Sam Victor
I am a social anthropologist (M.Sc., Université de Montréal; Ph.D., University of Cambridge) interested in value conflict, modalities of influence, and intellectual authority. Ethnographically, I'm attracted to situations where people find themselves pulled between polarizing commitments. My projects so far have focused on evangelical Christians in the US and in Quebec. I'm currently a FRQ-SC Post-doctoral Research Fellow and Course Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at McGill University.
My PhD dissertation is now a book project tentatively titled “After Literalism: Faith, Facts, and Intellectual Authority at an American Church”. It explores the experiences of suburban churchgoers in Nashville, Tennessee who reject biblical literalism but still struggle to let go of its moralized habits of thought. Against the backdrop of deepening political polarization, the ethnography describes a community's attempt to avoid schism while making significant institutional changes, including permitting women into leadership. The book aims to reinvigorate theoretical conversations in anthropology about when, where, and how cultures of knowledge and of ethics intersect in people’s everyday lives. It does this by clarifying our understanding of the ethical demands of intellectual authority in today’s plural world where the pressures of reflexivity have become complicated in new ways.
I'm currently working on a postdoctoral project with Hillary Kaell at McGill University (FRQ-SC Fellowship in Anthropology, 2024-2025). We are looking at a network of evangelical social entrepreneurs who transform historic church buildings into secular “community hubs”. Based on an ethnographic case study in Montreal of these religious actors’ attempts to promote the value of sacred spaces in the context of state secularism (laïcité), we are charting a path through anthropological theories about the evolving relationship between religion, ethics, and capitalism. The project is part of a wider multidisciplinary and interuniversity collaboration on urban religion in Quebec between scholars in theology, geography, and sociology (https://murel.openum.ca/).
Supervisors: Bob W. White (Department of Anthropology, Université de Montréal), Géraldine Mossière (Institut d'études religieuses, Hillary Kaell (School of Religious Studies and Department of Anthropology, McGill University), Joel Robbins (Department of Social Anthropology, and University of Cambridge)
Address: Montreal, Canada
My PhD dissertation is now a book project tentatively titled “After Literalism: Faith, Facts, and Intellectual Authority at an American Church”. It explores the experiences of suburban churchgoers in Nashville, Tennessee who reject biblical literalism but still struggle to let go of its moralized habits of thought. Against the backdrop of deepening political polarization, the ethnography describes a community's attempt to avoid schism while making significant institutional changes, including permitting women into leadership. The book aims to reinvigorate theoretical conversations in anthropology about when, where, and how cultures of knowledge and of ethics intersect in people’s everyday lives. It does this by clarifying our understanding of the ethical demands of intellectual authority in today’s plural world where the pressures of reflexivity have become complicated in new ways.
I'm currently working on a postdoctoral project with Hillary Kaell at McGill University (FRQ-SC Fellowship in Anthropology, 2024-2025). We are looking at a network of evangelical social entrepreneurs who transform historic church buildings into secular “community hubs”. Based on an ethnographic case study in Montreal of these religious actors’ attempts to promote the value of sacred spaces in the context of state secularism (laïcité), we are charting a path through anthropological theories about the evolving relationship between religion, ethics, and capitalism. The project is part of a wider multidisciplinary and interuniversity collaboration on urban religion in Quebec between scholars in theology, geography, and sociology (https://murel.openum.ca/).
