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Description
This study analyzes competing forms of Protestant Christianity within the Bible Belt of the Upper South (Kentucky, Tennessee, and North Carolina). On one hand, a conservative “culture war” version of Christianity has dominated the South, and deeply influenced national politics, for almost fifty years. This form of Christianity is predicated on white supremacy and heteropatriarchy and regulates religious, as well as sexual, gender, and racial norms. On the other hand, an emerging movement of those once socialized in the culture war version of Protestantism is now reconfiguring the regional traditions. Through ethnographic fieldwork, qualitative interviews, and historical analysis, this study explores the ways these post-culture war Christians are navigating and negotiating relations with family, church, and politics and society more broadly. This work argues that Protestantism in the Upper South is being re-landscaped from the inside by individuals staying within the tradition who seek to reorient regional, national and religious identities. This study goes beyond generalizations about changes in American religion to shed light on the specific motivations, conflicts and dynamics inherent in shifts in lived religion in this particular region. In so doing it also contributes to deeper understanding of processes of religious change more generally.
ContributorsShoemaker, Terry (Author) / Cady, Linell (Thesis advisor) / Gereboff, Joel (Committee member) / Bennett, Gaymon (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
Description
Since the 1960’s and 1970’s, ethnographic research on Jewish menstrual rituals known as niddah, Taharat HaMishpacha, or Family Purity has associated their practices with religious behavior. Much of this research organizes around questions of women’s agency within ostensibly patriarchally constructed religious practices that carry the potential to oppress its women practitioners. This premise is built upon a number of implicit assumptions about the history of today’s niddah practices: that niddah is observed exclusively by Orthodox Jews; that increasing rates of niddah observance correlate exclusively with the trend toward stricter observance levels among the Orthodox since the 1960s; and that this increasingly strict observance itself reflects a reactionary trend among the Orthodox community (a.k.a. tradition versus modernity). All these assumptions currently circulate, in various degrees, among the American Jewish lay community and are shared by a significant number of congregational rabbis. Until the 1990s, no history of niddah existed to either support or refute these assumptions. I initially intended that this project would provide future ethnographers with a comprehensive history of niddah in America during the past one and a half centuries. I engaged Victor Turner’s theory of Social Drama as a framework for understanding this history as a socio-cultural process, rather than as a series of less than related events. However, this study h*as resulted in the identification of many more specific assumptions about the decline and revival of niddah observance in the twentieth century, which are not supported by the scant evidence available. These challenged assumptions beg new directions for research; a thorough reworking of the history of niddah in America; and a fresh look at the literature advocating niddah produced in the 1990’s and early 2000’s. This genealogy as Social Drama presents niddah in twentieth century America as undergoing periods of crisis, negotiation, and reintegration. This drama was triggered by late nineteenth century concepts of religion, body, and ritual that undermined and ruptured the integrity of niddah as a bodily religious ritual practice. Niddah’s twentieth century social drama culminated in fresh articulations of a unique Jewish sexuality and Jewish marital ethic.
ContributorsJohnston, Isobel-Marie (Author) / Gereboff, Joel (Thesis advisor) / Talebi, Shahla (Thesis advisor) / Bennett, Gaymon (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
A new sect of Swaminarayan Hinduism emerged in the late eightieth century. This sect rapidly grew into a global organization due their highly structuralized nature. Fascinatingly, the new sect was able to create the feeling of home away from home in multiple countries. Through the establishments of mandirs, Hindu place of worship, practitioners were able to solidify the feeling of home away from home. Through books, magazine articles and letters the evidence of the new sect creating this feeling is overwhelming. Diaspora theory is woven within the thesis due to the global nature of the sect. This thesis uses a broad definition of diaspora to encompass the change in literature due to the ability of one to maintain close ties to their old homeland. The Swaminarayan sect treaded through diaspora by assimilating to their new homeland all the while keeping a close tie with their old homeland.
