In this exchange, Mayanthi Fernando and Susan Harding reflect on the norms and taboos of the secular academy and on…
Mayanthi L. Fernando
Mayanthi L. Fernando is associate professor of anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She works on religion, secularism, bodies, and the senses, and is the author of The Republic Unsettled: Muslim French and the Contradictions of Secularism (Duke University Press, 2014). She is currently writing a new book on nonhuman beings, the secular, and the post-humanist turn.
human
We secular moderns tend to think of the human body as an objective entity, as fairly stable over time. Indeed,…
A conversation between Sara Farris and Joan Wallach Scott
As the final installment of the series “Sex, secularism, and ‘femonationalism,’” Sara Farris, author of In the Name of Women’s Rights,…
Supernatureculture
I never thought much about ghosts until my cat Hoppy died.
Secularism and the Animist Indigene
In the prompt that we sent to the authors participating in this forum, Vincent Lloyd and I asked a series of questions…
Taking the Islamic in “the Islamic state” seriously
I want to focus on Salomon’s argument that the secular state—in this case the British colonial one—is in the business…
Short skirts and niqab bans: On sexuality and the secular body
Introduced in Québec in March 2010, Bill 94 proposed requiring women to unveil their faces if they wanted to work…