Religion and the Production of Difference: 2019 Conference of the Dutch Association for the Study of Religion (NGG)

Annual Conference of the Dutch Association for the Study of Religion, 30 October to 1 November, 2019, Groningen
Includes overview of the panels organized by Religious Matters

Organizing committee: Kim Knibbe, Joram Tarusarira, Todd Weir, Clare Wilde and Méadhbh McIvor

Deadline Call for panels: 1st of April. Notification to the applicants: around April 15th .
Deadline calls for papers: June 1st. Notification around June 15th .

It is well established within the field of religious studies that what is studied as “religion” today may not have been labeled as such in the past. Additionally, phenomena that contemporary scholars of religion study may not self-identify as religious. Despite these contested categories, “religion” has become an accepted category in societies around the world. It is a label to be claimed or rejected, or otherwise related to (for example, by those who call themselves ‘spiritual but not religious’); a phenomenon to be fought against or fought for; a societal actor that can claim rights within particular legal frameworks, regulated by various forms and levels of governance, or a superstitious holdover that should be argued out of existence.

Reflecting these tensions in the identification of religion, this conference calls for panels that examine religion in relation to the production of difference at various levels of society (e.g. religiousnon-religious, but also in relation to ethnicity and gender, national identity etc..). In highlighting the role of religion in the production of difference, we aim also to draw attention to the ways that religious practices, identifications, and alliances establish ‘same-ness’ through the fixing of meaning (e.g. “normative” practices or textual interpretations) and the delineation and legitimation of authority. Towards this end, we are interested in the lexicon of “religion” in various traditions, times and places (e.g. “Islam” as dīn but also umma). But also those practices, identifications and forms of authority that selectively use the category of “religion” (such as evangelical and Pentecostal Christians, who reject the term for themselves but apply it to others), and those which have been defined in an oppositional or other relationship to ” religion” (such as secularist or spiritual actors).

We aim to have a representation of scholarship on different historical periods, regions in the world and theoretical perspectives. Through the invited plenary sessions and keynotes, we will bring different strands of scholarship in conversation with each other around the conference theme.

The following is an indication of the topics we are interested in, but of course, they are not exhaustive and we are very much open to panels that address the theme in a different way.

Historicizing Social Dynamics

How salient has the category of “religion” been, when set against the bonds of kinship, descent, or other forms of identity, and how might it trouble those ostensible bonds? How have individuals and communities acquiesced or succumbed to the politics of religious difference?
How have religious identifications helped to forge networks and communities that crosscut and transcend other boundaries? In what ways can religion interact with or become mobilized in relation to categories such as gender, ethnicity, and/or political persuasion?
How is religion delineated and managed within a secular frame

Historicizing conceptual dynamics

In recent years, scholarship in the study of Religion has turned to the ways this field is complicit in producing the subject it aims to study. How is knowledge in the study of ‘religion’ produced, authenticated and disseminated? Critical perspectives on the roles of colonial enterprises and the discipline of religious studies itself in the production of “knowledge” are particularly encouraged.
What implications does this knowledge have for the production of difference, and how religious practices, identifications, and alliances establish ‘same-ness’ through the fixing of meaning and the delineating and legitimation of authority?

Theorizing Lived Religion

How are difference andameness produced, authenticated and legitimized in everyday religious and ritual practice?
What insights do the various approaches to lived religion bring to the table in studying religion and the production of difference? (e.g. material religion, gender/feminist/queer studies perspectives, post-colonial and decolonial perspectives).

The opening keynote will be by dr. Charles Hirschkind, University of California, Berkeley: ”What a 12th Century Muslim says to a 21st Century Christian in Andalusia: Inheriting a Complex Religious Identity” (October 30th, 2019).

