At a time when the world appears in many ways to be broken, what can the anthropology of religion meaningfully contribute? This conference invites us to think collectively about how to understand—and respond to—the current moment. We might read this moment as one of continuities, resurgences, or new configurations. But it is undeniably a time that forces us to grapple with an intensification of violence: majoritarian nationalisms, fascisms, genocidal wars, climate catastrophe, and enduring formations of white supremacy.

The conference will bring together anthropologists to examine how religion is mobilized within these conditions of brokenness and ruin, ideas that may be differently configured in different religious traditions. What does ethnography reveal about how communities experience, narrate, and inhabit brokenness across scales large and small? How are religious concepts—such as suffering, sacrifice, salvation, and apocalypse—reworked in the face of ongoing violence? And how do religious practices participate in projects of repair, whether through mourning, witnessing, solidarity, or the prefiguration of alternative futures?

We invite papers that engage religion in relation to: fascism and ethno-racial supremacies; sovereignty, war, and militarization; ecological collapse; eschatology, millenarianism, and apocalyptic imaginaries; scapegoating and victimhood; mourning, grief, and witnessing; and survival, resistance, and prefigurative politics. By foregrounding ethnographic attention to lived experience, this conference seeks to clarify what is distinctive about anthropological approaches to religion in a broken world—and what they make visible about the uneven ways brokenness is produced, inhabited, contested, and overcome. In addition to contributions on the main conference theme, SAR welcomes paper and panel proposals on ALL TOPICS in the anthropology of religion.

The SAR Biennial Conference will be running in parallel with the Society for Psychological Anthropology (SPA) Biennial Conference, which will be happening in Toronto at the same time.

Submissions and registration for the SAR Biennial are opening soon! If you have any questions about the conference, please contact SAR President Amira Mittermaier (amira.mittermaier@utoronto.ca).