Major Field: Religion, Science, and Critical Secular Studies

This field attends to the historical processes whereby conceptual binaries get established and mobilized toward (i) the formation of “secularization” as a modern philosophy of history, (ii) the “secular” as a modern epistemic domain, and (iii) “secularity” as a modern political doctrine. It thus also attends to (iv) the role of the social and human sciences in the production and reproduction of these processes, and the question of how they might (re)constitute the project of critique in relation to them.

This field also aims to identify, in a connected fashion, (v) the social dynamics in Europe and its colonies, which brought about a distinction between “religion” and “science” as a presumed “natural kind,” in order to problematize the social labor and institutional formation that both drive and have been driven by this imagined bifurcation. It pays close attention to (vi) the catalytic work done by notions and processes of disenchantment in these dynamics.

With pragmatic intent, the field will be organized around three prominent trajectories of critical work in the recent history of the interpretive human sciences, including and especially anthropology. All three bear directly in the problem at the center of this field, and to the methodological and ethical question of anthropology’s relation to these developments. These trajectories have only recently been brought into closer conversation. One goal of this field is thus to decipher their potential interrelations:

1. The critical genealogy of the West, and the rise of critical secular studies—disenchantment and the question of secularization.
2. Post-Weberian critiques of symbolic anthropology and the ontological dualism implied in a presumed split between “meaning-making” humans and ostensibly “non-symbolic” realities beyond the human—disenchantment and the question of empiricism.
3. Decoloniality and the politics of re-enchantment, including the proposed re-enchantment of materiality and buffering of older modes of materialist critique—disenchantment and the question of power.

In the spirit of case-based inquiry, this field will give attention to how these developments intersect with current scholarship on Soviet culture, Russian Cosmism, and cosmonautics.

Reading List.

1. Critical Secular Studies ✭ Disenchantment and the question of secularization

Asad, Talal. 2003. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Asad, Talal, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, and Saba Mahmood. 2013. Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech. New York: Fordham University Press.

Bhargava, Rajeev, ed. 2005. Secularism and Its Critics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Blumenberg, Hans. 1983. The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Casanova, José. 1994. Public Religions in the Modern World. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press.

Cavanaugh, William T. 2009. The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Certeau, Michel de. 2000. The Possession at Loudun. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press.

Harrison, Peter. 2015. The Territories of Science and Religion. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press.

Mahmood, Saba. 2016. Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Milbank, John. 2006. Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason. Malden: Blackwell Publishing.

Taylor, Charles. 2007. A Secular Age. Cambridge: Belknap Press.

2. The ontological turn and its discontents ✭ Disenchantment and the question of empiricism

Allen, Jafari Sinclaire, and Ryan Cecil Jobson. 2016. “The Decolonizing Generation: (Race and) Theory in Anthropology since the Eighties.” Current Anthropology 57 (2): 129–48. https://doi.org/10.1086/685502.

Argyrou, Vassos. 2017. “Ontology, ‘Hauntology’ and the ‘Turn’ That Keeps Anthropology Turning.” History of the Human Sciences 30 (1): 50–65. https://doi.org/10.1177/0952695116684310.

Bessire, Lucas, and David Bond. 2014. “Ontological Anthropology and the Deferral of Critique.” American Ethnologist 41 (3): 440–56. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.12083.

Boellstorff, Tom. 2016. “For Whom the Ontology Turns: Theorizing the Digital Real.” Current Anthropology 57 (4): 387–407. https://doi.org/10.1086/687362.

Bynum, Caroline Walker. 2011. Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Carrithers, Michael, Matei Candea, Karen Sykes, Martin Holbraad, and Soumhya Venkatesan. 2010. “Ontology Is Just Another Word for Culture: Motion Tabled at the 2008 Meeting of the Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory, University of Manchester.” Critique of Anthropology 30 (2): 152–200. https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X09364070.

Fernando, Mayanthi. 2019. SuperNatureCulture: Human/Nonhuman Entanglements beyond the Secular. School for Advanced Research. https://youtu.be/OBBKeXlq2Lw.

Graeber, David. 2015. “Radical Alterity Is Just Another Way of Saying ‘Reality’: A Reply to Eduardo Viveiros de Castro.”

Holbraad, Martin, Morten Axel Pedersen, and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. 2014. “The Politics of Ontology: Anthropological Positions.” Fieldsights. January 13, 2014. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/the-politics-of-ontology-anthropological-positions.

Josephson-Storm, Jason A. 2017. The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press.

Kohn, Eduardo. 2013. How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human. Berkeley: University of California Press.

———. 2014. “What an Ontological Anthropology Might Mean.” Fieldsights. January 13, 2014. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/what-an-ontological-anthropology-might-mean.

Lebner, Ashley, Paolo Heywood, Sarah Franklin, and Morten Axel Pedersen. 2017. “Interpreting Strathern’s ‘Unconscious’ Critique of Ontology.” Social Anthropology 25 (2): 221–33. https://doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12368.

Marshall, Wende Elizabeth. 2012. Potent Mana: Lessons in Power and Healing. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Ochoa, Todd Ramón. 2007. “Versions of the Dead: Kalunga, Cuban-Kongo Materiality, and Ethnography.” Cultural Anthropology 22 (4): 473–500.

Povinelli, Elizabeth A. 2016. Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism. Durham: Duke University Press.

Ramos, Alicida Rita. 2012. “The Politics of Perspectivism.” Annual Review of Anthropology 41: 481–94. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-092611-145950.

