Infrastructures of Economic Imaginaries: Prosperity, Extraction, and Apocalypse

This paper examines how spiritual power becomes a marketable resource in contemporary Nigerian charismatic and prophetic churches. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork across southwestern Nigeria, I analyze the circulation of anointed commodities such as oil, handkerchiefs, bracelets, and prophetic “insurance” packages as infrastructures of religious authority and economic survival. Rather than dismissing these goods as signs of corruption or excess, I argue that they function as vernacular technologies of risk management in contexts of unemployment, state failure, and everyday precarity. Through pricing, branding, and mediated distribution, pastors transform divine access into purchasable protection, recasting spiritual security as exchangeable value. These objects operate as multi-layered currencies that materialize hope while stratifying belonging along lines of class and gender. By theorizing sacred commerce as political economy rather than decline, the paper shows how markets reorganize charisma, inequality, and religious life. The study offers an African grounded account of religion, capitalism, and moral economy.

This paper examines how finance-dominated capitalism at the national scale creates a cycle of debt and a distorted form of desire, focusing on the South Korean housing market, where housing has become an investment rather than a place to live. First, it analyzes South Korean social phenomena in which every facet of life is translated into the language of finance, with particular emphasis on the “Republic of Apartments” phenomenon. Drawing on Kathryn Tanner’s concepts of “chained to the past” and “unbreakable continuity,” this paper illustrates how loans, investments, and housing constitute social inequality. Second, being chained to debt can be understood as a confinement within a self-created, distorted form of desire. Individuals create their own destiny; however, such destiny is markedly constrained. Drawing on the Lord’s Prayer and Jubilee traditions, this paper ultimately suggests radical forgiveness to break the chains of debt and foster a new understanding of religious desire.

This presentation draws from ethnographic research in Brazil to examine the recent paradoxical convergence of prosperity theology and apocalypticism in evangelical circulation of Judeo-Christian imagery. Whereas conventional approaches to Christian nationalism and Zionism tend to emphasize theological beliefs, this presentation draws from media studies and linguistic anthropology to focus on Judeo-Christian imagery as the effect of an evangelical economy of images blending past, present, and future into a universal history available (only) to those who embrace it. I pursue this argument through three case studies: first, I read a widely circulated evangelical theory of the Judeo-Christian origins of Brazil as a retroactive providential narrative running through modern-day Israel. Second, I read US pastor Larry Huch’s visit to Brazil as the formation of a pseudo-ethnic concept of spiritual kinship. Finally, I read a Brazilian seminar based in an Israeli West Bank settlement as a mediatized sanctification of war.

Muslim organizations have been important actors in the development of Muslim halal stand-up comedy circuits. Recognizing comedy's value for fundraising and community outreach, Islamic charities such as Penny Appeal and Human Appeal have run benefit comedy tours across the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom since 2015. These organizations have actively advanced the career prospects of numerous Muslim comedians by connecting them with large audiences and increasing their international exposure. Such comedians include US performers Yasmin Elhady, Moses the Comic, Preacher Moss and Omar Regan.

This paper considers how Muslim comics and philanthropists collaboratively intervene and invest in different futures. It specifically analyzes how Muslim comedy participates in the development of new communal horizons, the activation of international solidarities, and the evolution of giving practices. In doing so, it attends to the industry politics shaping the expansion of Muslim comedy circuits and the interdependent relationship between comedy and philanthropy.

Petroleum histories often place oil hunters into opposing camps: the rational, honest geologist (also called rockhound) versus the occult, unscrupulous doodlebugologist (oil diviner) either or both of whom work for the rugged, individualistic wildcatter (independent oil operator). However, this paper argues that framing doodlebug-rockhound relations as a dramatic showdown between occult practices and the scientific method misses the many spatial and rhetorical similarities between the two approaches to petroleum prospecting. Rather than focusing all attention on the line between true versus false subsurface methods, I argue that wildcatters, rockhounds, and doodlebugs work together to shift the stratigraphy of truth (scientific, mythic, and divine) from heavenly heights to hidden depths. Thinking doodlebugology with, rather than against, geology demonstrates the ways both fields help usher in a respatialization of truth as something buried, and value as that which comes from correctly locating and extracting this hidden substance.