Beyond blasphemy or devotion: art, the secular, and Catholicism in Paris

Oliphant, Elayne

doi:10.1111/1467-9655.12210

Cited by 23 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 21 publications

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“…For many reasons, I would answer. Following Danièle Hervieu-Léger's (2008) wider argument about the links between religion and 'chains of memory' , and recent discussions of 'religion as heritage' (Kaell 2017;Oliphant 2015), notions of lapsedness offer potentially different angles on the relationship between ritual, kinship, identity, and time. As Coleman suggests, much of interest is revealed when we focus our ethnographic gaze 'away from the most obvious centres of religious action' , when we 'move away from core, "hard" ritual practices and toward apparent ritual and aesthetic peripheries ' (2014: s290).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The lapsed and the laity: discipline and lenience in the study of religion

Mayblin

2017

Royal Anthropological Inst

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This article cautions against an 'earnest turn' within the anthropology of religion, pointing up the tendency for anthropologists of religion to over-emphasize the role of discipline in the construction of the religious subjecthood over mechanisms of leniency and compromise. Taking the Catholic Church as an example, I show how discipline and lenience have been co-constitutive of Christian subjectivities, as different movements in a gigantic choreography which have spanned and evolved over several centuries. By looking at certain technologies of lenience that have emerged over the course of Catholic history, I trace an alternative genealogy of 'the Christian self'; one in which institutional growth, power, and survival depended not only upon the formation of disciplined bodies and interior dispositions but also upon a carefully managed division of labour between clergy and laity, as well as upon a battery of legal commutations and practical avoidances aimed at minimizing the effort and pain of the ascetic approach. Taking the concept of 'lapsedness' as cue, I ask to what extent the 'lapsed Catholic', rather than indexing an ever-increasing tendency towards secularism, might already be contained and accounted for within Catholicism as a living, evolving form.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The lapsed and the laity: discipline and lenience in the study of religion

Mayblin

2017

Royal Anthropological Inst

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“…But first, back to my claim that medical debates in southern France may offer new perspectives on French secularity. There is no shortage of work on secularism in France (Asad 2006; Baubérot 2004; 2008; 2009; Bowen 2007; 2009; 2010; Fernando 2014; Oliphant 2015; Willaime 1985; 1990) or on secularism more generally (Agrama 2012; Asad 2003; Casanova 2006; Mahmood 2015; Taylor 2007). However, with some notable exceptions, most of this literature neither predicts nor illuminates the forms of personhood and authority evoked by care providers in moments of ethical debate.…”

Section: Secularity Secularisms and Francementioning

confidence: 99%

Making secular ‘French’ medical ethics: transcendent morality and patient subjectivities in southern French hospitals

Arkin

2020

Royal Anthropological Inst

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Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with physicians and nurses working in two state-funded southern French hospitals, this article explores why and how medical care providers connected their everyday deliberations about patient care to what they considered to be distinctively French forms of medical responsibility. Many healthcare professionals saw French medical morality in opposition to 'Anglo-Saxon' discourses of individual autonomy and transactional choice. In contrast to such 'transactionalism', they insisted that 'French' ethics required limits that transcended particular circumstances. And yet it was difficult for doctors and nurses working in secular and increasingly neoliberal hospitals to argue against individual transactionalism in an overtly moral register, one that might appear religious and paternalist. Through a close look at two different cases-one in assisted reproduction and one in palliative care-I show how the language of folk psychoanalysis provided some health professionals with a way out of this impasse. Care providers used pseudo-psychoanalytic accounts of patient subjectivities to depict individuals as incapable of knowing, let alone 'owning' or rationally mastering, themselves. This, in turn, suggests that some aspects of French secularity may be far less Protestant and liberal than contemporary anthropological work tends to assume. In the spring of 2017, a southern French hospital's public-facing bioethics institution, its espace éthique, brought in a national superstar-Jean-François Mattei-to give a talk on comparative bioethics. Mattei, a former legislator, practising doctor, and founding member of a prestigious regional bioethics institution, drew a crowd of doctors, nurses, and midwives to the old medical school amphitheatre. All were keen to hear a talk on what Mattei called 'various approaches to questions with no good answers'. But rather than talk about questions with no good answers, Mattei delivered an encomium to 'French' bioethics. Focusing on issues often covered in the French press, notably embryonic stem cell research and surrogacy, he told the audience that other countries had bad political or philosophical reasons for their approaches. According to Mattei, British doctors were too 'pragmatic' , engineering the category 'pre-embryo' as a 'convenience' that allowed scientists to experiment on embryos during the first weeks of existence, when they can still divide. This exceptional pre-person form of life, he noted, was a cynical ploy that allowed the British to claim that they were respecting human dignity from the moment the embryo became an indivisible entity, or a person.

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“…So, in the future, the study of secularism and de-churching will certainly form an important theme in the study of religion/s (see also Astor, Burchardt, and Griera 2017). By taking a material approach to the ways in which the remains of the Christian past on the garbage heap of secularization are handled and revaluedbeing destroyed (Beekers 2016), recycled (Gerhards and de Wildt 2015; Meyer forthcoming), touristified (Stausberg 2011), heritagized (Oliphant 2015; see also Coleman and Bowman 2019) 3we can assess what a productive, transdisciplinary Dutch research programme (2000-2011) once aptly called 'the future of the religious past' (e.g., de Vries 2008). But of course, in the Netherlands and Europe at large, there is more to do for us than deal with the reframing and mobilization of Christianity in secular frames of culture and heritage.…”

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confidence: 99%

Remapping our mindset: towards a transregional and pluralistic outlook

Meyer

2019

Religion

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The future of the study of religion/s must be actively envisioned and pursued. In the aftermath of the deconstruction of 'religion' and the idea of 'secularization' as imbued with a Western teleology, it is necessary to rethink and reconfigure the study of religion/s against a global horizon. In this essay I propose that we should move out of the unproductive Religious Studies-Theology binary and frame our work in the midst of the humanities. A new mindset is needed for scholarly research on religion, and to achieve this I point at the new vistas arising from a transregional and pluralistic outlook.

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Beyond blasphemy or devotion: art, the secular, and Catholicism in Paris

Cited by 23 publications

References 21 publications

The lapsed and the laity: discipline and lenience in the study of religion

The lapsed and the laity: discipline and lenience in the study of religion

Making secular ‘French’ medical ethics: transcendent morality and patient subjectivities in southern French hospitals

Remapping our mindset: towards a transregional and pluralistic outlook

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