Religious Infrastructure

This book opens a new and timely conversation between the study of religion and infrastructure studies through the innovative concept of religious infrastructure. Bringing together eight empirically grounded chapters by a multidisciplinary group of scholars, it explores diverse settings across Ghana, India, Madagascar, Nigeria, Russia, Serbia, and Tanzania. Within these contexts, the contributors examine an array of religiously marked arrangements and operations—from radio towers and social media algorithms to residential compounds and monasteries.

Across these cases, the book demonstrates how such configurations actively support, depend upon, and mutually transform wider landscapes of human action and relation. By moving fluidly across diverse traditions, it brings into focus dynamics that cut across religious boundaries, uncovers unexpected entanglements between religious and secular domains, and highlights forms of religious action that exceed the mediation of transcendent encounter.

The result is a compelling and original demonstration of the empirical possibilities and analytical productivity of thinking infrastructurally about religion, and religiously about infrastructure—enriching both fields in the process.

This book is ideal for scholars, researchers, and students in the fields of religious studies, anthropology, sociology, and infrastructure studies. It will also appeal to those interested in interdisciplinary approaches to understanding the intersections of religion, technology, and social organization.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Religion, State & Society.

Benjamin Kirby is Junior Professor of the Study of Religion with a focus on Global Entanglements at the University of Bayreuth. His research examines religious politics, urban transformation, and infrastructure from the vantage point of Dar es Salaam and other cities at the interface of Africa and the Indian Ocean.

Matteo (Teo) Benussi is an anthropologist specialising in religion, ethics, and power. Currently an assistant professor (RTDb) at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, his current research interests include piety and the politics of Islamic virtue, political ontologies and theologies, and the ethics of war volunteering in postsocialist Eurasia.

Yanti Hölzchen is an anthropologist whose work spans north-eastern Kyrgyzstan and Ethiopia, focusing on religious knowledge, institutions and networks, and on burial and pilgrimage practices in interreligious settings. She is currently based at the College of Fellows, University of Tübingen.