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Dear Colleagues: I am organizing a panel for the 2014 annual meeting of the AAA in Washington, D.C. called (for now), "Sacralizing the Secular: The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life" (a draft abstract is below). If you are interested in presenting, please email me ([log in to unmask]) by April 6th with a brief outline of your proposed paper. DRAFT ABSTRACT - Sacralizing the Secular: The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life This panel engages the ambiguous and often contentious relationship between notions of the "sacred" and the "secular" in modern life. In much of social theory the historical transformation from a predominantly religious to a modern, secular mode-of-life is correlated with the loss of sacred unifying beliefs, an overarching sense of meaning and purpose, and experiences of individual and collective transcendence. Religious leaders and commentators likewise admonish secularization as a perilous repudiation of the sacred and turn to the profane with disastrous consequences for our collective morality. Reflecting on a contemporary world in which one-in-six people now claim to have no religious affiliation (PEW), this panel asks whether the continuation of an historical epoch of secular-modernity necessarily results in the impoverishment of human experience and existence, what Max Weber famously pointed to as the malaise brought on by the "iron-cage" of modern "disenchantment." While tracing the ennui of a neoliberal, hyperrationalized, fragmented modern world back to the birth of enlightenment rationality is common within contemporary anthropological theorizing, contributions to this panel complicate such narratives by exploring how global secular communities foster, create, and experience "enchantment" - a sense of spontaneity, wonder, and imaginative excitement - outside of religious frameworks by channeling, transforming, and re-appropriating the sacred in their everyday lives. Papers on this panel will consider such questions as: Under what social and cultural conditions have secularized notions of the sacred re-emerged in the modern world? How has the logic and paradigmatic structure of the sacred been transposed into non-religious arenas? How do these new secular forms conform to and/or diverge from dominant conceptions of the sacred typically found in religious practice? How is the relationship between the sacred and the secular moderated, modified, or complicated by social forces of scientific rationalism, consumer capitalism, or digital technologies? How have various institutions and industries (e.g. educational, political, entertainment, media, etc.) propagated new forms of secular identity, ritual and belonging? What novel forms of 'secular-sacrality' have emerged within intentional non-religious communities, such as among religious apostates and atheists? How are religious/non-religious and sacred/secular divisions complicated within New Age movements, "secular churches," and studies on cryogenics and biogerentology? Best, Marshall Brooks E. Marshall Brooks PhD Candidate Department of Anthropology Rutgers University 131 George Street New Brunswick, NJ 08901-1414 Tel: 435-640-7667