Annual Meeting 2024 Program Book

This paper explores the cosmological and moral aspects of the "systems" model used to model life in US Nuclear programs during the mid-20th century. Through the lens of the friendship between medical researcher and UN Atomic Energy Agency administrator Ralph Kniseley and artist and critic Charles Counts, it argues that the "systems" models developed in life sciences division of the Oak Ridge National Laboratories were deployed as a means of atonement for the scientists who developed the bomb, through which they sought to integrate "ethics" and "spirit" into scientific practice. Counts and Kniseley were both critics of and participants in this process. This paper reflects on the power of "systems" to capture the concept of "ethics," suggesting that contemporary theorists who draw from "ecosystems" and "networks" as a form of moral solution may be repeating the mistakes first made by nuclear scientists in those concepts' early past.

Recent advances in end-of-life technologies have destabilized religious notions of personhood, identity, and ethics; for example, in the reliance on specific device and tests to mediate decisions about when to end life support and declare death. As notions of personhood and identity in the medical setting are made to conform to the limits of the technology it deploys, some in the West have sought guidance in the techniques and views related to the dying process cultivated in other cultures and religions, particularly Tibetan Buddhism. This paper will explore this seeking behavior in connection with the author’s psychophysiological and ethnographic fieldwork (2016-2020) in the Tibetan Buddhist monastic community in India. The details and history of this fieldwork—a scientific, religious, and cultural collaboration to determine the effects of meditative practice on the post-mortem body—are also explored in relation to narrative and semiotic resonances in the intersecting spaces of exile, research setting, and death.

In 1971, Barney Oliver and John Billingham led a NASA-funded research study aimed at designing an instrument for conducting the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). The proposed instrument, a colossal array of 2,500 radio telescopes, was called Project Cyclops. The instrument was never built, but not for lack of trying. Oliver and Billingham worked to further an argument, common among SETI researchers, that a successful detection would mean more than we are not alone in the universe--it would prove that our nuclear age, the period at which our technology could occasion our annihilation, was survivable. Humanity could yet be redeemed by the mere presence of the far-off alien. All this talk of redemption and apocalypse certainly smacks of religion, and this talk will attempt to unpack the leveraging of this rhetoric and make a case for why something like Project Cyclops belongs in the domain of religious studies.

Over the course of his life, Bruno Latour has sought to unravel the taken-for-granted character of sharp distinctions between nature and culture, religion, politics and science. After recapping the trajectory of Latour's "political epistemology", I argue that Latour's account of the laboratory as a locus for the rearticulation of power enables the development of new categories to analyze the distinctive ways that scientific institutions may enact violence. The violence of "Non-reciprocity" and "Non-representative authority" may make themselves present even in scientific encounters which attempt to be more sensitive to the concerns of indigenous populations or racial minorities, illustrated by the encounter of D. Carleton Gajusek with the Fore people and the (failed) attempts to enlist African-Americans in Tuskegee for a purportedly antiracist genomics program. Focusing attention on how overlapping, but non-identical communities navigate politico-epistemological authority and the circulation of knowledge opens a new angle to approach the religion-and-science conversation.

Though narratives from the Purāṇas and epics are far more prevalent in Hindu imaginings, the Upaniṣads also provide a series of enduring stories. This paper focuses on modern refigurations of the didactic dialogue between Naciketas and Yama in the Kaṭha Upaniṣad. The narrative itself is relatively straightforward: a young child made to wait at Death’s doorstep is granted three wishes, one of which is to learn about death itself. However, its complex teachings, including the famous chariot analogy, have long invited reflection and interpretation. Exploring three different formations—in Advaita Vedānta storytelling, in a 1979 issue of the illustrated series Amar Chitra Katha, and in a 45-minute water and light show in Gandhinagar, Gujarat—I attend to how the chosen form of the retelling factors into differential emphases aimed at diverse target audiences.

The eleventh-century Kathāsaritsāgara of Somadeva is a magisterial narrative, so large as nearly to constitute an encyclopedia of Indian story literature, this even as it is likely to convey only a fraction of the original text of which it is a retelling, Guṇāḍhya’s perhaps sixth-century, Paiśācī-language narrative, the Bṛhatkathā.  In this presentation, I identify unique features of what is in fact only one of many retellings of Guṇāḍhya’s now-lost work.  I argue it presents a double narrative, transforming a text originally steeped in Buddhism and mercantile life into a Brahmanical work tied to a popularized understanding of Śaiva tantrism.  Ultimately, the narrative claims that kings need Brahmins to succeed in the world and beyond, and that Brahmins need tantra—and the powers that can be furnished at the edges of polite society in the dangerous charnel grounds—if they are fruitfully to guide kings to the same.

