Professor Adam Possamai
Affiliation: Western Sydney University
Discipline: Sociology
Year elected: 2023
How would you describe your work at a dinner party?
As everyone has an opinion about religion, being a believer, ex-believer, atheist, sceptic or someone who grew up with a religion, I always find it challenging to speak about my research. I have found that the best answer I get is usually a raised eyebrow and a moment of silence. It gets even more delicate when I speak about my research on esotericism and exorcism. A more neutral approach is to speak about census data in Australia and religion but that does not get much traction. So, I usually start by saying that I work at Western Sydney University and I take it from there.
What role do the social sciences play in your work?
It might sound very unsociological to say this, but I feel I was born a sociologist without knowing what that meant until I went to university. I have navigated across various cultures, religions, and countries from a young age and have always taken the task to understand how and why people think and behave differently. This is now crucial in my work as a researcher on religion, in my various governance positions, and in my fiction writing in which I explored and illustrated social scientific theories such as Arendt’s banality of evil, Bataille’s notion of transgression, and Benjamin’s writings on modern life. Being a Weberian, people’s interpretation of their own life is at the core of my work.
What are you most proud of?
My broad intellectual impact in the sociology of religion. By naming and legitimising various religious tendencies, I have given language to experiences many people were already having but could not articulate. I have also created new concepts and provided a precise vocabulary for scholars to describe something that was happening but had not been clearly named, e.g. hyper-real religion, perennism, and the over-policing of the devil in which the supply of exorcism creates its own demand. I have less takers for Passé Secularism, but this only came out last year.
What continues to motivate your work?
Changes. My work as a researcher is on religion and change, and the way people understand religion is in flux. Whenever my work comes out in print, I feel I already need to update it. The same applies to my governance roles as I need to understand changes to lead. Change has become the only constant that keeps me going.
What is your desert island book, song and/or movie?
The movie Les Enfants du Paradis (Children of Paradise) directed by Marcel Carné with a script written by the poet Jacques Prévert. Not only it is rich with meaning, but it has also a runtime of more than 3 hours, ideal on a desert island (assuming there is electricity).
But to be more pragmatic I would probably go ahead with a collection of hundreds of chess games by world champions to keep my mind busy as the character from Stefan Zweig’s Chess story did in solitary confinement. Although it did not go that well at the end.