In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

In contemporary Bangkok, flowers are instrumental to religious life. Buddhists daily offer fresh garlands to temples to accrue merit and to ask deities for blessings. But over the past fifty years, the craftspeople who make these garlands have been forcibly removed from the city, deemed an aesthetic “blight” to the modern landscape. What is the future of these workers in a city that at once needs them and discards them? I answer this question by analyzing an eight-tiered fresh flower chandelier created by my interlocutor, a queer flower artist, which premiered at Singapore’s international art fair in 2025. Lowering the chandelier to the ground, the garlands on the bottom broke to provide a soft bed for more expensive garlands; lower-class workers are breaking under the weight of class inequality. The future is not hopeless. Through developing expansive and intimate relationships with flowers, Bangkokians can cultivate stronger floral and human solidarities.

This paper examines how Hikaru Okuizumi’s novella The Night to Kill a Snake (1992) destabilizes religiously mediated futures—often sustained by cohesive narrative structures—by proliferating religious imagery to the point where narrativity itself collapses. Through free association, the text disperses snake metaphors drawn from Shinto myth, Genesis, Greek legend, and Japanese imperial symbolism without allowing them to converge into symbolic resolution. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s account of modern literature as repetitive language without securing memory, this paper argues that the novella’s proliferating religious imagery exposes the fragility underlying both religious futurity and interpretive desire. As images multiply, the protagonist’s imagined future unravels, and the reader’s interpretive expectations are similarly frustrated. Literary art here neither redeems nor resolves; instead, it reveals futurity as radically open, suspended within the unsettling repetition of religious language itself.

This paper studies visions of the future, apocalyptic imagination and discourses on climate change in Hindu theistic traditions as revealed in the Vaishnava Puranas (4-18 c.CE). Hindu imagination sees time as cyclic, and not linear, and understands the cyclic creation and dissolution of the universe as a repetitive and normal process that is good, desired and necessary. In the Vaishnava tradition, Vishnu and his avataras, or bodily descents, in which he incarnates in various anthropomorphic and non-anthropomorphic forms, comes down to earth in order to save humankind from natural calamities and disasters, such as floods, draughts, etc. Similarly, the proliferation of contemporary discourses on the future, climate change, are often immersed in Hindu mythology and religious culture, and cannot be ignored when discussing the issues of apocalyptic imagination and climate change in Hindu traditions. Thus, my talk seeks to explore the complex links between visions of the future, apocalyptic imagination, the mythologizing of the divine, and the mythologizing of contemporary cultural and religious discourses on climate change. 

Scholarship on religion and the body has examined sexuality, purity, and bodily discipline but rarely considers how aging transforms the moral classification of bodies. This paper argues that Islamic traditions regulated female embodiment across the life course by distinguishing between the sexually disruptive body of the young woman and the desexualized body of the elderly woman. Drawing on Islamic legal discourse, waqf endowments, and Sufi hagiography, it shows how aging reconfigured norms governing women’s visibility, mobility, and bodily interaction. Once no longer associated with fitna, elderly women could appear in courts, establish endowments, and participate in devotional life, revealing how regimes of purity and bodily discipline shifted across the life course.

As we collectively imagine future/s, insights from the Choctaw Green Corn Ceremony inspire reconnection with Mother Earth, invigorate rematriation (Maracle 1988), attend to the wisdom of our ancestors, and encourage harmonious relationships. From an Indigenous feminist perspective, hopeful future/s require practices of culture-keeping such as storytelling, which demand the active presence of the community. Prior to removal from the sacred homeland of the Choctaws, the Green Corn Ceremony was the epicenter of social and spiritual celebrations (Pesantubbee 2005). This paper will explore the key elements of this tradition that relate to kinship with Mother Earth and Father Sky, gratitude for harvest, renewal of the sun, reminder of death, ecological importance of corn, and matrilineal leadership. Choctaw wisdom from this tragically lost ceremony offers fruitful possibilities to shape survivance for our world and its creatures, including the human ones.