This paper explores a retelling of the origins of the goddess temple in Tiruchanur (also known as Alamelumangapuram) a couple of kilometers outside of the bustling pilgrimage town of Tirupati. Though it is an oft overlooked story, this paper will explore 18th-century poet Tarigonda Veṅgamāmba’s retelling of this story found in her Veṅkaṭācala Māhātmyamu. This version of the story spends time not only describing the ascetic practices of the goddess Lakṣmī, but also exploring the domestic tensions that developed as a result of her separation from Viṣṇu. Through analysis of a prolonged discussion about the roles of wives and women, I argue, Vengamamba considers the possibility of a woman’s ability to simultaneously commit to asceticism and marriage. Further, because this conversation occurs between Lakṣmī and Kapila (a renounced sage, and an incarnation of Viṣṇu), I read their conversation as a kind of meta-textual commentary on the narrative.

The narrative popularly known as the Vetala Tales has unknown origins and prolific variations, including four Sanskrit recensions and several regional linguistic variations. In more recent times, the Vetala Tales have taken the form of children’s stories in Amar Chitra Katha comics and Chandamama magazines, two televised serials, at least three films (with a fourth in the making), and innumerable adaptations in print, including a Vikram and Vetala management training manual. In this paper, I ask two questions pertaining to this narrative: What makes this narrative possess such lasting influence and popularity? Secondly, why is a didactic narrative about ethics presented with the stylings of horror? I will explore two modern adaptations of the Vetala Tales to answer these questions – the long-running serialized children’s stories in the Chandamama magazines (specifically English and Tamil), and the Ramanand Sagar television serial Vikram aur Betaal (1985) telecast on Doordarshan.

In the 2023 Disney short film Once Upon a Studio, Mickey Mouse stops beneath a photo of Walt Disney, thanks his creator, and invites viewers to join in this act of devotion. Meanwhile, a quiet piano phrase from the 1964 Disney song “Feed the Birds” plays in the background. According to Disney legend, this was Walt’s favorite song, and he would ask the song’s composers to play it for him when he was feeling anxious or melancholy. In this paper, I argue that this song and story are central to the creation and maintenance of Walt Disney as a religious figure worthy of devotion. As the “Feed the Birds” story is retold and reenacted in films, fan events, biographies, and other media, it constructs Walt as someone who both needed and received spiritual help. In other words, it sanctifies him—not as a perfect man, but as a worthy one.

Children as a rhetorical device are central to the horror movie genre. Their presence often takes the shape of the one who is haunted (or is an agent of haunting) in a way that relates to questions of meaning making or divination. Using Jacques Derrida’s notion that the combination of psychoanalysis and cinema is, in essence, the science of ghosts, I will examine how the oppression of young people is a cyclical pattern that has become a part of the creative, cultural imagination. The minimizing effect of individuals and institutions that casts a child as the person of tomorrow comes into conflict against a subversive reality in the horror genre which might indicate another way forward.

"Policing Witch City" reevaluates contemporary consumer interests in Salem, Massachusetts as the site of The Witch Trials. Through an analysis of both the appearance of and collector market for Salem's police regalia, this study investigates the intersection of popular culture, tourism, and law enforcement practices in the downtown historic district. This paper, therefore, seeks to document the complex relationship between perceived notions of religious tolerance, Halloween, and policing elsewhere in the U.S. Drawing from performance studies and cultural history methodologies, this paper moves beyond traditional historical records. Instead, it examines Salem's police regalia alongside participant-observation studies, interviews, and digital research to illuminate why Salem's history has continued to thrive in America's popular imagination. 

A common scholarly narrative in the history of Christianity proposes that early Christians did not laugh. While this narrative compile compelling evidence from their primary sources, they often treat the equally compelling evidence of Christian laughter as exceptional. I suggest that this narrative simplifies the diversity found between sources and within individual ones to represent a proto-orthodox antigelasticism defined in opposition to either Jewish or Gnostic groups who, unlike the early orthodox Christians, laugh. I linger on the rhetorical use of laughter by John Chrysostom to differentiate between Antiochene Christians and Jews, and by Irenaeus to differentiate between his own orthodoxy and Gnostic heresy. I suggest that scholars should take these claims as rhetorical strategies of social formation rather than statements of pre-existing orthodoxy. I call for a remapping of early Christian laughter in all its diversity, showing connections across categories of Christian/Jewish/Pagan and diversity within each community.

