The Liminality of Grief in Trauma
As time continues to press forward after the April 30 shooting at UNCC, I have continued to reflect, think about my experience, and discuss the experiences with others…
Tag: Religion
Jon Bialecki on his book, A Diagram for Fire
https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520294219/a-diagram-for-fire Interview by Anna Eisenstein Anna Eisenstein: Your book identifies the miracle as the defining feature of American Charismatic Evangeli…
How Hearts Align in a Muslim Ritual
Devotees gather for the Sufi ritual of dhikr in downtown Istanbul. Dimitris Xygalatas In downtown Istanbul, Turks in religious garb filter into a large, multistory building. Behind the…
Religion and politics in the US: How the Christian Right moves away from Jesus
Along with an anthropology degree, I also completed a degree in philosophy with a focus on philosophy of religion. My primary interests in that are theodicies (excuses for…
Islam, Humanitarianism and everyday religion #MUHUM
In this intervention I argue that charitable or humanitarian practices among contemporary Muslims— and everyday religiosity more generally—are constituted and experienced not only through differences …
Rethinking difference: Muslim and Christian lives in comparative perspective
Image credit: David Evers, Flickr, Creative Commons. By Daan Beekers, Hansjörg Dilger and Daniel Nilsson DeHanas. In recent decades, the anthropology of religion has produced detailed and d…
Book: Ritualisierung – Mediatisierung – Performance
Luger, M., Graf, F., & Budka, P. (Eds.). (2019). Ritualisierung – Mediatisierung – Performance. (Ritualization – Mediatization – Performance). Göttingen: V&R Unipress/…
Teaching Evolution in the South: Framing Evolutionary Theory for Religious Students
I am a biocultural anthropologist and teach at a university in the southern United States of America. This means that many of my students are religious and haven’t…
Angie Heo on her new book, The Political Lives of Saints
https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520297982/the-political-lives-of-saints Interview by Alice Yeh Alice Yeh: Talk of persecution and extinction often accompanies media coverage of Christians in the …
Fluid Masculinity: The case of Krishna
As Rama becomes more and more the icon of “virile Hinduism” and the symbol of a new kind of hegemonic, patriarchal, masculinity, so Krishna is held up as…
Lecture: Ritual & Religion in Social and Cultural Anthropology
Together with Martin Luger, I am organizing a lecture on ritual and religion in social and cultural anthropology at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology of the…
Gods, AIs, and Mormon Transhumanism
I’d like to start this post by juxtaposing two scenes. The first one is set about two years ago, and occurred on the third floor of the Provo,…
Michaela Schäuble: Ecstasy: A review of two recent exhibitions on consciousness-expanding experience
In his classic Ecstatic Religion: A Study of Shamanism and Spirit Possession, I. M. Lewis (1971) contends that ritual, belief, and spiritual experience are the three cornerstones of…
How Do We Know Which Historical Accounts Are True?
It all started with a stray goat. On an otherwise nondescript day in the spring of 1947, a young Bedouin boy searched for a goat that had strayed…
Mitoni Rite
Javanese people have a tradition to celebrate seven months of pregnancy. Procot, iwel-iwel, rujak buah, bubur merah, tumpeng and nasi golong. Habits that have been preserved for a…
Mitoni Rite
Javanese people have a tradition to celebrate seven months of pregnancy. Procot, iwel-iwel, rujak buah, bubur merah, tumpeng and nasi golong. Habits that have been preserved for a…
Reclaiming “Allahu Akbar” from Semantic Pejoration
Allāhu akbar, the Arabic phrase meaning “God is the greatest,” has gained connotations in US public discourse that differ vastly from its meaning among Muslims. Understanding this process…
Islamisches Gemeindeleben in Berlin
Studie zur Vielfalt islamischen Lebens Autorinnen: Prof. Dr. Riem Spielhaus und Nina Mühe Die Studie gibt einen Überblick über islamisches Gemeindeleben in Berlin. Sie untersucht die religiöse Ausr…
Religion in the Age of Development: Encounters in Asia
Religious actors have become increasingly involved in development. Likewise, development actors like the World Bank have also become interested in religion (especially the religion of the communities …
The Role of Scientific Discourse in Chile’s Trans Rights Movement
También disponible en español aquí. On June 18, 2018, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced the removal of “transsexuality” (a term based on psychiatric diagnosis and maligned by…
Living Fossils
One of the most popular jokes among anthropologists is how often our work is mistaken for palaeontology. Almost every one of my colleagues and even a few of…
#Review: Moving by the Spirit
In Moving by the Spirit: Pentecostal Social Life on the Zambian Copperbelt, Naomi Haynes provides a compelling ethnographic study of the centrality of Pentecostal Christianity in contemporary Zambia.…
Ep. #14 Thesis writing, picturing cults, Muslims with caste, & fieldwork boredom: this month on TFS
Ian (1:25) starts us off by asking, just how well-written does a thesis need to be? “As anthropologists, basically what we do is write… whether it’s writing your field notes,…
Book Review: London Youth, Religion and Politics: Engagement and Activism from Brixton to Brick Lane by Daniel Nilsson DeHanas
In London Youth, Religion and Politics: Engagement and Activism from Brixton to Brick Lane, Daniel Nilsson DeHanas offers an illuminating comparison of the lives of Christian and Muslim young people…