Paul-François Tremlett

Religion in new times

T oday we occupy a curious vantage point when it comes to the question of religion. The great thinkers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries predicted its inevitable demise. And in the twenty-first, self-styled ‘new’ atheists such as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris have vociferously spoken out against its allegedly malign influence on politics, education and knowledge. Yet religion shows no signs of decline.

Two shock doctrines: From Christo-disciplinary to neoliberal urbanisms in the Philippines

In this essay, I contrast two moments of shock to open Christianity in the Philippines to a spatial analysis. I begin by framing the Spanish colonial period and the Christianisation of the Philippines as a spatial shock. The Philippines was spatially transformed through colonial projects such as urbanism, intensive agriculture and resource extraction that, taken together, can be understood in the first instance as processes of unmapping, where environments once alive and animated by meaningful relations between peoples and places were reconfigured as empty, and in the second instance as the instantiation of a new sensorium with profound consequences for how Filipinos would, thereafter, experience the world. I dwell initially on Spanish urban practices and the optical power of the planned town as the emplacement of a Christo-disciplinary sensorium that rendered local populations legible and visible to colonial power, generating new types, compositions and combinations of subjects and establishing new points of coordination for Filipino bodies and minds. I then move ‘forward’ in time to consider a second and rather more contemporary spatial shock. Here, the organising logic of the Christo-disciplinary sensorium is under threat as a new urban morphology and a new mobile religiosity mark the emergence of a new, neoliberal sensorium.

Protest objects: bricolage, performance and counter-archaeology

ABSTRACT In this article we analyse the Occupy Democracy demonstration that took place in Parliament Square in the autumn of 2014 and the ‘Disobedient Objects’ exhibition held at the Victoria and Albert Museum 2014–15. We develop a counter-archaeological analysis of these events on the one hand through reflection on previous archaeological studies of protest sites and the new heritage paradigm and on the other through an exploration of bricolage and performance to unpack the complex materialities of these assemblages of people, places and objects.

Re-cognizing the Mind in the Anthropology of Religion

Cognitive approaches to religion in religious studies and anthropology are proving increasingly fashionable of late. The focus of this essay is on “cognitivism” in the anthropology of religion, and in particular the writings of E. B. Tylor, Claude Levi-Strauss and Harvey Whitehouse. I define cognitivism in the anthropology of religion as an approach to religion that appeals to the mind and to processes of cognition as universals from which theories of — and explanations for — religion, can be generated. The essay engages in a detailed analysis of three cognitive theories of religion. Each theory takes the mind to be an enduring and stable foundation upon which an explanation for religion can be erected. Yet the mind — the foundation — is disclosed through each theory as unstable; it actually changes under different kinds of enquiry into religion. I then sketch two possible alternative theories of the mind before concluding by arguing that the cognizing mind might productively be treated not as a given and natural fact but rather as the product of discourse.

On the formation and function of the category ‘religion’ in anarchist writing

Recent works by Asad, McCutcheon and Fitzgerald have sought to call into question the category ‘religion’ in social anthropology and religious studies. The purpose of this essay is to explore the formation and function of the category religion in anarchist writing. Taking the mid‐nineteenth century as a rough point of departure, I demonstrate that the formation and function of religion as a category in anarchist writing reflects wider constructions and imaginings of modernity through which religion emerges as a cipher for thinking about the past. I will argue that the function of the category religion in anarchist writing is to order relations between past and present. Specifically, where ‘anarcho‐modernist’ writing broadly constitutes religion and the past as conditions to be overcome, ‘anarcho‐romanticist’ writing articulates a generalised nostalgia for religion and the past, although it should be noted that religion is rarely dealt with in any systematic way in anarchist writing. I will conclude by suggesting that although anarchist writing is a marginal corpus of literature, the category religion is constituted along similar lines and fulfils similar functions in both anthropological and phenomenological writings on religion.

Affective Dissent in the Heart of the Capitalist Utopia: Occupy Hong Kong and the Sacred

Hong Kong has been represented as a politically indifferent, capitalist utopia. This representation was first deployed by British colonial elites and has since been embroidered by Hong Kong’s new political masters in Beijing. Yet, on 15 October 2011, anti-capitalist activists identifying with the global Occupy movement assembled in Hong Kong Central and occupied a space under the HSBC bank. Occupy Hong Kong proved to be the longest occupation of all that was initiated by the global Occupy movement. Situated in a space notable for previously having been the haunt of Filipina domestic workers, the occupation conjured a community into the purified spaces of Hong Kong’s financial district. I describe this in terms of an eruption of the sacred that placed conventional norms of Hong Kong city life under erasure, releasing powerful emotions into spaces once thought to be immune to the ritual effervescences of the transgressive.

