CEDEJ Tuesdays: Charles Hirschkind “Presences and Absences in the Anthropology of Religion” — CEDEJ Cairo, 21 November 2023

On Tuesday November 21 at 11am at CEDEJ, Charles Hirschkind will be presenting his research: Presences and Absences in the Anthropology of Religion.

One generative line of debate and inquiry within the anthropology of religion today centers around a call to rethink the discipline’s commitment to a secular epistemology. If, some scholars argue, God is not marginal within Muslim and Christian lives but, on the contrary, is integral to the overarching reality that structures and orients those lives, then God should not be marginal to anthropological descriptions of those lives. The emphasis on human activity by the anthropologist, and the corresponding neglect of the activity of God, it is argued, effects, once again, a translation of religious lives—where God is an all-encompassing presence—into secular terms—where God is not. In this talk, I want to think about the implications of this necessarily theological question for anthropological practice. What are the ethical and epistemological stakes, I ask, that animate these invitations to stretch the secular boundaries on the discipline? What distinguishes a secular from a non-secular account of Islam from within the discipline?

Charles Hirschkind is a professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests concern religious practice, media technologies, and emergent forms of political community in the urban Middle East and Europe. His publications include books, The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics (Columbia 2006) and Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad and his Interlocutors (co-edited with David Scott, Stanford 2005), and The Feeling of History: Islam, Romanticism, and Andalusia (Chicago, 2020).

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