Rethinking Public Religion in Africa and South Asia
Events
Lectures
A lecture by Nusrat Chowdhury (Amherst College).
In this talk, Dr. Chowdhury takes the birth centennial of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the founding father of independent Bangladesh, as a point of entry in exploring the generative potential of mimicry in contemporary democracies. The repertoire of signs around the figure of Mujib around this historical moment (2021 marking the country’s 50th anniversary of Bangladesh) allows a vantage point from which to understand Bangladeshi political culture that came into sharp focus with the condensation of corporeal and symbolic energies around the replication of the leader’s likeness. The talk centers on the English-language novel, The Black Coat by Neamat Imam (2013), which pivots on the theme of impersonation and ends with the ongoing religious opposition to anthropomorphic reproductions. Chowdhury argues that the compulsion to mimic via statues, photographs, works of art, or reenactment ceremonies carries within it an ambivalent and generative politics. In every act of mimesis there is both a promise and a menace. Modern sovereign power manages this uncertainty through the specular and the spectacular, or what I describe as “monumentalised reproducibility.”
A lecture by Ebenezer Obadare (University of Kansas).
This presentation focuses on four women in their individual confrontations with four influential Nigerian pastors. Against the backdrop of the rise of the Pentecostal pastor as a cultural juggernaut across Africa, the performances of these women in varying contexts demonstrate that resistance to the power of the pastor can come from the most unexpected places, unleashing social dramas that amplify the contours and contradictions of the milieu in which pastoral power has become ascendant. Dr. Obadare argues that the way the respective encounters were resolved is a reminder of the power of the pastor and the durability of the structures that underpin and enable it. Second, it is a warning against the common tendency to flatten women’s agency by disregarding real and consequential class differences among them. While they often face similar political and cultural challenges, the way in which women combat or push back against such challenges- and therefore their success or failure in doing so- may vary depending on their education, social – and marital- status, shrewdness with the media, and other personal properties. Notwithstanding, women’s resistance provides an opportunity to juxtapose the antinomic character of women’s agency with the vulnerabilities of an impregnable-seeming pastoral hypermasculinity.
A workshop with Murtala Ibrahim, Brian Larkin, Abdullahi Shehu, Mamadou Diouf, Matthew Engelke, and M. Sani Umar.
This workshop examines the relation between religion and public space focusing on Muslim movements in Northern Nigeria. It approaches the question in three main ways. First it brings to the foreground the many and diverse ways Muslim movements assert their presence over public space and the response by other movements and by the state. Second, it shows – in contradistinction to contemporary arguments – that these issues are not new and that control of public space has long been an aspect of West African religious life: from the masquerade tradition, to the rise of mass Sufi movements in the 1950s, to the emergence of African Independent Churches in the 1960s and 1970s. Finally, while we recognize these actions emerge from deep traditions within religious movements they also reveal a common religious ecology. Different religious movements – often bitter enemies – end up developing practices that borrow from each other even while they are in competition. We seek to draw out the broader nature of this mixed religious ecology.
This is a discussion-based workshop and depends upon participants reading the pre-circulated papers ahead of time.
A lecture by Derek Peterson (University of Michigan).
In what ways—under the eight year dictatorship of Idi Amin—was religion made public? Amin came to power in 1971 at a conjuncture in the history of technology: the new broadcasting capacities of radio allowed him to govern as a dictator, to set the pace of public life, to obliged everyone to march to the same tempo. Religion had to be reoriented. The space for dissident forms of Christianity and Islam was radically narrowed; pentecostals, Bahais, Adventists and other nonconformists were imprisoned, their property was seized, and their religious lives were foreclosed. At the same time new standards of religious conduct—particularly the notion of ‘African Traditional Religion’—were given substance in scholarship and in public culture. It was part of a process by which political life was evacuated of competition and loyalties were centred around the president.
A lecture by Amitav Ghosh.
In the West, no matter whether in economics, science or indeed, fiction, climate change is almost always imagined in relation to the future. In the global South the imagining of climate change is markedly different. This talk will examine some of the differences between the two perspectives.
The event recording will be available on our Youtube channel for seven days after the event.
With Arvind Rajagopal (New York University).
Arvind Rajagopal will offer a broad outline of popular politics’ successive phases in modern times with a reinterpretation threaded through the question of technology. The latter, he argues, has typically been glossed over in most accounts. The emergence of contemporary technopolitics in India, culminating in "Hindu populism," can be understood in part as post Cold War triumphalism - witness Hindutva ideologues' comparison of Nehru with Stalin or Mao, or of Nehruvian developmentalism with socialism as such. Critiquing this triumphalism requires revisiting the international context of secular nation-building, and as well, early postcolonial/decolonial responses to the problems and challenges of mass mediation.
With Isabel Hofmeyr (University of the Witwatersrand and NYU).
This paper explores two functions of the Custom House: copyright and censorship. Drawing on southern African material, the paper explores the role of Customs on the colonial maritime boundary. The paper places the Custom House in the context of the ecology of the littoral and the port city, showing how these helped shaped the protocols and procedures of Customs officials and hence the way in which they formulated their hermeneutic strategies. The work is framed within a larger theoretical rubric, hydrocolonialism. For the purposes of this seminar series, the paper will highlight the ways in which the colonial maritime boundary offers an unusual and suggestive node for thinking about public religion.
