The Credible and the Credulous: The Question of “Villagers' Beliefs” in Nepal

Pigg, Stacy Leigh

doi:10.1525/can.1996.11.2.02a00020

Cited by 241 publications

(98 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…Because expressions of doubt are invariably linked with larger social contexts, such as historical change, socio-political crisis (Pelkmans 2013b: 8), and conversion to global religions, and with mundane relations, including kinship and cultural politics of modernization, cosmopolitanism, progress, and local traditions versus global development (Pigg 1996), one can sweepingly argue that pervasive doubt about ritual efficacy, and even about the existence of gods in Western Africa, is caused by colonial and cultural encounters that transmit 'Western modernities'. Building on the contemporary example of renegotiation and rejection of ancestral customs among Manjaco in Guinea-Bissau, Eric Gable (1995: 249) suggests that people's interactions with spirits point to the existence of the "indigenous landscape" within which skepticism makes sense.…”

Section: Doubtmentioning

confidence: 99%

Godless People, Doubt, and Atheism

Blanes¹,

Oustinova-Stjepanovic²

2015

Social Analysis

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Abstract:In the introduction to this special issue, we set the agenda for researching the aspirations and practices of godless people who seek to thin out religion in their daily lives. We reflect on why processes of disengagement from religion have not been adequately researched in anthropology. Locating this issue's articles in the anthropological literature on doubt and atheism, we argue for the importance of a comparative investigation to analyze people's reluctance to pursue religion.Keywords: atheism, disbelief, disengagement from religion, doubt, godless people, non-religion, unbelief Being GodlessIn the current climate of false prophecies of secularism and numerous theories of the resurgence of religions, it is rather unusual to study a way of disengaging from religion. A bulk of recent ethnographies tell stories about technologies of self and the adept cultivation of religious dispositions (Mahmood 2005), learning to discern God (Luhrmann 2007), and enacting divine presences in physical rituals, speech acts, dream visions, or materials (Engelke 2007). Rituals of presencing the transcendent, the divine, or the immaterial (e.g., Orsi 2005) and well-rehearsed arguments about the resilience of religious spiritualities in politics (Bubandt and van Beek 2012) seem to be the order of the day. Building on the growing interest in researching how people demarcate the boundaries of religion and what falls outside (Engelke 2012b(Engelke , 2014, this special issue suggests that 'being godless' is an important empirical reality that encompasses processes, aspirations, and practices that purposefully or inadvertently lead to the attenuation of one's religious life. Through ethnographies of 'godless people', we propose to explore modalities of disengagement from religion, such as aspirations to move away from one's religious tradition and attempts to maintain one's atheist sensibilities and dispositions in encounters 2 | Ruy Llera Blanes and Galina Oustinova-Stjepanovic with religious phenomena and people. The contributors to this issue illuminate several moments and movements within such processes: the materiality and bodily consequences of atheist configurations (Copeman and Quack), questions of certainty and doubt (Tremlett and Shih), problems of defining a non-religious identity (Lee), and political narratives and ontologies (Blanes and Paxe). We also interrogate the non-religious construction of scientific scholarship (Luehrmann) and the atheism of anthropology and anthropologists (Oustinova-Stjepanovic). These contributions exemplify possible questions and itineraries in the empirical study of atheism and non-religion and raise anthropological questions beyond a specific sub-disciplinary scope. As Matthew Engelke brilliantly exposes in the afterword to this issue, this exercise is conceptually uncomfortable but can be productive for both a hypothetical anthropology of non-religion and an anthropology of religion. In this introduction, we set an agenda for the study of non-religion and atheism and critically revie...

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Section: Doubtmentioning

confidence: 99%

Godless People, Doubt, and Atheism

Blanes¹,

Oustinova-Stjepanovic²

2015

Social Analysis

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“…Pigg (1996) who phrases this scale issue thusly, accepting: 'the premise that a locality (such as a Nepali village) is itself a translocal (or transnational) space. Locality is constituted in and through relations to wider systems, not simply impinged upon by them.…”

Section: Macro Scale -Broadly Based Global 'Rules' That Affect Pementioning

confidence: 99%

“…18 Arora-Jonsson (2013) notes, as does Pigg (1996) before her, the inherent links between the modernity narrative and the notion of 'tradition'-the two notions are oppositional; each implies the other as its opposite.…”

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confidence: 98%

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The gender box : A framework for analysing gender roles in forest management

Colfer¹

2012

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“…These events might be called controversies or even conspiracies of food safety, but I use reliability to avoid casting the world into the knowing and the duped -that is, between people who have tightened or loosened their grip on knowledge (Pigg, 1996;Nelson, 2001). In a setting such as Mumbai where food adulteration is the rule and not the exception, knowing about the problem is already a done deal (Mazzarella, 2006;Smith, 2007;Gupta, 2012).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Unreliable eating: Patterns of food adulteration in urban India

Solomon

2015

BioSocieties

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This article is about food safety and food adulteration in urban India. Situated at the relational interface of foods and their contaminants, it considers ways of thinking and acting at the porous boundaries between bodies and environments. The article details how people attempt to detect where food and its adulteration begins and ends, through ethnographic reflection on several events of adulteration in Mumbai and a context of changing food safety policies in India. The article develops the concept of reliability as a lens onto food politics different than one delimited strictly in terms of consumerism. Reliability refracts the politics of difference at work in times of toxic food environments, in contemporary India and elsewhere, wherein tensions between poison and nourishment take on renewed charges. This framework recasts a choice-focused approach to thinking about food safety by centralizing how living with harm -rather than ridding the world of it, element by element -is what is at stake.

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The Credible and the Credulous: The Question of “Villagers' Beliefs” in Nepal

Cited by 241 publications

References 18 publications

Godless People, Doubt, and Atheism

Godless People, Doubt, and Atheism

The gender box : A framework for analysing gender roles in forest management

Unreliable eating: Patterns of food adulteration in urban India

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