With Nasrin Rahimieh, University of California, Irvine.

My experience of directing an Iranian studies center in southern California provided me with unique opportunities to work with members of the Iranian American community, cultural associations, and donors. The linguistic, ethnic, and religious diversities of the local Iranian community bode well for exploring the different facets of Iranian culture in a university setting. But the promise and potential were at times weighed down by an impulse to contain and/or disavow Islam as a constitutive part of Iranian cultural legacy and by other effects of diaspora. In my presentation I will explore the ramifications of tensions that at times risked derailing the mission of an academic center devoted to the study of Iran. Understanding the anxieties manifested at the intersection of the academy and the community could pave the way for more robust engagements with ideas of Iran in the US academy today.

With Abou Farman, The New School for Social Research

Part of a series of readings/performative lectures by Abou Farman and Leonor Caraballo featuring tumors, shamans, insects, and hydrogen protons. How can we make sense of the afterlife beyond the limits of a secular frame? And how can the afterlife help us make senses - literally, as in cultivate new modalities of sensing? We will explore these questions through a notion of synaesthetics reformulated from Susan Buck Morss by way of MRIs, smells, sounds, and blindfolds.

With William Mazzarella, University of Chicago

The current global populist wave is often narrated as a ‘crisis of representation.’ The hunger for immediate participation, the assertion of the collective flesh, is typically dismissed as regressively theological: at best a dubious aestheticization of politics, at worst a slide into fascism. But is this a false choice? Can the populist critique of representation yield a different take on contemporary politics? This talk was an invitation to reanimate the grounds of critical theory via anthropological understandings of shared substance and ‘occult’ motifs of efficacious resonance.

With Sudipta Sen, University of California, Davis.
This talk focuses on the spoliation and seizure of objects as emblems of sovereignty across the valley of the Ganges in India from late antiquity across the longue durée, including desecration of temples and looting of idols, as suggestive points of departure for a history of the seizure and borrowing of images, texts and emblems from bygone or vanquished regimes. It discusses how the valley emerged as the political heartland and theatre of warfare in the subcontinent, redefining the geographical reach of the ‘middle-country’, setting the context for the culmination of an embattled history in which the Ganga, along with its tributary Yamuna, became a guardian deity and imperial icon essential to the practices of warfare, spoliation, patronage and kingship.

With Birgit Meyer, Utrecht University

The focus of this lecture was the public, and by implication material and corporeal, presence of religion in plural configurations in Ghana, where Dr. Meyer has conducted research over a long time-span, and in the Netherlands, where she lives and works. Her guiding idea was that a focus on religious matters – in the sense of concrete material forms and as matters of concern in public debate – is a productive empirical starting point to conceptualize the current co-existence of multiple religiosities.

With Lizbeth Mateo, Winnie Varghese, Amy Gottlieb, and Rose Cuison Villazor. Moderated by Katherine Franke.
In an era in which the idea of “religious liberty” has largely been co-opted by the Christian Right to signify protections for conservative beliefs about sex, marriage, and reproduction, what does “religious liberty” mean for undocumented people and immigration activists of faith? (How) should the law accommodate the religious belief that families and communities should not be torn apart by deportation, or that individuals have a right to migrate? Moreover, what effect will arguing for these rights in religious terms have on LGBTQ+ immigrants or immigrants who need reproductive health care?

This panel examines the various linkages between South Asia and the nonhuman. The nonhuman–whether animal, vegetal, telluric/elemental/mineral/topographical, extra-terrestrial, monstrous, or spectral—has called into question colonial and postcolonial imaginative circuits, political formations, and bodily registers, creating new forms of ethical engagement and analysis. These papers continue this important inquiry and, through a range of methods, explore how the non-human, in its questioning and surpassing of given forms, helps us to grasp as well as unravel the coordinates that structure(d) empire and its afterlives.

An evening talk with Lelah Khalili, Professor of Middle East Politics SOAS University of London, on the evolution of modern regimes.

Sponsored by the Department of Anthropology, Institute of Religion, Culture, and Public Life, The Racial Capitalism Working Group, Department of Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies, and the Middle East Institute.

Dr. Amitava Kumar will read from, and discuss, his recent novel Immigrant, Montana. One of The New Yorker‘s Best Books of 2018 and a New York Times Notable Book of 2018, the novel follows the protagonist Kailash on his American dream from a village in India to graduate school in New York, and focuses on the intersections of the sexual and the political.

Dr. Bruce Robbins, Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University, will offer a brief response and then be in conversation with Dr. Kumar.

Entangled Spirits brings together scholars, activists, artists and practitioners (in a variety of fields) for a series of public conversations; each of which will grapple with a tangled knot of questions and concerns that emerge from the intersection of the arts, religion, and politics. Organized by Professor Josef Sorett, Entangled Spirits is sponsored by the Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities.

The first Entangled Spirits event features a dialogue between the artist Mickalene Thomas and writer/activist Darnell Moore, moderated by Columbia Professor Kellie Jones, with a brief introduction by the series’ organizer, Professor Josef Sorett.

With Gil Anidjar, Alon Confino, Amos Goldberg, Raef Zreik, Gil Hochberg.
In this groundbreaking book, leading Arab and Jewish intellectuals examine how and why the Holocaust and the Nakba are interlinked without blurring fundamental differences between them. While these two foundational tragedies are often discussed separately and in abstraction from the constitutive historical global contexts of nationalism and colonialism, The Holocaust and the Nakba explores the historical, political, and cultural intersections between them. The majority of the contributors argue that these intersections are embedded in cultural imaginations, colonial and asymmetrical power relations, realities, and structures. Focusing on them paves the way for a new political, historical, and moral grammar that enables a joint Arab-Jewish dwelling and supports historical reconciliation in Israel/Palestine.

With Tom Boylston, University of Edinburgh

This lecture discussed contemporary Orthodox Christian revival in Ethiopia from two perspectives: the ascetic cultivation of attention to God through fasting, and the capture of public attention through preaching movements, public exorcisms, and educational drives. Orthodox Christians in Addis Ababa agree that it is acceptable and necessary to use media for the promotion of religion, but they have intense debates on how to use media correctly. Orthodox solutions to these problems revolve around attention. Boylston therefore suggests that the management of attention is crucial both to the understanding of religious publics, and to the broader issues of social control that surround them.

With Patrick Eisenlohr, University of Göttingen

This talk focused on the sonic dimensions of religious life and place-making in Mumbai, and its connections to a “right to the city” for people facing a precarious future. While soundscape is an established concept for the investigation of the sonic aspects of urban place-making, including its religious dimensions, Eisenlohr argued that an analytic of atmospheres is better suited to capture the powerful emotive dimensions of place-making through sonic performances.

With Kajri Jain, University of Toronto

We are well acquainted with how the affective forces of modern politics depart from the normative ideals of bourgeois publicness. But rather than treating this departure as a binary opposition perhaps it’s more useful to recognize the layered coexistence of, and circuits between, these modalities of publicness, as when electoral politics strategically deploys both religious and secular idioms while also keeping distinctions between them in play. This talk provided a glimpse into how successive new image technologies and genres of public iconopraxis in India, from neighbourhood festivals and printed icons to monumental concrete deities, have played a key role in melding the sensible idioms of democracy and religion.