Spice, Anne. 2018. “Fighting Invasive Infrastructures: Indigenous Relations against Pipelines.” Environment and Society 9 (1): 40–56. https://doi.org/10.3167/ares.2018.090104.

Steinmüller, Hans. 2019. “Anthropological Theory Is Serious Play.” Anthropology of This Century. May. http://aotcpress.com/articles/anthropological-theory-play/.

Todd, Zoe. 2016. “An Indigenous Feminist’s Take On The Ontological Turn: ‘Ontology’ Is Just Another Word For Colonialism.” Journal of Historical Sociology 29 (1): 4–22. https://doi.org/10.1111/johs.12124.

Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 2014. Cannibal Metaphysics. Translated by Peter Skafish. Minneapolis: Univocal.

Weber, Max. 2005. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. New York: Routledge.

Yates, Frances. 1972. The Rosicrucian Enlightenment. New York: Barnes and Noble Books.

3. Decoloniality with/against New Materialism ✭ Disenchantment and the question of power

Bynum, Caroline Walker. 2011. Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Dolphijn, Rick, and Iris van der Tuin, eds. 2012. New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies. Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.11515701.0001.001.

Federici, Silvia. 2004. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. New York: Autonomedia.

Hinton, Peta, Tara Mehrabi, and Josef Barla. 2015. “New Materialisms/New Colonialisms.” Unpublished Manuscript, Position Paper, AAbo Akademi University, Finland.

Lagalisse, Erica. 2019. Occult Features of Anarchism: With Attention to the Conspiracy of Kings and the Conspiracy of the Peoples. Oakland: PM Press.

Morton, Timothy. 2013. Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality. Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press.

Pandolfo, Stefania. 2018. Knot of the Soul: Madness, Psychoanalysis, Islam. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press.

Rekret, Paul. 2016. “A Critique of New Materialism: Ethics and Ontology.” Subjectivity 9 (3): 225–45. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41286-016-0001-y.

Robbins, Jeffrey W. 2016. “Renewing Materialism: Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala and the Hermeneutical Option for the Poor.” Philosophy Today 60 (3): 687–702. https://doi.org/10.5840/philtoday2016713127.

Schulz, Karsten A. 2017. “Decolonizing Political Ecology: Ontology, Technology and ‘critical’ Enchantment.” Journal of Political Ecology 24 (1): 125–43. https://doi.org/10.2458/v24i1.20789.

Staal, Jonas. 2019. “Comrades in Deep Future.” E-Flux Journal 102 (September). https://www.e-flux.com/journal/102/283568/comrades-in-deep-future/.

TallBear, Kim. 2017. “Beyond the Life/Not-Life Binary: A Feminist-Indigenous Reading of Cryopreservation, Interspecies Thinking, and the New Materialisms.” In Cryopolitics: Frozen Life in a Melting World, 179–202. Cambridge: The MIT Press.

Tsing, Anna, Heather Anne Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubandt, eds. 2017. Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Wark, McKenzie. 2016. Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene. New York: Verso.

Yusoff, Kathryn. 2015. “Queer Coal: Genealogies in/of the Blood.” PhiloSOPHIA 5 (2): 203–29.

———. 2019. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

4. Case-based inquiry ✭ Russian Cosmism, Soviet secularization, and cosmonautics

Banerjee, Anindita. 2013. We Modern People: Science Fiction and the Making of Russian Modernity. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press.

Berdiaev, Nikolai. 2008. “The Religion of Resurrection: N. F. Fedorov’s ‘Philosophy of the Common Task.’” Translated by Stephen D. Shenfield. Russian Studies in Philosophy 47 (2): 65–103. https://doi.org/10.2753/RSP1061-1967470204.

Bernstein, Anya. 2019. The Future of Immortality: Remaking Life and Death in Contemporary Russia. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Boer, Roland. 2014. “Religion and Socialism: AV Lunacharsky and the God-Builders.” Political Theology 15 (2): 188–209. https://doi.org/10.1179/1462317X13Z.00000000074.

Fedorov, Nikolai. 1990. What Was Man Created For? The Philosophy of the Common Task. Edited by Elisabeth Koutaissoff and Marilyn Minto. London: Honeyglen Publishing.

Groys, Boris. 2018. Russian Cosmism. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Krementsov, Nikolai. 2011. A Martian Stranded on Earth: Alexander Bogdanov, Blood Transfusions, and Proletarian Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

———. 2014. Revolutionary Experiments: The Quest for Immortality in Bolshevik Science and Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Peters, Benjamin. 2017. How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Rosenthal, Bernice Glatzer, ed. 1997. The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Siddiqi, Asif A. 2008. “Imagining the Cosmos: Utopians, Mystics, and the Popular Culture of Spaceflight in Revolutionary Russia.” Osiris 23 (1): 260–88. https://doi.org/10.1086/591877.

Tumarkin, Nina. 1981. “Religion, Bolshevism, and the Origins of the Lenin Cult.” The Russian Review 40 (1): 35–46. https://doi.org/10.2307/128733.

Velminski, Wladimir. 2017. Homo Sovieticus: Brain Waves, Mind Control, and Telepathic Destiny. Translated by Erik Butler. Cambridge: MIT Press.

White, James D. 2019. Red Hamlet: The Life and Ideas of Alexander Bogdanov. Chicago: Haymarket Books.

Young, George M. 2012. The Russian Cosmists: The Esoteric Futurism of Nikolai Fedorov and His Followers. Oxford: Oxford University Press.