Table Of ContentTOWARDS A NEW THEORY
OF RELIGION AND SOCIAL
CHANGE
Bloomsbury Studies in Religion, Space and Place
Series editors: Paul-François Tremlett, John Eade and Katy Soar
Religions, spiritualities and mysticisms are deeply implicated in processes of place-
making. These include political and geopolitical spaces, local and national spaces,
urban spaces, global and virtual spaces, contested spaces, spaces of performance,
spaces of memory and spaces of confinement. At the leading edge of theoretical,
methodological and interdisciplinary innovation in the study of religion,
Bloomsbury Studies in Religion, Space and Place brings together and gives shape
to the study of such processes.
These places are not defined simply by the material or the physical but also by the
sensual and the psychological, by the ways in which spaces are gendered, classified,
stratified, moved through, seen, touched, heard, interpreted and occupied. Places
are constituted through embodied practices that direct critical and analytical
attention to the spatial production of insides, outsides, bodies, landscapes, cities,
sovereignties, publics and interiorities.
Global Trajectories of Brazilian Religion,
edited by Martijn Oosterbaan, Linda van de Kamp and Joana Bahia
Religion and the Global City,
edited by David Garbin and Anna Strhan
Religious Pluralism and the City,
edited by Helmuth Berking, Silke Steets and Jochen Schwenk
TOWARDS A NEW THEORY
OF RELIGION AND SOCIAL
CHANGE
Sovereignties and Disruptions
PAUL-FRANÇOIS TREMLETT
BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
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First published in Great Britain 2021
Copyright © Paul-François Tremlett, 2021
Paul-François Tremlett has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work.
For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. vii–ix constitute an extension
of this copyright page.
Cover image © Thomas M. Scheer/EyeEm/gettyimages.co.uk
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ISBN: HB: 978-1-4742-7256-8
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CONTENTS
List of Figures vi
Preface and Acknowledgements vii
Introduction 1
1 Energy 21
2 Biology 53
3 Generative Interactivity 85
4 Emergence 135
5 Towards a General Theory of Religion and Social Change 151
Afterword: Assemblage Drawings, by Atsuhide Ito 155
Notes 162
References 164
Index 180
FIGURES
1 Occupy Democracy protestors take the centre of
Parliament Square, 17 October 2014 37
2 Occupy Democracy protesters briefly re-take
Parliament Square, 18 October 2014 39
3 Assemblage 1: The church-plaza assemblage 107
4 Assemblage 2: The Banahaw assemblage 111
5 Rizal monument outside the Spiritual Filipino
Catholic Church on Mount Banahaw 115
6 Rizal monument in the garden of the church plaza in
San Pablo City 116
7 Assemblage 3: The arcadian assemblage 118
8 Urban street vendor in Malate, Manila selling paintings
depicting a bucolic ideal of the Filipino countryside 125
9 Assemblage 4: The media-church assemblage 128
10 The four assemblages overlaid 131
PREFACE AND
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book draws from two distinct research projects. Most recently I was
involved in the REDO (Re-Assembling Democracy: Ritual as Cultural
Resource) project, an international research initiative led by Jone Salomonsen
and funded by the Norwegian Research Council. For my part, I conducted
fieldwork with Occupy activists in London and Hong Kong. In Hong Kong,
the work involved reconstructing the protest from the accounts of activists,
whereas in London it involved documenting further protests and events that
continued to be organized by Occupy groups, after the global wave of anti-
capitalist revolt of 2011 had subsided. Before that, my Arts and Humanities
Research Board (now the AHRC)-funded doctoral research and a subsequent
research project generously funded by the British Academy’s Southeast Asia
Committee allowed me to work on alternative religiosities gathered around
an extinct volcano some seventy kilometres south of Manila called Mount
Banahaw. I conducted fieldwork with healers as well as small, independent
churches and spiritual groups notable for their millenarian conviction in
the imminent transformation of society, an interest in the accumulation
and distribution of sacred power and potency (kapangyarihan) and their
veneration of José Rizal – a Filipino novelist and doctor who was executed by
the Spanish colonial regime in 1896.