ContributorsPatel, Amisha (Author) / Bruner, Jason (Thesis advisor) / Bennett, Gaymon (Committee member) / Henn, Alexander (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
This dissertation investigates the relationship between the universal aspirationsof technology and the particularity of place, by way of close participant observation with biotechnology companies in the San Francisco Bay Area. Its central claim is that the aspiration to placelessness in the development of science and technology operates as material configurations, modes of subjectivation, and historical conditions particular to places. Following Foucault’s late work in ethics, I conduct a series of sustained investigations into the reflective modes of critique biotechnologists make in thinking of and being in the San Francisco Bay Area. I show the ways the aspiration to placelessness exists in place at four different vantage points: the organization, the city, the broader cultural history of the region, and the practices of self-cultivation undertaken by technologists. Within biotechnology organizations, biological work is digitized and automated only through an intensification of bespoke material infrastructures, physical labor, and tacit institutional knowledge. Biotechnology organizations have come into existence through a history of settler colonial erasure, industrial devastation, post-war industrial decay, and urban renewal in Bay Area industrial suburbs and neighborhoods. A nostalgic imagination of the broader San Francisco Bay Area and its history of counterculture become mobilized as an antidote to the felt lifelessness of these forms of urban renewal and technological order and incorporated back into engineering practice. Finally, the technologist themselves must aspire to placelessness, in ways critiqued by local landless people’s movements who offer an alternative ethic to place in their imperative to gentrifiers to “move home with your parents.” I conclude by reflecting on the ways interlocutors at each of these vantage points are actively exploring the creation of more enduring relationships to place in the face of the unintended but intensified forms of social suffering in zones of technological innovation.
ContributorsHammang, Anne (Author) / Bennett, Gaymon (Thesis advisor) / Hurlbut, J. Benjamin (Committee member) / Frow, Emma (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
Description
This dissertation explores the contemporary politics of global transformation: the ways biological expertise and economic rationalities are positioned as agents of governance in the face of emerging global crisis. It examines visions for a new bioeconomy that are offered in response to impending global crisis. Leaders point to calculations of global population growth and resource depletion to predict future crises and call for a new bioeconomy as a pillar of sustainable and “good” governance.
Focusing on visions and practices of bioeconomy-making in the U.S. and Brazil, the dissertation examines bioeconomy discourse as a response to global crisis and a framework of global governance that promises resource abundance and human wellbeing. Bioeconomy discourse makes visible shared notions of how the world is and how it should be that animate the world-making practices of bioeconomy. The dissertation analyzes the bioeconomy as simultaneously a product of existing institutional and nationally situated values and rationalities, and a significant site of performative novelty. It is an effort to reformulate existing projects in the biosciences—from technology regulation to market formation—and establish new rationalities of governance in the name of producing thoroughgoing transformations to both the global economy and to life itself.
Framing existing scientific and economic rationalities as suppressed and misdirected in their power to govern, bioeconomy proponents envision a novel order derivable from the proper conjugation of biological and economic rationalities. Through the lens of bioconstitutionalism, the dissertation elucidates how national, scientific and public rights and responsibilities are coproduced in relation to a sociotechnical imaginary of vital conjuring. Underwritten by the imaginary of vital conjuring, visions of a future transformed promise that abundance and order can be called up from a tangle of crisis and decay. The imaginary of vital conjuring marries a vision of the technological potential of biological life and the forms of economy capable of unlocking that potential. This vision of bioeconomy, the dissertation argues, is a vision of governance: of the right relationships between state, citizen and science.
ContributorsDoezema, Tess A (Author) / Hurlbut, James B (Thesis advisor) / Miller, Clark A. (Committee member) / Bennett, Gaymon (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020
Description
ABSTRACT
The purpose of this thesis is to identify the key determinants of changes in the public’s perception and the historical and legal context for the current laws that govern the Right to Die in America. At its essence, the Right to Die Movement can be summarized in six selected narratives that were performed, told, debated, or reported for the public throughout history. Each of these six stories was presented with the most effective communication technologies available to the narrators in their respective eras.
