Anastasia Badder
University of Cambridge, Faculty of Divinity, Department Member
- Université du Luxembourg, Institute of English, Faculty of Humanities, Education and Social Sciences, Department MemberUniversité du Luxembourg, Fhse/Dhum, Department Memberadd
In the lives of students in Luxembourg's Liberal Jewish complementary school, flexibility and mobility are highly valued as key characteristics of modern living. Complementary school students feel they easily meet these criteria-they are... more
In the lives of students in Luxembourg's Liberal Jewish complementary school, flexibility and mobility are highly valued as key characteristics of modern living. Complementary school students feel they easily meet these criteria-they are multilingual, cosmopolitan, and their approach to Jewish life is flexible, and equally importantly, they look, dress, and comport themselves "like everyone else." These factors are understood to facilitate multiple movements and belongings in the contemporary world. The students directly contrast their ways of being with those of more observant Jews whom they refer to as "religious"; the material, embodied, and visible nature of observant Jewish life is perceived to be an impediment to participation and success in the secular sphere. However, when Jewishness appears in these students' secular school classrooms, it is most often represented by Orthodoxpresenting men-often a man in a yarmulke. Further, these men and their yarmulkes are taken to represent all Jews, framed as a homogeneous group of religious adherents. For many complementary school students, these experiences can be jarring-they suddenly find themselves on the "wrong" side of the religious-secular divide and grouped together with those from whom they could not feel more distant. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and a material approach to religion, this article argues that the yarmulke comes to point to different levels and modes of observance and identities and enable different possible belongings in the secular public sphere as it travels across contexts that include different definitions of and attitudes toward religion and Jewishness.
Research Interests:
Research Interests: Religion, Sociology of Religion, Ethnography, Anthropology of Children and Childhood, Anthropology of Christianity, and 9 moreGirlhood Studies, Language socialization, Language Socialization (Anthropology), Anthropology of ethics and morality, Subjectivity, Childhood studies, Language socialisation, Anthropology of Religion, and Language Socialization
This dissertation is an ethnography of children and young people growing up Jewish in Luxembourg. It focuses on the students of a Talmud Torah class in a Liberal synagogue that, in recent years, has drawn increasing numbers of highly... more
This dissertation is an ethnography of children and young people growing up Jewish in Luxembourg. It focuses on the students of a Talmud Torah class in a Liberal synagogue that, in recent years, has drawn increasing numbers of highly mobile, multilingual families from around the world. As these students learn how to be Jewish and carry on Jewish tradition, they simultaneously explore what it means to be modern and to be modern Jews. This process pushes them to confront a series of ambiguities and apparent paradoxes across the contexts of their everyday lives – in Talmud Torah, at home, and at school. Based on 31 months of fieldwork, this dissertation reveals the nuanced semiotic ideologies and competing visions of modernity that become visible through the lens of the students' Talmud Torah learning, including learning to read Hebrew, engaging with religious texts, and participating in ritual performance, and their school experiences. The students grapple with, navigate, and position themselves in relation to these different 'projects of modernity' as they work to make sense of and bring together the aims of Jewish continuity and liberal modernity and all that these entail. By exploring these processes, this dissertation aims to participate in the anthropological conversation about 'modernities' and 'the modern' as a project that is both embracing of the liberal, the secular, and inclusivity and can be powerfully normative, constraining, and exclusionary, and to encourage us as anthropologists and teachers to think about how we might leave open the possibility for nuance and alternative attachments, desires, goals, mobilities, and ways of being in the classroom and beyond
Research Interests:
When the dean of our faculty at the University of Luxembourg invited all staff and students to contribute to an anthology on the coronavirus crisis, we were immediately interested. While we did not yet have a concrete concept for our... more
When the dean of our faculty at the University of Luxembourg invited all staff and students to contribute to an anthology on the coronavirus crisis, we were immediately interested. While we did not yet have a concrete concept for our contribution, we were thankful for the opportunity to work together on a paper and share our thoughts. We strongly felt that we must grab these kinds of opportunities as they arise and be open to where they may lead us. The following reflects our collaborative, exploratory process of coming to grips with COVID-19 and, we hope, it sheds light on some issues and experiences that have been meaningful to us and the students of our programme during these last months.
