Gestures
The Study of Religion as Practice
Edited by Michiel Leezenberg, Anne-Marie Korte and Martin M. van Bruinessen
Contributions by Umut Azak, Christoph Baumgartner, Rajeev Bhargava, John R. Bowen, Judith Butler, Rokus de Groot, Martijn de Koning, Sanne Derks, Wendy Doniger, Willy Jansen, Yolande Jansen, Mariwan Kanie, Webb Keane, Anne-Marie Korte, Michael Lambek, Bruno Latour, Michiel Leezenberg, Annelies Moors, Catrien Notermans, S. Brent Plate, Samuli Schielke, Regina M. Schwartz, Yvonne Sherwood, Thomas Tweed, Martin M. van Bruinessen, Sander van Maas and Ali Hassan Zaidi
Published by: Fordham University Press
Series: The Future of the Religious Past
688 pages, 177.00 x 254.00 mm, 18 b/w illustrations
This concluding volume of the Future of the Religious Past series approaches contemporary religion through the lens of practice: the rituals, performances, devotions, and everyday acts through which humans do religion. In spite of predictions about the inevitability of secularism, religion in the twenty-first century remains stubbornly resilient, and Gestures: The Study of Religion as Practice offers a new vantage point from which to see the religious as a category shaped and reshaped by modernity and to encounter religion not as something bounded by doctrines and sacred texts but as lived experience.
Twenty-four globally based scholars look to practice to examine such diverse phenomena as human rights, memory, martyrdom, dress and fashion, colonial legacies, blasphemy, mass political action, and the future of secularism.
List of Illustrations | xiii
List of Credits | xv
Preface | xvii
Introduction: Practice Turns in the Study of Religion
MICHIEL LEEZENBERG | 1
I . RELIGIOUS PERFORMANCE AND PERFORMATIVITY
1. Gesturing Toward Sacrifice: Aping the Scapegoat and Monkeying Around with the Lamb
YVONNE SHERWOOD | 47
2. Unpacking “Performance”: Felicity Conditions, Efficacy, and Indexicals in Islamic Actions
JOHN R. BOWEN | 106
3. “Thou Shalt Not Freeze-Frame”: How Not to Misunderstand the Science and Religion Debate
