“Ancestor worship” is a classic category of analysis in religious studies, one that has come to be taken for granted in both academic writing and public discourse as a minoritarian form of religious practice. This talk examines the complexities of imposing the frame of religion on ancestors by examining the relational dimensions of ancestral practices in Zimbabwe that also raise questions about kinship. Drawing on missionary, colonial, and ethnographic archives, the talk interrogates how ancestral practices came to be a minoritized form of “religion” over the past two centuries. In the precolonial world, ancestral spirits were fundamental to local knowledge systems, played a central role in everyday life, and formed the bedrock of social and political power. The talk traces how British colonists worked to demonize, marginalize and ultimately minoritize ancestors in Zimbabwe, configuring them first as “superstition” and later a kind of religion that would become a minority form of religious practice. Ultimately, the talk argues that these processes transformed ancestors into a minority “religion” while erasing their relational dimensions, a struggle that played out in many contexts and continues to limit understandings of ancestors and ancestral practices. At the same time, the talk makes the case for a relational approach to ancestral spirits by examining how people in Zimbabwe continue to imagine, resist, and rework the meanings of both ancestors and religion. This talk draws on material from Raffaella Taylor-Seymour’s book project, titled Ancestral Intimacies: Queerness, Relationality and Religion in Zimbabwe.

For more than forty years, criminalization has been the primary approach to addressing intimate partner violence in the United States.  Intent on ensuring that intimate partner violence was treated like any other crime, anti-violence feminists campaigned for stronger enforcement of the criminal law against those accused of violence.  Bolstered by billions of dollars in federal funding, states have enacted laws and policies mandating arrest and prosecution in cases involving domestic violence and increasing sentences for crimes of violence.  But criminalization has not decreased or deterred intimate partner violence.  Instead, criminalization exacerbates the correlates of intimate partner violence and has serious consequences for the people that it was meant to help.  This talk will argue that we should shift our policy responses to intimate partner violence away from criminalization and instead look at the problem through the lenses of economics, public health, and community intervention.

What if the selfish gene theory is actually a poor model of human reproduction?  Female mammals’ sex organs seem to spend most of their time avoiding fertilization, not the other way around—which can give us better directions in women’s health research and a better way of telling the story of the female body. (Spoiler alert: it might also save male lives, too.)

IRCPL’s Religion and Climate series is animated by calls to reimagine human relationships with and responsibilities to the environment in an age of planetary crisis. As the impact of climate change is increasingly but unevenly felt, religion is emerging as a site of epistemological doubt, struggle, and possibility. This series explores the cosmological underpinnings that shape diverse understandings of the environment and examine how religious subjects react to and act upon the ecological upheavals they face, challenging exclusively technocratic and secular responses to the climate crisis.

The series involves four events structured around the elements—Earth, Water, Fire, and Air—each of which will take one element as a lens for engaging with specific climate struggles and the religious debates they ignite. In the final event, an online program on the theme of “Air,” Sophie Chao (University of Sydney) and Nikita Simpson (SOAS, University of London) will discuss their work on climate change, atmospherics and spirits in West Papua, India, and the U.K. This conversation will explore both the religious dimensions of air and atmospheres in these contexts, and the ways contemporary climate change emerges out of longer histories of environmental destruction.

In this talk, based on extensive ethnographic research in Italy, Dr. Parmigiani will focus on representations of women and gender-based violence in contemporary Italy. She will describe and analyze the politics of representation enacted by the Italian feminists of UDI (Unione delle Donne in Italia), the oldest Italian feminist group, in the context of the pervasive representations of women as victims portrayed by the Italian media, Catholic pro-life movements, and hegemonic patriarchal discourses. By analyzing UDI's motto “'We are witnesses, not victims," she will address the strengths and weaknesses of the "ethos of survivorship" and suggest other possible empowering ways to reframe discourses and representations around women and violence, in Italy and elsewhere.

