AAA Call for Papers: Making "Real" Families....Religious Communities
in North America
Call for Papers - Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological
Association Philadelphia, December 2-6, 2009
Organizers:
Todne Thomas (University of Virginia)
Asiya Malik (University of Virginia)
Making "Real" Families: Relatedness, Transendence and Boundary Making
among Religious Communities in North America
This panel explores the ways in which informal and formal
socio-religious communities inform myriad kinship formations in North
America. For many years, immigrant religiosity has been rendered
functionally as spaces preserving home cultures or fostering new
immigrants' assimilation to host countries. However, current research
illustrating the salience of transnational religious networks and the
meaningful practice of domestic religious observances have begun to
de-center denominationalism and/or sectarianism as the primary
framework to analyze local and immigrant religious institutions.
Furthermore, anthropological conceptualizations of relatedness—that
move away from understandings of kinship seen through a western lens
rooted in biology—direct our attention to the processual nature of
social relationships that incorporate agents into long-lasting ties of
kinship. By utilizing Carsten's framework of relatedness, we allow
for the broader inclusion of cross-cultural20and religious
understandings of kinship that incorporate both indigenous statements
and practices as well as multifarious religious institutional
employments of the term. We are left with a view of religious
communities that can be simultaneously familial, local, regional,
(trans)national, and global in scope and identity, differentially
fluid in their incorporation of new members, yet durable in their
anchoring of religious subjectivities in coll ective spiritual and
familial genealogies.
This panel examines religion as a social domain around which multiple
types of kinship can be constructed and expressed. On the one hand,
we consider the on going salience of religious constructions and
understandings of the "family" and how members of these
socio-religious communities negotiate, challenge and recreate these
ideals on a daily basis. On the other hand, we investigate the role
of spiritual commonality, place of origin, genealogy, class, language
and ethnicity in producing varied constructions of everyday
relatedness among religious practitioners.
In other words, we endeavor to show how varied kinship connections are
mobilized to promote socio-religious unities transcendent of social
difference. Yet we also show how these multiple forms of
socio-religious relatedness are employed by members to invoke
hierarchies of inclusion through discourses of authenticity. Rather
than classifying these kinship formations along rigid sacred and
secular lines, we explicate how members invoke and negotiate multiple
forms of relatedness in both20private and public settings and within
and across national borders. In addition to trac king these
discourses, practices, and configurations of contemporary religious
kinship, we analyze such forms against the presumed distinction of
religion and kinship as disparate social domains and institutions of
North American societies.
Sample topics representing a variety of religious communities can
include but are not limited to: church kinship among immigrant and
native groups; relatedness among Islamic socio-cultural associations
in North America; religion as a discourse for ethnic, class, or other
forms of social difference; theologies versus everyday practices of
religious relatedness; spiritual/ religious kinship as a tool for
socio-cultural exclusion; family genealogy and historical trajectories
as grounds for religious membership; spiritual genealogies and
differential religious membership.
All abstracts submitted by faculty, graduate students and researchers
should be informed by ethnographic research.
Please submit abstracts (250 words) and a brief bio or CV by email to
amm9w@virginia.edu by March 8, 2009. Participation in the panel will be
confirmed via email by March 15.