Supervisors: Bob W. White (Department of Anthropology, Université de Montréal), Géraldine Mossière (Institut d'études religieuses, Hillary Kaell (School of Religious Studies and Department of Anthropology, McGill University), Joel Robbins (Department of Social Anthropology, and University of Cambridge)
Address: Montreal, Canada
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This essay proposes a moral epistemological explanation for many US evangelicals’ growing unease about proselytizing. Drawing on extensive fieldwork at a church in Nashville, Tennessee, it highlights how a particular kind of epistemological certainty became a driving value of evangelical biblicism when early nineteenth-century evangelicals attempted to apply the precepts of inductive science to textual interpretation. Members of the church I studied routinely express regret about this historical entanglement, which they blame for their denomination’s dogmatic and ultimately unsuccessful fixation on persuading other people to believe the exact same things as they do. Against ‘proselytizing’ driven by ‘the desire to be right’, my interlocutors are trying to develop a practical social ethics whose explicitly biblical inspiration, they hope, will motivate others to want to become Christians. I show thatas an analytic, religious suasion makes concepts like ‘proselytizing’ and ‘evangelism’ ethnographic again by sending them back to the field where our interlocutors themselves define and critique them. Doing this allows us to better grasp nuances in evangelicals’ own evolving ideologies and practices for making their religion intelligible to themselves and others.
Nous observons que les visions sur l'idée de vivre avec la différence, soit avec les non-chrétiens, s’expriment comme une tension fragile entre les valeurs concurrentielles de leur vision de l’hospitalité, qui est à la fois évangélique et pluraliste. Plutôt que d’identifier les changements entrepris par les membres comme étant l’émergence d’une disposition cosmopolite, nous soutenons que cette ambivalence morale est un aspect constitutif d’un savoir distinct sur l’éthique des relations sociales en contexte pluriel. En ce sens, cet article propose une remise en question du caractère normatif du cosmopolitisme en tant que barème moral de la pensée pluraliste dans les conceptualisations anthropologiques de la cohabitation interculturelle.
En conclusion, nous proposons qu’afin de mieux comprendre les discours religieux sur l’éthique des relations sociales en contexte pluriel, les chercheurs se questionnent sur l’influence de la pensée cosmopolite sur le cadre conceptuel de la convivialité et envisagent un engagement plus profond avec le travail intellectuel et éthique de nos interlocuteurs, qui va au-delà de la notion d’incommensurabilité des valeurs.
Since the late 1990s, anthropologists have increasingly turned their attention to "happiness" and "wellbeing", a field of study long dominated by moral philosophers, social psychologists, and welfare economists. This chapter reviews anthropological approaches to "happiness" and "wellbeing", and their engagement with ideas from virtue ethics, value theory, and capabilities approaches to development. Across a range of ethnographic cases in which the concepts have been applied as well as from which analogous concepts have been drawn out, we highlight the analytical tension between (a) a search for objective measures that can be used to guide efforts aimed at increasing wellbeing and reducing global inequities and (b) the exploration of cultural worlds in which different peoples conceive of and pursue "the good life" in varied and sometimes incommensurate ways. This multidisciplinary analytical field has been productive for anthropological theory, but there remains scepticism around the implications of its evaluative impulses and ambitions.
Coming mostly from fundamentalist backgrounds, the people at Heart Ridge Church are wary of their denomination’s dogmatic pursuit of certainty in biblical knowledge. Their conventional interpretative method is rooted in a form of literalism modeled explicitly on the moral epistemological precepts of early 19th century inductive science. It is, as its proponents have historically called it, “an objective method”. The people at Heart Ridge Church are in search of an alternative conception of biblical authority that, they hope, will better enable them to respond to a range of moral, social, and political challenges they are facing in the changing landscape of conservative Protestantism in the United States.
Across the chapters of this ethnography, I describe these Christians’ efforts to nudge each other away from their deeply held commitment to objectivity in textual interpretation and toward what they consider a righteously situated conception of biblical authority that embraces cultural and historical positionality. These efforts put them at odds with their own epistemic habits and intuitions. The intensely moralized tenor of their internal debates makes Heart Ridge Church a fruitful ethnographic case for theorizing epistemic virtue in anthropology. The conceptual language developed in this dissertation is intended to equip analysts to better understand the moral epistemic demands of a plural world where actively knowing one’s religion is becoming an increasingly important aspect of social life.
