Making Promises: Oaths, Treaties, and Covenants in Multi-jurisdictional and Multi-religious Societies (November 5-7, 2020)
The final workshop in the Religion and Public Memory in Multicultural Societies project, in collaboration with the York Research Chair in Pluralism and Public Law, held at University College, University of Toronto. What does it mean to make a promise in a society characterized by legal and religious pluralism? In such conditions of multiplicity, how are public promises made meaningful through appeals to varied transcendent powers and diverse traditions of material culture and embodied emotion? In this workshop, we convene a comparative conversation about oaths, treaties, and covenants as speech acts or performances grounded on transcendental referents, such as God, the Creator, or a future yet to come, and enacted through ritual and material exchange. At a time of environmental devastation when making promises for the future seems both urgent and futile, this workshop examines the politics of the promise in interdisciplinary perspectives.
A public keynote address will delivered by Prof. Jeffery G. Hewitt, Assistant Professor at Osgoode Hall Law School at York University. See here for details and registration information.
This 2.5-day workshop brings together scholars from religious studies, Indigenous Studies, law, history, politics, and anthropology, and other relevant disciplines whose research focuses on “making promises” in a range of historical and regional contexts. Swearing oaths of citizenship and allegiance, negotiating treaties as “sacred promises” between nations, and legitimizing relations of kinship through state-sanctioned ceremonies of marriage and adoption are all examples of ritualized promises in which secular politics and religious commitments conjoin. These public promises are, in fact, far more than examples: oaths, treaties, and covenants are generative sites of relationship out of which the very concepts and practices of religion, the sacred, and the secular have emerged.
Making Promises will bring new theoretical and empirical attention to public promises as authoritative discourses generated at the confluence of religion, law, ritual, material culture, and emotion.
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