Religious infrastructure: designations, transformations, entanglements

Abstract

ABSTRACT Infrastructures are ensembles of social and technical components that make practices and relations possible. In this contribution, I develop a notion of ‘religious infrastructure’ and delineate why I find it to be a generative analytical category. Thinking with religious infrastructure spotlights new sites of empirical inquiry for scholarship on religion, as well as fresh ways of apprehending familiar objects of analysis. It brings into focus how religiously marked arrangements support, depend on, and mutually transform wider landscapes of action and relation. These lines of inquiry point to dynamics that cut across different religious boundaries, and they uncover sometimes surprising entanglements between religiously and secularly marked domains of practice. They also help to foreground the multiple modalities of religious operation that a given arrangement can perform, beyond that of mediating transcendent encounters. Accordingly, religious infrastructure elicits questions about what qualifies as ‘infrastructure’, but also about what qualifies as ‘religion’.