This ethnographic essay focuses on the relationship between religious performances and the "strong discourse" of contemporary global capitalism. It explores the subjective meaning and social significance of religious practice in the context of a rapidly expanding mass religious phenomenon in India. The narrative draws on Weber's insights on the intersections between religion and economy, phenomenological theory, performance studies, and Indian philosophy and popular culture. It shows that religion here is primarily a means of performing to and preparing for an informal economy. It gives the chance to live meaningful social lives while challenging the inequities and symbolic violence of an imposing global capitalist social ethic. Unlike exclusive formal institutions that are increasingly governed by neoliberal rationalities, the religious event provides an open and freely accessible yet challenging stage for participants to practice and prove their resolve, gifts, and sincerity. In contrast to the focus on social anomie and the reactionary characterization of contemporary religion in identity-based arguments, this essay demonstrates that religious practice here is simultaneously a way of performing to and performing against a totalizing capitalist social order.
This article addresses the social and historical relation between Chicago School neo-liberalism and contemporary racism, and its connections with the formations of racism in classical liberalism and its colonial character. I show the pragmatic and discursive operations of neo-racism in the context of this shift to a neo-liberal discourse, drawing particularly on Michel Foucault's seminars, Society Must be Defended, and Birth of Bio-politics. Insofar as "race" cannot be understood as a discrete category outside its social, economic, moral, and political embeddedness in liberalism, I argue that methodological individualism and expectations of high-specialization constrain the theorization of race in U.S. scholarship. Racial lines will continue to be (re)excavated, borrowed, or inscribed afresh to channel, reinforce, and institutionalize the social violence that neo-liberalism must unleash.Keywords: neoliberalism; race; Foucault; liberalism; internal racism This article analyzes the social and historical relationship between Chicago school neo-liberalism and contemporary racism, or what some have called neo-racism (Balibar 1991;Bonilla-Silva 1997; Goldberg 1993Goldberg , 2011, in light of the formation of racism in the colonial origins of classical liberalism. I will be discussing racialization through the thought/works of Michel Foucault, who locates race in the historical formations of liberal ideology and governmental practice. I will then move on to pursue the ramifications of the constitutive raciality of liberalism into post world war II neo-liberalism. My emphasis is on the seeming coincidence that an extreme discourse such as American neo-liberalism should originate in a country where a racial schism runs deep in the social consciousness. I am arguing that the historically entrenched sociological condition of race, and its punitive ferocity, make possible the extreme metaphysics of American neo-liberalism. The latter, in turn, engineers a form of racism that operates effortlessly, if viciously, under the cover of a post-racial epoch.
This article focuses on 'dread' in religious practice in contemporary India. It argues that the dread of everyday existence, which is as salient in a biographical temporality as it pervades the phenomenal environment, connects and transfers between religious practices and everyday life in India for the marginalized masses. For such dread, dominant liberal discourses, such as those of the nation, economy, or ego-centric performance, have neither the patience nor the forms to represent, perform, and abreact. Formulated in dialogue with critical theory, phenomenology, and psychoanalytic theory, this article conceives of religious practices in continuum with the economic, social, ethical, and political realms, and the repressions thereof. Focused on a rapidly expanding religious movement in India, it challenges normative discourses of religious practitioners as fundamentalists or reactionaries, and strives to extend the imperatives of recent critical urban ethnography into the domain of religious practice.
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