Research Interests:
Nearly two decades ago, Hirschfeld (2002) asked, "why don't anthropologists like children?" suggesting that 'mainstream' anthropology had so far ignored the roles children play in cultural production. While childhood studies has since... more
Nearly two decades ago, Hirschfeld (2002) asked, "why don't anthropologists like children?" suggesting that 'mainstream' anthropology had so far ignored the roles children play in cultural production. While childhood studies has since exploded, the roles of children in religious processes remain under-examined (Csordas 2009, Fader 2009, and Lytra, Volk, & Gregory 2016 are notable exceptions). Fader (2009) calls for scholars to acknowledge children's active engagements with religion, arguing that exchanges between adults and children and children and their peers in the official religious and intimate spaces of their everyday lives offer fruitful sites for understanding how religion and religious subjectivities are learned, challenged, and take unintended or unpredictable forms (Kulick & Schieffelin 2006).
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Across the contexts of the lives of Luxembourg's Liberal Talmud Torah students, secularism and mobility are highly valued and understood to be key characteristics of modern living. Talmud Torah students feel they easily meet these... more
Across the contexts of the lives of Luxembourg's Liberal Talmud Torah students, secularism and mobility are highly valued and understood to be key characteristics of modern living. Talmud Torah students feel they easily meet these criteria-they are multilingual, they currently lead and anticipate highly mobile lives, they see themselves as cosmopolitan and their approach to Jewish life as flexible, and, equally importantly, they look, dress, and comport themselves "like everyone else," all of which are understood to facilitate movement (in the sense of movement across geographic, economic, social, and religious/secular spheres) and belonging in the modern world. The students directly contrast their ways of being with those of more observant Jews. Identifiable by their rootedness, linguistic stringency, and, especially, their ways of dressing (e.g. wearing a kippah in public), the embodied practices and visibility of observant Jews are perceived to be impediments to participation and success in the secular realm. For Talmud Torah students, the public kippah in particular indexes a religious individual and a "backwards" and undesirable life. However, when Jewishness appears in their school classrooms, it is usually visually represented by orthodox-presenting men-often a man in a white shirt and black kippah. In the school classroom, these men and their kippot are framed as representing all Jews, understood as a homogenous group of adherents to the religion Judaism. For many Talmud Torah students, their first encounter with this new meaning of the kippah, visualization and associated conceptualization of Jewishness is jarring-they suddenly find themselves on the 'wrong' side of the religious/secular divide and grouped together with those from whom they could not feel more distant. Based on 31 months of ethnographic fieldwork with Luxembourg's Liberal Jewish community, this paper will explore how the kippah is remediated from the Talmud Torah to the school classroom, how students grapple with this uncomfortable process, and some of its implications.
Research Interests:
For decades, Luxembourg funded its recognized religious communities; recently, with a goal of greater secularization, the state made major changes (and cuts) to its funding scheme. This move revived simmering tensions in the Jewish... more
For decades, Luxembourg funded its recognized religious communities; recently, with a goal of greater secularization, the state made major changes (and cuts) to its funding scheme. This move revived simmering tensions in the Jewish community, comprised of one Orthodox and one Liberal synagogue and represented to the state by a single Orthodox-led administrative body (la Consistoire Israélite du Luxembourg, or CIL). Emboldened by growing membership and fearing a loss of their already-precarious autonomy and financial support, the Liberal congregation has begun pushing for representation on the CIL, which the Orthodox congregation in turn resists. In the process, Orthodox leadership is forced to reflect on their own practices and values in sometimes uncomfortable ways. As they jostle for control of the CIL, each side makes claims to truth, authenticity, and authority based on drastically different ethics and visions of the future for Luxembourg and its Jewish community. In board meetings, general assemblies, and conversations, old conflicts around the 'right' kind of Jewish life and current and future shape and needs of the Jewish community are rearticulated as the two congregations debate who can and should be the state's interlocutor. Based on 31 months of fieldwork, this paper explores how a reorganization of state administrative control reignited an old struggle within Luxembourg's Jewish community and how two congregations with different histories, ethical projects, and anticipated futures fight to define Jewishness, community, and a good Jewish life and to maintain (or gain) the right to represent Judaism to the Luxembourgish state.
