About
I currently serve as Co-Editor of the interdisciplinary journal, Comparative Studies in Society and History (CSSH), and recently published a co-authored book called Ekklesia: Three Inquiries of Church and State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), together with Winnifred Fallers Sullivan and Pamela E. Klassen.
The book I am now working on is called Automaton Autonomy: Agency and Religion. In this book I explore the tensile bands linking automatism and agency, yet also holding them apart. To explore these two tropes—autonomy and the automatic--and their unstable relation vis-à vis “religion,” I recount the late-19th and early 20th century appearance of a series of figures in Brazil whose key attributed characteristic was the capacity to act consequentially, as agents, but only automatically, without will. Nearhuman figures—classed as such by virtue of their shared quality of lacking conscious volition—became objects of ritual attraction and sites of revelation through and in consequence of their imputed automatism. The figures include a monkey, a mechanical chess-player, a slave become saint, a photograph, a possession priest, a psychiatric patient, a child-spirit, and a corpse. Each is nearhuman in a distinct way, along a different vector of proximity: speech (sounds human), time (was once human), iconic likeness (looks human), indexicality (has part of a human), and quality (as an ill, captive, or diminished human). What is at stake is the particular quality of religious agency. I ask, in what sense is “religion”--a domain whose central feature entails being spoken-through, or acted-through by extrahuman powers and the subjection of individual will—a form of agency. The formulation seems perhaps too obvious, even clumsy; yet it has never been adequately addressed, much less solved. This book tackles the problem of religion and agency head on in two theoretical chapters—the Introduction on the automatic, and the Conclusion, on agency—and a series of five exemplary episodes comprising the middle.
Affiliation(s)
- DAAS, Doctoral Program in Anthropology and History
Award(s)
- 2008, John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship
- 2008, Wesley-Logan Prize of the American Historical Association, for the best book on the African diaspora
- 2003, Best Book Award (analytic-descriptive), American Academy of Religion
- 2003-2004, National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship
- 2000-2001, National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship
Field(s) of Study
- Theories of religion, ethnography, history of the study of religion, religion and race, modern history of Brazil, history of the Caribbean, Afro-Atlantic traditions
