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This book explores the challenges of promise-making in societies characterized by legal and religious pluralism and shaped by colonialism. It examines how promises are sites of meaning and memory, made through spiritual appeals, contestation, and more.
List of contents
Promising Practices: A Preface
Pamela E. Klassen, Monique Scheer, and Benjamin L. Berger
Introduction: Fragmented Promises, Pentimento & the Salvage Paradigm
Jeffery Hewitt
Part I: Promises in Place: A Great Lakes Pentimento
Pamela E. Klassen
1. Remembering, Forgetting and the Telling of Stories: Land and Commemoration in the
Aftermath of the American Revolution
Elizabeth Elbourne
2. “The Culture of the Soil”: Agriculture, Improvement, and Settler Colonial Landscapes of
Nineteenth-Century Manitoulin Island
Kate Stoehr
3. Between Gratitude and Guilt: The Promise of a Better Life in a Settler Colony for Racialized Refugees
Sujith Xavier
Part II: The Weight of the Promise: Material–Immaterial Practices
Monique Scheer
4. Making Promises to the Shogun: Spinoza on the Dutch United East Indian Company in Japan
Pooyan Tamimi Arab
5. Longing and Belonging in France and Algeria: The Promise of Amel’s Chedda
Jennifer Selby
6. Quid pro Quo? Egyptian Papyri Distributions and the Bureaucracy of a Promise
Gregory Fewster
7. Covenant, Torah, and the Failed Promise of Jewish Museums
Yaniv Feller
Part III: The Oath, the Law, and the “Sense of Religion”
Benjamin L. Berger
8. “However Honestly Meant”: Chinese Australians and Truth-Telling in Colonial Victorian
Courts
Catherine Evans
9. An Oath on the Big Book: Oaths and Examinations in American Codes of Procedure
Kellen Funk
10. Ceremonial Promises: Oath, Treaties, and the Transformation of Christian Privilege in Canada
Pamela E. Klassen and Isabel Klassen-Marshall
Conclusion: Promises That Make Us Who We Are
Jeremy Webber
About the author
Pamela E. Klassen is a professor of the study of religion at the University of Toronto, and the author of
The Story of Radio Mind: A Missionary’s Journey on Indigenous Land (University of Chicago Press, 2018).
Benjamin L. Berger is an associate professor at Osgoode Hall Law School at York University.
Monique Scheer is a professor of historical and cultural anthropology at the University of Tübingen, and the author of
Enthusiasm: Emotional Practices of Conviction in Modern Germany (Oxford University Press, 2020).
