Ethnicity and Religion Revisited


subtheme 1

How do we make sense of diverse ethnic groups and religious beliefs in the contemporary world? Can we devise new anthropological and sociological approaches that would enable us to understand the complexities of today’s ethnic and religious tensions?

This sub-theme welcomes panels and individual papers that focus on ethnicity, relations between ethnic groups and the state, ethnic conflict, multiculturalism, ethnicity and neoliberalism, ethnicity and language-related policies, religious movements, new religious cults, and secularization and its challenges.

These topics are deemed to be of particular interest given the recurrence of ethnic and religious tensions, which are often the result of state policies aimed to either maintain and tolerate differences or to create an impression of national unity, and that are often embedded in the very notions of identity that are at the basis of state-formation and nationalisms.