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In a remarkably short span of time, religious freedom has taken center stage in public and policy debates worldwide. Longstanding legal guarantees of religious freedom built into laws and constitutions over the last few centuries are being mobilized while comparable guarantees are introduced into new types of legal instruments, constitutions, and legislation. In legal and public policy circles, religious freedom is presented as the key to emancipating individuals and communities from violence, poverty, and oppression. What exactly is being promoted through the discourse of religious freedom, and what is not? What is being protected under these various legal instruments? What forms of politics are enabled by these activities? How might we describe the cultural and epistemological assumptions that underlie this frenzy? And, what is its longer and contentious history? This volume seeks to understand the various conceptions of religious freedom at play in the world today, their different social and political contexts, and their varied histories. The volume emerged out of the Politics of Religious Freedom research project, a three-year effort funded by the Luce Foundation to study the discourses of religious freedom in South Asia, North Africa, the Middle East, Europe, and the United States; later expanded to include research on sub-Saharan Africa and Brazil. It is divided into four sections, Religion, History, Law/Politics, and Freedom, each with a brief preface by one of the editors.

This book offers an in-depth analysis of an iconoclastic religious movement initiated by a Muslim preacher among coastal Baga farmers in the French colonial period. With an ethnographic approach that listens as carefully to those who suffered iconoclastic violence as to those who wanted to ‘get rid of custom’, it discusses the extent to which iconoclasm produces a rupture of religious knowledge and identity, and analyses its relevance in the making of modern nations and citizens. The book covers many topics such as the anthropology of religion, iconoclasm, the history and anthropology of West Africa, and the politics of heritage.

A collection of classic and contemporary ethnographic explorations of Catholicism, by anthropologists and religious studies scholars. The book approaches Catholicism through a variety topics and across a wide range of geographical settings. Includes material whose theme is ‘religion’, as well as contributions that expand on Catholicism’s intersection with politics and economics, secularism and modernity, sex and gender, kinship and heritage, and technologies of mediation.

To Be Cared For offers a unique window into the conceptual and moral world of slum-bound Dalits (“untouchables”), in the south Indian city of Chennai. It focuses on decisions by many women there to embrace locally specific forms of Pentecostal Christianity. Nathaniel Roberts challenges dominant anthropological understandings of religion as a matter of culture and identity, as well as Indian nationalist narratives of Christianity as a “foreign” ideology that disrupts local communities. Far from being a divisive force, he argues, these conversions serve to integrate the slum community as a whole, Christians and Hindus alike, by addressing hidden moral fault lines in the slum that subtly pit women against one another and render them vulnerable in their own homes. Christians and Hindus in the slum are not in opposed camps; they are united in a shared struggle to survive in a national context that renders Dalits as outsiders in their own country.

What is the work that miracles do in American Charismatic Evangelicalism? How are miracles something that are at once unanticipated, and yet worked for? Finally, what do miracles tell us about Christianity, and even about the category of religion? A Diagram for Fire engages with those questions through an detailed ethnographic study of the Vineyard, a Southern-California originated American Evangelical movement known for believing that biblical-style miracles are something that all Christians can perform today. This book sees the miracle a resource and a challenge to institutional cohesion and human planning, and as an immanently-situated and fundamentally social means of producing change that operates through taking surprise and the unexpected, and using it to reimagine and reconfigure the will. A Diagram for Fire shows how this configuration of the miraculous shapes typical Pentecostal and Charismatic religious practices such as prophesy, speaking in tongues, healing, and battling demons; but it also shows how the miraculous as a configuration also ends up shaping other practices that seem far from the miracle, such as a sense of temporality, music, reading, economic choices, and both conservative and progressive political imaginaries. This book suggests that the open potential of the miracle, and the ironic constriction of the miracle’s potential through the intentional attempt to embrace it, has much to tell us not only about how contemporary Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity both functions and changes, but about an underlying mutability that plays an important role in Christianity and even in religion writ large.

