Sam Victor
I am a social anthropologist (M.Sc., Université de Montréal; Ph.D., University of Cambridge) interested in ethics, value conflict, and intellectual authority. Ethnographically, I'm attracted to situations where people find themselves pulled between polarizing commitments. My projects so far have focused on evangelical Christians in the US and in Quebec. I'm currently a FRQ-SC Post-doctoral Research Fellow and Course Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at McGill University.
My PhD dissertation is now a book manuscript tentatively titled “After Fundamentalism: Faith, Facts, and Intellectual Authority at Heart Ridge Church”. It follows evangelical Christians in Nashville, Tennessee who reject biblical literalism but still struggle to let go of its moralized habits of thought as they reconcile long-held religious beliefs with new ethical and political commitments. Drawing on their daily life experiences as well as debates over church reforms, the book illuminates the central moral dilemma facing American evangelicals today: how to reclaim intellectual credibility from the grips of religious fundamentalism. It reveals a process of historical and social reconstruction taking place within evangelicalism post-pandemic and offers a new approach for undertanding how communities manage ethical ambiguity when trusted intellectual authorities become destabilized.
I'm currently working on a postdoctoral project with Hillary Kaell at McGill University (FRQ-SC Fellowship in Anthropology, 2024-2025). We are looking at a network of evangelical social entrepreneurs who transform historic church buildings into secular “community hubs”. Based on an ethnographic case study in Montreal of these religious actors’ attempts to promote the value of sacred spaces in the context of state secularism (laïcité), we are charting a path through anthropological theories about the evolving relationship between religion, heritage, and capitalism. The project is part of a wider multidisciplinary and interuniversity collaboration on urban religion in Quebec between scholars in theology, geography, and sociology (https://murel.openum.ca/).
Supervisors: Bob W. White (Department of Anthropology, Université de Montréal), Géraldine Mossière (Institut d'études religieuses, Hillary Kaell (School of Religious Studies and Department of Anthropology, McGill University), Joel Robbins (Department of Social Anthropology, and University of Cambridge)
Address: Montreal, Canada
My PhD dissertation is now a book manuscript tentatively titled “After Fundamentalism: Faith, Facts, and Intellectual Authority at Heart Ridge Church”. It follows evangelical Christians in Nashville, Tennessee who reject biblical literalism but still struggle to let go of its moralized habits of thought as they reconcile long-held religious beliefs with new ethical and political commitments. Drawing on their daily life experiences as well as debates over church reforms, the book illuminates the central moral dilemma facing American evangelicals today: how to reclaim intellectual credibility from the grips of religious fundamentalism. It reveals a process of historical and social reconstruction taking place within evangelicalism post-pandemic and offers a new approach for undertanding how communities manage ethical ambiguity when trusted intellectual authorities become destabilized.
I'm currently working on a postdoctoral project with Hillary Kaell at McGill University (FRQ-SC Fellowship in Anthropology, 2024-2025). We are looking at a network of evangelical social entrepreneurs who transform historic church buildings into secular “community hubs”. Based on an ethnographic case study in Montreal of these religious actors’ attempts to promote the value of sacred spaces in the context of state secularism (laïcité), we are charting a path through anthropological theories about the evolving relationship between religion, heritage, and capitalism. The project is part of a wider multidisciplinary and interuniversity collaboration on urban religion in Quebec between scholars in theology, geography, and sociology (https://murel.openum.ca/).
Supervisors: Bob W. White (Department of Anthropology, Université de Montréal), Géraldine Mossière (Institut d'études religieuses, Hillary Kaell (School of Religious Studies and Department of Anthropology, McGill University), Joel Robbins (Department of Social Anthropology, and University of Cambridge)
Address: Montreal, Canada
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Book Chapters by Sam Victor
Since the late 1990s, anthropologists have increasingly turned their attention to "happiness" and "wellbeing", a field of study long dominated by moral philosophers, social psychologists, and welfare economists. This chapter reviews anthropological approaches to "happiness" and "wellbeing", and their engagement with ideas from virtue ethics, value theory, and capabilities approaches to development. Across a range of ethnographic cases in which the concepts have been applied as well as from which analogous concepts have been drawn out, we highlight the analytical tension between (a) a search for objective measures that can be used to guide efforts aimed at increasing wellbeing and reducing global inequities and (b) the exploration of cultural worlds in which different peoples conceive of and pursue "the good life" in varied and sometimes incommensurate ways. This multidisciplinary analytical field has been productive for anthropological theory, but there remains scepticism around the implications of its evaluative impulses and ambitions.