A panel and roundtable with Daho Djerbal (University of Algiers), Mohamed Amer Meziane (Religion), Mamadou Diouf (MESAAS), Mahmood Mamdani (Anthropology), and Madeleine Dobie (French).
To the extent that they identify Africa to subsaharan Africa and the Arab world to the Middle East, predominant global geographies tend to marginalize North Africa. This workshop is part of a larger project which aims at questionning the geographic divides of Africa and the Middle East. The ‘‘North Africa in Africa’’ project questions the marginalization of North Africa in Western-centered global geographies. This specific workshop is focused on the Algerian case. It will address the following question: if one takes into account the centrality of both the colonization and the decolonization of Algeria in the colonization and the decolonization of Africa and the Third World, how might the postcolonial predicament of the African continent and the Third World be re-conceptualized? How are we to think about what is happening today in this country as something else than a simple extension of the ‘‘Arab Spring’’?
With Iftikhar Dadi, Cornell University
This lecture will look at two frameworks for situating the question of the secular in Pakistan and its diaspora. The first is exemplified by Rasheed Araeen, who has deployed “Islamicate” forms is his practice, along with his criticism of valorizing exoticized subjectivity and cultural difference. Araeen brings to the idea of “modern Islamic art,” a persistent practice of self-critique and social engagement. By contrast, another framework has emerged in Pakistan during the recent decades, in which social concerns are seemingly peripheral to emphasis on repetitive practice. What are possible terms for evaluating these intensive formalist procedures? This paper will offer tentative lines of inquiry into these developments, informed by recent theoretical debates on secularism.
With William Mazzarella, University of Chicago
The current global populist wave is often narrated as a ‘crisis of representation.’ The hunger for immediate participation, the assertion of the collective flesh, is typically dismissed as regressively theological: at best a dubious aestheticization of politics, at worst a slide into fascism. But is this a false choice? Can the populist critique of representation yield a different take on contemporary politics? This talk was an invitation to reanimate the grounds of critical theory via anthropological understandings of shared substance and ‘occult’ motifs of efficacious resonance.
With Birgit Meyer, Utrecht University
The focus of this lecture was the public, and by implication material and corporeal, presence of religion in plural configurations in Ghana, where Dr. Meyer has conducted research over a long time-span, and in the Netherlands, where she lives and works. Her guiding idea was that a focus on religious matters – in the sense of concrete material forms and as matters of concern in public debate – is a productive empirical starting point to conceptualize the current co-existence of multiple religiosities.
With Tom Boylston, University of Edinburgh
This lecture discussed contemporary Orthodox Christian revival in Ethiopia from two perspectives: the ascetic cultivation of attention to God through fasting, and the capture of public attention through preaching movements, public exorcisms, and educational drives. Orthodox Christians in Addis Ababa agree that it is acceptable and necessary to use media for the promotion of religion, but they have intense debates on how to use media correctly. Orthodox solutions to these problems revolve around attention. Boylston therefore suggests that the management of attention is crucial both to the understanding of religious publics, and to the broader issues of social control that surround them.
With Patrick Eisenlohr, University of Göttingen
This talk focused on the sonic dimensions of religious life and place-making in Mumbai, and its connections to a “right to the city” for people facing a precarious future. While soundscape is an established concept for the investigation of the sonic aspects of urban place-making, including its religious dimensions, Eisenlohr argued that an analytic of atmospheres is better suited to capture the powerful emotive dimensions of place-making through sonic performances.
With Kajri Jain, University of Toronto
We are well acquainted with how the affective forces of modern politics depart from the normative ideals of bourgeois publicness. But rather than treating this departure as a binary opposition perhaps it’s more useful to recognize the layered coexistence of, and circuits between, these modalities of publicness, as when electoral politics strategically deploys both religious and secular idioms while also keeping distinctions between them in play. This talk provided a glimpse into how successive new image technologies and genres of public iconopraxis in India, from neighbourhood festivals and printed icons to monumental concrete deities, have played a key role in melding the sensible idioms of democracy and religion.
Workshops
Over the course of three years, IRCPL will organize three workshops that examine religious encounters across the two global regions in terms of specific modalities clustered into related themes. The workshops will bring together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to discuss these themes through a comparative and cross-regional lens.
The first workshop, “Word, Sound, Image”, was held in April 2019. It considered diverse processes of communication and the movement of words, sounds, and images across communities in Africa and South Asia. The guiding questions were: To what extent are forms and media shared across religious communities and to what extent are these borrowings unrecognized or explicitly acknowledged? What role do changing technologies play in the rise of new religious movements? How are understandings of materiality changing with the rise of religious reform movements?
In October 2019, IRCPL hosted “Time, Space, Memory.” What role do religious practices, traditions, identities, and boundaries play in the use of space and the articulation of historical memory in religiously mixed communities? How are shared spaces negotiated? To what extent are memories of co-presence and common histories acknowledged and shared? How do religious orientations constitute the experience of time and how are orientations to time, origins, and possible futures changing in the postcolonial era?
Finally, “The Body, Gender, and Sexuality as Forms of Religious Publicity” will consider how bodily practices and ways of doing gender and sexuality are infused with religious significance and shaped by religious and language ideologies, sometimes publicly manifesting in unexpected ways. How are gender practices influenced by the presence of other religious communities, nationalisms, and secular ideologies that may both divide and unite religious communities? How do the divisive practices of colonialism, such as the development of separate codes of personal and family law for different religious groups, continue to resonate in postcolonial law and legal challenges?