Overview of the panels organized by Religious Matters
with abstracts of the speakers’ papers

October 30th

15:15- 16:45
Food and Religious Plurality
Convener: Birgit Meyer
Speakers: Rashida Alhassan Adum-Atta, Nina ter Laan, Shaheed Tayob
Court room

Panel abstract: What, with whom, when and how people eat and drink is framed through specific food regimes. People incorporate food in deeply embodied ways that become part of their digestive system, gustatory apparatus and habitus. Eating and drinking fundamentally shapes their being in the world on multiple levels – biological, affective, social, ethical. Being natural and cultural, food is at the same time a biological necessity and a powerful socialcultural phenomenon that underpins embodied identities and a sense of community, (non)belonging, and difference. Wherever people who embrace different food regimes meet, there is potential for tensions. At the same time, sharing food and eating and drinking together may instigate (new) senses of togetherness and sociality. If, as the saying goes, people are what they eat, the question is how they negotiate plural food regimes. Doing so is not merely a matter of personal taste, but also involves legal arrangements, state regulations, institutional policies and cultural or even national sensitivities. Food being a vital matter, a focus on different eating practices and their transformation offers a productive entry point into negotiations of how to coexist in plural environments that involve people with various religious, ethnic and cultural backgrounds. As a fundamental religious matte, food forms a productive entry point for exploring religion and the production of difference.

Individual abstracts:

Mocking Hunger! – Sprinkling Kpokpoi on ‘Ga’ Lands during Homowo Festival – Rashida Alhassan Adum-Atta

Every year the Ga celebrate the end of a period of extreme hunger with a maize meal called Kpokpoi, in a festival to mock hunger; Homowo. The Homowo festival is a combination of an annual agricultural festival and commemorative event that re-inscribes the importance of maize as a staple in the Ga community and the Ga history. The festival is a reminder of people’s vulnerability and dependence on food and an invocation for the blessings of the deities/God on the crops to supply the community with its daily needs. Kpokpoi is prepared with the primary ingredients of steamed fermented corn meal, palm nut soup and smoked fish. The meal is sprinkled around the community by the Chiefs and community leaders. The significance of this is to hoot at hunger, thank the gods for their assistance in ending the period of hunger, and to seek their assistance to ensure abundance of food in years to come. Guided by Marion Kilson’s ethnographic works on the Ga, I am interested in telling the Kpokpoi story as a pivot of unity through the sharing of food and the superstitions associated with it, especially within a predominantly Muslim community of Madina Zongo.

“I absolutely have to do my groceries at the Lidl!” Dutch and Belgian converts in Morocco performing a European Islam in Morocco through food – Nina ter Laan

This paper focuses on eating habits among Dutch and Belgian converts, who have performed hijra (the religious-inspired migration to a Muslim country) to Morocco. I argue that the converts perform a kind of Muslim Europeanness through food, resulting in a mixed Euro/Moroccan food culture. Expecting simple access to a halal diet as an important benefit of living in a Muslim majority country, the converts find a perplexing reality. On the one hand, they tend to embrace, even idealize, Moroccan cooking and eating habits. The traditional Moroccan marketplace (souq) for example, is incorporated in white upper-class hipster culture narratives of climate consciousness, organic eating, alongside reverence of the Prophet. At the same time, the quality of particular ingredients, shortage of European products, and different hygiene standards can be a source of frustration. Disillusionment and home-sickness can be met with attempts to get a hold of European products and ingredients to create familiar dishes. Others set up restaurants, and businesses dealing in European foods. Whether positive of negative, local food practices are often assessed in reference to mechanisms of distinction, processes of ethical self-formation, and religious (im)perfection. This creates a sense of community among the converts, as well as produces difference regarding Moroccan society. I reference the work of Ann Stoler (2002) on class, race, and imperialism and particularly her notion of the ‘sensory nature of memory’ to examine how the privileged position ‘white’ converts had in the West, (Özüyrek 2014, Galonnier 2015, Roozen-Soltar 2012) is played out through food, after their migration to Morocco, a country with a colonial past.