Vietnamese Catholicism is culturally influenced by a double layer of patriarchy: Confucianism and traditional interpretations of Catholicism. Confucian teachings, introduced through a thousand years of rule by the Chinese Han Dynasty, subordinate women in most aspects of life and have become the norm for Vietnamese social relationships and order. Likewise, the patriarchal mindset of the Catholic tradition and biblical passages that subordinate women not only reinforce but divinize Confucian thought and practices in Vietnam. Within this context, Vietnamese Catholic women struggle for equality to find their place in the Church. In this paper, I examine the gaps in gender equality and the context for women in the Vietnamese Church to recommend ways for the Vietnamese Church to improve gender equality, which I call ‘A Future in Negotiation.’ This analysis seeks to empower Vietnamese Catholic women to challenge patriarchal structures and establish a point for dialogue with male Church leaders.

Engaging with Sabrina Strings’ genealogical account of fatphobia’s Protestant origins, Michelle Lelwica’s analysis of diet culture as secularized soteriology, and clinical literature documenting weight stigma as a source of measurable trauma this paper argues that the chronic psychological harm fat people carry is not incidental to Christian theological history—it is, in significant part, its product. Applying this framework of social sin to establish the tradition’s structural complicity in the production of this harm, the paper further demonstrates that Christian communities function as sites of theological amplification, intensifying secular fat stigma through the doctrinal encoding of somatic hierarchy as moral and spiritual failure. The paper then turns constructively to retrieve tradition’s own resources as grounds for a reparative theological anthropology, refusing to condition human dignity on somatic conformity, concluding with an account of what institutional repentance requires. This is justice for fat people—liberation from oppressive systems rooted in religion.

Tea is historically entangled with Chinese Buddhism, as networks of monasteries in medieval China were predominantly growers and distributors of tea. Beyond production, Buddhist communities over the years were responsible for the ritualization of tea, contributing to a thriving culture of tea in East Asia. In contemporary Taiwan, Buddhist communities are involved in the production, circulation, ritualization, and consumption of tea. Tea is harnessed for modern forms of practice, community building, and the financial sustainability of Buddhist groups. Approaches to the place of tea and its relationship with Buddhist identities and cultivation vary in ethical, philosophical, and practical aspects. This paper examines the place of tea within the context of environmental approaches to its production, consumption, and incorporation in modern rituals. The study is based on ethnographic data, examining large-scale Buddhist monasteries and smaller-scale Buddhist grassroots communities, from the perspectives of practical, material, and social effects on Buddhist life worlds.

Looking at a case study in Sagaing, Myanmar, a main monastic hub, this paper explores how gendered structures of merit and monastic discipline often place Myanmar Buddhist nuns (thilashin) at a disadvantage when receiving food. At the same time, the ability to “make their own rules” and flexibility in practice may strategically help them in navigating these material constraints. Culinary knowledge formed in the villages together with thilashin food practices not only help in the formation of these female renunciants but also cement reciprocal relationships and responsibilities between monks and nuns as well as between monastics and the laity. These practices are essential for maintaining the sāsana, which are often dismissed as being insignificant as domestic duties.

At Cherry Blossom Zen Monastery, Vietnamese American families gather every Sunday to perform funeral rites for their dead. There, resident nuns help them navigate the perilous crossings that connect life and death. Together they chant sutras, light incense, and, most importantly, offer food to help the consciousness of the deceased move from their previous existence on to the next. Mahayana Vietnamese Buddhism teaches that, when a person passes away, their consciousness wanders for forty-nine days before being reincarnated into a new body. In this period of liminal existence, the deceased, distressed, confused, and sometimes angry, needs guidance. Living family members, also afflicted by the broad spectrum of emotions and potentially unwholesome states that accompany grief, need attention too. In this paper, I present ethnographic data to show that food serves crucial functions in enabling and conditioning the crossings that shape the experience of death at Cherry Blossom temple.