“Big dreams” are rare but extremely vivid forms of dreaming that make a strong, lasting impact on waking consciousness. Experiences of big dreaming have played prominent roles in religious and cultural traditions throughout history. This book provides an original, evidence-based analysis of big dreams drawing on research from cognitive science and the comparative history of religions. The goal is to shed new light on the classic theory of Nietzsche, Tylor, and others that the origins of religion can be found in dreaming. This theory has always appealed to anthropologists and philosophers, but it has never been tested using current scientific research. Big Dreams is the first book to make that attempt. It builds on findings from neuroscience, evolutionary biology, anthropology, and psychology to illuminate the dreaming‒religion connection. The book provides a mapping of four “prototypes” of big dreaming: aggressive, sexual, gravitational, and mystical. Each prototype is associated with a distinct kind of emotional and physiological arousal—a fight/flight response in a chasing nightmare, an actual orgasm in a “wet” dream, a startled sensation of vertigo in a falling dream, a joyous feeling of freedom and power in a flying dream. Scientific research on these big dream prototypes has revealed a naturalistic basis for religious beliefs arising from intensified modes of sleep and dreaming. Big Dreams looks at cross-cultural and historical cases of dreams involved in demonic seduction, prophetic vision, ritual healing, and contemplative practice to argue that Nietzsche and Tylor were essentially right—dreaming is a primal wellspring of religious experience.

A classic question in the anthropology of religion is how ritual performances achieve—or fail to achieve—their effects. This book argues that participants condition their own expectations of ritual efficacy by interactively creating distinct textual patterns of sequence, conjunction, contrast, and substitution. Drawing on long-term research on Christianity in Fiji, the book presents in-depth studies of each of these patterns, taken from a wide range of settings: a fiery, soul-saving Pentecostal crusade; relaxed gatherings at which people drink the narcotic beverage kava; deathbeds at which missionaries eagerly await the signs of good Christians’ “happy deaths”; and the monologic pronouncements of a military-led government determined to make the nation speak in a single voice. Each of these cases reveals the broad ideologies of motion that frame participants’ ritual actions, such as Pentecostals’ beliefs that effective worship requires ecstatic movement like jumping, dancing, and clapping, and nineteenth-century missionaries’ insistence that the journeys of the soul in the afterlife should follow a new path. By approaching ritual as an act of “entextualization”—in which the flow of discourse is turned into object-like texts—while analyzing the ways people expect words, things, and selves to move in performance, this book presents a new and compelling way to understand the efficacy of ritual action.

Voices of the Ritual analyzes the revival of and manifestation of rituals at female saint shrines in the Holy Land. In the Middle East, a turbulent, often violent place, states tend to have no clear physical borders, and lands are constantly in flux. Here, groups with no voice in the political, cultural, media, and legal arenas look for alternative venues to voice their entitlements. Members of religious minorities employ rituals in various sacred places to claim their belonging to and appropriation of territory. What does this female ritualistic revival mean—politically, culturally, and spatially? The author bases her analysis on a long ethnographic study (2003–2017) that analyzes the rise of female sacred shrines, focusing on four dimensions of the ritual: the body in motion, female materiality, place, and the rituals encrypted in the Israel/Palestine landscape. In the practices at these shrines, mostly canonical, the idea of the “body in motion” is central, with rituals imitating birth and the cycle of life using a set of body gestures. These rituals, performed by men and women, are intimate forces that extend between the female saint and the worshippers. Female materiality strengthens intimacy and creates a bridge between the experience and the material. The intimacy between saint and worshipper created with the body and the female material scattered around represent keys to intimate claims to the land, making the land familiar to worshippers. Rituals encrypt female themes into the landscape that has for decades been dominated by masculine-disseminated war and conflict.

Musical activity is one of the most ubiquitous and highly valued forms of social interaction in North America—from sporting events to political rallies, concerts to churches. Its use as an affective agent for political and religious programs suggests that it has ethical significance, but it is one of the most undertheorized aspects of both theological ethics and music scholarship. Music for Others: Care, Justice, and Relational Ethics in Christian Music fills part of this scholarly gap by focusing on the religious aspects of musical activity, particularly on the practices of Christian communities. It is based on ethnomusicological fieldwork at three Protestant churches and interviews with a group of seminary students, combined with theories of discourse, formation, response, and care ethics oriented toward restorative justice. The book argues that relationships are ontological for both human beings and musical activity. It further argues that musical meaning and emotion converge in human bodies such that music participates in personal and communal identity construction in affective ways—yet these constructions are not always just. Thus, Music for Others argues that music is ethical when it preserves people in and restores people to just relationships with each other, and thereby with God.