Agenda

04 Feb 2026 15:00

Outrageous illocutions

Online

CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF LIVED RELIGION
Lecture Series Illicit Objects, Lived Religion: Materiality, Performance, and Power

Matteo Benussi, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice
Outrageous illocutions: extra-ordinary speech, fidelity, and ethical intensity among Tatarstani Muslim pietists

Abstract: This paper explores the extra-ordinary speech of Salafi-leaning Muslims in Russia’s Tatarstan region through the concept of “fidemic speech,” which emerges out of an engagement with autonomist theories of language, truth, and the social power of speech. This exploration is inspired by ethnographic encounters with utterances that are widely considered outrageous – intellectually, morally, or both – in Tatarstan’s secular mainstream, and risk putting their utterers on the wrong side of the state’s ideological and security apparatuses. The same utterances, however, play an important role as indexes of pietists’ fidelity to the ontological and ethical truths of Islam. By focusing on these particularly intractable verbal objects, this paper aspires to shed light on a dimension of language that has received relatively little attention: the point of encounter of speech, the political, and high-intensity ethical commitment.

Bio: Matteo (Teo) Benussi is a social and cultural anthropologist based at Ca’ Foscari’s Department of Humanities, specializing in religion, politics, and space-making in Eurasia. He has conducted research on Islamic piety movements in Tatarstan, the legacies of Chornobyl in Ukraine, and post-Soviet heritage dynamics. He is currently exploring topics of war, poetry, time, and political theology/ontology amid Eurasia’s geopolitical convulsions.

 

Wednesday 4th February 2026, 3.00pm-4.00pm CET
Online - For online participation please register at this link Zoom

For information please contact the Center for the Study of Lived Religion cslr@unive.it

Organizzatore

Department of Asian and North African Studies; Center for the Study of Lived Religion

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