Obstetric violence is characterized by medical neglect, unconsented intervention, and demeaning treatment of pregnant and birthing people. It is a particular, and particularly gendered, form of institutional and social violence that both stems from, and exacerbates, other oppressions and vulnerabilities. For example, obstetric racism is one form of obstetric violence that partially accounts for the unacceptably high rate of maternal mortality among Black, Latino, and Indigenous women in the United States. This talk will place Mexico within a transnational history of obstetric violence. It offers a new genealogy of the concept, beginning with the priest-surgeons of Spain’s late Bourbon empire, during which time the Spanish Crown declared that the spiritual life of an embryo was of greater importance than the corporeal life of its mother. Moving throughout scientific racism in the nineteenth century and to eugenics in the early twentieth century, the talk explores how Catholic theology affected— and was affected by—developments in maternal/fetal science. Even during periods of Church-state conflict, the religious valences of experimental surgery manifested in embodied expressions of racialized, and often-coercive, medical science. Examining this history underscores the long history, and persistent legacy, of religious prerogatives in the provenance of reproductive healthcare.

Cattin, a teenaged enslaved girl brought to France by her enslaver in 1746, experienced extraordinary levels of physical abuse during her seven month stay. This talk explores her world through a micro-microhistory that examines the intersections of Catholicism, slavery, and intimate violence in Nantes, France’s largest slave port. As Cattin pursued fugitivity, her interactions with enslavers, priests, nuns, Hôtel-Dieu bureaucrats and godparents as well as free Black and enslaved women shaped her experiences of intimate violence and communities of care in a Catholic city immersed in racial capitalism.

 Years after critiques of the understanding of religions as texts to be interpreted, decoded, or translated, the notion of religion as belief-based still looms large in public discussion, teaching about religion, and policymaking. What are the remaining implications for the study of religion in our classrooms and civic spaces? In what ways are narratives, dispositions, bodily practices, and material culture overlooked—and with what consequences for American religion? Join IRCPL for a conversation with scholars and policy practitioners about the pitfalls and possibilities of understanding the category of religion in terms of belief.

American responses to the rise of AI have been mixed: is Artificial Intelligence our friend, or our foe? Hope for the future, or our undoing? IRCPL's "American Religion is…Human" program offers new ways of thinking about AI, humanity, and religion, going past the utopian-dystopian binaries that our public discourse is stuck in. We will think together about how the rise of potentially destabilizing AI technology might intersect productively with current efforts to rethink humanistic pedagogy and scholarship. Join IRCPL as we interrogate assumptions about religion’s “human-ness” and considerations of hierarchy and supremacy raised by the notion of religion as an innately human concept.

Islamophobia has posed a serious threat to religious freedom and human rights in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region of China. This event will bring together experts and civil society leaders to explore effective strategies and foster international collaboration in combating Islamophobia. The goal is to serve as a catalyst for change, inspiring a region-wide commitment to protecting the dignity and rights of Muslim communities.

IRCPL’s Religion and Climate series is animated by calls to reimagine human relationships with and responsibilities to the environment in an age of planetary crisis. As the impact of climate change is increasingly but unevenly felt, religion is emerging as a site of epistemological doubt, struggle, and possibility. This series will explore the cosmological underpinnings that shape diverse understandings of the environment and examine how religious subjects react to and act upon the ecological upheavals they face, challenging exclusively technocratic or secular responses to the climate crisis. The series consists of four events structured around the elements—Earth, Water, Fire, and Air—each of which takes one element as a lens for engaging with specific climate struggles and the religious debates they ignite. Join IRCPL for an in-person conversation on the theme of “Water” with Naveeda Khan (Anthropology, Johns Hopkins University) and Jinah Kim (History of Art and Architecture, Harvard University), who will discuss their work on water, riverine ecosystems, and religion in South Asia. The conversation will explore cosmologies of water, religious struggles taking place around rivers, and the complexities of taking action to prevent environmental destruction. The event will be introduced and moderated by Raffaella Taylor-Seymour (IRCPL, Columbia University).

Patriarchal violence in the home has a long and profoundly troubling history. Recent and contemporary American law and culture have made great strides in identifying and responding to acts of violence in the home. But progress has been slow, and slowing down in the face of new mechanisms and technologies of abuse. In order to understand and respond to current modes and forms of domestic violence, we need to look back—way back to the English Middle Ages—to see the practical and ideological origins of domestic violence. Getting into the core religious and social beliefs that medieval people held about women's rights to autonomy and safety in the home sheds an uncomfortable but important light on social values and jurisprudence since the 1960s.