This essay proposes a moral epistemological explanation for many US evangelicals’ growing unease about proselytizing. Drawing on extensive fieldwork at a church in Nashville, Tennessee, it highlights how a particular kind of epistemological certainty became a driving value of evangelical biblicism when early nineteenth-century evangelicals attempted to apply the precepts of inductive science to textual interpretation. Members of the church I studied routinely express regret about this historical entanglement, which they blame for their denomination’s dogmatic and ultimately unsuccessful fixation on persuading other people to believe the exact same things as they do. Against ‘proselytizing’ driven by ‘the desire to be right’, my interlocutors are trying to develop a practical social ethics whose explicitly biblical inspiration, they hope, will motivate others to want to become Christians. I show thatas an analytic, religious suasion makes concepts like ‘proselytizing’ and ‘evangelism’ ethnographic again by sending them back to the field where our interlocutors themselves define and critique them. Doing this allows us to better grasp nuances in evangelicals’ own evolving ideologies and practices for making their religion intelligible to themselves and others.
Nous observons que les visions sur l'idée de vivre avec la différence, soit avec les non-chrétiens, s’expriment comme une tension fragile entre les valeurs concurrentielles de leur vision de l’hospitalité, qui est à la fois évangélique et pluraliste. Plutôt que d’identifier les changements entrepris par les membres comme étant l’émergence d’une disposition cosmopolite, nous soutenons que cette ambivalence morale est un aspect constitutif d’un savoir distinct sur l’éthique des relations sociales en contexte pluriel. En ce sens, cet article propose une remise en question du caractère normatif du cosmopolitisme en tant que barème moral de la pensée pluraliste dans les conceptualisations anthropologiques de la cohabitation interculturelle.
En conclusion, nous proposons qu’afin de mieux comprendre les discours religieux sur l’éthique des relations sociales en contexte pluriel, les chercheurs se questionnent sur l’influence de la pensée cosmopolite sur le cadre conceptuel de la convivialité et envisagent un engagement plus profond avec le travail intellectuel et éthique de nos interlocuteurs, qui va au-delà de la notion d’incommensurabilité des valeurs.
Since the late 1990s, anthropologists have increasingly turned their attention to "happiness" and "wellbeing", a field of study long dominated by moral philosophers, social psychologists, and welfare economists. This chapter reviews anthropological approaches to "happiness" and "wellbeing", and their engagement with ideas from virtue ethics, value theory, and capabilities approaches to development. Across a range of ethnographic cases in which the concepts have been applied as well as from which analogous concepts have been drawn out, we highlight the analytical tension between (a) a search for objective measures that can be used to guide efforts aimed at increasing wellbeing and reducing global inequities and (b) the exploration of cultural worlds in which different peoples conceive of and pursue "the good life" in varied and sometimes incommensurate ways. This multidisciplinary analytical field has been productive for anthropological theory, but there remains scepticism around the implications of its evaluative impulses and ambitions.
Coming mostly from fundamentalist backgrounds, the people at Heart Ridge Church are wary of their denomination’s dogmatic pursuit of certainty in biblical knowledge. Their conventional interpretative method is rooted in a form of literalism modeled explicitly on the moral epistemological precepts of early 19th century inductive science. It is, as its proponents have historically called it, “an objective method”. The people at Heart Ridge Church are in search of an alternative conception of biblical authority that, they hope, will better enable them to respond to a range of moral, social, and political challenges they are facing in the changing landscape of conservative Protestantism in the United States.
Across the chapters of this ethnography, I describe these Christians’ efforts to nudge each other away from their deeply held commitment to objectivity in textual interpretation and toward what they consider a righteously situated conception of biblical authority that embraces cultural and historical positionality. These efforts put them at odds with their own epistemic habits and intuitions. The intensely moralized tenor of their internal debates makes Heart Ridge Church a fruitful ethnographic case for theorizing epistemic virtue in anthropology. The conceptual language developed in this dissertation is intended to equip analysts to better understand the moral epistemic demands of a plural world where actively knowing one’s religion is becoming an increasingly important aspect of social life.