Disgust as an Embodied Critique: Being Middle Class and Muslim in Mumbai – Shaheed Tayob

Hindu nationalist discourse articulates a link between the violence of slaughter and the notion of a violent, abject Muslim as cruel Other. However, for Muslims in Mumbai the cruelty of slaughter is not inherent and questions of order and propriety are heavily circumscribed by communal politics. This paper presents moments during Bakri Id (Qurbani) and everyday life where participants evoke or experience disgust. Drawing on a discursive tradition of slaughter together with everyday observations by middle-class Muslims from various walks of life on infrastructure, order and marginalization draws attention to the way disgust is and is not experienced by Muslims in the city. The paper argues that these instances of disgust are moments of embodied critique that secure the middle-class Muslim as subject by pointing to the histories of marginalization, infrastructural neglect and improper religious practice.

17:00- 18:30
Food and Religious Plurality II
Convener: Birgit Meyer
Speakers: Margreet van Es, Pooyan Tamimi Arab
Court room

Individual abstracts:

Halal dining in Rotterdam – Margreet van Es

This paper focuses on a number of new and fashionable halal restaurants located along the West-Kruiskade in Rotterdam. Although these Muslim-owned restaurants differ in terms of cuisine and interior decorations, they have in common that they only serve halal meat and that they do not serve alcohol. The customers are highly diverse in terms of ethnicity and religious affiliation, but this new form of ‘hip halal dining’ is especially popular among young Muslims who have experienced strong upward social mobility. However, these restaurants have also become a subject of political contestation, with the right-wing populist party Leefbaar Rotterdam arguing that the growing number of alcohol-free halal restaurants ‘negatively affects the diversity in the neighbourhood’. In analyzing these restaurants as ‘aesthetic formations’, this paper raises questions about how diversity is conceptualized by different social actors, what it means to be inclusive, and on whose terms and conditions religious plurality is being facilitated in particular settings.

The Anthropology of Islam and the Ethics and Politics of Wine Drinking – Pooyan Tamimi Arab

In this presentation, I reflect on the possibility and impossibility of wine drinking as an Islamic practice that can be researched by anthropologists. The aim is to show how Shahab Ahmed’s posthumous What is Islam? The Importance of Being can contribute to producing new ethnographies, after absorbing Ahmed’s criticisms of figures such as Geertz, El-Zein, and Asad, and to see to what extent his thoughts on wine drinking in the so-called Balkan-toBengal-Complex (1350-1850 A.D.) can also be useful for studying the ethics and politics of wine drinking in pluralist settings such as contemporary European countries. A brief reflection on Wine-shop the Philosopher in The Hague, The Netherlands, will illustrate how such a research can be conducted.

October 31st

09:00- 10:30
Entangled Differences: Studying Religious Multiplicity in Frontier Zones Convener: Birgit Meyer
Speakers: Martin Luther Darko, Joseph Fosu-Ankrah, Murtala Ibrahim
Doopsgezinde Kerk

Panel abstract: While religion scholars are well equipped to gain insights into particular religious groups and movements, it is more difficult and less common to study the dynamics of such plural configurations from a wider angle and in a relational perspective. This panel will approach the co-existence of various religious groups through the notion of the “frontier zone” (Chidester), understood as a space in which religious and other differences are produced negotiated, ascribed and denied. These differences do not recur to equal entities (as is claimed in normative approaches to religious pluralism), but may better be understood as emerging in the complex entanglements of various religious groups and the ways in which they are made to relate to each other. Presentations in this panel will involve research grounded in the study of the co-existence of Muslims, Christians and secular actors in Ghana and in the Netherlands. It is part of the Religious Matters programme (www.religiousmatters.nl), and its Madina project.

