The emotional labor of media consumption

The emotional labor of media consumption

Week 8: Hindu nationalists and their in-laws

Ryan Schram
ANTH 1002: Anthropology in the world
Wednesday, September 18, 2024

Slides available at https://anthro.rschram.org/1002/2024/8.2

Main reading: Udupa and Kramer (2023)

Other reading: Mankekar and Carlan (2019); Krishnan (2023)

Missionaries go home

In the era of European imperialism, Christian missionaries have gone all over the world, and made Christianity into a truly global religion.

In many societies which were once under colonial influence, the work of missionaries is strictly controlled, or even banned.

Many societies also regulate religion in specific other ways.

• Local communities in Tuvalu (an island country in Oceania) have banned the establishment of Jehovah’s Witnesses and Seventh Day Adventist churches (Fer 2011, 465).
• It is illegal to cause someone to convert to another religion in Nepal, a crime that can be punished by fines, prison time, or deportation of foreigners (Fischer 2018).
• Governments in Sri Lanka, where the majority of people are Buddhist, have made several attempts to ban foriegn missionaries to protect the supremacy of Buddhism in the country (Hertzberg 2020).
• Malaysia defines all Malays as Muslims, and it is illegal for a Malay Muslim to covert to another religion (Ahmad, Masum, and Ayus 2016).

What is your response to these regulations and prohibitions on proselytization (making someone into a convert)?

Talk amongst yourself for a moment, and then let’s see what our reactions are.

Anti-proselytization laws, yea or nay?

Let’s take the pulse of this class.

Go to https://menti.com and use code 4821 7779. On a scale rate how much you agree with each statement.

You can also use this URL: https://www.menti.com/algdbpfv1vsd.

If you are unsure how to answer, that’s a good sign.

These questions have no correct answer, and there is no single way of looking at them.

This is a link to the results: https://www.mentimeter.com/app/presentation/n/alkdbix9yvgpe2amoabpnaptzrux6pt7/present

One nation under ____.

Every society has answered these questions in its own way.

Many countries have a statement in their constitutions about having a special relationship to a national religion.

• For instance there’s the Church of England or the Church of Finland.
  • But those are really old, so you might want to dismiss them as relics.
• Many countries created in the 20th century do this as well.
  • PNG, Samoa, Zambia are Christian countries
  • Malaysia is an Islamic federation. Pakistan is an Islamic republic.

A national religion and religious nationalism are paradoxes for European thought

European conceptions of nation and of religion make it hard to understand how other societies relate to religion.

Christianity shapes the way people think about the relationship between religion and society.

• In Christian thinking, morality is a matter of individual beliefs. This tendency is only emphasized in Protestantism.
• The European model of a liberal nation-state also promises that religion is individual, private, and has no bearing on whether a person has rights.
• This kind of nation-state is, almost by definition, a secular state:
  • Each person has a right to their own religious affiliation and beliefs.
  • The state is neutral with respect to religion.
  • Religious practice and expression is something that belongs in the private domain.

Secularism influences how the social sciences think about social change

Gellner and Anderson are two examples of how many scholars have thought about how societies change.

• Many scholars think that all societies move along the same linear path from a primitive condition toward a modern type of society.
• They may also assume that there is a special kind of change that causes a fundamental shift, a total transformation.
  • Marx is one example. The historical emergence of private property is what induces a shift to a fundamentally new kind of society.

Max Weber’s theories of society and social change

For Max Weber, social change is a process of rationalization.

• Rationalization is a movement towards a position in which “one can, in principle, master all things by calculation” (Weber [1919] 1946, 139).
• People and groups move away from traditional habits to formal, explicit rules and procedures as the basis for social patterns and systems.
• Social institutions become more specialized in their functions. Economics is separated from other domains; the functions of law and order are placed in the hands of specific systems.

Weber’s secularization thesis

As societies undergo progressive rationalization and institutional specialization, they will also become more secular.

• Religion is limited to a private domain
• Religious belief itself will become less important as a source of meaning

However many societies all over the world defy this prediction. Societies do not inevitably become more secular.

Religion has never been purely private, and liberal societies have never been purely secular

Problem: The secularization thesis is wrong (see, i.e., Clark 2012).