Research Interests:
Secularism has long been central to Western self-understandings of progress and modernity. Even as scholars (c.f. Asad 2003; Hirschkind 2011) have shown that secularism has its own history and is not an inevitable telos for the modern... more
Secularism has long been central to Western self-understandings of progress and modernity. Even as scholars (c.f. Asad 2003; Hirschkind 2011) have shown that secularism has its own history and is not an inevitable telos for the modern world, the concept has taken on a new contemporary relevance. The apparent clash between the secular and the religious continues to churn in political realms and these categories shift in the face of social and political crises. To this point, Mahmood (2009) and others have argued for greater attention to the ways that the secular and religious articulate with and transform each other, especially in the context of particular events, legal and political processes, spaces, and objects. To this end, this panel seeks to explore how concepts of the secular and religious emerge and shape space in European sites. Approaching space as constituted through practice and based upon the existence of plurality (Massey 2005), we examine contested spaces that are variously defined as religious and/or secular in order to better understand how these categories are enacted, conceptualized, and altered across contexts. How do certain spaces (physical or conceptual) become loci of religious and secular claims? How are these spaces figured as religious and secular, by whom and in what contexts? How do contested definitions impact the ways that actors organize spatial practices and relationships? We invite papers that explore these and related questions based on ethnographic studies of spaces that have become sites of contestation between the secular and religious.
Ongoing debates over which objects will be included in the museum, how they will be defined, how they will link to other sites of Jewish heritage around the city (through tours, performances, reference, etc.), as well as a hesitancy by... more
Ongoing debates over which objects will be included in the museum, how they will be defined, how they will link to other sites of Jewish heritage around the city (through tours, performances, reference, etc.), as well as a hesitancy by many to donate family objects all point to issues around the construction of collective memory, communal cultural heritage, and multiple narratives of the past and how these are erased in the process of producing heritage as a series of museum objects. These debates also highlight concerns about how the contemporary community – which is multilingual, multinational, and multidenominational – will be represented; in other words, who will be included in representations of the community and how will the contemporary community be defined, if at all? Finally, ongoing discussions around what will be emphasized or downplayed indicate the contested nature, not only of the past, but also of collective visions of the future as constituted through representations...
Research Interests:
Can words alone can draw people into meaningful relations of mutual respect, tolerance, and peace? Recent decades have seen a global rise in inter-religious initiatives. Of late, however, inter-religious organizations and other... more
Can words alone can draw people into meaningful relations of mutual respect, tolerance, and peace?
Recent decades have seen a global rise in inter-religious initiatives. Of late, however, inter-religious organizations and other stakeholders have expressed concerns about the challenges of talking about faith and across faiths, highlighting dialogue’s potential for failure and what might be ‘lost in translation’ in talk-based exchange (Brink-Danan 2015). Perhaps in response to these concerns, materially oriented inter-religious activities are becoming increasingly popular in Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, and elsewhere.
At the same time, the material turn in sociology, anthropology, and religious studies has shown the need to attend to the material and embodied nature of religious experience (c.f. Becker 2020; Eichler-Levine 2020; Fader 2009; Meyer and Houtman 2012; Naumescu 2017; Stadler 2022). Pushing back against earlier approaches focused narrowly on belief and text, scholars across these disciplines have explored embodied practices and material engagements. Thinking through space (Simmonds 2019; Victor 2022) and buildings (Bano & Benadi 2018; Coleman 2019), clothing and makeup (Badder forthcoming; Sagir 2021), light, music, and sound (Rakow 2020), aesthetics (Esposti 2018), ruins and archaeological sites (Hanscam 2018), and many more material forms, this wide-ranging body of work showcases the ways and contexts in which different objects and materials enable or support religious feelings. This body of work demonstrates the central role that material elements and ‘sensational forms’ (Meyer 2011) play in cultivating connections, belongings, and community across various religious groups.
