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FRIHUMSAM-Fri prosj.st. hum og sam

Religious and Secular Worldmaking: Narrative Cultures of Utopian Emigration and the Formation of Modern Regimes of Attention

Alternative title: Religiøse og sekulære verdensdannelser: Emigrasjonens utopiske fortellingskulturer og oppkomsten av moderne oppmerksomhetsregimer

Awarded: NOK 10.8 mill.

Do religious and secular people experience the world differently? Our research project, NC-RoA, examines this question by focusing on the 19th century, a time when narrative cultures were diverging and a shared reality seemed to be breaking down. This led to the emergence of conceptual binaries - such as faith vs. science, political left vs. right, and capitalist vs. communist - that shaped European discussions about "modernity." Recent debates on social media bubbles, mainstream media, and misleading information suggest that society is becoming increasingly polarized, with many people seeing their opponents as unreachable through rational argument or evidence. NC-RoA investigates these dynamics in a historical setting to study the cognitive processes that lead to drifting perceptions of the world. We're interested in the story worlds of early 19th-century utopians who emigrated from Europe to the US in order to create or participate in utopian societies. From the perspective of European observers, these radical attempts to establish a divine economy, create a new moral world, establish a new Zion, or build a communist paradise were seen as social experiments that modeled modern society, economy, and the future of religion. Our sources show how emigrants' perceptions of the world and society changed as they encountered each other in the "promised land." Conceptual distinctions began to emerge as utopians of all types reframed their individual experiences of the New World as religious positions. NC-RoA studies the narrative cultures of utopian emigration as regimes of attention - structures suited to control, regulate, or guide people's perception of the world. Drawing on recent models from cognitive science, we analyze how narrative practices described and prescribed alternative ways of modulating attention that were foundational to modern practices of world-making.

Do religious and secular people experience the world differently? NC-RoA examines the moment in the 19th century, in which narrative cultures were decoupled and a sense of shared reality seemed disrupted, giving epistemic affordance to conceptual binaries—such as faith/science, political left/right, capitalist/communist—that came to shape European discourses on “modernity”. The proposed project connects conceptual history to the study of vernacular religion and the social history of emigration. We study the story worlds of early 19th-century utopians who emigrated from Europe to the US to engage in attempts to create a “perfect society”. From the perspective of European observers, these radical utopian attempts to establish a divine economy, create a new moral world, establish a new Zion, or build a communist paradise were social experiments modeling modern society, economy, and the future of religion. Our sources document shared realities such as meeting places, day-to-day cooperation, the exchange of ideas and goods, even whole towns. The detailed accounts of daily routines, the environment of the settlements, and their social organization, however, also document how emigrants' perception of the world and society changed. Conceptual distinctions started to occur: utopians of all shades learned to reframe their individual experiences of the New World as religious positions when encountering each other in the “promised land”. NC-RoA studies the narrative cultures of utopian emigration as regimes of attention. Taking inspiration from recent predictive processing accounts on cultural affordances, we analyze how new narrative practices described and prescribed alternative patterns of attending foundational to alternative practices of world-making and conceptual boundary-drawing in situations of fundamental reorientation.

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FRIHUMSAM-Fri prosj.st. hum og sam