“Global God Talk: Communication Anxiety and Playful Improvisation in Interfaith Encounters” withDr. Marcy Brink-Danan
Wednesday, November 16th 2016, 12:00pm
Anthropology Department, PLS102
From President Obama’s Interfaith Campus Challenge to the Doha Annual Interfaith Dialogue Conference, today there are few places in the world where government policies have not prioritized increased interfaith “communication.” Why is God talk experiencing such a global boom? To investigate this question, I study international organizations involved in what is cynically called the “interfaith industry,” charting the movement of interfaith dialogue practices between London, New York and Jerusalem. I will analyze how different methods of interfaith communication promote and resist dominant language ideologies present in intercultural dialogue advocacy, such as authenticity, scripting and therapeutic talk (Carr 2010).
Marcy Brink-Danan (PhD 2005, Stanford) specializes in linguistic and cultural anthropology, politics, religion and secularism. Her work appears in American Anthropologist, Anthropological Quarterly, PoLAR, Language & Communication, edited books and a monograph called “Jewish Life in 21st Century Turkey: The Other Side of Tolerance.” Her current project, “Global God Talk,” analyzes the global circulation of linguistic strategies for managing religious diversity, focusing on “God-talkers” such as interfaith dialogue advocates, New Atheists, Humanists, politicians and religious authorities. Brink-Danan was on the faculty at Brown University before joining the Sociology and Anthropology Department at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where she now lives.