Stuff I’ve Published
Under Construction…
My book manuscript, Enchanted Social, “Enchanted Social: Love and Community in Catholic Charismatic Development Missions” draws on 22 months of fieldwork documenting the ritual life of a transnational Catholic Charismatic community and its two development NGOs in France and in Rwanda. The book investigates the social life of love – variedly conceived of as community, friendship, charity, and divine gift - as a concept through which Christians today make sense of their faith. In doing so, the book asks whether and how love can be of analytical or heuristic value for anthropology. It intervenes in theoretical debates in the anthropology of religion, the anthropology of sociality and reciprocity, and anthropological theories of agency, action, and change.
The doctoral dissertation on which the book is based won the 2016 University of California San Diego’s Dissertation Medal, awarded to one dissertation per year in the Social Science division, in recognition of the work’s impact, originality, presentation, and quality.
Journal Articles
An Unaccountable Love: Healing and Sacrifice in Post-Genocide Rwanda
2022, Cambridge Journal of Anthropology, 40(1): 34-50
The article is part of a special issue on the topic of Grace and the theoretical legacy of anthropologist Julian Pitt-Rivers, edited by Michael Edwards and Meadhbh McIvor. It asks how a consideration of the place of grace in the therapeutic relationship can add to our understanding of healing. Examining the experience of bereavement and healing in the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide, I argue that the healing process involves acts of sacrifice and gifting, taking place between the mourner, God, and social others.
A Sacred Social: Christian Relationalism and the Reenchantment of the World
2021, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 27: 265-284
This article focuses on the question of individualism and relationalism in Christianity. Noting that in contrast with many ethnographic accounts of Christianity that show it to have an individulizing effect on converts, Christianity in the case of the Emmanuel community inspires a focus on relations and relationality. I argue that the key to understanding these differences between different Christian contexts has to do with the ways in which God is variedly experienced by believers to be present in the world.
Signifiers for the Divine: Non-Compassionate Aid in the French Cites
2020, American Ethnologist 47(3): 1-13
This article focuses on the work of the Rocher, a Catholic Charismatic development NGO operating in the French cites, or housing projects located in the outskirts of the large French cities. It demonstrates that while volunteers for the Rocher think of their missions in terms of love, love is understood not as a feeling for the suffering other, but as a means of making God present in the aid relationship. I argue that introducing God as a third element into the otherwise dyadic relation opens up possibilities for mutuality in a setting in which relationships are typically defined as nonreciprocal.
Making Selves and Meeting Others in Neo-Shamanic Healing
2015, Ethos 43(3): 286-310. Winner of the Society for Psychological Anthropology 2014 Richard Condon Prize.
This article reconsiders anthropology’s conception of therapeutic efficacy as understood as a process based primarily in a transformation of meaning or manipulation of symbols. Through a close analysis of the neo-shamanic healing ritual of soul retrieval, I argue that the transformative potential of the healing ritual may be located prior to the supposed manipulation of symbols, hinging instead on establishing a successful encounter with alterity, or otherness.
Blog Posts & Other Stuff…
Ethnography as a Memory of a Love Story (An essay in the Self-Positionality in the Anthropology of Christianity series)
2021, the New Directions in the Anthropology of Christianity Blog
Book review of Tanya M. Luhrmann’s “When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God.”
2013, the New Directions in the Anthropology of Christianity Blog
Some Reflections on the Gay Marriage Debate in France and Ethnographically Engaging with Nonliberal Worlds of Meaning
2013, The Dirt Magazine, UCSD Anthropology Newsletter