REMINDER AND UPDATE

Atheism and Anthropology: Researching Atheism and Self-searching Belief and Experience
Workshop 
University College London
Daryll Forde seminar room, 2nd floor, Taviton Street 14
21 September, 2011
Sponsored by the European Association of Social Anthropologists and EASA Anthropology of Religion Network
Convenors: Ruy Llera Blanes (Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon), Galina Oustinova-Stjepanovic (University College London) 
  
Headline clashes between ‘new atheists’ such as Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins and various religious leaders have shown that strong convictions inform atheist and religious discourses, searching to convey their own propositional ‘truths’. Some people argue that atheism has turned militant; others suggest religious education is a menace. Yet, what is atheism? How are subjectivities, ideas, embodied practices and material environments inflected with atheism? These matters are often neglected in anthropology for the simple reason that the discipline itself is an offspring of methodological atheism caught in an awkward relationship with theology and religious performances.
This workshop adopts a two-pronged approach to the research of atheism. We have invited scholars who research atheism as historical, political, and cultural articulations of non-belief, atheistic critique, political and practical disinterestedness in matters of religions. Through our workshop, we will explore the definitions and manifestations of atheism through the comparison and analysis of a number of ethnographic case studies. Furthermore, we will address the questions of specifically religious reflexivity in anthropology by considering the ethical and methodological implications of conducting research as atheist anthropologists and representing religious traditions and ontologies in the secular language of anthropology. A few questions worth considering:
- Is an ‘anthropology of atheism’ possible, or necessary? 
- Are atheism and religiosity competing, opposed ‘regimes of truth’? Can atheism be researched as a form of belief? What are the additional dimensions of ‘atheism’ that are not covered by the concept of ‘belief’?
- What does secularism tell us about atheism?
- Is atheism as awkward as theology for anthropology? Is anthropology an inevitably non-theistic discipline? Can you teach anthropological theories of religion to students of anthropology who take witchcraft seriously?
Keynote Lecture by Matthew Engelke (London School of Economics) 


PROGRAMME (UPDATED):

9:45 Welcome words by convenors 
10:00: Keynote Lecture
Matthew Engelke: The Anthropology of After Religion
11:15: Break

11:30: Session 1: Researching Atheism
Lorna Mumford: Discourses of Atheist and Humanist Identity in Britain
Rebecca Catto and Janet Eccles: A Sociological Investigation of Young People in Britain’s Active Non-Religious Identities
12:45: Lunch
14:00 Session 2: Atheism and Secularism
Sindre Bangstad: Which Road to Enlightenment? On The Impasses of Secularist Absolutism In Relation to Anthropology in Contemporary Norway
Vlad Naumescu: Secular missionaries or phonies?  Old Believers’ moral dilemmas in (post)socialist Romania
Chair/discussant: Charles Stewart
15:30 Break
16:00 Session 3: Anthropological Atheism 
Sonja Luehrmann: Antagonistic Insights: Evolving Soviet atheist critiques of religion and why they might matter for anthropology 
Tim Jenkins: The ‘language ideologies’ of a positivist sociological study and
Evangelical Christianity compared
Galina Oustinova-Stjepanovic: Confessional Anthropology
17:45 Final discussion and farewell