Is addiction voluntary self-enslavement or an inherited disease of the will? Lawmakers and clinicians have debated this question for hundreds of years; however, despite centuries of investigation, one important aspect of the concept of addiction remains entirely unexamined—its deep theological history. Christian theologians writing in Latin from the second to the seventeenth century used the Roman legal term addictio—originally denoting debt-bondage—as a metaphor to describe the sinful human condition. In this talk, I uncover the genesis and development of the Christian addiction metaphor in the writings of Roman Church Fathers Tertullian, Ambrose, and Augustine. I analyze their theologies of addiction to show how the language and logic of Roman pecuniary jurisprudence structures their thinking about sin, salvation, and the free will. I contend that the disease-delinquency ambivalence constitutive of today's understanding of addiction originated in their paradoxical definition of sin as both generational enslavement and willful servitude. 

This paper addresses the roles of human and non-human animals in the religious narratives of early medieval Ireland. Texts are drawn from the *Acta Sanctorum Hiberniae* with an emphasis on those found in the *Codex Salmanticensis*.  Selected narratives betray a construction of both human and non-human animals as together occupying the community of the Created—the Incarnated--- with the Divine functioning as the powerful Other. The problematic categorizations of “domestic”, “wild”, and “fabulous” animals will also be explored leading to a discussion on the role of traditionally “wild” animals in conjunction with sacred texts and non-human animals as participants in the cosmological transformations of early medieval Ireland. The paper concludes with a comparison of the manner in which human and non-human animals are conceived in the narratives of St. Francis versus the early Irish saints, particularly in the concept of their relationship and access to the Divine Other.   

This study follows an ecumenical and interfaith Trans Day of Remembrance/Resilience (TDOR/R) service, which took place in Atlanta, GA. Based on participant observation, thick description, and one-on-one interviews with service leaders, I explore how the TDOR/R service reveals the complex spiritual lives and religious gatherings of local LGBTQ+ communities in response to violence and trauma. Throughout the service, the community engages in a variety of spiritual practices: care, flocking, lament, veneration, and repair (among others). Combining ethnographic description with pastoral-psychological analysis, I consider the psychospiritual functions and impact of these spiritual practices and the TDOR/R service more broadly on the mind-body-spirits of people and communities. Ultimately, I offer a descriptive account of queer and trans resilience as reclaimed ancestry and spirituality.

Trans youth are growing up in an empire of immi/a/nent death – a constant spatial and temporal closeness to death that has devastating psychological effects on the developing brain. The necropolitics of Transgender Day of Remembrance (TDOR) in particular demonstrates how the rhetoric of memorialization functions to foreclose the future life chances even of those still-living, causing them to exist in an ambiguous, haunted positionality where the possibility of trans flourishing appears to be foreclosed. The first part of this paper considers the data and accounting of trans death that is central to TDOR observances, and particularly the abstraction of anti-trans violence from race and class. The second half of the paper consists of ethnographic accounts from participants at an interfaith summer camp for trans youth to illuminate the psychological effects that TDOR rhetoric has on the livability of young trans people and considers the possibilities for remembering otherwise.

The relationship of transness to psych regimes is fraught. Caught between a long and still living history of attempts to eradicate transness, on the one hand, and, on the other, the practical need for validation from the gatekeepers of medical treatment, trans people must navigate a narrow middle way of proving themselves sufficiently gender-distressed to merit treatment without being deemed too mentally unwell for such treatment. This institutional demand for trans sanity is incompatible with the realities of trans life under cisheteropatriarchy, which both produces and punishes trans Madness. Trans Day of Remembrance has the potential to be a ritual space of resistance to the violence of the gender regime and a site for trans life to be honored in the fullness of its trans Madness and prophetic maladjustment.

