Conference Agenda
The Online Program of events for the SEM 2026 Annual Meeting appears below. This program is subject to change. The final program will be published in early November.
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Click on the session name for a detailed view (with participant names and abstracts).
Please note that all times are shown in the time zone of the conference. The current conference time is: 29th Aug 2026, 08:47:01pm EDT
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Daily Overview |
| Session | |
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01H: Christian Musicking Across Diverse Worlds Location: Sassafras | |
| Presentation 4 | |
Why Suruí Christians Sing: Exploring a Post-secular Ethnomusicology in Brazil University of Toronto, This presentation considers the notion of post-secularism as a lens to study Christian Indigenous song in Brazil—specifically the repertoire and practices of Paiter-Suruí Christians—through critical reflection on my fieldwork experiences and research process. The continuance and resurgence of multiple religions worldwide as well as debates over the place of religion in scholarship has led scholars in diverse fields (e.g., Habermas 2008, Milbank 2006, Asad 2003) to explore post-secularism as a concept to describe how secularisms and religions interact. Though the disciplines of anthropology and theology presumably developed in opposition, recent scholarship details how the Enlightenment project structured both areas of study (Larsen 2014; Robbins 2003). In doing so, this research helps account for the frequent marginalization of Christian expressions, especially in scholarship on expressive culture in non-western, post-colonial and Indigenous contexts (Dueck and Reily 2016; Engelke 2014). This tendency is prominent in writings about Suruí culture, which describe their “traditional” rituals and shamanic singing at length, but largely ignore expressions of their Christianity (Pucci 2011). Yet my fieldwork engages with a large body of Christian worship songs that are composed and sung in Suruí and based on their traditional musical practices. Given the import of these songs to Suruí Christians and following calls for theologically engaged anthropology (Mittermaier 2025; Lemons 2018), I argue that post-secularism can facilitate frank conversations between scholars of varying beliefs and ultimately allows a fuller understanding of not only how and why Suruí Christians sing, but also how they can be fully Indigenous and Christian. | |
