Ana Schuber is a graduate student in our Religion in Culture MA program. This post was originally published on our Religious Studies & Social Theory: Foundations course blog. So, here in the middle, actually right up on the final run toward the mid-term 2018 elections, it was amazing to see a political advertisement that turned the standard dialogue about women running for office on its head. Paid for by the Serve America PAC, a democratic effort, this ad features eight first time congressional […]
Tag: Language
Why Do They Touch the Phallus? Or, Diverging Theories of Ritual
One night during my fieldwork among Brazilian migrant communities in Japan, I was invited to a dinner at Daniel’s apartment. He and his girlfriend frequented a local Brazilian evangelical church that I was studying. After the dinner, they started talking about the “strange festival” in Komaki, a city one-hour drive away from where they lived. The festival took place the previous week (on March 15 2014) and they came across its footage online. The Hōnen Festival at Tagata Shrine is best known […]
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The Cow Says Moo
To make the argument with students that language and identity are deeply connected historical phenomena — i.e., that what we designate as meaning results from the coordination of a variety of arbitrarily-related sounds and symbols that are themselves each arbitrarily assigned relationships with items in the world that strike our fancy. That’s how we know what a cow says and that they have something to do with farmers and milk and horses and barns and…. […]
Getting Our Hands on an Ungraspable Totality
Have you read Craig Martin‘s new interview with Talal Asad, just published in the Bulletin for the Study of Religion? […]