On Symbolic Economies of Resistance
Articles Keanu Heydari Articles Keanu Heydari

On Symbolic Economies of Resistance

In Symbolic Economies, Jean-Joseph Goux explores how Marx’s analysis of the genesis of money and value in Capital can be applied beyond economic contexts to understand broader logics of value exchange, both quantitative and qualitative. Goux begins by adopting a “radicalized conception of exchange,” which goes beyond traditional economic exchange. He is interested in exchange as a fundamental principle that applies to both economic systems and other domains of human interaction.

Read More
On Elective Affinities
Articles Keanu Heydari Articles Keanu Heydari

On Elective Affinities

To begin theorizing with Weber’s ideas about the “Protestant ethic,” i.e., to theorize alongside Weber (and perhaps even against him), I think it behooves us to come up with a working definition of what he could have possibly meant by Wahlverwandtschaften [Elective Affinities]. Perhaps it was Goethe’s play that exposed Weber to this idea and perhaps Goethe learned about it from the eighteenth-century Swedish chemist, Torbern Bergman, who coined the term in a treatise about molecular combinations. Swedberg and Agevall (2016) concede that “‘Elective affinity’ is not a carefully defined technical concept in Weber’s writings but rather a key phrase.” Scott (2015) argues that Weber used the term to “describe the relationship between Protestantism and capitalism.” In Scott’s view, the term “refers to the resonance or coherence between aspects of the teachings of Protestantism and the ethos of the capitalist enterprise: the contents of one system of meaning engender a tendency for adherents to build and pursue the other system of meaning. The actors concerned may not be consciously aware of this affinity.”

Read More
Victor Turner, Christian Women, & Emancipation in Ritual
Theology Keanu Heydari Theology Keanu Heydari

Victor Turner, Christian Women, & Emancipation in Ritual

Rituals are a common thread across culture, time, and space. Examples of rituals studied by ethnographers include everything from circumcision ceremonies in central Africa to Christmas holiday shopping in megamalls across the United States. There exists a rich trove of theoretical apparatuses from which we can mine to better understand the seemingly impenetrable worlds of other religious procedures that defy Euro-American norms of liberated femininity and female emancipation. This is never more true than it is in the realm of the anthropology of theology, religion, and religious ritual.

Read More
Towards a Socialistic Theology (I & II)
Theology Keanu Heydari Theology Keanu Heydari

Towards a Socialistic Theology (I & II)

This distinction is perhaps one jumping off point, a conceptual springboard, from which we can begin to expand on pressing ideas in the air among left-wing Christians today. Christians together “constitute the covenant people of God” (135). What this means is that the texture of reconciliation with God must not, cannot, and will not begin with individual people reconciled to an individual God; it begins, much to the contrary, with a storied God redeeming his beloved people in space and time as the fulfillment of his freely willed determination to be the God of love in freedom, the God who wills to be with human beings for all eternity. Gorman terms the individual components of the Gospel as its “benefits.”

Read More
Exteriorizing Subjectivity: Snapchat & Pharmacopornographic Biocapitalism
Articles Keanu Heydari Articles Keanu Heydari

Exteriorizing Subjectivity: Snapchat & Pharmacopornographic Biocapitalism

Welcome to the pharmacopornographic regime. Digital screens, monitors, and interfaces of every size buzz, pulsate, and project wave-particles of light into the air, all around us, twenty-four hours a day. For those born after the advent of Web 2.0 (at the new millennium), there has never been a period of non-digitally mediated subjectivity. The entanglements of technology, late-modern capitalism, and our use of technology in the context of late-modern capitalism raise questions of baffling complexity and of intense urgency.

Read More