Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: The editors of this special issue did not have to do a lot of (per)suading to get me to agree to write this afterword.The essays in this collection together offer an important rethinking of how to analyse the different kinds of work that go into the expansion of religious communities, and it is a pleasure to be able to comment on them here.In naming their topic 'religious suasion' , Victor and Cardoza point to the ways in which varying models of how to influence others can be privileged perspectives on a broad swatch of issues in the anthropology of religion: subjectivity, forms of knowledge, problems of circulation, and the teleological goals for transformed worlds.But the generative flexibility of the framing of religious suasion is perhaps best seen in the fact that scholars working on very different religious traditions and in equally different kinds of contexts were all able to use it to great analytic effect in their individual essays.Simply pushing what usually gets talked about as 'evangelism' outside of its Christian framework is an important accomplishment of the collection in itself.For most Christian evangelists, the stated goal has been the transformation of beliefs, and this requires some focus on the transmission of canonical texts, whether in translation or in original scriptural languages.This has put incredible scholarly attention on three central components of the evangelistic interaction.Using the terms of communications scholars or information theorists, the focus has been on senders of messages, receivers of messages, and the messages themselves.The basic elements of the analysis resemble diagrams from Saussure's Course in general linguistics (2011 [1916]), with two heads facing one another and messages passing back and forth.For anthropologists, most of the focus on projects of evangelism has centred on the receivers of messages and the ways that they interpret them.Have local communities converted or not?How have they (mis)understood the messages?Cardoza and Victor's introduction (this issue) diligently outlines the ways in which their own framework of suasion does not necessarily invoke the old spectre of belief that anthropologists of religion have been pushing away from for the past few decades. 1 I do not want to recapitulate their arguments here, but I would like to take a somewhat Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.
Author: Courtney Handman
Institution: The University of Texas at Austin
Language: English
Subfield: Religious studies
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4393091873