Annual Meeting 2024 Program Book

Using skin as an analytical tool (Ahmed), this study explores how, when, and to what ends premodern Islamic jurists, physicians, and religious thinkers affirmed or troubled customary divisions that separated humans from animals. Close readings of the rhetoric, laws, and practices surrounding the uses of animal skins for water consumption, medicine, prayer mats, disguises, travel accommodations, or parchment reveal ongoing declarations of human uniqueness and dominance, but also the tactile intimacies and health dangers that subverted those claims. Case studies examine several junctures at which Sunni and Shi’ite scholars asserted likeness over difference, or difference over likeness, between human and animal skins to trace deeper considerations of human/animal relations. In deliberations of what skins could touch what parts of whose bodies, under what conditions, and in what ways, we find unresolved tensions over the volatile lines separating humans from animals, and debates about how dis/similitude might best be determined.

This proposal examines the links between witchcraft accusations, femicide, and cat vilification within Nigerian Yoruba Pentecostalism, exploring how religious beliefs and cultural traditions contribute to violence against women and animals. In Yoruba communities, cats are often associated with witchcraft, leading to their persecution and the targeted killing of women accused of witchcraft. Utilising symbolic interactionism, this study aims to understand the social dynamics and stigmatisation driving these acts, focusing on the interplay of religious interpretations and cultural attitudes. It highlights the urgent need for interventions to address these harmful practices, contributing to discussions on social justice, gender equality, and animal welfare. By investigating these issues, the research underscores the impact of esoteric beliefs on societal development and the importance of challenging these beliefs for more inclusive, equitable societies.

Abstract:

Contemporary political debates diverge on whether multispecies solidarity can occur *with* or only *on behalf of* more-than-human beings. The South Asian concept of nonviolence (*ahiṃsā*), notably developed in the Jain tradition, challenges this either/or approach. Jain cosmology, emphasizing universal sentience with karmic difference, offers a foundation for solidarity *with* other beings. Its account of reciprocal suffering and responses of carefulness and compassion provide a foundation for solidarity *on behalf of* other beings. Moreover, the Jain view provides a third alternative—solidarity *as* other beings—through religious practices of cosmic merger missing in political accounts that presume a subject-centric “I think” as their onto-epistemic ground. Jain accounts of rebirth memory and fasting unto death provide modes of *un*selfing and *un*knowing necessary to support costly multispecies solidarity. Importantly, the Jain view maintains a clear sense of anthropocentric privilege, paradoxically occurring and reaching full expression only through multispecies nonviolence.

As a form of religious violence, animal sacrifice is a contentious but deeply rooted element in religions generally and in Indian religions specifically. Despite the overarching principle of non-violence, as espoused in Hindu theology, there exists a complex discourse wherein theologians endeavor to justify sacrificial violence towards animals. This paper examines the apologetics of violence in the Manubhāṣya (ca. 9th century), the exegesis of the Mānavadharmaśāstra (ca. 200 BCE-200 CE), which is the most influential legal treatise in pre-modern India. Through textual analysis, this paper scrutinizes how the exegesis defends sacrificial violence by highlighting the spiritual benefits accrued by the sacrificial animals and plants, although animals and plants are deemed incapable of actively seeking liberation. By analyzing this rhetoric of benefits, this research investigates how legal scholars in medieval India understand the spirituality of animals, their potential for liberation, and the notion of their hypothetical consent in sacrificial rituals.

Through a net ethnography of the r/Hunting subreddit on the social media website Reddit, I uncover the intricate ways white settler hunters imagine themselves in intimate relationships to human and non-human animals because of the violence they enact on their kills.  For hunters on r/hunting, the moment of violence–euphemized as “harvesting”–is at once the point, and superfluous to it, serving as both the node of intimacy with the harvest animal as well as a necessary evil to be necessarily minimized: true hunting, they argue, is about limiting suffering–anything else is just sadistic killing.  Indeed, this moment of violence, I show, anchors ethical scaffolding as well as religious cosmologies.  Hunting, then–even white settler hunting–is the implicitly intimate moment where violence meets compassion, where life meets life, where humans are honest about the death they bring into the world.

