Book Review: White Utopias: The Religious Exoticism of Transformational Festivals

Abstract

and important about the constitution of culture and society in the not so (these days!) UnitedKingdom. But I want to return to Bayart to pursue the postmodern or perhaps Deleuzian dimensions of nonreligion—the fact that non-religion is not a thing or an object but a contingent relation that emerges through specific, situated acts and performances—and what this means for the way societies and religions are understood and studied. Postmodern methodologies such as deconstruction take the instability of structures and objects for their point of departure. Not just Bayart and Deleuze but new materialists such as Jane Bennett, Rosa Braidotti, and Bruno Latour as well as post-Marxists such as Donna Haraway and Ernesto Laclau take the incompleteness of the social as a point of departure, its tendency for transformation as a given. But this point of departure is arguablymarginal to the “critical” tradition of Religious Studies with which Cotter identifies. So, why does this study of non-religion matter? Because it draws into view a range of wider questions about theory and method in Religious Studies which are only hinted at in Cotter’s otherwise excellent study.