TOPIC: Blowing it up at Burning Man. Religion, technology and ritual in the age of authenticity
BIO:
François Gauthier is professor of Religious Studies at the Department of Social sciences of the Université de Fribourg, Switzerland, since 2013. Born on the Quebec side of the Ottawa river in 1973, he is a socio-anthropologist of religion who likes to think outside the box and outside the West, mixing up French and English-language traditions. He likes getting dirty when doing his ethnography and then upswinging into big macro questions and back. He prefers epistemology to fixed methods, believes Marcel Mauss was right when he refused to separate anthropology and sociology, and struggles with parenting-work equilibria.
He has recently published Religion, Modernity, Globalisation. Nation-State to Market (Routledge 2020) and has co-edited the Routledge International Handbook of Religion in Global Society (2021). He is also the co-founder and co-editor-in-chief of the generalist social scientific journal MAUSS International. Anti-Utilitarian Interventions in the Social Sciences, and a co-editor of the French language Revue du MAUSS semestrielle. He is committed to enabling the provincialisation of the West while resisting the dissolution of universalism into relativism, promotes critical thinking as a means for political involvement, and works to renew interest for religion as a main theme for the general social sciences while de-marginalising the social scientific study of religion. Finally, he is a sucker for Durkheimian effervescence and crazy stuff.