2012 AAA Meeting CFP: "Making Space for Spirits"

[Jesse Ellen Davie-Kessler]

Hi all,

I am seeking faculty and graduate students interested in joining a panel that explores how anthropologists might use ethnographic method to illuminate embodied sensations of the divine. The panel abstract is included below. Please send a 250 word abstract (and any questions) to Jesse Davie-Kessler (jdavie at stanford.edu) by Friday, March 9, 2012. Thank you!

Best,

Jesse



Panel Abstract:

Anthropologists of religion face a dilemma: the divine object defining informants’ religious lives eludes our analytic grasp. The experiential evidence of spirits and gods lies outside the bounds of ethnographic certainty, which grounds itself in replicable, material evidence. For this reason, immaterial deities often disappear altogether from anthropological studies of religion. How, this panel asks, might ethnographic method illuminate others’ embodied sensations of the divine? What analytic spaces do gods and spirits already occupy in ethnographies of religion, and what do these spaces teach anthropologists about the limits and possibilities of understanding spirit-centered life-worlds? These questions are energized by the recent work of anthropologists of religion who bring a critical eye to the cultural and epistemological boundaries and bridges mediating scholars’ relationships to ethnographic subjects. This growing body of literature sharpens anthropologists' analytic tools against various forms of alterity that surface in the study of religion, addressing Western assumptions about language, materiality, and personhood. Building on this epistemological, self-reflexive approach to the study of religion, this panel takes the incommensurability between religious sensation and ethnographic analysis as a productive starting point for the study of spiritual life-forms. How do linguistic ideologies structure approaches to spiritual experience and spirits themselves? How do ethnographers address the felt perceptions of religious practitioners, and to what effect? What is the relationship between historically and culturally specific categories and sensate objects? While the papers in this panel focus on making analytic space for immaterial beings, they speak to anthropologists across the discipline, addressing key questions surrounding the translation of sensory evidence into written prose.