“Treaty People and the Spiritual Vulnerability of Colonial Settlement”, University of Otago, Dunedin, Aoteoroa/New Zealand, April 20, 2018.
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Does the Secular Matter?
The main question that this seminar poses is if, and how, bodies, but also other material forms, can be considered secular. If so, how do we theorise and conceptualise secular embodiment and other material forms? Which new understandings about the secular or secularity may emerge from these explorations? What are suitable approaches and methods to study secular materiality?
Master Class at “Does the Secular Matter: Rethinking Secular Materiality and the Secular Body” a NOSTER Thematic Workshop at the University of Utrecht, Netherlands, April 18, 2017.
Revelations in Method
Where do ideas come from? What difference do methods of scholarship make in generating new ideas and perceptions that we then channel via writing into theoretical conversations that resonate with others, or at least with other scholars? Uncanny or rational, spiritual or empirical, the genesis of thinking cannot be pinned down.
My 2018 book The Story of Radio Mind: A Missionary’s Journey on Indigenous Land was part of The Immanent Frame’s forum discussion entitled Modernity’s Resonances: New Inquiries into the Secular. My contribution to that discussion can be read here.
Photography, Resistance, and Re-mediation on Manidoo Ziibi
In this presentation, I considered the significance for studies of missionary colonialism of what scholars call the “photographic event,” focusing on a diary written by an Anglican missionary-journalist, Frederick Du Vernet, during his 1898 trip to visit the Ojibwe of Rainy River in Treaty 3 territory (also known in Canada as northwestern Ontario). Du Vernet recorded both Ojibwe resistance to and requests for his picture-taking. His stories reveal how the event of taking photographs marked his own longing to capture spiritual stories and presences and provoked a variety of Ojibwe responses to such forms of visual capture.
“Photography, Resistance, and Re-mediation on Manidoo Ziibi” Centre for Research on Colonial Culture, University of Otago, Dunedin, Aoteoroa/New Zealand, April 11, 2018.
Crown Land and the Spiritual Jurisdiction of Colonial Property
In the so-called “New World,” monarchs of several nations legitimized settler claims to Indigenous territory by resting their authority on a Christian-inflected cosmology of land that asserted a monarch’s divinely-ordained right to rule, even over lands very far from their original dominion. In the British Empire, this right to rule was most powerfully “landed” in the idea of “Crown tenure,” a legal fiction—or creation story—that held that all lands belonged, in a sense both spiritual and temporal, to the monarch. At this Religion, Culture, and Politics Workshop, I examined what many scholars have pointed to as the tricky metaphysical grounding of monarchical claims to land in colonial modernity (which is, arguably, all modernity).
“Crown Land and the Spiritual Jurisdiction of Colonial Property”, Religion, Culture, and Politics Workshop, Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs, Georgetown University, Washington, DC, March 29.