Religion & Politics

Catalog description

This seminar adopts a history of longue durée to examine the mutual embeddedness of religion, politics, and the state across archaic, medieval, and modern social formations across the globe. It combines theoretical writings (Lefebvre, Foucault, Rappaport, Mahmood, Taylor, Lefort, Deleuze, and Guattari) with empirical analyses of religious politics in archaic states (Angkor, Inca, China, Aztecs, and Abrahamic religions). It explores religious movements in modernity in Korea, China, Mexico, Russia, India, and the US. Themes include ritualization of politics and states, gender politics, millenarianism, spatialization, "political theology," biopolitics, etc.