Update: the long written version is now online: Samuli Schielke. 2019. "The power of God: Four proposals for an anthropological engagement." ZMO Programmatic Texts, vol. 13.
Social scientists usually find it much easier to talk about religion than about God, and yet religious people often talk much more about God, and religion is for them not just a human business; it is a relation humans have with divine beings. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Egypt, in this lecture I make four proposals about how anthropologists may
account for the monotheist God as a social reality, embodying and
enacting a form of power that makes us, and through which we make
ourselves - in manifold and also contrary ways. This is something that social scientists can study regardless of their theistic, atheistic, or other ontological commitments.
The first proposal is to
pay ethnographic attention to the way different specific powers of God
are present in human interactions through linguistic references and the
search for guidance and sustenance. The second proposal is to consider
more systematically the forms of relational or relationship power God
commands over humans. The third proposal is to pay attention to the
productive tensions and conflicts that arise from the encounter with a
God who is both harshly punishing and merciful, disciplining and
sustaining, a life-giver and a dead-maker. The fourth proposal is to
think of secularity or “the secular” as a reconfiguration of the
human-God relationship in which humans are empowered, and whereby a
triadic relationship where God acts as supreme mediator between humans
is weakened, transformed, or partially replaced by separate
relationships.
A longer article on which this lecture is based will be published soon as a ZMO programmatic text. This lecture was delivered as a keynote lecture to the workshop “The
'Ethical' and the 'Everyday': Interrogating analytical turns for/in the
study of Islam and Muslims in Europe” organised by Amin El-Yousfi and
Zubair Ahmad at Cambridge University, 29-30 November 2018.
The first 10 minutes of the talk are introduction related to the conference. The actual four proposals begin at 9:40.
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