reinforced assimilationist policies at the time. I argue that the uncritical association of pan-Indianism with urban spaces leaves unexamined colonial ideologies which not only constructed the concept of pan-Indianism but continue to obscure the centrality of land within Indigenous religious traditions today. By critically examining pan-Indianism’s association with urbanization and assimilation, we refuse assimilationist rhetoric and Indigenous erasure and can center Indigenous religious traditions in the ongoing work to reconceptualize urban spaces and decolonize land.
Following the Chinese central government’s concern with secularization and securitization of religious spaces, local governments started to require planting Chinese flags in churches, mosques, and temples all across the country’s cities. The campaign is controversial, because the Chinese flag law requires the flag to be flown only in places of national significance and representation. In this paper, I explore how this controversy unfolded in a small Chinese ethnic Muslim town. The Party official demanded to erect the flag in front of the mosque so as to supposedly balance overwhelmingly religious atmosphere with symbols of patriotism and nationalism. By drawing attention to the visual and symbolic logics of his reasoning, I compare him to a traditional geomancer and identify his practice with an art of political fengshui. The instance is thus illustrative of the geomantic production of Chinese secularism.
The paper explores the myriad ways in which religion and urbanity interact as they develop and expand within Benares. While the colonial and nationalist writings allocated a homogenous Hindu identity to Benares, Jain sources depict it as a dynamic and cosmopolitan space. Using inscriptional records, a fourteenth-century narrative by the Swetambara Jain monk Jinprabha Suri and a sixteenth-century autobiography by the Srimal Jain merchant Banarasidas, an attempt is made to enquire into the Jain religious, educational, and commercial participation in early modern Benares. The merchants played a crucial role in developing a ‘sacred’ space through interconnected worlds of commerce, piety, and knowledge. This paper aims to locate such spaces of negotiations, conflicts, inclusions and exclusions, and appropriation by a minority community to study its role in shaping the city’s identity. Through this research, I argue that spaces cannot be static entities and are subject to constant mutation and change.
Much of the news surrounding parishioner temples or their larger governing bodies in Japan is dire: the decline and shuttering of temples, decreases in participation, and disinterest in religion. However, this presentation will look at “alternative” religious spaces in contemporary Japan and the women who craft and sustain them. In particular, it will look at the creation of a women’s group at the nuns’ training hall in Kyoto as an example of women’s active labor to craft religious spaces for themselves beyond and in addition to their parishioner temples. Their activities take place in cities, where women with similar interests can find each other and labor together for Buddhism. At the same time, these spaces are precarious and without constant, dedicated labor, they collapse. This paper will conclude with a consideration of the meaning of “alternative” in women’s places of belonging that contributes to this precarity.
This panel features four papers that explore some of the new and emerging scholarly trends in the field of Coptic Studies in the medieval and modern periods. The first paper examines the poetry of scribes, owners, and readers in Copto-Arabic manuscripts, shedding light on the social and cultural contexts in which these manuscripts were produced and consumed. The second paper investigates the ethical doctrines of three 14th century Coptic miscellaneous manuscripts, revealing the complex interplay between religious teachings, ethical principles, and social norms in Coptic society. The third paper reflects on the challenges of translating Coptic Orthodox praxis into ethical terms that resonate with contemporary sensibilities, and proposes a framework for an ethical transliteration of Coptic Orthodox practice. Finally, the fourth paper explores the politics of religious freedom in Egypt and the contested identity of the Coptic community in global publics, highlighting the tensions between religious tradition and political activism in contemporary Coptic discourse.
Papers
Nearly 90 years ago, Max Weisweiler published a collection of some 45 Arabic “scribal verses,” many with themes of human transience, the contrast between hand and script, and the Judgment to come: “Arabische Schreiberverse,” in Orientalistische Studien, ed. Rudi Paret (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1935), 101-120. Weisweiler had surveyed about 8,000 Islamic manuscripts, and found scribal verses in about a hundred, the earliest dating to 1210 CE.
The present communication calls attention to the existence of such scribal verses – as well as other pious verses added by scribes, owners, or readers – in Copto-Arabic manuscripts of the 13th-14th centuries CE. It will present examples and comment on the significance of this material for describing the piety, formation, and outlook of Copts who wrote and used books, especially members of the bureaucratic class during the so-called “golden age” of Copto-Arabic literature.
