"God(s) and Wealth" draws inspiration from, and contributes to, a variety of academic fields and literatures. The research will be carried out in five different countries and in two continents: Ghana, Mali and Zambia (Africa); Bangladesh, India, Nepal, and South Korea (Asia). The adoption of this vast comparative perspective will permit us to tease out points of convergence and difference in religious experiences on a scale rarely attempted in the past.
The overarching questions that ¿God(s) and Wealth¿ proposes to address are:
In which ways do actors from different historical, geographical and confessional contexts conceptualize positive visions of individual enrichment in religious terms?
How do such understandings relate to, or challenge, religious discourses and practices valorizing redistribution (such as almsgiving, anti-witchcraft cults ascribing individual wealth to witchcraft, etc)?
To what extent has the involvement in the colonial and, more recently, in the neoliberal economy triggered comparable religious responses in such disparate contexts?
These changes in religious practices in Asia and Africa undoubtedly deserve in-depth analysis and observational work to better understand where this fast-paced part of the world is heading and the basis on which its future societies will be built.
The most innovative dimension of ¿God(s) and Wealth¿ lies in its effort to overcome traditional academic partitions.
By adopting an innovative comparative perspective that considers different religious and cultural contexts, the proposed research will allow us to explore the relationship between religion and wealth in an original fashion and from a variety of points of view. The aim of the comparisons is not to constrain the richness of individual case studies and trajectories within a totalizing interpretation of the phenomenon, but rather to tease out commonalities and the different ways in which this relationship has manifested itself through long and complex histories.
As shown by the state of the art (see above), scholars from a variety of disciplines (anthropology, religious studies, history, development studies) have debated the ambivalent relationship between gods and wealth for several years. Some geographical areas and religious contexts, however, have been less well served than others.
For example, the Nzema region of Ghana, the focus of Schirripa and Mannara¿s sub-project, is witnessing a rapid growth of the oil and gas sector. Yet the new industry¿s impact upon practices of individual enrichment and their religious expressions remains entirely unexplored. Still in Ghana, much remains to be said about the Pentecostal movement and the extent to which ongoing processes of socio-economic change are shaping its expansion into previously ¿untouched¿ rural areas. Equally promising is the holistic approach that informs all the other sub-projects which make up ¿Gods and Wealth¿. Indeed, the effort to bring under a single analytical lens a number of discrete of religious phenomena (be they the African-led churches of colonial central Africa or the new cults of 21st-century South Korea) is bound to generate new data and insights that will enrich the existing literature.
Over and above the various sub-projects¿ specific contributions, however, the most innovative dimension of ¿Gods and Wealth¿ lies in its effort to overcome traditional (and sometimes parochial) academic partitions. As shown above, the relationship between religion and the personal accumulation of wealth has been most commonly explored within the boundaries of regional scholarly traditions. These efforts, moreover, have often been marred by an insufficient grounding in history. It is this latter flaw that has led to overemphasize the role of neoliberal ideology and practice, to which every new religious development tends to be simplistically attributed.
¿Gods and Wealth¿, conversely, wants to do two things:
1. First, to give history its due. Not only will the project include a specifically historical sub-project, but all the other sub-projects will be alive to the need to trace the lines of continuity, as well as the fractures and frictions (Tsing 2005), that, over the decades and centuries, have shaped the ambivalent relationship between gods and the individual acquisition of wealth in various contexts.
2. Secondly, to adopt an innovative comparative perspective that takes into account different religious and cultural contexts. This ¿cross-fertilization¿ will allow us to explore the relationship between religion and wealth in an original fashion and from a variety of points of view. The aim of the comparisons that we propose to draw, of course, is not to constrain the richness of individual case studies and trajectories within a totalizing interpretation of the phenomenon, but rather to tease out commonalities and the different ways in which this relationship has manifested itself through long and complex histories. Naturally, the project will also take into account the extent to which such local and regional trajectories have become strongly intertwined through faster communications and the global diffusion of ideas. By so doing, we will be able to grasp how the individual values, discourses and practices that are developing on a global scale, such as neoliberal ones, have different translations and articulations in different contemporary contexts.
In sum, the project¿s key contention is that the relationship between gods and wealth is best examined through a comparative perspective that encompasses different geographical and historical frames.