Arguably, social scientists were doomed to fail. They looked at religion and society through an ethnocentric lens:

• Religion is a set of systems and institutions that flows from beliefs about the sacred, morality, and goodness.
• Questions of morality are ultimately questions about what to think.

Religion as it is lived is different from the ideal conception of religion as a set of beliefs.

• Many things we name as examples of religion are based in experiences that they give people, not ideas. People participate because of the truth they see in their religious experiences (James [1902] 1985; Csordas 1997; Luhrmann 2012).
• Many religious practices are very un-Christian; you don’t need faith in order to practice them (Asad 1983, 1993).

If religion is a set of experiences, and not a set of ideas, then religion can never really be fully private. People find their religious experiences in the context of their relationships.

Religion and nationalism, take two

Gellner and Anderson each argue that nationalism is a symptom of living in a mass, industrialized society. They take secularization for granted.

In reality, nationalism—Anderson’s homogenous “imagined community” (Anderson [1983] 2006)—will always coexist with religion as distinct, interacting sources of one’s identity.

Unpacking religious nationalism

• There are forces in society that create nationalisms, but they never fully homogenize society.
• The imaginary “homogenous, empty time” (Anderson [1983] 2006, 26) of nationalism is easy to create in centers, but harder to do on the edges.

Forces of national homogenization don’t really create complete nations:

• they create majorities.
• and, as a side-effect, they create minorities.

The idea of a religious minority within the nation likewise also means that people think of the majority in terms of a religious identity too, even if a society believes it is secular.

References and further reading

Ahmad, Nehaluddin, Ahmad Masum, and Abdul Mohaimin Ayus. 2016. “Freedom of Religion and Apostasy: The Malaysian Experience.” Human Rights Quarterly 38 (3): 736–53. https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/article/627632.

Anderson, Benedict Richard O’Gorman. (1983) 2006. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso.

Asad, Talal. 1983. “Anthropological Conceptions of Religion: Reflections on Geertz.” Man 18 (2): 237–59. https://doi.org/10.2307/2801433.

———. 1993. Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Clark, J. C. D. 2012. “Secularization and Modernization: The Failure of a ‘Grand Narrative’.” The Historical Journal 55 (1): 161–94. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X11000586.

Csordas, Thomas J. 1997. The Sacred Self: A Cultural Phenomenology of Charismatic Healing. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Fer, Yannick. 2011. “Religion, Pluralism, and Conflicts in the Pacific Islands.” In The Blackwell Companion to Religion and Violence, edited by Andrew R. Murphy, 1st ed., 461–72. Malden, Mass.: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781444395747.

Fischer, Meghan Grizzle. 2018. “Anti-Conversion Laws and the International response.” Penn State Journal of Law and International Affairs 6 (1): 1–69. https://heinonline.org/HOL/P?h=hein.journals/pensalfaw6&i=9.

Hertzberg, Michael. 2020. “The Gifts of Allurement: Anti-Conversion Legislation, Gift-Giving, and Political Allegiance in South Asia.” Journal of Contemporary Religion 35 (1): 93–114. https://doi.org/10.1080/13537903.2020.1695815.

James, William. (1902) 1985. The varieties of religious experience. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. http://archive.org/details/varietiesreligi02jamegoog.

Krishnan, Sneha. 2023. “Carceral Domesticities and the Geopolitics of Love Jihad.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 41 (6): 995–1012. https://doi.org/10.1177/02637758231212767.

Luhrmann, T. M. 2012. When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God. New York: Knopf.

Mankekar, Purnima, and Hannah Carlan. 2019. “The Remediation of Nationalism: Viscerality, Virality, and Digital Affect.” In Global Digital Cultures: Perspectives from South Asia, edited by Aswin Punathambekar and Sriram Mohan, 203–22. Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press. https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.9561751.

Udupa, Sahana, and Max Kramer. 2023. “Multiple Interfaces: Social Media, Religious Politics, and National (Un)belonging in India and the Diaspora.” American Ethnologist 50 (2): 247–59. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.13117.

Weber, Max. (1919) 1946. “Science as a Vocation.” In From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, edited by C. Wright Mills and H. H. Gerth, 129–56. New York: Oxford University Press.