Nigeria has endured the explosion of such religious extremism and violence, eliciting mass civil unrest particularly in the last two decades. Women are often especially at the risk of victimization, enduring diverse forms of human rights violations though their participation and instrumentalization in orchestrating such acts of violence complexifies the relationship between gender and religiously motivated violence in Nigeria. In addition, the exploration of their efforts to form part of the nexus of public discourse critiquing religious extremism and violence in the public sphere within scholarly discourse leaves room for more to be said especially with respect to Nigerian and African women. Through the juxtaposition of two of such women-led efforts, this paper, therefore, seeks to engage contemporary scholarship on the intersection of religion, violence, and gender by examining the resources Nigerian and African women utilize in their mobilizing quest towards demanding accountability and justice for the oppressed. This paper will argue that Nigerian and African women’s pursuit for social justice are often constructed in spaces of duality where their agency is firmly asserted and remains uncontested and the margin between violence and non-violence at blurred.

Myanmar women are aware of the inseparable connection between their struggle for gender justice and political liberty, and they express their concerns in the “Sarong Revolution.” By waving a sarong as a flag, Myanmar women fight against taboo, sexism, and an unjust political system. I posit that a new interpretation of the male-biased gender norm, phon, helps women realize their true liberated womanhood and leads them to resist gender-based violence, and regime. First, I briefly introduce the political background of Myanmar, and then, the “Sarong Revolution” will be presented. Lastly, I present a new interpretation of phon and its application in protest. To support my argument, I use Martin Luther King Jr’s view on protest, Kwok Pui-Lan’s view on demystifying religious myths, Aye Nwe’s view on reinterpreting gender-biased cultural norms, and monk Nandamala Bhivamsa’s view on a new understanding of phon. It is a timely, intersectional, and inspirational proposal.  

African social ordering is centered around the philosophy of Ubuntu. The maxim I am because we are, propagates a communalism organization of societies. Ubuntu postulates a relational form of personhood, which means you are because of others, not only in being but also in moral action. The communal ordering is contrasted with subjective autonomy that governs most of the developed world. As such, in Africa, autonomy is founded primarily on relationships. A central aspect of relational autonomy is protecting people from violence and abusive relationships. However, though venerated in Africa, relational autonomy has the potential to propagate violent behavioral tenets among relations. This is because social structures and relationships abound them and can be oppressive and destructive to autonomy. This proposal calls for interrogating relational autonomy as an enabler of violence, nonviolence, and peace among all earth communities.

This paper approaches the intersection of gender and violence in Javanese Islam by using as a heuristic the historical narrative of a violent murder in early modern Java where a woman, despite her central role, is erased from the story. It examines attempts in contemporary Javanese theater to recover the woman in the story as a strategy of revisionist mythmaking and an avenue for women’s agency and resistance. Specifically, it focuses on a play produced by self-identified Muslim women with a feminist project in which a woman’s courageous intervention prevents the murder, presenting a non-violent historical vision as a normative model of Islamic ethics. Because the play conceptualizes this re-vision as a recovery of a truth that became distorted by colonial scholarship, the feminist and decolonial project are intimately linked in the play’s recovery of early Javanese Islam as a normative vision of Islamic orthodoxy for today.

This paper examines conceptions of sacred geography invoked by two Muslim groups in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century, the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, and the Moorish Science Temple of America (MSTA). Geographic touchstones for both groups included Chicago, the American South, India, Asia, and Africa. This seemingly eclectic mix of locations, ranging from cities to regions to continents, were consecrated and stitched together through repeated invocations in community newspapers and periodicals. The idea of a Muslim world provided the Ahmadiyya and MSTA with a vision in which their small burgeoning groups in the United States could be understood as integral components of much larger global forces. Categorization is a means of establishing mastery of knowledge, and in mapping out these geographic assemblages, the Ahmadiyya and MSTA groups presented different visions of racialized understandings of Muslim identity that would eliminate racial inequality.

Over the last fifty years, Islamic fundamentalism, marked by scripturalism and an emphasis on purification of Islamic customs, has emerged in sub-Saharan Africa. Motivated by this seismic transformation, this chapter examines how and why Islamic fundamentalism emerged in African countries. I trace the role of educational exchange with Islamic institutions in Arab countries in serving as a key channel for the diffusion of conservative ideas from the Arab world into African countries. I particularly focus on al-Azhar University in Egypt and the Islamic University of Medina in Saudi Arabia as two prominent educational institutions where reformist ideas were dominant during the mid- and late-twentieth century. Through case studies from East and West Africa, I show that beneficiaries of educational exchange played a key role in founding reformist Islamic organizations that facilitate the diffusion of conservative ideas in African countries.