BRUNO LATOUR | 119
4. Dorsal Monuments: Messiaen, Sellars, and Saint Francis
SANDER VAN MAAS | 141
II . EMBODIMENT AND MATERIALI TY
5. From Kama to Karma: The Resurgence of Puritanism in Contemporary India
WENDY DONIGER | 173
6. Bodies in Alliance and the Politics of the Street
JUDITH BUTLER | 194
7. Divine Impersonations: Transgressive Gestures in Hindu Devotion
ROKUS DE GROOT | 215
8. Islamic Dress and Fashion: A Religious and a Sartorial Practice Revisited
ANNELIES MOORS | 235
9. On Spirit Writing: Materialities of Language and the Religious Work of Transduction
WEBB KEANE | 249
III . EVERYDAY RELIGION
10. The Quotidian Turn: Interpretive Categories and Scholarly Trajectories
THOMAS A. TWEED | 279
11. Rhythms of Roots: Identity Politics in Religious Dance Processions in Bolivia
SANNE DERKS, CATRIEN NOTERMANS, AND WILLY JANSEN | 303
12. State Rituals in Turkey: Commemorating the Gazi and Kubilay the Martyr
UMUT AZAK | 322
13. Second Thoughts About the Anthropology of Islam
SAMULI SCHIELKE | 348
IV. TRANSGRESSIVE ACTS: HERESY AND BLASPHEMY
14. Eventual Blasphemies: Setting the Offensive Work of Art in Time
S. BRENT PLATE | 375
15. The Political Gesture of “Blasphemous” Art: Facing Pussy Riot’s Punk Prayer
ANNE-MARIE KORTE | 391
16. On Silencing and Public Debates about Religiously Offensive Acts
CHRISTOPH BAUMGARTNER | 417
17. Offending Muslims: Provocation, Blasphemy, and Public Debate in the Netherlands
MARTIJN DE KONING | 445
V. VIOLENT RELIGIOUS PERFORMANCES: SACRIFICE AND MARTYRDOM
18. Sacrifice and the Problem of Beginning: Meditations from Sakalava Mythopraxis
MICHAEL LAMBEK | 475
19. The Mass and the Theater: Othello and Sacrifice
REGINA M. SCHWARTZ | 502
20. Martyrdom, Religion, and Nation in Kurdish Literature
MARIWAN KANIE | 524
21. Suicide Terrorism and the Modern Nation-State: Antiliberal Protest or Biopolitical Performance?
MICHIEL LEEZENBERG | 546
VI . SECULARISM AND POSTSECULARISM
22. Good Religion, Bad Religion: Beyond the Secularity-Religion and Secularity-Piety Binaries
YOLANDE JANSEN | 579
23. Human Rights, Muslim Communities, and the Unintentional Secularization of Canada
ALI HASSAN ZAIDI | 605
24. The Distinctiveness of Indian Secularism
RAJEEV BHARGAVA | 623
List of Contributors | 651
Index | 657
Michiel Leezenberg teaches in the Departments of Philosophy, Religious Studies, and Classics at the University of Amsterdam and has published widely on the philosophy of the humanities, Islamic intellectual history, and the Kurdish question. His recent publications include (with Gerard de Vries) History and Philosophy of the Humanities: An Introduction (Amsterdam University Press, 2018), Sexuality and Politics in Islam (Prometheus, 2017), and Foucault (Athenaum, 2021).
Anne-Marie Korte is professor of religion and gender at Utrecht University. She coedited (with Angela Berlis and Kune Biezeveld) Everyday Life and the Sacred: Re/configuring Gender Studies in Religion (Brill, 2017); (with Christiane Kruse and Birgit Meyer) Taking Offense: Religion, Art, and Visual Culture in Plural Configurations (Fink Verlag, 2018); and (with Mariecke van den Berg, Lieke Schrijvers, and Jelle Wiering) Transforming Bodies: Religions, Powers and Agencies in Europe (New York: Routledge, 2020).
Martin van Bruinessen is professor emeritus in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Utrecht University. He is the editor of Contemporary Developments in Indonesian Islam: Explaining the ‘Conservative Turn’ (Institute of South East Asian Studies, 2013) and (with Stefano Allievi) of Producing Islamic Knowledge: Transmission and Dissemination in Western Europe (Routledge, 2011).
Umut Azak is associate professor in the Department of International Relations at Istanbul Okan University. Her research focuses on the history of secularism and memory politics in Turkey. She is the author of Islam and Secularism in Turkey: Kemalism, Religion and the Nation State (I. B. Tauris, 2010).
Christoph Baumgartner is associate professor of ethics in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Utrecht University. His recent work includes “Liberal Political Philosophy of Religious Difference after Saba Mahmood,” Sociology of Islam 7, no. 4 (2019).
John R. Bowen is Dunbar-Van Cleve Professor at Washington University in St. Louis. He is the author of the collaborative work Pragmatic Inquiry (Routledge, 2021) and of On British Islam (Princeton University Press, 2016) and is currently writing a five-country study of Proving Halal.
Judith Butler is Maxine Elliot Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature and Co-director of the Program of Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley. Her books include Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity; Undoing Gender; and Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?
Elizabeth Weed is Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University and Director of the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women. She is editor of Coming to Terms: Feminism/Theory/Politics and editor (with Naomi Schor) of Feminism Meets Queer Theory (IUP, 1997) and The Essential Difference (IUP, 1994).
Rokus de Groot is professor emeritus of Musicology at the University of Amsterdam and a composer. His work includes “From Past to Present and from Listening to Hearing: Final Indefinable Moments in Bach’s and Stravinsky’s Music,” in On Religion and Memory, ed. Babette Hellemans et al. (Fordham University Press, 2013) and, as composer, “For Dhruba” (2017), an homage to the sarangi maestro Pandit Dhruba Ghosh.
Martijn de Koning is an anthropologist affiliated with the Department of Islamic Studies at Radboud University Nijmegen. He is the co-author (with Carmen Becker and Ineke Roex) of Islamic Militant Activism in Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany: “Islands in a Sea of Disbelief”’ (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). With Nadia Fadil and Francesco Ragazzi, he edited the volume Radicalization in Belgium and the Netherlands Critical Perspectives on Violence and Security (IB Tauris, 2019). He maintains his own blog: http://religionresearch.org/closer.
Sanne Derks is a freelance documentary photographer and anthropologist (PhD) from Arnhem, the Netherlands. Her work focuses on social and environmental issues in Latin America and is published, among others, in the New York Times, the Guardian, and El País.
