Claremont Prize for the Study of Religion

Isaiah Ellis is an incoming Assistant Professor of Urban Religions in the Department of Religious Studies at Southern Methodist University, in Dallas, Texas. He has recently served as an Arts & Sciences Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto, and in the coming year he will be a Robert M. Kingdon Fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He received his Ph.D. in Religion and Culture from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

His book, Apostles of Asphalt: Race, Empire, and the Religious Politics of Infrastructure in the American South explores infrastructure’s fraught but central role in the drama of American history by investigating the ideas at the root of the modern highway system. We usually imagine infrastructure as offering solutions to problems of mobility and political unification, but grand statements about the positive socio-economic change accompanying infrastructure development grate against renewed criticism of its role in empire-building, structural inequality, and segregation by design. In the decades leading up to the first Federal highway bills of the 1920s, participants in a reform-minded movement for good roads laid the groundwork for a modernized, federally funded highway system. This “Good Roads Movement” was most impactful in the American South, where its advocates drew upon the language of moral reform and longer legacies of U.S. empire building to argue that white southerners had a moral burden to civilize American land by building public infrastructure. Southern road builders were uniquely successful in arguing for public infrastructure because they articulated their efforts as missionary, redemptive, and civilizing, not only on behalf of the nation but also to redeem and reinvigorate their Confederate past. Those rhetorical moves impacted the lives and work of government officials, engineers, and corporate agents, as well as the Black convict laborers and Indigenous pathfinders whose labor made modern roads possible. What the terms “missionary, redemptive, and civilizing” meant was not always straightforward or coherent, but it was their useful ambiguity, as well as their specific cultural resonance in the Jim Crow South, that proved to be roadbuilders’ most effective tool in advancing a national roadbuilding agenda. At its core, Apostles of Asphalt is about infrastructure’s contested rise as an emblem of the public good in the United States, and how American Christianity’s historical entanglement with race and empire continues to haunt American political and public life.

Aftab Singh Jassal is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and an Affiliate Faculty in the Program for the Study of Religion and the Global Health Program at the University of California, San Diego. He previously taught at Duke and Colgate University. He received his PhD in West and South Asian Religions from the Graduate Division of Religion at Emory University. 

His book, Gods in the World: Place-making and Healing in the Himalayas is a richly descriptive and evocative ethnography of Hindu ritual practices in the north Indian, Himalayan state of Uttarakhand, a region facing the combined pressures of tourism, neoliberal development, and Hindutva. The book examines how these socioeconomic and political transformations are experienced and refracted through human-divine relations. Gods in the World explores the moral, affective, and ontological textures of human-divine relations, how deities and other supernatural agents are made real or present in ritual encounters through acts of “place-making,” and how divinities come to matter in the lives of ordinary people. Working across multiple sites and scales, the book unfolds place-making as a healing practice that repairs and restores relations between divinities and humans, showing how significant those relations are for health, environment, and political life. By making place for divinities as key social and political actors, the book shows how they actively participate and intervene in matters of personal and collective importance in tangible ways.

Through long-term ethnographic fieldwork with professional ritual healers, storytellers, musicians, spirit mediums, lay devotees—many of whom belong to Dalit communities—as well as with caste-privileged temple functionaries, the book offers a striking study of contemporary Hinduism that demonstrates its heterogenous, internally contested character. In bringing fresh insights on the dynamics of caste and gender together with enduring questions in the anthropology of religion about the efficacy of ritual, healing, and the nature of human-divine relations, the book contributes critical insights into everyday Hinduism as a terrain of negotiation and struggle.