From 1928-1930, three Muslim movements emerged that would garner mass followings: the Muslim Brothers in Egypt; the Tijani Fayḍah in Senegal; and the Nation of Islam in the U.S. Each led large-scale social mobilization efforts and attempted participation in local politics. All three challenged the societies in which they functioned, as well as the twin pillars of the emerging postwar world order: secularization and political liberalism. These movements are often differentiated from one another through their respective classifications as Islamist and Arab, Sufi and African, and Black Nationalist and American. However, these designations can obscure more than they reveal. In a mid-century setting when alliances among global powers were being torn apart and reassembled toward variant grand visions of how the world ought to be arranged, I argue that these groups’ attempts to fashion assemblies and visions of their own can help us broaden our understandings of these movements and the mid-20th century. 

The Darul Islam Movement (1962 to 1983) was arguably the most successful Islamic revivalist movement in U.S. At its height, it consisted of a network of about 40 affiliated mosques throughout the country, as well as its own magazine, printing press, businesses, and schools. Formed during the 1960s, the Dar shared many concerns in common with contemporary groups like the Nation of Islam and the Black Panther Party. Yet the Dar also deeply engaged the ideas of Islamic reformists like Abul A'la al-Maududi, Hassan Al-Banna, and Sayyid Qutb. This paper considers the diverse ideological influences that characterized the Dar and the impact of the movement on subsequent Muslim communities in the US. I argue that the Dar crafted a version of Islamic Internationalism that appropriated global Islamist discourses, while simultaneously contending with the ideals of Black self-determination, Black nationalism, and working-class consciousness that animated radical organizing in the urban U.S.

Art has long been utilized by people of color to express and even bring healing to the wounds inflicted by racism. But what of art as a tool of reconciliation? What role might aesthetic experiences, including the act of creating, play in challenging the dominant racial imaginary that shapes how we see the world? And how might these encounters be understood pneumatologically? Art can rewire our brains, reshaping the weight or meaning given to people, places, and things. It can prime pathways for new meaning making. Drawing upon research in neuroaesthetics, this paper considers more than the potential of art to address the negative effects of racial trauma, but, pushing beyond current literature, it entertains the possibility of art’s intervention into how prejudicial ways of thinking shape the brain. Delightfully improvisational and often messy, meaningful aesthetic experiences, like the Spirit, have a way of moving us beyond ourselves, beyond our expectations and comfortable boundaries, and toward significant encounter that can then give rise to something new – to a new narrative, to a new conception of family, to a new way of seeing that moves us beyond our given racial imaginary.

Contemporary conversations around theopoetics tend to define it as a critical method for theologizing and engaging God-talk that is attentive to the limitations of language. Given the mysterious and creative nature of the divine, creative arts generally, and poetry specifically, provide an imaginative framework to engage the divine. I argue that the field of theopoetics must be more attentive to the dynamic of praxis through the practice of art and poetry creation amidst analysis and theological God talk, lest theopoetics confine artistic expression and imaginative creation to professionalism and expertise. This presentation challenges current understandings of theopoetics by centering praxis, names theologians and theorists who craft poetry amidst their theoretical work, and invites participants to a time of imaginative reflection and artistic creation.

How might God meet you

here? In your own creative

wisdom and response?

On the evening of the 28th of September of 2023, Mixteyot Vázquez inagurated his first solo exhibition with the painting series Taoltsin to Nemilis. Mixteyot Vázquez is a Maseual artist from San Miguel Tzinacapan, an indigenous community in central Mexico. His exhibition featured six oleo paintings, five of them depicting scenes from the liturgical dance Danza de los Tejoneros. The last painting is a portrait of the sculpture of Tzinacapan’s patron saint, St. Michael Archangel.

In this paper, I examine Taoltsin to nemilis as an actor that allows us to understand how Mesoamerican Religious traditions and Catholicism are intertwined in a contemporary indigenous community. Furthermore, I argue that the paintings encapsulate divine presences from the two religious’ worldviews. Imbued by these divine presences, the paintings were welcomed in the main religious feast of Tzinacapan, as an offering to maintain the balance of the universe and guarantee human and non-human life.  

Black American Sign Language (BASL) is an embodied language expressing language, emotion, culture, and spirituality. It is often seen as a poetic expression and invoking a dancer's narration. Black Church Liturgy, often expressed in song, word, and dance, disproportionately recognizes BASL as an equal function. This paper invites the Black Deaf Community, Black interpreters, faith leaders, and interested Hearing community members to embrace Black ASL as a worship praxis.

