Subject: [ACADEMIC-STUDY-MAGIC] AAA Call for papers on Race and
Religion, AAA meetings 11/17-21/2010
Apologies for cross-posting ...
Call for Papers for
the AAA Annual Meetings, Nov. 17-21, New Orleans 2010
Panel Title: Raced
Religion: Neo-Liberal Identities and the Racialization of Religion
The
(perhaps increasing?) importance of religious practices and religious identity
politics in places as diverse as post-colonial Africa, post-Socialist Russia,
the United States, and Europe seem to have finally sounded the death knell of
modernization theory and attracted considerable anthropological attention. Many
sociological studies of religion run in one of two directions. Some celebrate
the ways in which progressive liberal ideals have penetrated and transformed
religious practices, turning religious affiliation into a conscious choice among
a range of possibilities. Others focus on religious practices that are thought
to offer productive critiques of liberalism, particularly its understanding of
religion as belief and free choice. These accounts highlight the heteronomy and
bodily discipline that lies at the heart of religious traditions like observant
Islam and Judaism.
As useful as these approaches are for reintegrating
questions about religious identities and practices into accounts of lives and
experiences of modern communities, they seem to be missing a crucial question:
to what extent have some contemporary religious revivals incorporated the
forms of essentialization of race, gender, and even class that have often
accompanied the spread of liberal values[?] Rather than assume that embodied
religious practices depart dramatically from liberal conceptions of personhood
and subjectivity, this panel asks how liberal ideas about essential authentic
selves circulate into religious practice[.] How and where do people make claims
that specific kinds of religious practice are appropriate for particular kinds
of bodies? We will question whether and how conceptions of race that have
emerged out of liberal and scientific discourse inform religious understandings
in a wide range of social locations, from French Jews to post-Soviet Buryat
shamans. We will ask where, when, and why the racialization of religion might be
occurring. We will query the ways in which biologized and interiorized
conceptions of the religious self perpetuate, challenge, and/or transform
alternative understandings. And we will ask what implications, if any, such
transformations have for thinking about pluralism in the contemporary
world.
Please send paper proposals of no more than 250 words, and brief
biographical information (department affiliation, etc.) to Kimberley Arkin
([log in to unmask] <mailto:[log in to unmask]>) and Justine Buck Quijada
([log in to unmask] <mailto:[log in to unmask]>) no later than March
5th. The panel proposal will be subsequently edited to reflect the included
papers.
Justine Buck Quijada
Postdoctoral Research
Fellow
Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic
Diversity
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