When nourishment turns to rot, what happens to Buddhist offerings to the dead? By focusing on nōkotsudō, indoor ossuary facilities that house cremated remains, this paper examines food offerings in contemporary Japanese Buddhist deathcare practice. In this context, food waste emerges not simply a matter of excess or neglect but a distinctly Buddhist problem of care. Offerings are embedded in logics of abundance in which nourishment sustains ongoing relations between living and dead. Yet these practices unfold within temple ritual economies that must manage perishable goods within institutional infrastructures. Drawing on ethnographic research in rural Japan, I show that waste emerges when multiple temporal regimes embedded in Buddhist deathcare practice, such as ritual cycles, microbial decay, bureaucratic regulation, and disaster preparedness, fall out of alignment. I describe this friction as temporal dissonance, revealing how temples become sites where abundance, decay, and ancestral care must be continually negotiated.

Tea is historically entangled with Chinese Buddhism, as networks of monasteries in medieval China were predominantly growers and distributors of tea. Beyond production, Buddhist communities over the years were responsible for the ritualization of tea, contributing to a thriving culture of tea in East Asia. In contemporary Taiwan, Buddhist communities are involved in the production, circulation, ritualization, and consumption of tea. Tea is harnessed for modern forms of practice, community building, and the financial sustainability of Buddhist groups. Approaches to the place of tea and its relationship with Buddhist identities and cultivation vary in ethical, philosophical, and practical aspects. This paper examines the place of tea within the context of environmental approaches to its production, consumption, and incorporation in modern rituals. The study is based on ethnographic data, examining large-scale Buddhist monasteries and smaller-scale Buddhist grassroots communities, from the perspectives of practical, material, and social effects on Buddhist life worlds.

Looking at a case study in Sagaing, Myanmar, a main monastic hub, this paper explores how gendered structures of merit and monastic discipline often place Myanmar Buddhist nuns (thilashin) at a disadvantage when receiving food. At the same time, the ability to “make their own rules” and flexibility in practice may strategically help them in navigating these material constraints. Culinary knowledge formed in the villages together with thilashin food practices not only help in the formation of these female renunciants but also cement reciprocal relationships and responsibilities between monks and nuns as well as between monastics and the laity. These practices are essential for maintaining the sāsana, which are often dismissed as being insignificant as domestic duties.

At Cherry Blossom Zen Monastery, Vietnamese American families gather every Sunday to perform funeral rites for their dead. There, resident nuns help them navigate the perilous crossings that connect life and death. Together they chant sutras, light incense, and, most importantly, offer food to help the consciousness of the deceased move from their previous existence on to the next. Mahayana Vietnamese Buddhism teaches that, when a person passes away, their consciousness wanders for forty-nine days before being reincarnated into a new body. In this period of liminal existence, the deceased, distressed, confused, and sometimes angry, needs guidance. Living family members, also afflicted by the broad spectrum of emotions and potentially unwholesome states that accompany grief, need attention too. In this paper, I present ethnographic data to show that food serves crucial functions in enabling and conditioning the crossings that shape the experience of death at Cherry Blossom temple.

When nourishment turns to rot, what happens to Buddhist offerings to the dead? By focusing on nōkotsudō, indoor ossuary facilities that house cremated remains, this paper examines food offerings in contemporary Japanese Buddhist deathcare practice. In this context, food waste emerges not simply a matter of excess or neglect but a distinctly Buddhist problem of care. Offerings are embedded in logics of abundance in which nourishment sustains ongoing relations between living and dead. Yet these practices unfold within temple ritual economies that must manage perishable goods within institutional infrastructures. Drawing on ethnographic research in rural Japan, I show that waste emerges when multiple temporal regimes embedded in Buddhist deathcare practice, such as ritual cycles, microbial decay, bureaucratic regulation, and disaster preparedness, fall out of alignment. I describe this friction as temporal dissonance, revealing how temples become sites where abundance, decay, and ancestral care must be continually negotiated.

