Elayne Oliphant

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

My research addresses religion’s role in the maintenance and upending of privilege and inequality. My first book, The Privilege of Being Banal: Art, Secularism, and Catholicism in Paris will be published by the University of Chicago Press in October 2020. In it, I describe how Catholicism has achieved the status of the “banal” in Parisian public life. This banality is evident in the way Catholic materiality shifts between the background and the foreground without causing consternation and concern, despite claims that all religious signs must be absent from the public sphere in France. Banality, therefore, rather than a sign of weakness, is a source of privilege. Through an ethnographic and archival study, I show how the Catholic Church in France participates in making Catholic materiality banal, in particular by aestheticizing its heritage forms. By bringing aesthetics and politics together in contemporary France, I argue that certain actors in the French Catholic Church risk fostering the kind of banality that Hannah Arendt warned against: the incapacity to take on another person’s experience of the world.

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

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

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

2019. “The Notre Dame Fire and France’s National Reconstruction Project.” The Revealer.  Published on April 26, 2019. 

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. 

2015. “Circulations of the Sacred: Contemporary Art as ‘Cultural’ Catholicism in Paris.” In Global Secularisms in a Post-Secular Age. Edited by Michael Rectenwald, Almeida Rochelle, and George Levine. Pp. 287-294. Berlin: De Gruyters. 

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 March 2020
My first book—The Privilege of Being Banal: Art, Secularism, and Catholicism in Paris—is now available for pre-order through the University of Chicago Press website and on Amazon. 

I have recently started a new research project tentatively entitled “The Debts We Owe: Imagining Sociality as Obligation in a Capitalist Age.” In it, I focus on religious and secular projects that aim to address privilege’s tenacity and—through a focus on the question of debts and obligations—push forward to an alternate future. I am attempting to explore the similarities and distinctions between two such projects in France and the United States: the Yellow Vests protest movements and various Christian Church reparations’ committees aimed at addressing the debts and obligations imposed by historical support for and benefits from slavery.