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

Abstract

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.