Apocalyptic themes formed a central part of the rhetoric of The Legion of the Archangel Michael (1927-1941), Romania’s interwar mystico-fascist movement. Key to the Legion’s propaganda was the Satanically conceived threat of “Judeo-Bolshevism” from the East. Although the Legion’s founder and Căpitan, Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, was executed by King Carol II in 1938 and the Legion was ultimately crushed at the hands of Marshal Ion Antonescu in 1941, the notion that the apocalypse was at the gates and that only an ultranationalist government with a supreme leader at its head could save the nation continued to be mobilized by Antonescu’s genocidal personal dictatorship. I argue that the success of this apocalyptic propagandizing to the Romanian people heavily relied on mythical ideation. In addition to the self-evidently operative myth of “Judeo-Bolshevism” itself, I specifically analyze the workings of the politico-theological myth of divine kingship within this context of mystico-fascist apocalypticism.

This paper investigates Gershom Scholem's positing of an “anti-ideological turn in Jewish mysticism”. I illuminate Scholem’s thoughts on the matter by way of an appraisal of the relationship between nominalism and antinomianism in his work. Scholem assessed the mystical function of nomoi (laws) having sought to peel off and separate an ideological, discursive, temporal, and providential (nominalist) structure from the bare bones of law. By seating law below language, despite Scholem’s best attempts to argue that there is “no such thing as mysticism in the abstract”, he essentially permitted a messianic and apocalyptic isolation of the mystical law from any temporal and providential context.

This paper historicizes the power of feelings of shock at the center of antinomian expressions of sacred eros from Sabbatian to modern New Age kabbalistic sex magic. Donovan Schaefer argues that feeling functions as “a mode of creating, transferring, and consolidating space, community, and power.”[1] Medieval kabbalistic myths and rituals of sacred sexuality cultivated an oceanic feeling, unifying the practitioner with the ten sefirot and divinity itself, in the contex of a particularistic society. However, the myths obscure the homoerotic and even incestuous relationships required to make them work. Early Modern Sabbatian kabbalists engage in a sort of emotional-theological edgeplay, creating a sense of sacred shock as they expose and expand these undercurrents with explicit images of homoeroticism and incestuous, necrotic, no-future models of generation. These new emotional repertoires of sacred shock powerfully enact new theologies of self, cosmology, and universalist models of kinship incorporating religious others. 

Recent conflicts between the indigenous Parmalim community and industrial forestry in North Sumatra are often framed as disputes over land rights or environmental protection. This paper argues that such conflicts reveal a deeper ontological divergence concerning the moral status of land. Parmalim cosmology understands land as spiritually constituted through tondi, a life-force that binds humans, forests, and territory within reciprocal moral relations. By contrast, missionary Protestant theology introduced in the nineteenth century reframed land through a stewardship paradigm that conceptualizes nature as divinely entrusted resource under human management. While stewardship theology is not inherently extractive, its managerial anthropology historically aligned with colonial and postcolonial land governance. Drawing on decolonial theory and political ecology, the paper argues that Parmalim cosmology generates structural resistance to commodification by disrupting anthropocentric moral hierarchies embedded in modern land regimes. The case reveals how competing religious ontologies shape environmental futures in Southeast Asia.

This paper examines the relative disappearance of race language in the Dutch East Indies at the turn of the twentieth century under Abraham Kuyper’s Ethical Politics. Although racial discourse was widespread in European colonialism, colonial governance in Indonesia increasingly relied on the moral idioms of ethics, education, and tutelage rather than overt racial classification. I argue that this shift did not mark the end of racial hierarchy but its displacement into theological, moral, and pedagogical forms. The contrast is especially striking because Kuyper employed explicit racialized language elsewhere, including in his 1898 Princeton lectures and in his support for the Boers in South Africa. The Indonesian case shows how colonial domination could be recast as ethical responsibility while preserving structures of exclusion and inequality. Read from the present and through the lens of haunting future/s, this history suggests that racial power may survive most effectively when it no longer appears explicitly as race, but lingers in the moral vocabularies of care, tutelage, and responsibility.

