Suchergebnisse

Introduction : illegitimate religion -- Mastering uncertainty : performance and recognition in religion -- "Everything is a gift, Bhole" : custom and the ethics of care -- Ominous signs : of dread, desires, and determination -- Damning corpses : violence, religious or secular? -- Caste and the informal economy : subversive aesthetics of popular religion -- Wishful nightmares : triumphant neoliberalism and the resistances of religion -- War, nation, and the human as a thing

This ethnographic essay focuses on the relationship between religious performances and the "strong discourse" of contemporary global capitalism. It explores the subjective meaning and social significance of religious practice in the context of a rapidly expanding mass religious phenomenon in India. The narrative draws on Weber's insights on the intersections between religion and economy, phenomenological theory, performance studies, and Indian philosophy and popular culture. It shows that religion here is primarily a means of performing to and preparing for an informal economy. It gives the chance to live meaningful social lives while challenging the inequities and symbolic violence of an imposing global capitalist social ethic. Unlike exclusive formal institutions that are increasingly governed by neoliberal rationalities, the religious event provides an open and freely accessible yet challenging stage for participants to practice and prove their resolve, gifts, and sincerity. In contrast to the focus on social anomie and the reactionary characterization of contemporary religion in identity‐based arguments, this essay demonstrates that religious practice here is simultaneously a way of performing to and performing against a totalizing capitalist social order.

This article discusses continuities between the discourse of caste in ancient India, the racialization constitutive of the Enlightenment, and a similarly exclusionary, overdetermined conception of worthlessness—the lazy, immoral, deviant minorities—evident in contemporary racism as much as in the abandonment of a global underclass. We argue that the negative marking of a social condition or group as inferior and subhuman (on all kinds of grounds, moral, aesthetic, and intellectual) has been constitutive of the paradigms in which these societies subsist. The practices and project of all that is good is shadowed by this negative, its infectious, abominable presence. Analytically bringing together the politics of the homo sacer with the social psychology of abjection, we argue that such exclusion is as vested in politics and economic interests as in their psychic correspondences.