In response to a trend in socio-cultural anthropology to focus on relations, recent research has advocated for new investigations of the role of detachment (Candea et al. 2015) in the making of the social. Detachment needs not to be understood solely as the cutting or lack of relations, but also as a modality of engagement within relationships, which can be a completed state, or a continuous ongoing process. In addition, recent studies (re)explored notions of technology as assemblages of material objects, techniques and technical systems, as well as broader social systems. Thus, for instance, while bringing this notion of technology in conversation with affect theory White and Katsuno (2022) have argued that certain technologies have the power to disassemble existing configurations of relations held together by affects.
This panel builds upon the aforementioned approaches while adding a focus on religious and spiritual practices. It aims at analyzing different practices and technologies that elicit affects in the field, thus contributing to the creation of new ontologies while, at the same time, enabling the disassembling of or detachment from others. In fact, despite the long-standing anthropological tradition shedding light on the technological aspect of spiritual and religious practices – notably rituals – and on their capacity to reshape marginalities, (re)making worlds, offer ways to cope with uncertainty and lead to wellbeing, the phenomenological dynamics of such processes have been surprisingly under-investigated.
Thus, this panel aims at starting a discussion for a cross-cultural understanding of how detachment as a process emerges through affects, feelings, and attunements with the environment in spiritual practices. It aims at analyzing how the emergence of detachment enables the formation of new ontologies by enabling the formation of new relations and connections, reshaping assemblages of marginality and uncertainty, thus contributing to the emergence of new forms of wellbeing.