The thesis includes an original research study assessing the impact of a social media phenomenon on the Right to Die Movement. While the Brittany Maynard Farewell video may not have been solely responsible for the surge of public support for MAID, it certainly captured the sense of autonomy and individual rights Americans believe they have in 2014 and continuing at least through 2019. This belief in autonomy and individual rights influenced the American sense of who owns their bodies and who can control their deaths after they are given terminal diagnoses. The first key narrative introduced Natural Law and the Natural Rights that proceed from this universal law. The second opened up communication about death. The next three demonstrated to Americans what legal rights they had and which were withheld by tradition and law. The last narrative captured and embodied the American sense of autonomy and individual rights that a majority of Americans now feel they possess. The laws and policies that have resulted from the Right to Die Movement both define the boundaries of autonomy and construct an evolving understanding of human freedom.
The purpose of this thesis is to identify the key determinants of changes in the public’s perception and the historical and legal context for the current laws that govern the Right to Die in America. At its essence, the Right to Die Movement can be summarized in six selected narratives that were performed, told, debated, or reported for the public throughout history. Each of these six stories was presented with the most effective communication technologies available to the narrators in their respective eras.
The thesis includes an original research study assessing the impact of a social media phenomenon on the Right to Die Movement. While the Brittany Maynard Farewell video may not have been solely responsible for the surge of public support for MAID, it certainly captured the sense of autonomy and individual rights Americans believe they have in 2014 and continuing at least through 2019. This belief in autonomy and individual rights influenced the American sense of who owns their bodies and who can control their deaths after they are given terminal diagnoses. The first key narrative introduced Natural Law and the Natural Rights that proceed from this universal law. The second opened up communication about death. The next three demonstrated to Americans what legal rights they had and which were withheld by tradition and law. The last narrative captured and embodied the American sense of autonomy and individual rights that a majority of Americans now feel they possess. The laws and policies that have resulted from the Right to Die Movement both define the boundaries of autonomy and construct an evolving understanding of human freedom.
ContributorsGrossman, Jennifer Elizabeth (Author) / Gereboff, Joel (Thesis advisor) / Ross, Heather M. (Committee member) / Bennett, Gaymon (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020
Description
Much of the anthropological and Islamic studies focus in recent years has addressed the shifting forms of Islamic piety across Muslim majority societies. The analysis of this shift in Islamic practice and belief has enveloped the changing sensibilities around technologies, social strata, democracy, law, and everyday life. In light of these transformations, after the fall of the Indonesian New Order in 1998, the performances of Islamic devotional songs (salawat) by Habib Syech bin Abdul Qadir Assegaf (Habib Syech) began bringing millions of people together across Indonesia, Malaysia, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Thailand, South Korea, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen. Although salawat has typically been performed in remembrance of the birth of Prophet Muhammad (mawlid) in localized celebrations. The performances of salawat by Habib Syech, on the other hand, occur fifteen or more times a month with crowds swelling to tens of thousands across multiple nation-states. Habib Syech’s salawat performances furthermore appeal to and bring together diverse Muslim populations that have historically been more divided. Habib Syech’s gatherings reveal how popular forms of piety are shifting in conjunction with profound societal changes in Indonesia and other Muslim communities. In untangling the popularity of Habib Syech’s gatherings, it was not until I became entangled in the rhythm of salawat that baraka, often translated as blessings, emerged as a slippery, elusive, and living helping propel the popularity of this phenomena. The guttural cries of my interlocutors (baraka, baraka, baraka) resonate and summon a methodology that takes the visible and invisible together in understanding the concept and life of baraka. I, like my interlocutors, began hunting baraka as an alternative, living concept that challenges understandings of Islam in Indonesia driven by Islamic civil organizations, prescriptive vs everyday Islamic piety, and Western interpretations of the world as disenchanted. This dissertation is an exploration of new opportunities for understanding religion in the modern world that emerge from the ethnographic field through the life of baraka.
