Call for papers
Convenor
Kostas Retsikas
SOAS, University of London
Abstract
‘The motto IN GOD WE TRUST was placed on United States coins largely because of the increased religious sentiment existing during the Civil War. Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase received many appeals from devout persons throughout the country, urging that the United States recognize the Deity on United States coins’.
Ever since Max Weber’s publication of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (2005), the intersections of religion and the economy have been at the forefront of anthropological concerns. One of Weber’s key contributions has been to show us not only how capitalism might have emerged from within a field of Reformed theological thought and everyday worship, but primarily to give us a glimpse into a social universe in which the very distinction between economy and religion has neither been imagined nor taken hold. Taking its inspiration from Weber’s insights, the panel aims to explore the ways in which the distinction between the monetary and the ceremonial is produced and reproduced in particular instances in the contemporary world as well as to probe situations and cases in which this very distinction is either simply invalid and false for us to assume or consciously and enthusiastically resisted and nullified.
While the work of Michael Foucault (2007, 2008) has shown in great detail how, in Western Europe, the market has come to historically acquire a wholly autonomous existence and exercise an increasing influence in the production of the social, Bruno Latour (1993) has insisted that even for ‘moderns’ this development is far from a foregone conclusion. He has therefore invited researchers to look into the entangled processes of ‘purification’ and ‘hybridization’, attending to the ways in which divisions in the general flow of social life are made and remade while specific, named domains emerge in unstable and impermanent fashion. The panel encourages participants to focus ethnographically on and think critically about the tools, mechanisms and processes, conceptual as well as material, deployed in the making and unmaking of the distinction between the economic and the religious in diverse social and cultural settings. In particular, recent anthropological literature on both ‘world’ and ‘local’ religions has made the case that especially in a world full with opportunities for quick and easy profits but ultimately beset by recurrent financial crises and widespread poverty, the powers of the occult, the supernatural and divine are increasingly relied on to intervene for safeguarding livelihoods and advancing general well-being. In this context, a variety of actors, including not only Pentecostal pastors and Buddhist monks but also devoutly Christian stock brokers and Islamic economists as well as a diversity of financial institutions ranging from the Federal Reserve to Grameen Bank express, regulate and constitute the grounds of credit and faith anew. In a nutshell, the panel intends to bring attention to the myriads of micro-processes as well as a few of the ‘macro-fundamentals’ that inform the practice of market life in the 21st century at a critical juncture of their articulation with the unseen and the non-human.
References
Foucault, M. 2007. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France 1977-1978. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.
—- 2008. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France 1978-1978. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.
Latour, B. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.
Weber, M. 2005. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. London: Routledge.