Elayne Oliphant

Ph.D. Anthropology, University of Chicago; M.A. Political Economy, Carleton University; B.A. International Development Studies, Trent University

I am an anthropologist of the privilege and power garnered by Christian lifeways, particularly in Europe. I analyze how structures of inequality are reproduced through material forms and practices. My research explores how practices and objects that we think of as evidence of Europe’s civilized status or high culture—such as the maintenance of heritage Christian spaces and the viewing of art—are mobilized to justify and even celebrate experiences of privilege and supremacy.

American Academy of Religion, American Anthropological Association, American Ethnological Society, Society for Cultural Anthropology, Society for the Anthropology of Religion, Council for European Studies, French Historical Society

Clifford Geertz Prize, Society for the Anthropology of Religion, 2022

"Creating the World Anew: Religion and Mutual Aid,” Henry Luce Foundation, $250,000, 2022-24

First Book Colloquium Grant, New York University, 2018

Global Research Initiative Grant, New York University, NYU Paris, 2018

Creative Arts Council Grant, Brown University, 2014

Humanities Research Group Grant, Cogut Center for the Humanities, Brown University, 2014

Mark Watkins Dissertation Fellowship, Dept. of Anthropology, University of Chicago, 2011 

International Dissertation Research Fellowship, Social Science Research Council, 2008-2009

Dissertation Proposal Development Fellowship, Social Science Research Council, 2007

2022. “Embracing George W. Bush?” Public Books. 

https://www.publicbooks.org/george-w-bush-immigration-portraits/

2022. “Abundance and the Late Capitalist Imagination: Catholicism and Fashion at the Metropolitan Museum.” In Mediating Catholicism. Edited by Kristen Norget and Eric Pina de Cabral. Pp. 151-168. Bloomsbury Press.  

2022. "Density and Domination: Catholic Materiality and the Workings of History." American Ethnologist 49 (2): 151-162. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.13073.

2021. The Privilege of Being Banal: Art, Secularism, and Catholicism in Paris. Chicago: University of Chicago Press

2021. “The Secular and the Global: Rethinking the Anthropology of Christianity in the Wake of 1492.” Religion 51 (4): 577-592. DOI: 10.1080/0048721X.2021.1971500.

2019. “The Notre Dame Fire and France’s National Reconstruction Project.” The Revealer. https://therevealer.org/the-notre-dame-fire-and-frances-national-reconstruction-project/  

2019. “Debts.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 87, no. 3: 642-648.

2019. “Christ in the Banlieue: The Passionate Infrastructure of the French Catholic Church.” Exchanges 48, no. 3: 236-250. 

2017. “The Intimate Provocations of Showing Religion in France.” In Showing Off/Showing Up, edited by Catherine Schuler, Laurie Frederik Meer, and Kim Marra, 233-254. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 

2015. “Beyond Blasphemy or Devotion: Art, the Secular, and Catholicism in Paris.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 21, no. 2: 352-373. 

2012. “The Crucifix as a Symbol of Secular Europe: The Unlikely Semiotics of the European Court of Human Rights.” Anthropology Today 28, no. 2 (2012): 16-18.

2007 "Voices and Apparitions in Jules Bastien-Lepage's Joan of Arc." In Looking and Listening in Nineteenth-Century France. Edited by Martha Ward and Anne Leonard. Exhibition Catalogue. Chicago: Smart Museum of Art.

Updated June 2022

My first book, The Privilege of Being Banal: Art, Secularism, and Catholicism in Paris was awarded the Clifford Geertz Prize by the Society for the Anthropology of Religion in 2022. It develops an original overarching theory to explain how the variety of practices aimed at securing Catholicism’s privilege in France are reproduced despite the contradictions they bring the fore. This work expands the concept of “banality,” famously developed by the twentieth century political theorist Hannah Arendt to explain how actions typically deemed reprehensible come to appear as self-evident, both to individuals and collectively. It is the self-evident nature of actions otherwise deemed problematic that makes banality such a useful analytic. It explains how Catholic objects, images, and spaces can occupy the Parisian landscape in ways that France’s laïcité ostensibly abhors.

I have now begun two new research projects. The first, entitled “Catholicism, Slavery, and Abolition: Rethinking Redemption and Reparation in the French Caribbean,” engages with activists from the French Caribbean who are looking to rewrite the history of abolition in France, and also addresses the role of the French Catholic Church in the transition from chattel slavery to racial capitalism in the mid-nineteenth century. With this project, I hope to both call attention to how Christian actors, practices, and institutions worked to maintain racialized exploitation, while also highlighting how formerly enslaved people refused their efforts and violently revolted against systems of enslavement and exploitation.

The second project, entitled “Creating the World Anew: Religion and Mutual Aid” just received a $250,000 grant from the Henry Luce Foundation. Profs. Daniel Vaca (Brown University and Laura McTighe (Florida State University), and I will bring together a working group of Religious Studies scholars and mutual aid activists to explore the relationships between the commitments that shape religious life and those that are necessary in the work of mutual aid. Mutual aid initiatives aim to dismantle harmful systems and create social relations and infrastructures that are more survivable.