In the Americas, missionary colonialism prospered on the sharp edge of secular Christian power. Cutting up land with a blade that reflected Christian glory on one side and secular state governance on the other, the new nations of the Americas were made through a process of violent spiritual-political invention. New Christian-infused forms of spiritual jurisdiction—royal proclamations and constitutions—were written on top of already-existing Indigenous laws and alliances also rooted in spiritual claims. Indigenous scholars such as John Borrows and Audra Simpson have made clear that for scholars to understand ongoing Indigenous sovereignty requires attention to history, to protocol, and to how Indigenous stories are both told and withheld. I would add that thinking about Indigeneity in North America—or Turtle Island—requires careful attention to how ceremony, protocol, and invocations of the spirit have shaped all claims to sovereignty on this land, including those of settler-colonial nations.
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The Myth of Disenchantment: An Introduction
by
Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm
A great many theorists have argued that precisely what makes the modern world “modern” is that people no longer believe in spirits, myths, or magic. Even theorists who have challenged grand narratives of secularization often assume that modernity produces a disenchanted world. The age of myth is allegedly over, the spirits have vanished, and vibrant nature has been subjugated. In The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences, I argue that as broad cultural history goes, this narrative is wrong. Our era is far from mythless, belief in spirits continues to be widespread, vitalized nature has been a persistent philosophical counter-current, and even attempts to suppress magic have failed more often than they have succeeded. Hence, I contend that the whole notion of “modernity” as rupture that undergirds a host of disciplines is itself a myth.
Call for Applications | International Center for the Humanities and Social Change, UCSB
by The EditorsThe recently established International Center for the Humanities and Social Change at the University of California, Santa Barbara, will fund dissertation fellows and postdoctoral scholars for the academic year 2017-2018. For more information or with any questions, visit the Center's website.
A State of suspicion: Counter-radicalization in Norway
by
Sindre Bangstad
"It has long been known that Muslims constitute the proverbial public enemy number one for right-wing populists across the Western world. What is new and relatively unprecedented in the Norwegian context, however, is the active embrace and instrumentalization of what Rogers Brubaker has referred to as “Christianist secularism” by Norwegian populist right-wingers in government. Given that Norway happens to be among the most secularized countries on earth by any standard measure developed by classical secularization theory (with steadily declining Christian church membership, attendance, and baptism), what Norwegian populist right-wingers offer is, of course, a culturalized Christianity largely devoid of any substantive content relating to faith."