Afterword: religious infrastructure, or doing religion in the contemporary mode

ABSTRACT

Written as a response to a collection of essays that proposes to think infrastructurally about religion, this Afterword builds on Paul Rabinow’s reflections on an ‘anthropology of the contemporary’ to highlight how infrastructural thinking can strengthen our understanding of religion in a late-modern, logistically saturated and hyperconnected ecumene. This essay explores three forms in which religiously connoted sociotechnical arrangements contribute to the shaping of the present kairos (‘fitting time’, or shared moment) as infrastructures of contemporariness, coevality, and contemporaneousness. In Rabinowian terms, contemporariness encompasses modernity and its mythology, while outpacing it at the same time: thus, religious infrastructures outpace the modernist myth of secularity while thriving on the technical utopias of high modernity. Coevality refers to how the ‘infrastructuring’ of religious life synchronises imagined pasts, presents, and futures through vectors of connectivity, consolidation, and enablement. Contemporaneousness refers to how religious-infrastructural sociotechnical assemblages bracket different domains and spheres of activity – locality, globality, economy, spirituality, leisure, etc. – making them overlap, often with exhilarating/empowering outcomes, but, sometimes, with disruptive or uncanny results.

KEYWORDS:

• Religion
• infrastructure
• the contemporary, modernity
• social theory

Acknowledgements

I thank my co-editors, Ben Kirby and Yanti Hoelzchen, and all the contributors to this collection of essays for this extremely exciting intellectual adventure. The writing of this afterword was made possible by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement 843901. The project methodologies and output, including this contribution, has received ethical clearance by Ca Foscari University’s Ethical Board.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. I gratefully borrow this expression from Brian Larkin, who made that point during a discussion at the ‘Religious Infrastructure’ conference in Accra, Ghana, in June 2023.

2. I am thankful to David Sneath for the conversation during which this point was elaborated.

3. The Accra project likely carries links to Nigeria’s interdenominational National Christian Centre in Abuja, informally known as ‘National Cathedral’, as well as echoing, more generally, mainline Protestant churches that retain the cathedral format or title, with or without an episcopal hierarchy.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Matteo (Teo) Benussi

Matteo (Teo) Benussi is an anthropologist specialising in religion and politics in post-socialist Eurasia and beyond. Currently an assistant professor (RTDb) at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, he received his training at the Universities of Venice, Cambridge, and California, Berkeley. Teo’s current work deals with Islamic piety movements and the politics of virtue amongst Muslims in Tatarstan (Russia), with a special focus on spatial manifestations of ethical and devotional life. Teo has also researched vernacular Orthodox Christianity, morality, memory, and place-making in post-Chernobyl Ukraine.