Mascha Schulz, The Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology

Keywords: podcast, nonreligion, anthropology, lived nonreligion

---

A podcast video with Mascha Schulz on the Anthropology of Nonreligion has recently been published by the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany. In this episode of the series Talk On!, Christoph Brumann talks to Mascha Schulz about her research on non-religion in Bangladesh. They also discuss the special issue ‘An Anthropology of Nonreligion?’, published in the Berghahn Journal Religion and Society (2023) and edited by Mascha Schulz and Stefan Binder. In their introduction, Schulz and Binder suggest that recent ethnographic studies of what might be called lived, embodied, situated, or everyday forms of nonreligion have opened up possibilities for new questions that address the different ways in which nonreligious positionalities and their attendant social dynamics are shaped by the contexts in which they are embedded. Consequently, many of the papers in this special issue address nonreligion in ways that offer comparative perspectives on how specific dispositions, sensibilities and expressions—including those of everyday, ambivalent or less obvious forms of lived nonreligion—are linked to specific social configurations and imaginaries, power structures and transnational entanglements. They examine not only what people doubt or disbelieve—or how these positions are shaped by particular intellectual traditions—but also when, how and why critiques of religion, skepticism or unbelief emerge in particular embodied and situated practices in the first place. In this podcast episode, Brumann and Schulz summarize some of the points made in the special issues, covering topics such as forms of non-organized non-religion, the Satanic Temple, and why anthropology is a latecomer to the study of non-religion but is nevertheless important in this field. Watch the full podcast below!

---

Mascha Schulz is a Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany, whose research focuses on politics, (non)religion, and law in Bangladesh. Her recent publications include the edited volume “Global Sceptical Publics: From Non-religious Print Media to ‘Digital Atheism’” (UCL Press, 2022, co-edited with Jacob Copeman) and the special section “The Anthropology of Nonreligion” in Religion & Society (2023, co-edited with Stefan Binder).

---