The myth of the Infinito Dios presents a “heretical” cosmology that reimagines the Genesis creation account by positing a deity who precedes the Biblical God. The presentation describes the content of the Infinito Dios myth, tracing its development through the scant available source materials, which have traditionally been held in secret and hidden from researchers. The paper also speculates on the origins of the narrative within the context of ten centuries of Asian and European migrations to the Philippines and the beliefs and ideas that accompanied them. There are reasonable arguments and circumstantial evidence suggesting that the myth of the Infinito Dios has roots in dualist and Gnostic cosmologies in the Mediterranean world and Silk Route, specifically Manichaeism.

This paper examines the role of Islam, local customs, and modernity in influencing Maldivian marriage culture based on ethnographic research. I explore the causes and norms surrounding the divorce rate in the Maldives that is currently the world’s highest and yet unaddressed in Anglophone Islamicist scholarship. While religiously inclined communities are often considered more likely to preserve practices of lifelong monogamy due to their presumed commitment to notions of sexual purity, Muslim societies are thus stereotyped even more frequently not only in orientalist imagination but also by modern Muslims themselves. An increase in marital breakdown in a Muslim society is attributed to Western hegemony and the legacies of colonialism on indigenous legal systems that presumably devalued lifelong marital bonds and encouraged consumeristic, flippant, "transactional" attitudes towards romantic relationships. I question the premises of such binary assumptions by exploring the legal and ethical dimensions of Muslim romantic life in the Maldives.

This paper examines how Islamic jurists on the Shariah boards of Islamic financial institutions in North America adapt Islamic law to local financial regulatory systems. While scholarship on Islamic legal adaptation in North America has focused mainly on family law and arbitration, the ethical dimensions of Islamic finance remain understudied. Drawing on textual analysis and ethnographic research, the paper shows how Islamic law and finance, which prohibit interest, are made workable within regulatory systems structured around it. It argues that jurists use fiqh al-aqalliyyāt (jurisprudential accommodations for Muslims as minorities) to create pragmatic, profitable financial products while preserving claims to Islamic legality. By analyzing how Shariah boards structure financial contracts and justify their legal-ethical reasoning, the paper positions Islamic finance as a key site for understanding how Muslim minorities in North America pursue financial prosperity without compromising religious commitments.

At the behest of the Sunni-Muslim monarchy and state apparatus, the densely-populated, GCC island-nation of Bahrain has undergone accelerated urbanization and architectural programs, particularly since the Arab Spring. This is most visible in Manama, the political capital, and in Muharraq, selected Arab cultural capital for 2018. However, the majority Shi‘i Muslim community has enacted different visual cultural and urbanism projects, largely beyond foreign attention. This presentation will focus on the ma’tam, a commemorative ritual space akin to the Husayniyyas of certain other Ithna‘ashari Shi‘ite societies.  We examine why Shi‘ites in Bahrain have begun to adorn or re-adorn such spaces of memory in ornamental and epigraphic programs distinct from those on Sunni mosques. In contrasting their architecture and communal narratives, we investigate the different relations the communities prioritize with foreign interests, but also the different policies and populations that successive US administrations have prioritized in diplomacy with Bahrain and local reactions.

What may be involved in a Muslim’s aspiration to leave Islam? How can experiences of leaving Islam complicate our conceptions of Islam as an object of scholarly inquiry? I ask these questions by drawing on fieldwork among non-observant Muslims in Kyrgyzstan—those estranged from key aspects of Islamic observance by the Soviet state. I focus particularly on the story of Begimai, a woman in her fifties who, after an unpleasant encounter at a mosque, attempted—but did not succeed—to convert to Christianity. I examine several experiential fields that mediated Begimai’s relationship with Islam, including the conceptual legacy of Soviet secularization, the post-Soviet Islamic revival, and the agency of Begimai’s deceased ancestors. This exploration illuminates a relational web of forces through which Begimai’s (in)ability to imagine a future without Islam was articulated. The paper concludes with a broader argument about how non-observant or ambiguous ways of living Islam may be conceptualized.