Urban Religious Change at the Neoliberal Frontier: Notes toward a Spatial Analysis of a Contemporary Filipino Vernacular Catholicism

This article sketches a theoretical point of departure for a spatial analysis of a contemporary Filipino vernacular Catholicism. Based on materials from religious studies, the sociology of religion, and ethnographic and historical materials, it focuses on the new neoliberal spatial dynamics of Manila and the extent to which recent shifts in its spatial constitution might be correlated with shifts in the sites and occasions of contemporary Catholicism, and in particular with the emergence of El Shaddai. It asks: If increasingly the neoliberal city is eviscerated of public and civic spaces, can El Shaddai serve to revitalize and reenchant the city?

The problem with the jargon of inauthenticity: Towards a materialist repositioning of the analysis of postmodern religion

This study argues that the jargon of inauthenticity in religious studies, which is characterised by references to ‘fake’, ‘hyperreal’ and ‘invented’ religions, is symptomatic of a crisis of method in the study of religion. In the historiography of the state, the term ‘invented’ signalled the emergence of practices and institutions that harnessed and limited modes of assembly through the development of technologies of government that marked a radical break with the past. In religious studies, although the term is taken to signal the emergence of new sites of religiosity, the idealist methods characteristic of phenomenology and Weberian sociology, which are typically used to study both them and the postmodern or late capitalist societies in which they have emerged, have generated an impoverished understanding of their significance. I argue that fake, hyperreal and invented religions can be situated as part of a shift in the sites of religion in the context of rapid postmodern transformation. Drawing from recent studies of such shifts in East Asian urban contexts, I argue that the real meaning of the new sites of religion lies not in allusions to simulations, hyperrealities or consumption, but as agentive nodes for generating new forms of public association and assembly.

Aliens and strangers? The struggle for coherence in the everyday lives of Evangelicals

Cities vex moral imaginaries. Their densities of exchange generate anxieties and distances, and compel intimacies. Strhan asks how, in such complex and uncertain environments, does interpellation work and, more specifically, how is Christian evangelical subjectivity produced in contemporary London. Drawing from a range of theoretical sources from the anthropology of Christianity and the work of Jon Bialecki, James Bielo and Webb Keane to reflections on urban life and experience by the likes of de Tocqueville, Simmel and Sennett, Strhan’s finely observed ethnography explores the textures of evangelical life, engaging carefully and productively with the sociology of religion’s master narrative of secularisation to paint a rather more subtle picture of contemporary religious life while also ‘tracing the contemporary analytical significance of cities in social theory for understanding the nature of social change’ (33). For Strhan, London is a complex site of relationships where tolerance and indifference sit, not necessarily comfortably, side-by-side. More than a site of blasé indifference London, according to Strhan, is also a site for ‘forms of religious life’ that can ‘provide a creative response’ to processes of ‘cultural fragmentation’ (42). For Strhan, London is a ‘paradigmatic site of modernity’ – perhaps even a laboratory – where the processes through which ‘we separate from and connect with others through the creation of physical, emotional, and imagined boundaries’ (2) can be interrogated. Given the anthropological complexity of London, then, how is evangelical subjectivity sustained when there is so much to tempt, distract and seduce? The book’s focus of attention is a conservative evangelical church in metropolitan London, and Strhan explores

Book Review Symposium

In Beautiful Wasteland Rebecca Kinney offers a sweeping cultural analysis of the images and symbolic landscapes that have made and remade our imaginary of the city of Detroit. The iconic birthplace of America’s aspirational object, the automobile; the backdrop for the origin story of the American Dream; the embodiment of 20th century hopes and dreams about industry, modernization, and progress; a city like no other, Detroit. Throughout her book, Kinney digs in to this narrative of prosperity, ingenuity, and the American spirit by questioning the cultural imaginary of Detroit. She interrogates myriad representations of Detroit including an online housing forum, photographs, two documentary films, a 2011 Super Bowl commercial campaign, and more recent efforts to re-brand Detroit as a home for urban pioneers seeking refuge from rising rents in beloved cities elsewhere. Kinney examines these narratives and asks what realities are being created by photographers, ad executives, and billionaire boosters, all people who have something to gain by creating Detroit in their own image. Beautiful Wasteland traces the changing narrative of Detroit from a city of the American Dream to a city of decline, emptiness, and ruin, and then back again in contemporary narratives of downtown Detroit’s revitalization, renewal, and rebirth. Part of the success of Beautiful Wasteland is that it offers specific examples of the devaluing of land and homes held by black families, and the persistent exclusion, marginalization and erasure of people who do not appear to be white from Detroit’s story. In excavating the racialized logics and narratives that underpin the rise, decline, and rise again of Detroit, Kinney’s book makes an important step in suturing the whitewashed history of the city