The two research projects shared a number of features: first an interest in
change, particularly of the sudden and fundamentally transformative type.
Occupy activists and ‘Rizalists’ alike wanted to change their respective societies.
Second, the two projects shared an interest in space. The Occupy movement
was about the rupturing of urban space in the expectation of opening out
viii PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
alternative ways to assemble people together and to engage in creative projects.
Similarly, the healers and churches in Mount Banahaw sought alternatives to
what they perceived to be the unjust and immoral spaces of Manila, partly
through pilgrimage to Banahaw’s sacred spaces and immersion in its caves,
waterfalls and healing waters but also through journeys along its hidden
passages and to secret chambers and by building their own communities.
By the time I was in Banahaw it was a veritable cottage industry of religious
leaders, healers, mystics, pilgrims, New Agers and earnest research students,
all participating in and adding to the Banahaw imaginary.
This book and its interest in change and space is very much a product of the
work I pursued in Mount Banahaw in the Philippines and later with REDO, in
London and Hong Kong. It is also the product of formal and informal inter-
disciplinary conversations at the borders of the study of religions where the
humanities, the social and the physical sciences sometimes meet, and it would
not have been possible without the goodwill and support of so many colleagues
and friends. I would like to thank Lalle Pursglove, Lucy Carroll and Camilla
Erskine at Bloomsbury for their enthusiasm, support and encouragement
for this project. To my departmental, school and faculty colleagues (past
and present) at the Open University – particularly Hugh Beattie, Gwilym
Beckerlegge, Marion Bowman, Graham Harvey, John Maiden, Suzanne
Newcombe, Stefanie Sinclair, Helen Waterhouse and John Wolffe – but also
Simon Carter, Peter Elmer, Rodney Harrison, Donna Loftus, Liz McFall, Jess
Perriam and Peter Redman – I have an immense debt of gratitude: the collective
mode of producing course materials at the Open University is something I
have found, from the very beginning, to be a wonderful way of realizing a basic
sociological insight, namely, that learning is both social and individual.
To my friends and colleagues who participated in the REDO project
which contributed so much to the writing of this book, my thanks go to Tony
Balcomb, Grzegorz Brzozowski, Gitte Buch-Hansen, Agnes Czajka, Grégory
Delaplace, Cora Alexa Døving, Samuel Etikpah, Marion Grau, Ron Grimes,
PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ix
Kjetil Hafstad, Ida Marie Høeg, Nina Hoel, Michael Houseman, Morny Joy,
Jens Kreinath, Bruno Latour, Zaki Nahaboo, Birte Nordahl, Sarah Pike, Jone
Salomonsen and Donna Seamone; it was an unbelievable privilege thinking
with you.
There are others too who, along the way, have been the difference that
makes a difference: Syed Mustafa Ali, David Chapman, Jay Cornelio, John
Eade, José Francisco, David Garbin, Marie Gillespie, Suman Gupta, Titus
Hjelm, Richard Irvine, Theodoros Kyriakides, Rebecca Lee, Chris Lewis-
Jones, Magnus Ramage, Maria Nita, Francis Stewart, Steve Sutcliffe, Liam
T. Sutherland, Sophie Watson and, in particular, my research students (past
and present) Hilde Capparella, Owen Coggins, Lucy May Constantini, Alison
Robertson, Aled Thomas and Claire Wanless. A final but very special note of
thanks goes to Atsuhide Ito for enthusiastically throwing himself into the task
of producing the wonderful diagrams for Chapter 3 and for the Afterword,
‘Assemblage Drawings’. The photographs reproduced in the book are my own.
For my family and for my friends outside the bubble – you are my constant
companions. This is for Katy.