Wendy Doniger is Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago. She has also translated The Kama·sutra (with Sudhir Kakar), The Rig Veda: An Anthology, Hindu Myths: A Sourcebook and The Laws of Manu (with Brian K. Smith), and is the author of nine more books about Indian culture.
Willy Jansen is professor emerita of gender studies at Radboud University Nijmegen. She has published on religious women’s groups in Algeria, missions in the Middle East, and gender and ritual in Spain. She is the coeditor (with Catrien Notermans) of Moved by Mary: The Power of Pilgrimage in the Modern World (Routledge, 2009) and Gender, Nation, and Religion in European Pilgrimage (Routledge, 2012).
Yolande Jansen is associate professor of philosophy at the University of Amsterdam and professor of humanism in relation to religion and secularity at the VU University Amsterdam, appointed by the Socrates Foundation. She is the author of Secularism, Assimilation, and the Crisis of Multiculturalism: French Modernist Legacies (Amsterdam University Press, 2014).
Mariwan Kanie is a lecturer at the Department of Arabic Culture at the University of Amsterdam. He specializes in the political and intellectual history of the modern Middle East and the Kurdish question and is the author of Ethics and Resistance: Introduction to Foucault’s Thought (in Kurdish) (Andesha Publication, 2017).
Webb Keane is the George Herbert Mead Collegiate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan and the author of Ethical Life: Its Natural and Social Histories (Princeton University Press, 2016) and Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter (University of California Press, 2007).
Michael Lambek is a professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of Toronto Scarborough. He held a Canada Research Chair in the Anthropology of Ethical Life from 2006 to 2020 and was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2000.
Bruno Latour is Professor and Dean for Research at Sciences Po in Paris. His many books include Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory; Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy; Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies; Aramis, Or, The Love of Technology; and We Have Never Been Modern.
Catrien Notermans is an anthropologist and associate professor in the Department of Cultural Anthropology and Development Studies at Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands. She is coeditor (with Willy Jansen) of Moved by Mary: The Power of Pilgrimage in the Modern World (Routledge, 2009) and Gender, Nation and Religion in European Pilgrimage (Routledge, 2012).
S. Brent Plate is professor of religious studies at Hamilton College (Clinton, USA) and author of Religion and Film: Cinema and the Re-Creation of the World (Columbia University Press, 2017) and A History of Religion in 5½ Objects (Beacon Press, 2014).
Samuli Schielke is a research fellow at Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO) and an external lecturer at the Free University of Berlin. He is author of The Perils of Joy: Contesting Mulid Festivals in Contemporary Egypt, and editor (with Knut Graw) of The Global Horizon: Expectations of Migration in Africa and the Middle East and (with Liza Debevec) of Ordinary Lives and Grand Schemes: An Anthropology of Everyday Religion.
Regina M. Schwartz is professor of English and law at Northwestern University. She is the author and editor of numerous books, including Sacramental Poetics at the Dawn of Secularism.
Patrick J. McGrath is associate professor of English at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. He is the author of Early Modern Asceticism: Literature, Religion, and Austerity in the English Renaissance.
Yvonne Sherwood has taught literature and religious studies at several British universities, most recently at the School of European Culture and Languages of the University of Kent. She is the coauthor (with Stephen D. Moore) of The Invention of the Biblical Scholar: A Critical Manifesto (Fortress Press, 2011) and author of Biblical Blaspheming: Trials of the Sacred for a Secular Age (Cambridge University Press, 2012) and Blasphemy: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2021).
Thomas A. Tweed is the Harold and Martha Welch Professor of American Studies and professor of history at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of Crossing and Dwelling: A Theory of Religion (Harvard University Press, 2006) and Religion: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2020).
Sander van Maas teaches philosophy and music at Utrecht University College, the University of Amsterdam, and the Conservatorium van Amsterdam. His publications include The Reinvention of Religious Music: Olivier Messiaen’s Breakthrough Toward the Beyond (Fordham University Press, 2012), Thresholds of Listening: Sound, Technics, Space (Fordham University Press, 2015), and Contemporary Music and Spirituality (Routledge, 2016).
Ali Hassan Zaidi is an associate professor in the Department of Global Studies and cross-appointed to the Department of Religion and Culture at Wilfrid Laurier University (Waterloo, Canada). He is the author of Islam, Modernity and the Human Sciences (2011) and has published in various journals, including most recently the Journal of Islamic and Muslim Studies.