Anthropology of Religion Unit

We invite proposals from the full range of ethnographic theories and methods exploring diverse traditions, regions, topics, periods, and standpoints from across the disciplines of Anthropology and Religious Studies.

The following areas are of particular interest for individual and panel submissions for the 2023 meetings in San Antonio, Texas:

• Building Bodies of Knowledge. How we negotiate knowledge production in research, with particular attention to community-engaged scholarship, collaboration, and diversifying expertise. 

• Critical Positionality. How we engage with the ethical dimensions of research praxis, with particular attention to relationality, processes of ethical compromise and being compromised.

• Failure. How we experience failure as scholars, in seeking research opportunities, in fieldwork, in theorizing and analysis, in writing, and in responding to the reception of our scholarship. 

• Religion & Indigeneity. Explorations of the ways in which “indigeneity” as a category is made and negotiated in religious life, with particular attention to nationalism, racialization, and kinship.

• Teaching the Anthropology of Religion. Best practices for doing the ethnography of religion in undergraduate and graduate contexts, including the conceptual, pragmatic, and ethical challenges of students conducting fieldwork.

• We also have a preplanned and co-sponsored author meets respondents session on Rebekka King’s The New Heretics: Skepticism, Secularism, and Progressive Christianity for which we are not seeking proposals.

Further, we encourage panel proposals that use creative and alternative formats that elevate critical dialogue and engage multiple senses, for example:

• Flash Formats. An increased number of presenters are allotted ~5 minutes, followed by a robust, guided discussion.
• Sensory Props. Presenters engage with a material form that bears fieldwork significance, such as physical objects, food(s), visual images, and/or sound recordings.
• Author Meets Critics. Traditional and creative arrangements, including single authors, books from multiple authors on a related or contested theme, and prominent writers of religion in the public sphere.