Anthropology and Theology: For a Theopolitical Relation

Abstract

This talk is offered to explore generative relations between anthropology and (mainly Christian) Political Theology as analytics and praxis.  If anthropology has historically placed cultural difference and otherness in the strict domain of the human, by circumscribing God out of its political equation, then when we focus on the long durée of affective history, a kinetic nature of the divine, it can shed light on a disruption to an economic theology of dominion and secularization.  Recently formulated anthropological work on Theopolitics - that focuses on divine justice and sovereignty intrinsic to a never-ending provisional nature of political orders - offers an enabling critique to an existing anthropology of Theology and Christianity, while reckoning that Christianity is always a political formation which has contributed to coloniality and the spread of racialized primitive accumulation. Finally, I offer some reflections to move forth a straitjacketing of politics of identity in exploring some generative intersections between Christian mystical archives, singularity, degrowth and emerging current radical, political formations.

This is a hybrid event. For Zoom link, please contact pdios54 [at] stanford.edu (pdios54[at]stanford[dot]edu).