Religion and the economy: genealogies, borders and thresholds

Like the concept of religion itself (Asad), the concept of the economy encompasses a multitude of means, ends and expectations, often overflowing the regimes of expertise responsible for its compartmentalization in secular modernity (Polanyi). In fact, a number of classic and contemporary authors (Mauss, Simiand, Benveniste, Weber, Sombart, Hart, Agamben, Comaroffs, Graeber, among others) have demonstrated how these two apparent realms are genealogically intertwined. This kinship is made explicit by the theological residues of secular economics (e.g. the providential "invisible hand" of the market), the economic residues of religious grammar (e.g. the etymological links between "belief" and "credit" in neo-Latin languages or "guilt" and "debt" in Germanic languages) and the ambiguity of shared notions such as "value". Their affinities have become a more evident focus of managerial objectification and ethical problematization in a context characterized both by the capillarization of the secular-economic (immaterial work, digital capitalism) and by the revival of the public relevance of religious practices and traditions. Avoiding a simplistic and causal engagement with abstract entities such as "Neoliberalism", this dossier aims to comparatively examine the social production of continuities and discontinuities between the religious and the economic in contemporary times from an anthropological and ethnographic perspective. How do different religious traditions conceive of, intertwine with or isolate themselves from the capitalist market economy in terms of their own moral economies, sensibilities, agencies and temporalities? Related topics include ritual transactions; ethics, spirituality and work; economic-religious temporalities; conflicts and reconciliations between economic-religious prescriptions - and other phenomena that reveal the economy as a field of ethical and ontological problematization in a period of modernity called "post-secular" by a growing number of authors.