ABSTRACT
Let us consider the times. Wealth is increasingly concentrated in the possession of a few, while poverty and declining standards of living are increasingly distributed among the many, who are, in any case, being exploited and dispossessed; in the hope of a better life the millions among this many enter into global migration and wandering – in many cases reversing, but also complementing the flow of capital; crime is ubiquitous, creating the need for legitimate violence as a corrective, and there is no shortage of powers, usually illegitimate, to carry it out in the service of megapolitical actors, who, despite their advantages of scale, are unable to eliminate pockets of the resistance.1 And all of this is to the accompaniment of an aggressive insistence on religious observance by major actors, which is to say the obedience to, and reverence for certain controlling powers and truths by way of specified practices in honour of their efficacy and vindication is so commonplace that it is thought to be unremarkable.
