2025 Biennial Meeting

Society for the Anthropology of Religion (SAR) Biennial Conference

To be held on the oceanside campus of the
University of California, Santa Barbara
June 21-23, 2025

UC Santa Barbara campus (foreground: Manzanita Village dormitories, where attendees may stay)

Conference Theme:
Religiosities, Ecologies, and Environmentalisms in the Age of the Anthropocene

The Society for the Anthropology of Religion (SAR) Biennial Conference will be held June 21-23, 2025 at U.C. Santa Barbara. SAR welcomes paper and panel proposals on ALL TOPICS in the Anthropology of Religion. At the same time, we do have a main Conference theme for 2025:  Religiosities, Ecologies, and Environmentalisms in the Age of the Anthropocene.

Keynote Speaker: Prof. Ana Mariella Bacigalupo, Anthropology Department at SUNY Buffalo; she will speak on indigenous religious environmentalism in Peru.

For the first time, our SAR Biennial Conference will collaborate with the International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture (ISSRNC) https://www.issrnc.org/. The last day of our SAR Conference (June 23, 2025) will overlap with the first day of their Conference, also to be held at UC Santa Barbara. SAR members are free to stay on and attend ISSRNC panel sessions with no extra charge.

In the Age of the Anthropocene, the field of Anthropology is expanding beyond the study of mere humans, for the effects of climate change and the pollution of our life-sustaining biosphere, including our air, water, and soil, is impacting all living species, which are interdependent. This conference brings into play interpretive, scientific, and religious perspectives on forms of life and their changing cultural and natural environments. It promotes new ways of inquiring into the entangled relations between humans and other beings: deities, ghosts, animals, insects, plants, and sacred natural formations such as rocks, rivers, mountains, and stars. Across the globe, how do different religious communities, doctrines, and institutions adjust themselves and their religious imaginaries to play a role in the age of the Anthropocene?

The conference hopes to bring together anthropologists of religion and scholars of environmental studies to share our research on how religious discourses and practices have already begun to address environmental degradation and climate change concerns. What are valuable gems of environmentalist thought and practice embedded in religious teachings, rituals, texts, customs, diets, and ontologies that have significant potentials to help us address our current concerns? How have different religious agents engaged with modern science and technologies to address environmental concerns? What explains how some religious traditions have a significant environmental cosmology, but they do not operationalize their valuable religious teachings and ontology? How and why do certain religious traditions also deploy their religious teachings as obstacles to environmentalist measures and the efforts to reduce climate change? How do religious agents reinterpret their doctrines and scriptures to address our current environmental crisis? How do they work with the state or capitalist forces to promote environmental efforts, and how do states or capitalist forces also deploy religious forces? 

What more appropriate place to hold this conference than on the beautiful seaside campus of University of California, Santa Barbara? The huge oil spill of 1969, when black crude oil and tar coated our beaches and marine life, set in motion much of the environmentalist movement in the U.S.: the establishment of the first undergraduate Environmental Studies Department in the U.S. at UCSB in 1970; the Environmental Protection Agency in Washington D.C. in 1970; the U.S. Clean Water Act and the California Coastal Commission in 1972; and the U.S. Endangered Species Act in 1973. The world’s first Earth Day was held in Santa Barbara on April 22, 1970, and now has the participation of 190 countries.

The Society for the Anthropology of Religion (SAR) will accept panel and paper proposals that are not about religion and environment for the Biennial Conference in 2025. However, we encourage panel and individual paper proposals in the following areas on the topic of Religiosities, Ecologies, and Environmentalism in the Age of the Anthropocene:

1. Religion, Cosmology, Ethics, and the Ontological Turn
2. Religio-Environmental Rituals and Practices
3. Religion and Environmental Justice, Race, Colonialism, and Postcoloniality
4. Indigenous Religiosities in the Age of Capitalist Extractivism and State Developmentalism
5. Religion, Ecology, and Multispecies Studies
6. Religion and Environment in the Media
7. Religion, Economic Development, Infrastructure, and Capitalist Environmental Degradation
8. Religio-Environmental and Multispecies History and Archaeology

Call for Submissions to the Society for Anthropology of Religion (SAR) Biennial Conference:

Individual Paper Proposal submission web portal

Organized Panel Proposal submission web portal

Roundtable Proposal submission web portal

Deadline for all submissions: 

Sunday, January 5, 2024
Notification of Paper, Panel, or Roundtable Acceptance:  Jan. 30, 2025

SAR Biennial Conference Registration Opens:  Jan. 30, 2025
Early Bird Registration deadline:  Feb. 20, 2025
UCSB Dormitory registration opens:  Feb. 20, 2025 (register asap, dorm rooms are limited, Santa Barbara hotel and Airbnb costs are high, also limited)
UCSB Dormitory priority registration closes:  April 15, 2025

2025 Biennial Conference Registration Fees:

For SAR Members Early Bird Registration:

Non-Student/Professional – $160
Student – $60
International-based Professional (traveling from abroad); Contingent Employment – $30

For Non-SAR Members and Non-Early Bird SAR Members

Non-Student/Professional – $185
Student – $70
International-based Professional (traveling from abroad); Contingent Employment – $40

SAR warmly thanks our UC Santa Barbara Co-sponsors:

Bren School for Environmental Sciences and Management
UCSB Department of Religious Studies
Walter H. Capps Center for the Study of Ethics, Religion, and Public Life
UCSB Department of Anthropology