Gestures - The Study of Religion As Practice

"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 contents

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

About the author

Michiel Leezenberg (Edited By)

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 (Edited By)

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 M. van Bruinessen (Edited By)

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).

Product details

• Authors: Michiel Korte Leezenberg, Martin M. (EDT)/ Korte Van Bruinessen
• Assisted by: Martin M. van Bruinessen (Editor), Anne-Marie Korte (Editor), Michiel Leezenberg (Editor), Martin M. van Bruinessen (Editor)
• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 31.12.2022
• EAN: 9780823299621
• ISBN: 978-0-8232-9962-1
• No. of pages: 688
• Series: Future of the Religious Past
• Subject: Non-fiction book > Philosophy, religion > Miscellaneous