Colonial courts have treated Hindu deities as legal persons since the mid-nineteenth century: the deity was seen as a non-human beneficiary of its wealth, and human caretakers could act as its agents to make decisions on its behalf and exercise its “divine will.” Until the mid 1900s, the deity was represented by shebaits and caretakers whose proximity to the deity was sanctioned by the scriptures. However, as corruption allegations against shebaits became commonplace, courts allowed the deity to be represented by any worshipper, termed the “disinterested next friend,” who could appear in Court claiming to represent the deity’s will. This paper examines the increasing importance of the “next friend” in temple property disputes. Drawing on case laws and secondary scholarship on Anglo-Hindu Law, I show how the birth and evolution of this category of “next friend” was a political maneuver, which found resonance in neither  English law nor Hindu scriptures. 

Village deities in the Western Himalaya agentively participate in the everyday lives of their devotees. A primary form in which they do so is through their raths—portable wooden palanquins carried on the shoulders of male devotees. The raths are understood to embody the deities and manifest their will, which, devotees report, is communicated through the palanquins’ autonomous movement, to which the carriers’ bodies respond. In this paper, I explore the embodied socialization process through which male community members are trained and gradually integrated into this ritual performance. Drawing on scholarship on material religion and on two decades of ethnographic research in the region, I illustrate how this process unfolds in gradual stages—from early childhood games to full adult performative integration—during which practitioners learn to transform their bodies from active producers of choreographed movement to responsive conduits of what is experienced as divine agency.

Drummer-priests called pampaikkārar mediate divine presence across diverse vernacular Hindu ritual performances in Tamil-speaking South India. Through expressive and aesthetic practices (i.e., lyrical and material alaṅkāram), they invite deities and ancestors to take up residence in oil lamps and the bodies of human hosts. Central to the drummers’ divine mediation is their musical and ritual virtuosity and their aesthetic artistry. Ritual participants who embody and give voice to the divine must also evince certain qualities and characteristics. Drawing on long-term fieldwork, this paper centers divine agency as the crucial factor in whether the deities and the dead will manifest and speak, if the ritual will proceed, and whether it will meet its goals. Entreaties and offerings from participating devotees and the musicians’ percussive skill and creative ritual interventions notwithstanding, it is a matter of divine will whether these entities respond to the exertions of their human mediators.

In the suburb of RC Puram, Hyderabad city, the “non-existent” village of Mandumoola is reconstituted through the annual Mallanna jatara. Organized by the Kuruma caste association of displaced Kuruma caste members, the festival serves as a space for nostalgic recuperation of an ancestral lifeworld lost to state land acquisition and physical displacement. This paper analyzes a pivotal ritual innovation of the annual festival: a Poturaju (guardian-deity) sheep sacrifice performed at a sacred space disputed between the members of Kuruma and the Vaddera castes. I argue that the “possessed” body of the Ogguvandlu ritual specialist functions as a ritual arbiter, mediating and representing a “divine will” to resolve claims over sacrality and space. By situating this agency within broader caste-informed notions of the nature of the divine and local representative politics, I demonstrate how claims of representing and enacting “divine will” enable the Kurumas to claim disputed space through ritual action.

Is spirit possession a form of darśan? Does multisensory embodiment intensify the idea of contact inherent in darśan? Does it collapse the distance between the seer and the seen and the distinction between seeing and becoming? In this paper, I draw on fieldwork among Indo-Caribbean Madrasi healers in Guyana and New York to 1) situate spirit possession within the field of Hindu visuality and 2) propose a multisensory theory of darśan. The Madrasis are a religious minority within the Indo-Caribbean diaspora. They cohere around south Indian ancestral deities and practice spirit possession, drumming, and healing rituals. Smoke, drums, neem, and water allow Madrasi healers to “see through the eyes” of the deity. Possession is mediated through the senses. The Madrasis’ multisensory rituals of possession urge us to review and revise ocularcentric interpretations of Hindu ways of perceiving the world (pratyakṣa), entering bodies (āveśa), and seeing and being seen (darśan).