Individual abstracts:

“We Serve the Same God”: Christian-Muslim Encounters at a Mission Hospital in Madina, Accra – Martin Luther Darko

Matthias Basedau (2017) indicates the rise in religious armed conflicts in the African subregion. Christian-Muslim encounters in many jurisdictions have been characterized by tensions, animosity, fights and often destruction of lives and properties. While the situation looks gloomy in some jurisdictions in Africa, in Ghana, the encounters between Muslims and Christians have seen higher cooperation and peaceful coexistence. Christians encounter Muslims in different spaces in Ghana. These encounters are often cordial. In this paper, I demonstrate how Christians and Muslims encounter each other in a Mission Hospital and how these encounters lead to entanglement of “faith sharing” in a health-seeking enclave. The hospital organizes church services every midweek for its clients and staff. The Muslim clients of the hospital partake in the morning service with the explanation that is the same God being worshipped at the hospital. The Pentecost Hospital is the “frontier zone” (Chidester) which creates this encounters and negotiations, and this study shows how Muslims negotiate and create their reality in this space in their quest for health.

From Jamaica to the Promised Land: Urban Market Spaces, Ritual Performances and Religious Coexistence in Madina, Accra – Joseph Fosu-Ankrah

Since the Protestant Reformation in Europe and missionary endeavors, particularly in West Africa, religious rituals have been the source of tensions, contestations and conflicts. This is due to the varied interpretations, disgust and contempt ‘religious others’ attached to this aspect of religious practice. Combining archival and newspaper sources with ethnographic fieldwork in Madina Zongo, Accra, I explore religious ritual performances such as sacrifices, prayers, “planting of gods/deities” (both literally and symbolically) in the newly created market space in a highly diversifying neighborhood. These rituals are also reflected in the change of name of the market space from “Jamaica” to “the Promised Land”. Engaging Chidester’s concept of “Frontier Zones”, Mary Douglas’ ideas around “Purity and Danger” and the concept of “Common Grounds” which I propose, I examine the complexities and nuances associated with the nature of the sacred and profane in everyday encounters (social life) of religious practitioners viz: Christians, Muslims and traditionalists and its implications for coexistence in diversifying communities like Madina. Again, situating my study within the framework of religion in a modernizing and global context, I contribute to the discourse on the relation between religion and the state, the meaning of religious symbolism and how religion helps to shape and negotiate meaning in different political contexts.

The Sites of Divine Encounter: Affective Religious Spaces and Sensational Practices in Christ Embassy and NASFAT in the City of Abuja – Murtala Ibrahim

Building on Andreas Reckwitz’s concept of praxeology that links affective practices with physical space and Walter Benjamin’s concept of phantasmagoria, the paper explores iconic places of worship in the Abuja cityscape, comparing Pentecostal (Christ Embassy) Islamic (NASFAT) sensational religious practices. Abuja, as a new city built from scratch with aesthetically designed religious structures, invokes dream-like, phantasmagoric imageries that induce specific affective sensations. The affective and emotional experiences generated by sensational religious practices transform places of worship into affective spaces, as well as into sites of the human-divine encounter. The nexus of embodied/spatial practices and aesthetically designed buildings combine to create a dream-like cityscape. Moreover, the paper suggests that religious places of worship are centres of activities and participation that are inextricably connected with people’s sense of identity and belonging. Through a range of affective practices, believers develop a strong connection to their religious spaces to the extent that the latter become an inherent part of their social identity.

13:30- 15:00
Entangled Differences: Studying Religious Multiplicity in Frontier Zones II
Convener: Birgit Meyer
Speakers: Mariam Goshadze, Angelantonio Grossi, Kauthar Khamis
Doopsgezinde Kerk

Panel abstract: While religion scholars are well equipped to gain insights into particular religious groups and movements, it is more difficult and less common to study the dynamics of such plural configurations from a wider angle and in a relational perspective. This panel will approach the co-existence of various religious groups through the notion of the “frontier zone” (Chidester), understood as a space in which religious and other differences are produced negotiated, ascribed and denied. These differences do not recur to equal entities (as is claimed in normative approaches to religious pluralism), but may better be understood as emerging in the complex entanglements of various religious groups and the ways in which they are made to relate to each other. Presentations in this panel will involve research grounded in the study of the co-existence of Muslims, Christians and secular actors in Ghana and in the Netherlands. It is part of the Religious Matters programme (www.religiousmatters.nl), and its Madina project.

