Philosophy, Anthropology, and Religion

2018.  University of Nebraska Press.  Anthropology of North America Series.
In Religious, Feminist, Activist, Laurel Zwissler investigates the political and religious identities of women who understand their social-justice activism as religiously motivated. Placing these women in historical context as faith-based activists for social change, this book discusses what their activities reveal about the public significance of religion in the pluralistic context of North America and in our increasingly globalized world. Zwissler’s ethnographic interviews with feminist Catholics, Pagans, and United Church Protestants reveal radically different views of religious and political expression and illuminate how individual women and their communities negotiate issues of personal identity, spirituality, and political responsibility.

This article examines historically competing categories of magic and religion and their gendered traces in the history of religious studies. On one hand, we have a genealogy that traces the term, “magic”, back to an early modern European Christianity trying to understand itself through contrast with an imagined heresy that comes to be personified with a woman’s face. On the other, we have contemporary political and religious communities that use the identification as Witches to reverse this version of dichotomous Christian gaze and legitimize religious difference, which also comes to be symbolized by a female body. Between these historical moments we have the beginning of the academic study of religion, the theoretical turn in which Christian-dominant scholarship comes to see itself on a continuum with, rather than opposed to, different religions, as first characterized by cultural evolution theories about the origins of religion. Especially given the field’s theological roots, examining the constructed relationships between religion and magic, both of which represent crucial foci for early theorists, through the analytical lens of gender, which does not, provides opportunities to surface implicit assumptions of the current field about what is and is not worth studying.

Part of a special roundtable on Black Panther (2018), directed by Ryan Coogler. This review analyzes engagement with the movie as a religious experience and considers some political implications of both its storyline and reception. In particular, the piece focuses on constructions of race, especially in relationship to Africa and African Americans, as well as practical tensions around commodifying dissent.

While contemporary discussions about witchcraft include reinterpretations and feminist reclamations, early modern accusations contained no such complexity. It is this historical witch as misogynist nightmare that the film,The Witch: A New England Folktale (2015), expresses so effectively. Within the film, the very patriarchal structures that decry witchcraft – the Puritan church from which the family exiles itself, the male headship to which the parents so desperately cling, the insistence, in the face of repeated failure, on the viability of the isolated nuclear family unit – are the same structures that inevitably foreclose the options of the lead character, Thomasin.
https://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/jrf/vol22/iss3/6

Whereas much literature focuses on ways that Christian discourses can perpetuate homophobia and transmisogyny, there is less scholarly attention focused on Christian groups that embrace people with diverse gender and sexual identities. As this article demonstrates, it is precisely because of their traditional marginalization that active inclusion of LGBTQ people may come to serve as a signifier of less institutionally oriented and more socially progressive forms of religiosity, especially for communities actively negotiating intersecting neoliberal oppressions. Drawing on sustained fieldwork with a progressive Protestant congregation, this project analyzes two of the community’s foundational narratives: one of a minister coming out as lesbian; and one of giving up their church building. As members connect these stories to their more recent embrace of the first known transwoman to be ordained in the denomination, they reveal tensions surrounding power, embodiment, and sexuality at the core of contemporary conversations about North American religion.

Chapter in volume edited by Anna Fedele and Kim Knibbe, Gendering the Study of Religion in the Social Sciences series, Routledge.

The spiritual marketplace (Roof 1993) is one result of particular conceptions of secularism, in which religious participation becomes optional and specific religions are personal choices.  Further, bricolage spirituality is grounded in ideas of consumption as liberating and a sign of personal agency.  In North American public space hard-policed tensions between secularity and religion in the public sphere nonetheless allow a third category of “spirituality” to flourish.  The category of spirituality highlights the fuzziness of the public/private split and ambivalences about where religion is supposed to fall in the divide.  In the West, the division historically relegated all non-economic transactions to the private, the traditionally feminine domain.  Yet the market also intervenes in intimacies, with domestic consumption symbolizing care-taking and affective attachment to family, that is, women’s moral value.  The double edged messages of domestic consumption as a moral virtue and as frivolous, even corrupting in its required engagement with the outside world, create a historically familiar problem for women, caught in the middle as conduits between the public, in this case the market, and the private, in this case home and heart. 

This project brings analysis of these historical trends together with field-work on a major fair-trade organization in the USA and Canada that works with volunteers, predominantly women.  I investigate how participants negotiate between their loyalty to the Christian group who founded the project and their desire to compete in a secularized retail market.  In this struggle, the language of spirituality serves both to present the stores and their household items to customers as non-religious, and to justify this presentation as nonetheless faithful to the original religious roots of the fair-trade project.  Spirituality becomes an attempt to promote gendered ethical values, originally grounded in a particular religious community, as universal.

Anthropologists spend our time asking questions: of our interlocutors; of social systems; of theories; of ourselves. This is what we have done, what we do. In this current moment, many of us are trying to use ethnographic work, our own and each other’s, to make sense of right now, to try to understand and work our way out of rabid, foaming nationalism based in racist white supremacy, conservative evangelical Christian chauvinism, and thieving oligarchy. How do you tell the truth about abusive power when the very narratives created to reinforce that power have already subsumed criticism as proving the righteousness of its domination? How do you analyze a dehumanizing system while honoring the humanity of those caught up within it? Using the tools of affect theory to struggle through these questions, in Biblical Porn Jessica Johnson makes several important contributions to the anthropology of religion, as well as illuminating one particular nexus of religion and politics within contemporary American culture.