Shinto shrines often form a component of the nation and its extension; consequently research surrounding Shinto is primarily undertaken within the borders of Japan. This paper challenges the traditional view of Shinto as geographically bound to the empire in the early 20th century through an examination of the American Daijingu (grand shrine), established in Los Angeles in 1909. Discussion of the American Daijingu considers religion in public, troubles the categories of religion and the secular, and, in a larger frame, invites challenges to the transnational historiography of religion in the United States and Japan. How and why the erasure of the American shrine after World War II happened in historical accounts engages Eiichiro Azuma’s transnational history of Japanese Americans and Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s theory of power and archival silence. This paper suggests that the absence of shrines in the material world delimits Shinto scholarship’s understanding of the tradition in transnational spaces.

Following historical analyses comparing the relation between the Hmong messianic figure and the Hmong political state broker and their positionality to the state, this paper considers the dialectic of these two figures as a single site of examination for interpreting Hmong diasporic and Hmong American history. This paper contends that the political state broker’s assassination of the messianic figure reveals their competing leadership along the porousness of political and religious Hmong American identity. Subsequently, the paradigm of the political state broker continues to discipline the transnational political and religious imaginations of contemporary Hmong Americans. How this takes form domestically across various religious Hmong American communities will be the site of future research.     

Indian American Christianity is at a crossroads in the current socio-political order. One in five Indian Americans identifies as a Christian, and most embrace American evangelicalism. During the 2021 Capitol Hill riot, an Indian American waved the tricolor flag in support of Donald Trump. Although being a catholic, he identified himself as an evangelical in his faith and beliefs. Indian American Christianity had formed a tryst with white American evangelicalism post-1960 immigration reforms. In 1974, K.P Yohannan, one of the pioneers in Indian American Christianity, was appointed as the international POC pastor of the First Baptist Church in Dallas under the invitation of W. A Criswell, popular for his segregationist and divisive policies.  In this context, the paper examines racist and casteist imagination idealized through capitalism, racism, and xenophobia. This paper also interrogates ratifications of white working-class economic anxieties, misogyny, anti-black prejudice, fear of Islamic terrorism, and xenophobia in Indian American communities.

This paper explores the discursive consciousness of Korean women who became picture brides in early twentieth century America, an area which has often been overlooked in scholarship of religion and race in a transpacific migratory context. Engaging with Korean women’s writings that began to appear in late nineteenth-century print media in Korea and Korean picture brides’ oral interviews, the paper suggests that Korean women reshaped the concept of ideal womanhood that was promoted to them by American women missionaries. Through reinterpreting a theological understanding of gender equality, Korean women utilized the picture marriage system to achieve goals for education and political empowerment in America. Although the picture marriage system was considered backward in American society, Korean women’s use of this system challenges the Western ownership of the New Woman label.

This presentation introduces the recently published critical edition (Brill, 2020) and monograph (Cambridge University Press, 2024) on the legacy of the sixteenth-century female Sufi master from Bukhara, celebrated as Aghā-yi Buzurg, along with the hagiography Maẓhar al-ʿajāʾib dedicated to her by her male disciple Ḥāfiẓ Baṣīr.

It is widely held by scholars of early Sufism that Sufism developed out of ascetic and renunciant traditions (*zuhd*). In this view, Sufi ideas about the love of God and about union with the divine Beloved enriched, or in some cases, replaced earlier ideals of renouncing the world, fear of God, and fear of divine punishment. This paper reconsiders our understanding of a transition from ideals of fear to ideals of love by examining the seventh-century ascetic of Basra, ʿĀmir b. ʿAbd Qays. ʿĀmir was remembered for his lifelong celibacy, which he defended as an act of “betrothal” to God. I argue that ʿĀmir’s biographers saw him as an early exemplar of love mysticism, saw no conflict between his fear of God and his engagement to God, and understood him as articulating the value of celibacy for Muslims as a form of spiritual marriage.