In the early 1200s, the Persian philosopher Afẓal al-dīn Kāshānī (d.1214) produced the earliest surviving attestation of the Rebuke of the Soul, an aphoristic exhortation to the soul to turn towards divine things. With remarkable haste, the text enjoyed a widespread dissemination in both Christian and Islamic manuscript traditions. This presentation assesses the Christian reception of the ethical treatise in three 14th and 15th century Coptic miscellaneous manuscripts. The paper will test the value of reading miscellaneous manuscripts as whole books, taking into consideration the complementarity between the collection of texts with the miscellanies. Studying the medieval Coptic manuscript reception of The Rebukesheds light on how an Islamic treatise was repurposed to serve the theological aims of the medieval Coptic Church. It also investigates how book practices, such as the compilation of miscellaneous manuscripts, exposes the scope and concerns of Coptic ethical literature in this period.
Western ethical systems have developed into complex tapestries, impacting the religious, cultural, political, and socioeconomic landscapes in which they flourish. While ethical language has had an impact in the West that cannot be understated, Eastern religions have seemed to speak an entirely different language regarding morality. As a case study, this paper will investigate the largest Christian denomination in the Middle East—the Coptic Orthodox Christians of Egypt—to understand why the language of ethics has been entirely absent among ancient and contemporary Copts alike. A shift away from deontological and consequentialist ethics and towards virtue ethics is one step in the direction towards developing a Coptic Christian ethic, but not without its mitigations. The acquisition of virtue for Coptic Christians is a result of a primary ethic of the pursuit of unity with God through grace-enabled spiritual struggle. This model will be dissected into three basic tiers based on Gregory of Nyssa’s theory of epektasis and will help make sense of the transformative practices that constitute a contemporary Coptic Christian ethos.
In recent decades global religious freedom movements, allied with diaspora Coptic activists, have leveled a challenge to the existing patterns of church-state relations in Egypt. When the global activist community becomes an important part of the negotiation of Coptic interests, what is the impact on the natural outgrowth of Coptic representation? Both Egyptians and foreign observers have questioned the authenticity of diaspora activists and their demands on the Egyptian state. Amidst the relationships among Egyptian Christians in the Middle East and in the diaspora, their international interlocutors, allies, and related movements, who truly speaks for the Copts? This paper will consider the way in which we understand who is a Copt amid the growth of global interest in religious freedom and the status of Christians in their Egyptian homeland.
Sunday, 3:00 PM - 4:30 PM | Grand Hyatt-Presidio A (3rd Floor)Session ID: A19-334
“Conversion” is a category with deep roots in Christian, specifically Protestant, thought and culture. How well or poorly does it apply to varieties of religious transformation in different religious and cultural contexts? What do we mean by “conversion” in diverse socio-historical contexts beyond U.S.-based Christianity? In this panel, we seek to decolonize the category of conversion by examining three distinct instances of religious change that disrupt our assumptions, revealing the implicit biases that shape scholarly and everyday understandings of conversion.
Papers
In this paper I analyze the ways an early social and political reformer, O. Kandaswamy Chetti (1867-1943), sought to challenge colonial constructions of religious categories in Madras (Chennai) at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. Chetti was a self-described Hindu follower of Christ who refused to take baptism and “convert” to Christianity, though he embraced positive – even closely Protestant – views regarding Christ and biblical scripture. As such Chetti engaged an early process of decolonizing the criteria of religion by creating what I call a “hybrid religiosity” to obtain social capital that he could use for reform initiatives. In contrast, his fellow Chettiar and friend Vengal Chakkarai (1880-1958) converted to Christianity and engaged in social and political reform on behalf of and from within the Christian convert community. The contrasting case studies provides insights into the ways some have sought to challenge and decolonize conversion narratives and identity.
This paper argues for a critical reconceptualization of ‘conversion’ from an intersectional and comparative perspective, based on a ethnographic study of Dutch women who converted to Judaism, Christianity or Islam. First, it critically reflects if, and how, the concept of conversion can be applied to all three contexts, highlighting the critique voiced by Jewish and Muslim women about the Christian (Protestant) connotations with the term. Second, it proposes a reconceptualization of conversion that includes the dimension of race, by analysing the different processes of racialization experienced by the participants. The paper builds on the innovative work by scholars who call attention to the intersections of race and religion, which is crucial for the decolonization of ‘conversion’ studies. A bottom-up comparative approach has the potential to critically examine not only the positions of (religious/racial) minorities, but also the mechanisms of (religious/racial) hegemony at work in Western Europe.