ContributorsEdmonds, James Michael (Author) / Talebi, Shahla (Thesis advisor) / Bennett, Gaymon (Committee member) / Haines, Charles (Committee member) / Rush, James (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021
Description
Peyote is a subject which renders the mechanisms, forces, and assemblages of colonialism clear. It is in the very inability of the colonial world to categorize, locate, understand and react to peyote that reveals so much about how colonialism operates. A primary goal of this project is to demonstrate that through understanding peyote, and its role in both colonial and contemporary history, one may come to better understand or recognize racial hierarchies and colonial forces which have not gone away with time. The first chapter is primarily a discussion of the Ghost Dance, I lay out some of the difficulties that indigenous appeals to religious freedom face both in terms of political power, but also conceptual, cultural, and academic thinking. In chapter two I move more specifically to the topic of peyote, tracing peyote’s history from precolonial times to the present. Chapters three and four deal with peyote as part of the borderlands and part of the War on Drugs respectively.
I argue that understanding peyote can benefit a broader decolonial project within scholarship. The richness of the intersections between peyote and myriad other subjects is vastly understudied in academia and continued decolonial scholarship on the topic could have immense potential in bringing new insights into view. I draw heavily on scholars such as Edward Said and Aimé Césaire, but I have also been strongly influenced by other scholars such as Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Frantz Fanon, and Gloria Anzaldúa. In keeping with the decolonial mission, it is important to recognize that much of what I am presenting in this work is necessarily new or radical to the indigenous communities who are close to the topics at hand. While I present my own novel insights and discoveries, I also intend for this project to be a call for greater attention and study to be brought to the subject of peyote.
ContributorsRosenberg, Harrison Charles (Author) / Bennett, Gaymon (Thesis advisor) / Berry, Evan (Committee member) / Alhassan, Shamara W (Committee member) / Swanson, Tod (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021
Description
By utilizing words, photographs, and motion pictures, this multimodal and multisited project traces a rhizomatic genealogy of Russian Cosmism—a nineteenth century political theology promoting a universal human program for overcoming death, resurrecting ancestors, and traveling through the cosmos—amongst post-Soviet techno-utopian projects and imaginaries. I illustrate how Cosmist techno-utopian, futurist, and other-than-human discourse exist as Weberian “elective affinities” within diverse ecologies of the imagination, transmitting a variety of philosophies and political programs throughout trans-temporal, yet philosophically bounded, communities. With a particular focus on the United States and Ukraine, and taking an apophatic analytical position, I dissect how different groups of philosophers, technologists, and publics interact(ed) with Cosmism, as well as how seemingly disparate communities (re)shape and deterritorialize Cosmist political theology in an attempt to legitimize their constructed political imaginaries.
ContributorsGenovese, Taylor (Author) / Bennett, Gaymon (Thesis advisor) / Avina, Alexander (Committee member) / Messeri, Lisa (Committee member) / Josephson Storm, Jason Ā (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
Description
This dissertation centers on the life of Patrick Francis Healy, the son of an enslaved woman and an Irish slaveholder. Born in 1834, Healy became a Jesuit priest in 1864 and the president of Georgetown University in 1874, seven decades before Georgetown admitted its first African American student. In the twentieth century, historical investigations of race and American Catholicism cast Healy and his family in a new light. Today, the Healys are upheld in some circles as African American Catholic icons. Patrick Healy is now remembered as the first African American Jesuit and Catholic university president, as well as the first African American to receive a doctorate. This dissertation pursues both the life of Patrick Healy as well as what I call his “afterlives,” or the ways in which he has been remembered since the 1950s, when Albert S. Foley, S.J. discovered that the Healys’ mother was enslaved and refashioned them from white Irish Americans to white-passing African Americans. How and why did Patrick Francis Healy understand and comport himself as a white, upper-class Catholic? How and why have others sought to construct him as African American in the years since his ancestry was made widely known? How has Georgetown incorporated Healy’s legacy, in the context of its and other universities’ coming-to-terms with their dealings with slavery more broadly? I pursue these questions through archival sources (primarily Healy’s diaries and letters) at Georgetown University and College of the Holy Cross, as well as secondary literature on passing, subjectivity, and hagiography.
ContributorsGriffin, Alexandria Gale (Author) / Fessenden, Tracy (Thesis advisor) / O'Donnell, Catherine (Committee member) / Bennett, Gaymon (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020