Inspired by this turn and drawing on the growing literature on inter-religious relations (Egorova 2018; Everett and Gidley 2018; Hadžimuhamedović 2018; Özyürek 2022; Sheldon 2022; Taragin-Zeller forthcoming; Walton 2016) in a post-pandemic world where people are renegotiating face-to-face encounters (Kasstan 2022), this conference will explore materiality in the context of inter-religious encounters. We are seeking papers that explore questions in this area, including:
- How do material elements – from buildings to food to bodies – enable inter-religious relations, shape the texture of those relations, and facilitate respect and care?
- How do materially-oriented activities bring people of different faiths into interaction with each other?
- What links between dialogue and material things are at work in these various encounters?
- How is this process understood to build respect and peace?
- What are ‘materials-in-action’ (Guerrettaz 2021) capable of doing that dialogue cannot?
- What happens when these material inter-religious encounters intersect with the (secular) public sphere?
By focusing on the role of the material in inter-religious encounters, we hope to reveal an aspect of inter-religious relations so far uninterrogated by scholarship on interfaith relations, complicate the ideological/material, mind/body dichotomies often erected by inter-religious discussions and initiatives, and produce novel connections and insights that will lay the foundations for further investigation and praxis in this area.
Recent decades have seen a global rise in inter-religious initiatives. Of late, however, inter-religious organizations and other stakeholders have expressed concerns about the challenges of talking about faith and across faiths, highlighting dialogue’s potential for failure and what might be ‘lost in translation’ in talk-based exchange (Brink-Danan 2015). Perhaps in response to these concerns, materially oriented inter-religious activities are becoming increasingly popular in Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, and elsewhere.
At the same time, the material turn in sociology, anthropology, and religious studies has shown the need to attend to the material and embodied nature of religious experience (c.f. Becker 2020; Eichler-Levine 2020; Fader 2009; Meyer and Houtman 2012; Naumescu 2017; Stadler 2022). Pushing back against earlier approaches focused narrowly on belief and text, scholars across these disciplines have explored embodied practices and material engagements. Thinking through space (Simmonds 2019; Victor 2022) and buildings (Bano & Benadi 2018; Coleman 2019), clothing and makeup (Badder forthcoming; Sagir 2021), light, music, and sound (Rakow 2020), aesthetics (Esposti 2018), ruins and archaeological sites (Hanscam 2018), and many more material forms, this wide-ranging body of work showcases the ways and contexts in which different objects and materials enable or support religious feelings. This body of work demonstrates the central role that material elements and ‘sensational forms’ (Meyer 2011) play in cultivating connections, belongings, and community across various religious groups.
Inspired by this turn and drawing on the growing literature on inter-religious relations (Egorova 2018; Everett and Gidley 2018; Hadžimuhamedović 2018; Özyürek 2022; Sheldon 2022; Taragin-Zeller forthcoming; Walton 2016) in a post-pandemic world where people are renegotiating face-to-face encounters (Kasstan 2022), this conference will explore materiality in the context of inter-religious encounters. We are seeking papers that explore questions in this area, including:
- How do material elements – from buildings to food to bodies – enable inter-religious relations, shape the texture of those relations, and facilitate respect and care?
- How do materially-oriented activities bring people of different faiths into interaction with each other?
- What links between dialogue and material things are at work in these various encounters?
- How is this process understood to build respect and peace?
- What are ‘materials-in-action’ (Guerrettaz 2021) capable of doing that dialogue cannot?
- What happens when these material inter-religious encounters intersect with the (secular) public sphere?
By focusing on the role of the material in inter-religious encounters, we hope to reveal an aspect of inter-religious relations so far uninterrogated by scholarship on interfaith relations, complicate the ideological/material, mind/body dichotomies often erected by inter-religious discussions and initiatives, and produce novel connections and insights that will lay the foundations for further investigation and praxis in this area.