Perforating Kinship: Syriac Christianity, Ethnicity, and Secular Legibility

Kellogg, Sarah Bakker

doi:10.1086/705233

Cited by 8 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 46 publications

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“…Among Indian Syriacs, recorded genealogies linking lay Christians to an apostle or early saint inform both local family life and wider historical sensibilities (Varghese 2004; cf. Bakker Kellogg 2019). In different ways, descent relations cut across social and religious lines to inform the lives and faiths of Ethiopians (Boylston 2018), Russian Old Believers (Rogers 2009), and Egyptian Copts (Ramzy 2015).…”

Section: Transmitting ‘The Forces That Bring Forth Life’mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Their difference is thus not so much a question of contrasting models of time as it is of which forms of relatedness can be considered sacred. And while literature on links between the filial and ritual dead is growing, from a theoretical standpoint the two domains remain stubbornly separate (but see Bakker Kellogg 2019; Cannell 2013 b ). One important exception is the work of Gillian Feeley‐Harnik.…”

Section: Transmitting ‘The Forces That Bring Forth Life’mentioning

confidence: 99%

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A lineage in land: the transmission of Palestinian Christianity

Goodgame

2023

Royal Anthropological Inst

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This article examines a Christian tradition defined by descent, but a descent that extends beyond family lineages to include relatedness with saints and sacred land. This tradition emerges from the Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem, one of the oldest churches in the world, composed of a Palestinian laity and a Greek monastic hierarchy. Through an ethnography of the Orthodox feast of St George and the ritual use of olive oil from Palestinian villages, the article frames discussion of indigeneity, land, and rootedness around the concept of descent. Putting Palestinian Orthodoxy in conversation with kinship theory and the critique of social structure, it argues against sequestering divine and human forms of relatedness in separate social domains. It suggests the concept of descent can be a powerful tool for integrating them when expanded to include all ‘forces that bring forth life’.

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Section: Transmitting ‘The Forces That Bring Forth Life’mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Transmitting ‘The Forces That Bring Forth Life’mentioning

confidence: 99%

A lineage in land: the transmission of Palestinian Christianity

Goodgame

2023

Royal Anthropological Inst

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“…As Dejan said in a later conversation, non‐Orthodox Serbs cannot be Serbs ‘in the fullest sense’. Disaggregating the confessional and ethnic aspects of identity risks dissolving a sense of self (Bakker Kellogg 2019: 484).…”

Section: Peoplehood/personhoodmentioning

confidence: 99%

Peoplehood and the Orthodox person: a view from central Serbia

Lackenby

2023

Royal Anthropological Inst

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Practising Orthodox Christians in central Serbia live their liturgical lives within the idiom of Serbian peoplehood. This article probes the ‘people’ (narod) – perceived locally as an historically and geographically rooted ethno‐moral collectivity – as a core concept of belonging which is key for understanding post‐Yugoslav Orthodox life. The ‘people’ functions as a this‐worldly collective identity within which my interlocutors situate themselves as Orthodox persons, and through which they approach the Divine. Threats to Serb identity serve to foreground peoplehood as the supposedly prime site for Orthodox flourishing. Moving beyond state‐oriented analyses of ‘religious nationalism’, the article demonstrates not how ‘nationalism’ can be understood through ‘religion’, but how, to use Orthodox Serbs’ own terminology, faith can be understood through the prism of peoplehood.

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“…While disparate national histories of secularization throughout the Middle East have created regional differences among Syriac Orthodox self‐understandings (Bakker Kellogg 2015), diasporic Suryoye have nonetheless maintained a tight grip on collective memories of non‐Chalcedonian history as the authorizing wellspring of ethnonational difference, whether defined as Assyrian, Aramaean, or just Syriac (Bakker Kellogg 2019). How they labor to make this non‐Chalcedonian Christianity relevant to the programs meant to integrate them into Dutch society holds a mirror to the logics at work in European debates over minority accommodation.…”

Section: Welcome To the Wesselerbronxmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…22Syriac Orthodox Christians are known in different national, regional, and linguistic contexts as Suryoye (Suryoyo, singular masculine; Suryayto, singular feminine) or Suroyo in neo‐Aramaic, Süryani in Arabic and Turkish, or Assyrian, Aramaean, or simply Syriac in English. In this corner of the Syriac world, where the majority of Syriac Orthodox Christians hail from Tur Abdin, little consensus exists over which term best captures the historical, cultural, and ethnonational dimensions of their identity in English or Dutch, so I default here to Suryoye / Suryoyo, with the understanding that this, too, is a contested term (see Bakker Kellogg 2019). …”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

A Racial-Religious Imagination: Syriac Christians, Iconic Bodies, and the Sensory Politics of Ethical Difference in the Netherlands

Kellogg

2021

Cult. Anthropol.

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Since 9/11, political debate over immigration in Europe is often posed as a question of Islam’s distance from Europe’s putatively Judeo-Christian ethical tradition—and therefore a matter of neither explicitly racial nor religious animus. This article interrogates this claim from the perspective of Syriac Orthodox Christians living in the Netherlands, who, despite their conspicuous Christianity, are frequently told by both the state and their neighbors that their ethnoreligious difference is not meaningfully different from Muslim difference. Drawing on fieldwork in the Dutch subprovince of Twente, I analyze both everyday and bureaucratic moments of misrecognition as sites of racialization that illuminate a Dutch racial-religious imagination rooted in post-Calvinist theological anxieties over social reproduction. By showing how minoritized bodies are read as icons of invisible reproductive relations, I deploy the Orthodox Christian doctrine of the holy icon to theorize secular modern racialization as a process of ethical differentiation, classification, and control over reproductive power.

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Perforating Kinship: Syriac Christianity, Ethnicity, and Secular Legibility

Cited by 8 publications

References 46 publications

A lineage in land: the transmission of Palestinian Christianity

A lineage in land: the transmission of Palestinian Christianity

Peoplehood and the Orthodox person: a view from central Serbia

A Racial-Religious Imagination: Syriac Christians, Iconic Bodies, and the Sensory Politics of Ethical Difference in the Netherlands

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