Ritual and Democracy - Protests, Publics and Performances - Sarah M. Pike
2. A Tale of Two Energies: The Political Agency of Things
Ritual and Democracy - Protests, Publics and Performances - Sarah M. Pike
Paul-Francois Tremlett [+]
Open University
View Website
Paul-François Tremlett is a senior lecturer in religious studies at the Open University. His research interests include classical and contemporary anthropological and sociological theories of religion and the broad constitution of religion as a site of study in societies experiencing rapid social change. He is the author of Towards a New Theory of Religion and Social Change: Sovereignties and Disruptions (Bloomsbury 2021) and co-edited Ritual and Democracy: Protests, Publics and Performances (Equinox, 2020). He also co-edits the Bloomsbury Series ‘Religion, Space and Place’.
Description
This chapter concerns a specific moment of political protest that took place in London in 2014, organised by a group called Occupy Democracy. The protest was marked by the iconoclastic destruction of protest material culture by ‘Heritage Wardens’ and Police. My interest is in the political agency of protest things. In order to understand how these things might – at least at certain sites and on certain occasions – possess political agency, I turn substantially to Emile Durkheim’s theory of totemism and then to Jane Bennett’s vitalist conception of the assemblage.