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Politics of misrecognition
What would secularity look like if we approached it through the perhaps vague rubric of “indigenous ‘religions’”? (The diacritics will hereafter be taken as understood.) Will we ever know? Most...
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The future of China’s past: An interview with Mayfair Yang
Anthropologist Mayfair Yang teaches in the Religious Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She has done pioneering work discovering, describing, and reflecting on the fate...
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Secularism, lexical ordering, and resistance to dialogue
Akeel Bilgrami’s paper is very rich; I cannot speak to all its arguments. I focus on his principal concern: his desire to amend Charles Taylor’s definition of secularism so that the rights to free...
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Traditional, African, religious, freedom?
Having returned from Uganda within the last few months, it might be expected that I would address the internationally infamous Anti-Homosexuality Bill that has reared its head again, supported more...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Politics of misrecognition
What would secularity look like if we approached it through the perhaps vague rubric of “indigenous ‘religions’”? (The diacritics will hereafter be taken as understood.) Will we ever know? Most...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The future of China’s past: An interview with Mayfair Yang
Anthropologist Mayfair Yang teaches in the Religious Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She has done pioneering work discovering, describing, and reflecting on the fate...
View ArticleNative American civil religion?
At Trans/Missions, Lee Gilmore reflects on the opening blessing at Obama’s Tucson speech last week by Carlos Gonzales, a medical doctor on the faculty of the University of Arizona who identifies as...
View ArticleRhetoric and authority
At Notes from the Social Field, Ernesto Castañeda reflects on President Obama’s rhetorical performance in the aftermath of the shootings in Tucson: The precedent was set by Professor Carlos Gonzales...
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Secularism, lexical ordering, and resistance to dialogue
Akeel Bilgrami’s paper is very rich; I cannot speak to all its arguments. I focus on his principal concern: his desire to amend Charles Taylor’s definition of secularism so that the rights to free...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Wild Religion: Tracking the Sacred in South Africa
In his new publication, Wild Religion: Tracking the Sacred in South Africa, David Chidester explores South African indigenous religious heritage and the meaning and power of this religion in a changing...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Traditional, African, religious, freedom?
Having returned from Uganda within the last few months, it might be expected that I would address the internationally infamous Anti-Homosexuality Bill that has reared its head again, supported more...
View ArticleA tale of two burdens
In his landmark essay, Nomos and Narrative, the late legal scholar Robert Cover wrote about the jurispathic function of courts—that is, its ability to quash other commitments and forms of...
View ArticleIs the “native” secular?
Headlines scream of burgeoning populism around the world, but the shift in politics today could also be described as a return of nativism, and perhaps even of a certain indigeneity. Politicians speak...
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Secular Christian power and the spiritual invention of nations
In the Americas, missionary colonialism prospered on the sharp edge of secular Christian power. Cutting up land with a blade that reflected Christian glory on one side and secular state governance on...
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The river is not a person: Indigeneity and the sacred in Aotearoa New Zealand
Earlier this year, the New Zealand Parliament passed a remarkable piece of legislation declaring the Whanganui River to be a legal person. This was quickly taken up by global media: “New Zealand...
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Sacrality, secularity, and contested indigeneity
Indigenous peoples articulate their indigeneity within the political and legal language of secularism, even as it renders certain claims to indigeneity illegible. In this short essay, I examine the...
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Indigenous protective occupation and emergent networks of spirited refusal
The spirited refusal of conceited and deaf forms of state secularity is on stark display in many contemporary protest movements. This is especially true in Native contexts wherein “Indigenous” is a...
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Secularism and the Animist Indigene
In the prompt that we sent to the authors participating in this forum, Vincent Lloyd and I asked a series of questions about the relationship between indigeneity and secularity: “How is indigeneity...
View ArticleOn category-mistakes and androgynous divinities
In his book entitled Ethiopia Unbound, published in 1911, the eclectic Gold Coast (now Ghana) journalist, scholar, and lawyer Joseph E. Casely Hayford describes an encounter between two young men in...
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