Conversion raises important questions about the social processes within which religion is embedded.Conversion is usually an individual process, involving a change of worldview and affiliation by a single person, but it occurs within a context of institutional procedures and social relationships. Religious groups structure the ways in which adherents may move in and out, and in many cases they place converts in a unique social position. These processes articulate with other dynamics within groups -their internal divisions their authority structures, their political rivalries, and more. How do these social structure incorporate the intense and often unpredictable experience of the individual convert?How does temporal power constrain the sense of divine power so integral to many conversion? What effects does conversion produce in the group that gains a convert, and what does it do to group that loses one? Conversion is a process that highlights the interaction, and in many cases the tension, between individual consciouness and the structural requirements of community life.
This panel approach is to address these questions and invite ethnography in this regard. Here, papers are invited that provides understanding what conversion is and how it works is to explore the different ways that other cultures have understood it.Also to have an understanding as to what does conversion mean for anthroplogical theories of agency and the cultural construction of reality? How in the context of changing realities different identities are produced, how interacting identities create differences that further extended into tension.