Individual abstracts:

The Perks of Being a “Culture”: The Ghanaian State Negotiates Boundaries with the Ga Indigenous Religion – Mariam Goshadze

Constitutionally speaking, religious differences in contemporary Ghana have been negotiated along two distinct lines. The status of “religion” has been generously ascribed to Christianity and Islam, while various indigenous religions scattered throughout the country have been thrown into the category of “culture” or “custom.” The differentiation reflects evolutionary taxonomy of religions with Christianity at its pinnacle, a model which has been encoded in the version of secularism adopted by Ghana. Constitutional advantages accorded to Christianity and Islam as the country’s “religions” are obvious; benefits of being a “culture,” on the other hand, are far less apparent, especially owing to the depoliticizing and despiritualizing trends prominent throughout Ghanaian history. Looking at the state’s response to conflicts between Pentecostal/Charismatic churches and the Ga community in Accra following the former’s violation of the customary “ban on drumming and noise making” imposed prior to the annual Hɔmɔwɔ festival, this paper seeks to shed light on the few yet significant advantages of the “cultural” label, which enable the Ga traditional religion to percolate through the legislative restrictions applied to Ghana’s “religions.” More broadly, the paper demonstrates how selective use of the category of “religion” in the Ghanaian constitution and public discourse does not only reflect colonial and post-colonial hierarchization of indigenous and Western epistemologies, but also offers an opportunity for unofficial power sharing strategies developed between the Ghanaian state and the Ga traditional authorities, who according to the customary law, are the lawful guardians of Accra’s lands.
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“This is not a Religion”: Dealing with Faith and Diversity in Ghanaian Shrines – Angelantonio Grossi

Countering common arguments that stigmatize spiritual mediations happening outside of the domain of Christianity, and “world religions” at large, Ghanaian traditional priests have established a prolific relationship with digital modes of communication. A look at the social media presence of different Akomfo, Bokorwo and Mallams based in Ghana clearly shows how bringing online a set of practices deemed backward and dangerous, they situate local knowledge in a global network where spirits from Africa are highly valued and in great demand. At the same time, they deal with a strong public bias towards the tradition they represent on a daily basis and on different levels: welcoming people from different backgrounds and religious affiliations; tracking connections with different religious traditions; articulating their practices in and out the secular concept of religion. In doing so, they circumvent scholars and policies assumptions about what religion is, or should be. Following these entanglements, in the aim to understand how religious plurality is experienced and expressed among people in their daily lives, this paper looks at the Ghanaian shrines as a space where religious affiliation is a relational category, at times both overlooked or emphasized. A matter of laughter and attentive inquiry.

Women Negotiating Religious Differences in Beauty Salons of Madina Zongo – Kauthar Khamis

In Ghana, churches, mosques and shrines are sacred places where Christians, Muslims and adherents of traditional religion connect with the divine. These public spaces are distinct from others and therefore characterized by holy languages, rituals and images among others. In contrast, other public spaces such as cafés, night clubs as well as beauty salons are considered as “profane spaces” where people engage in leisure activities considered as “worldly”. Yet, in these “profane spaces” interesting religious exchanges take place between adherents of different religions. Using Chidester’s notion of “Frontier zones” in the study of religion, understood as sites where differences are articulated, encountered and governed, this paper will focus on beauty salons in Madina Zongo as frontier zones where religious boundaries are experienced and negotiated. It will examine how practices in beauty salons in a religiously pluralistic setting are entangled with religion to the extent that women remove their footwear when entering them, as Moses did (Exodus) and Muslims do when entering the mosque, while analyzing how Muslim and Christian women negotiate their differences in such spaces.