This panel examines the way in which the extraordinary experiences occasioned by psychedelics are being reframed by religious meanings, and similarly how mind-altering drugs are reshaping religious and medical institutions in the West, as well as Western spiritual enguagements with indigenous communities. The panel opens with a paper analyzing the shifts in indigenous practices following the commodification of ayahuasca in South America by Western “spiritual tourists.” Likewise, the second paper draws from primary research on the Mazatec “wise women,” María Sabina, to challenge the dichotomization of “religious”/“medical” use of psychedelics within the modern West. Attenton then turns to the problematics of psychedelic science, as the third paper interrogates the way psychedelic Buddhism in the US informed the "Psychedelic Renaissance," and the panel will conclude with interrogations of religious biases that structure the way scientists have quantified "mystical experience" as a means of measuring the efficacy of psychedelic therapy.
Papers
Recent scholarship on substance commodification in South America has focused almost exclusively on the appropriative aspects of spiritual tourism or on governmental and economic departments of thought. There is very little scholarship which addresses the profound religious impacts caused by this commodification. This paper explores the possibility that Western commodification of culturally significant substances in South America is actively altering indigenous ritual practices. I examine recent modes of ayahuasca commodification and hybrid ayahuasca-Christian practice in relation to traditional uses. I propose that spiritual tourism and Western influence is creating new forms of indigenous traditions, co-produced from Western values and beliefs. I conclude that Western influences on the ritually significant ayahuasca have sparked notable changes in indigenous practices and in some cases created hybrid systems of belief – outcomes which emphasize the changes happening to ayahuasca ritual practice.
This paper builds on notions of centripetality and centrifugality in the context of psychedelic ritual and selfhood found in Chris Partridge and Erik Davis respectively, applying these motional dynamics to the study of chemical and plant mysticism. As has been well attested, the privatisation of stress inherent in models of psycho-pharmacy is myopic in its neglect of the social. Contrasting this to indigenous and syncretic ethoses proves informative, critical, and potentially instructive. In an academic field where ‘culture’ has a fundamental impact on the ‘preparation, set, setting, dose, integration’ paradigm, Theology inevitably informs clinical practice. The flat curvature of the MEQ, quantifying qualities as it does, suffices only to correlate ‘intensity’ with ‘efficacy’ defined as so-many-months-long symptom cessation. But relapsing among participants indicates the need for a deeper psychedelic infrastructure which motivates and mitigates the integration of mystical revelations into the kind of world it is worth inhabiting.
Researchers have been splitting hairs over the “religious” versus “medical” use of psychedelics, either in preference to one paradigm over the other, or in proliferating paradigms for including “healing” in religious space and spiritual sense-making in medical space. This problematic has defined psychedelic use in the Global North since the first encounters with María Sabina, the Mazatec “wise woman” from Oaxaca, who brought psilocybin mushrooms to the attention of English speakers. By way of an archival investigation of the Gordon Wasson Ethnomycological Collection, I argue that translators and researchers have fundamentally misunderstood their encounter with psilocybin mushrooms, and with Sabina herself, from the very beginning, unnecessarily bifurcating the medical and religious import of psilocybin. Scientific researchers’ attempts to make legible the medical benefits of psilocybin ritualizes a foundational oversight of alternative and ongoing relational approaches to psilocybin-containing life, an oversight that may be fundamental to a medical dogmatism.
This paper will follow the tenuous relationship between Buddhism and psychedelics in their North American contexts before analyzing how psychedelics are being reconsidered by today’s Buddhist communities. It will first provide a survey of how Buddhists understood psychedelics in their initial cultural moment and unpack how practitioners navigated some of the ethical and practical problems of psychedelic Buddhism. It will then look at how scholarship on Buddhism and psychedelics began reemerging in the nineties alongside the first signs of the psychedelic renaissance and how this later literature reflected a more mature, nuanced, and critical approach to the incorporation of psychedelics in Buddhist practice. Finally, this paper will analyze two syncretic, innovative approaches to psychedelic Buddhism in Spring Washam’s “Lotus Vine Journeys” retreat centre and Mike Crowley’s recent work on the origins and practice of psychedelic Buddhism to identify contemporary trends and speculate about the future of this movement.
