Mellichamp Lecture Series
in Global Civil Society
PRESENTS
David Chidester
Professor of Religious Studies and Director of the Institute for Comparative Religion in Southern Africa (ICRSA) at the University of Cape Town in South Africa

Sacred Economy:

Religion as the Mediated,

Animated, and Politicized

Economy of the Sacred

In this presentation, David Chidester explores ways in which religion can be understood as a sacred economy, with special attention to the mediations and animations of sacred values, surpluses, and exchanges in a globalizing political economy of the sacred. Religion, defined as transcendent and sacred, is often thought to be situated beyond or apart from economic calculations. Under globalizing conditions, however, religion has clearly been embedded in the symbolic and material economies of corporate media, diasporic cultures, networked social relations, and transnational political struggles. Reviewing theoretical resources for understanding the economy of religion, Chidester focuses on an animated cartoon, Destination Earth, which was produced by the American Petroleum Institute in 1956, as an animated text for analyzing the emergence of a globalizing political economy of the sacred, pointing to three basic features of that sacred economy—mediations between economic and sacred values; mediations between economic scarcity and sacred surplus; and mediations among competing claims on the legitimate ownership of the sacred.

David Chidester is Professor of Religious Studies and Director of the Institute for Comparative Religion in Southern Africa (ICRSA) at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. He has also served as Special Advisor to the Minister of Education and Visiting Fellow with the Human Sciences Research Council. Chidester is the author or editor of over twenty books in North American studies, South African studies, and comparative religion. His publications include Savage Systems: Colonialism and Comparative Religion in Southern Africa (1996); Christianity: A Global History (2000); Salvation and Suicide: Jim Jones, the Peoples Temple, and Jonestown (revised edition 2003); Nelson Mandela: In His Own Words (2004); and Authentic Fakes: Religion and American Popular Culture (2005). He received the American Academy of Religion’s Award for Excellence in Religious Studies in 1990 and 1997 and the Alan J. Pifer Award for social research in 2005. Since 2002, he has been editor of Journal for the Study of Religion.