Recent studies on Islamic mysticism in the early modern period have explored the influence of Muḥammad ibn ‘Arabī (1165-1240) on political theory and social movements in Asia. However, to what extent did Ibn ‘Arabī see himself as contributing to Islamic political theory. This paper explores the ways in which Ibn ‘Arabī bridges the classical Ṣūfism of the Islamic East with a native, Andalusī-Maghribī mystical tradition (I‘tibār). I argue that the political dimensions of texts like The Meccan Revelations and the Bezels of Wisdom represent draw heavily on caliphal and mahdist ideologies from the Islamic West (Fāṭimids, Umayyad Córdoba, Almohads) that are absent from classical Ṣūfism. I further argue that Ibn ‘Arabī’s “Seal of the Saints” (khātim al-awliyā’) recasts the mahdī as a transhistorical, mystical influence on awliyā’ across time and functions as new constitutional principle for a caliphate that incorporates the mahdī’s  power to create post-prophetic sunna.

This paper is about how borrowings from Shiʿism shaped ideas of mystical and political authority among the Niʿmatullāhiyya, a major Sufi order of medieval and modern Iran.  Roughly a century before becoming Iran’s official religion and political instrument of the Safavid Empire, Twelver Shiʿism provided inspiration for the Niʿmatullāhiyya’s founder Shāh Niʿmatullāh Walī and his successors in their formulation of a decentralized view of collective identity that gave nominal recognition to worldly sultanates, while teaching complete loyalty to a Sufi shaykh and ascribing ultimate authority only to the Hidden Imam.  I present evidence for these Sufi Shiʿite teachings for the first time in scholarship, considering their significance as a quietist alternative to the centralizing imperial messianism of the Sunni Timurids.  I argue that Niʿmatullāhī teachings reflected the order’s social and political reality as a loosely incorporated, transregional network with economical and political autonomy on the margins of imperial power.

 This paper proposes an elaborate process of Native collecting based on information gathered from colonial Nahuatl-language sources and available material culture from archeological sites, in particular Teotihuacan, Tollan, and Tenochtitlan (1325-1521). The paper connects oztomecameh “disguised traders,” members of the telpochcalli “house of youth,” and calpixque “caretakers of big house.” Together they ensured that precious goods—like those the ancient left behind—arrived safely back to their city-states, where they were subsequently stored, classified, and directed to their appropriate destinations in the Nahua market economy.

This paper will focus on the methods of categorization that Cyrus Adler (1863-1940), the Smithsonian’s first curator of religion, and others at the Smithsonian used to sort religious objects from different communities and religious groups. Adler was charged with conserving objects that had some sort of religious significance. He specifically focused on monotheistic traditions, while objects relating to Indigenous traditions of the Americas, Africa, Australia, and elsewhere were not under his purview. These objects were held separately, in anthropological collections. I will be exploring the rationale for this method of classification, and the implications of museum categorization for understandings of religious hierarchies. During the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, museums like the Smithsonian often distinguished between Indigenous and “world” religions based on a racialized system of cultural evolution. This led to uneven treatment of Indigenous and non-Native religious objects.

In this paper I think from and with a contested collection of thousands of Maya offerings from the sacred site of México which have been housed at Harvard’s Peabody Museum for over a century. This assemblage of materials can be understood as populated by powerful entities in relational networks both past and present. For Mesoamerican peoples these material bodies, like human and animal bodies, are imbued with life forces—they are active and essential participants in cycles of life and death, fertility, regeneration, and beyond. Yet, in coming to the museum they are treated as inanimate objects. Here, I attend to materials which “fall through the cracks” of conventional repatriation and thus will remain, for the foreseeable future, in museum storage. What are the ethical obligations of preservation or of decay to these Indigenous belongings? This paper interrogates traditional assumptions and explores alternatives for life and death in the anthropology museum.

Indigenous Pacific Island youth living in the diaspora, particularly in Aotearoa New Zealand, increasingly express difficulty in grappling with the role Christianity has played in colonization and how this impacts their self-identity and wellbeing. This paper will explore perspectives of indigenous storytelling shared on popular social media accounts and streaming platforms which celebrate pre-Christian indigenous Pacific spiritualities and practices, as well as question and criticise forms of Christianity that continue to colonize Pacific communities. Cultural and spiritual identity and a sense of belonging to place are key to the mental resiliency of Pacific youth. Further, Pacific Island youth do not necessarily have access to decolonized Christian theologies in their church communities, or know that this type of theology exists. I reflect on how authentic storytelling is key for challenging media stereotypes for indigenous Pacific youth, especially on the topic of how pre-Christian spiritualities sit alongside Christian theology in everyday life.