This paper reflects on an art class at a women's maximum-security prison. Here, art stands as a defiant counterpoint to the system's dehumanization. Prisons reduce individuals to numbers and enforce singular narratives. Philosopher Merleau-Ponty argues that our bodies are central to how we experience the world, but prisons, a site of bodily confinement, disrupt this. Art becomes a "second layer of flesh," offering two key insights: 1) Reclaiming Subjectivity: incarcerated artists express their inner selves through art, defying the prison's narrative. Paintings become a window into their complexities and experiences. 2) Social Connection: The act of creation fosters connection. It's not just about the physical act of creating, but the web of experiences and relationships woven into the art. This reminded the incarcerated artists that they were part of a larger social fabric, not isolated units. While art doesn't offer simple solutions, it challenges the prison's one-dimensional view. Art pushes us to re-imagine systems that value the whole person.

This talk is about what happens when those who are involved in Newar religion co-produce an environment that is neither ordered nor disordered, yet as if both calling for order and accepting what may seem like the absence of order, its inhabitants being both troubled by it and yet willing to go with the flow. Sharing moments in which it remains undecided when and how the mess happed and who caused it, only knowing that both my research partner and I are involved in it, I will talk about the relation between conversation and note-taking (interview), the suspension of understanding in the heterolingual (translation), and the interruption of the textual by the material (manuscripts). I want to talk about how in the period of engagement something else emerges that is neither order nor its other, but which may be better understood as a situation that is suspended and still open.

The chariot procession of Karunamaya – the god of compassion is one of the major festivals in the city of Patan and Bungamati which is five kilometers from Patan. Every year the chariot goes through the ancient city of Patan and every twelve years from Bungamati to Patan with the belief of good rain for a good harvest. Communities carry out the procession with fanfare, even people from other cities and villages participate during the procession. In 2020, during the time of COVID-19, the chariot was stranded on the street for several months without any certainty of procession. So one ordinary day local people started pulling chariots which led to conflict. This paper focusing on that event will try to understand the reasons and factors behind the conflict as well as underlying issues and the solutions brought by the mess.

To research Christianity in Nepal is to fall in-between, in-between the scope of research on Nepal and the scope of research on Christianity, where concepts and classifications do not seem prepared to grasp what is happening in the everyday lives of my interlocutors. However, the messiness goes far beyond my own struggles to find the proper theoretical and methodological tools to reach the field. Christianity is still quite new for most Nepalis. For my interlocutors, ordinary life is permeated by the extraordinary as they first encounter Christian teachings and technologies for creating their lives anew. This means that consensus around practices, abstinences, or even the numbers of faithful are difficult to find. This presentation is about the messiness of researching a field that is new to me, that is new for its two parent disciplines, and most of all that is being newly formed by the people who take part in its projects. 

A sacrificial arena, initially tidy with carefully arranged paraphernalia in straight lines, is now a bloody mess. The body of a goat to one side, blood splattered everywhere, and rigor mortis slowly setting in to the quivering sheep’s body. Parallelly, ask any ethnographer to tell you stories from their research period and you will elicit a stream of tales regarding the mess of it all. However, in academia, the tendency to write out the messy dynamics of these processes remains. In thinking intersubjectively about ethnographic data related to the performance of the sacrificial ritual to the Buddhist goddess Hāratī called chāhāyekegu, this paper argues that mess is an everyday reality not something out of the ordinary. Mess is an integral part of social research that seeks to portray more accurately and sensitively the everyday.

On gathāṃ mugaḥ, one cleans the house. Of what? The dirt of the rice planting season, certainly, but what hitches a ride with that dirt? Or who? Ghosts, bhut, pret. There are elaborate rites for this kind of house cleaning, from the individual residence to the neighborhood. Bundles of thorns are carried burning through each room of the house, top to bottom. Six-foot-tall strawmen with explicit male genitalia of round fruits and cotton are paraded burning through the streets by young men shouting sexualized phrases. But not everywhere. Not everywhere is it still dirty enough. For who still plants rice in June and July? The ground floor is now a garage, home office, reception room, not a barn. This paper recreates a single day spent in search of a 'proper' gathāṃ mugaḥ, and of the forms of life we negate when all the mess becomes yecu picu, neat and clean.