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The Public Work of Christmas: Difference and Belonging in Multicultural Societies

Christmas is not a holiday just for Christians anymore, if it ever was. Embedded in calendars around the world and long a lucrative merchandising opportunity, Christmas enters multicultural, multi-religious public spaces, provoking both festivity and controversy, hospitality and hostility.

The Public Work of Christmas provides a comparative historical and ethnographic perspective on the politics of Christmas in multicultural contexts ranging from a Jewish museum in Berlin to a shopping boulevard in Singapore. A seasonal celebration that is at once inclusive and assimilatory, Christmas offers a clarifying lens for considering the historical and ongoing intersections of multiculturalism, Christianity, and the nationalizing and racializing of religion. The essays gathered here examine how cathedrals, banquets, and carols serve as infrastructures of memory that hold up Christmas as a civic, yet unavoidably Christian holiday. At the same time, the authors show how the public work of Christmas depends on cultural forms that mark, mask, and resist the ongoing power of Christianity in the lives of Christians and non-Christians alike.

Legislated into paid holidays and commodified into marketplaces, Christmas has arguably become more cultural than religious, making ever wider both its audience and the pool of workers who make it happen every year. The Public Work of Christmas articulates a fresh reading of Christmas – as fantasy, ethos, consumable product, site of memory, and terrain for the revival of exclusionary visions of nation and whiteness – at a time of renewed attention to the fragility of belonging in diverse societies.

Contributors include Herman Bausinger (Tübingen), Marion Bowman (Open), Juliane Brauer (MPI Berlin), Simon Coleman (Toronto), Yaniv Feller (Wesleyan), Christian Marchetti (Tübingen), Helen Mo (Toronto), Katja Rakow (Utrecht), Sophie Reimers (Berlin), Tiina Sepp (Tartu), and Isaac Weiner (Ohio State).

Metals and Memory: Gold and the Metaphysics of Colonial Territory

Metal is at once durable and impressionable, natural and extracted. In this talk, I consider the affordances of metal as both holder and inciter of memory, with a focus on gold in the making and maintaining of colonial territory in the British Empire. In particular, I consider how gold is at the symbolic and material centre of the settler cosmologies of land that enabled colonialism: molded into the Crown, panned out of gold rush rivers, and undergirding the currency, gold materialized colonial sovereignty. Through a discussion of the concept of Crown land and the public memory of gold mining that persists in museums and gold-panning theme parks, (especially Canada, Australia, and New Zealand), I consider how gold continues to ground the metaphysics of colonial territory.

“Metals and Memory: Gold and the Metaphysics of Colonial Territory,” McLester Colloquium, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, United States. February 26, 2020.

Digital Storytelling with Indigenous Nations Workshop

In this workshop, I discussed my own and my students’ ongoing work as the Story Nations Collective, done in collaboration with various people of the Rainy River First Nations. The Kiinawin Kawindomowin Story Nations project is a participatory digital collaboration. Featuring an interactive annotation tool, an audio-book, audio-visual media such as photographs and digital stories, and ongoing conversations with present-day community members, the website engages with questions of treaty relationships, ceremony, and public memory. This digital storytelling site is a contemporary counternarrative to the missionary’s historical document and a platform that allows the diary to be made more accessible and available to the public in a digital format.

“Digital Storytelling with Indigenous Nations,” University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, United States. February 25, 2020.

Summer School at the University of Tübingen

Prof Monique Scheer, Sarina Annis, Kyle Byron, Valeria Vergani, Judith Brunton, Suzanne van Geuns and me, September 2019

At the University of Tübingen, several of my students and I attended the ‘Problematizing Morality: Ethnographic Approaches to the Normative Dimensions of Everyday Life’ Summer School. A disciplinarily and nationally diverse group, we learned much from each other. Professor Monique Scheer and I co-taught one masterclass, and I gave a keynote lecture entitled ‘Ceremonial Morality: What a History of Oath-Making Reveals about Practices of Living in a Good Way.’ During the same week, I was named an Ambassador for the University of Tübingen – please approach me to learn more about this.

Elected to the Royal Society of Canada

Founded in the 1880s, the Royal Society of Canada recognizes scholars and their work in order to help them build a better future in Canada and around the world.

“My work has always been animated by – this is more grandiose than I want to make it sound – questions of injustice that I see around me and how religion plays into various kinds of inequality, or how religion shapes the political world in which we live,” Klassen says.