Tag Archives: ritual

The nascent anthropology of Christianity highlights rupture as central to conversion. Yet thick ethnography of a Bidayuh village in Malaysian Borneo reveals how conversion can also foster modes of thinking and speaking about continuity between Christianity and “the old ways.” Through a study of the shifting moral and religious topography of a community in which three churches coexist alongside a few elderly animist practitioners, I argue that such discourses and practices of continuity highlight the pluralistic and sometimes contradictory nature of Christianization. At the same time, they generate an understanding of conversion as a temporal and relational positioning that encompasses both converts and nonconverts.

In this article, I explore articulations between ritual practice, public sociality, and the politics of immigration in Catalonia (Spain). I investigate phenomena associated with a vernacular interculturalist project known in Catalan as convivència (living together), an alternative to both xenophobic and liberal multiculturalist discourses circulating in Europe. I focus on the capacity of ritual practice to shape embodied socialities between hosts and immigrants and contextualize these dynamics by asking, what congeries of history, public reasoning, techniques of sociality, and policy feed momentum toward polarization or toward pluralism?

Many Alevis in Turkey today view their community’s traditions of ritual weeping as anachronistic in the modern world. In this article, I situate such sensibilities within a political context in which Turkish state agencies have vigorously regulated norms of public affect. I describe the efforts of one Alevi group to counter such sensibilities by cultivating a susceptibility to affective excitation in line with Shi‘i traditions of lamentation. The group’s practices are exemplary of many Islamic revival movements, which aim simultaneously to spread a religious message and to transform the affective conditions in which that message might be received.