Spirituality against religion: the role of gender and power - Call for paper

"Spirituality against religion: the role of gender and power" EASA conference, Maynooth, Ireland, August 24th till 27th, 2010

Convenors:
Dr. Anna Fedele (Lisbon University Institute, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris)
Dr. Kim Knibbe (dept. of social and cultural anthropology, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam)
Deadline for submissions: 1st March 2010.

In this panel we want to discuss the processes of (gendered) power among people who call themselves 'spiritual' rather than 'religious' and problematize the opposition between these two terms. What kinds of power can we discern despite people's assertions that they only follow their own ‘inner voice'? We invite papers rooted in ethnographic research that explicitly discuss processes of (gendered) power in "New Age" or Neopagan movements or other social and religious movements using the distinction/opposition between religion and spirituality.

N.B.: We plan to turn the papers of this panel into a publication. This means that if your paper is selected for the panel, we expect you to send it to us before the conference, so that we can start looking for a publisher and working on a book-proposal.


Abstract

In social sciences, the debates on the increasing popularity of alternative spiritualities and the fate of religion in Europe and Northern America has in the past few years been dominated by the thesis that posits a 'shift' from religion, recognizing a transcendent authority outside the self, to spirituality, focused on the inner self as the ultimate authority. This shift is furthermore linked to a broad array of attitudes (Paul Heelas et al. 2005, Peter Berger et al. 2008: 14-15). However, we might wonder whether this thesis does not in fact replicate the internal discourses of alternative spiritualities, obscuring the ways in which the fields of alternative spiritualities are themselves socially structured and the role of various kinds of power in them. What kinds of critique are embedded within the distinction between 'religion' and 'spirituality'? How can we theorize power in these settings? Gender, for example, is one issue that is hardly addressed except descriptively. Although people might be searching for a 'religion without power', from a social scientific point of view there is no such thing as religion without power.

In this panel we want to address the question how the categories 'religion' and 'spirituality' are constructed, how this relates to gender and what theories of power to bring to this field.


Submission

You can submit a proposal for a paper via the EASA website choosing the workshop W014

http://www.nomadit.co.uk/easa/easa2010/panels.php5?View=Workshops


Or access the panel directly and click on “Propose a paper”:

http://www.nomadit.co.uk/easa/easa2010/panels.php5?PanelID=591

Please note that you do not need to be a EASA member in order to submit a paper, you can become a member and register once your paper is accepted.