The Sociology and Anthropology of Secularism: From Genealogy/Power to the Multiple Manifestations of the Secular (original) (raw)
Related papers
Politics of Religion and Secularism in the Ottoman Empire: 14th to 20th Century
2013
The subject of this article is the movements and processes of secularism in the Ottoman Empire. The main argument of the article is that while the Ottoman Empire was a substantially religious state in legal and political terms in its establishment, beginning with the late 17th century it is introduced to a gradually strengthening process of secularization reaching to a peak during the collapse of the Empire. The major reason for this development was the weakening of the Ottoman state power relative to its European counterparts and the necessity envisaged by the statesmen and the intellectuals to change the traditional domestic institutions with more effective and productive western institutions. Being initiated in the military domain first, the process was gradually to spread over other domains of the Ottoman state and society too.
Islamicate Secularities in Past and Present
Historical Social Research, 2019
Quote as: Dressler, Markus, Armando Salvatore and Monika Wohlrab-Sahr (eds). 2029. Islamicate Secularities: Past and Present, in Historical Social Research 44(3). All papers are accessible through https://www.gesis.org/en/hsr/full-text-archive/2019/443-islamicate-secularities-in-past-and-present Partly as a product of encounters with Europe, accelerated in the last 150 years, Islamicate societies developed new epistemic distinctions and structural differentiations between religious and non-religious spheres and practices. This special issue conceptualizes these distinctions and differentiations as “Islamicate secularities”, thereby connecting Marshall Hodgson’s notion of the “Islamicate” with the concept of “Multiple Secularities”. The individual contributions address the question of secularity in relation to Islam with a variety of spatial and temporal foci that range from Turkey to China and Indonesia, from the present to the colonial era and even precolonial contexts. The issue thus provides an array of perspectives on how Muslims have engaged with religion in relation to social and political conflicts and how this has led to contested reifications of ‘Islam’ and its boundaries, especially in relation to politics. As preliminary result, a tendency towards ‘soft distinctions’, kept under the umbrella of ‘Islam,’ emerges. Quote the Introduction as: Dressler, Markus, Armando Salvatore, A., and Monika Wohlrab-Sahr. 2019. Islamicate Secularities: New Perspectives on a Contested Concept. Historical Social Research, 44(3), 7-34. In the colonial era, new distinctions and differentiations between religious and non-religious spheres took shape within inner-Islamic discourses, partly as a product of encounters with Western knowledge. This introduction conceptualizes these distinctions and differentiations in relation to Islam, drawing on Marshall Hodgson’s concept of the Islamicate, which we employ for our heuristic notion of Islamicate secularities. It charts the paradigmatic conflicts that shape the contested fields of Islamic and secularity/secularism studies. The introduction discusses the epistemological and political context of these debates, and argues that theoretical and normative conflicts should not hinder further empirical inquiries into forms of secularity in Islamicate contexts. It also explores promising theoretical and methodological approaches for further explorations. Particular emphasis is laid on the historical trajectories and conditions, close in time or distant, that have played a role in the formation of contemporary Islamicate secularities. Keywords: Secularity, multiple secularities, Islamicate secularities, Islam and politics, Marshall Hodgson.
Revisiting Secularism: Secularism and Secularisation-A Bibliographical Essay
Economic and Political Weekly
Tracing the trajectory of "secularism" studies, this essay brings out a critique of the evolutionary perspective that pronounced a waning of the "religious" in a predominantly "secular" "modern" world. In the face of global and local realities that negate any strict boundaries between the "secular", "religious" and "political", many western and non-western debates on secularism have creatively re-envisaged the concept and highlighted its variegated meanings. Yet, these have been unable to locate secularism in lived phenomenological realities. This bibliographical essay discusses works that may not be categorised as "secularism" studies and yet offer insights into the interaction between religious, cultural, political and secular aspects of society, while attempting to unentangle the different, but related, processes of "secularism" and "secularisation". It is the secularisation process that needs academic attention to understand the complex interaction between the "secular" and the "religious".
Re-Thinking Secularism: The Post-Secular Turn and Its Critics (Graduate) (Fall 2020)
2020
This course will consist of an in-depth engagement with foundational accounts about secularism as these have been explored by anthropologists, social theorists, and intellectual historians. Part I of the seminar will focus on the thought of the contemporary anthropologist of Islam Talal Asad, undertaking a close and in-depth reading of his seminal texts to address his thinking about religion, secularism, tradition, time / temporality, modernity, and the relationship between colonial power and academic knowledge (particularly religion and the public sphere). Part II of the course will draw on works inspired by (and sometimes critical of) Asad's writings, including the writings of Saba Mahmoud, Fernando Coronil, and Gil Anidjar, among others. Throughout his career, Talal Asad has engaged with the assumptions behind multiple disciplines that have framed the way that the West has formulated knowledge about the non-Western world, interventions that continue to reverberate in multiple disciplines. Asad, moreover, has also engaged with the question of human embodiment (pain, emotion, and discipline), the concepts of tradition and of culture, and with questions about modern democratic politics, building upon Friedrich Nietzsche and Michel Foucault via the method of genealogy. By juxtaposing Asad's thought with that of his critics, students from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds will be able to gain much from the different ways of thinking about secularism that may inform their own research and help them be more sensitive to potential methodological assumptions and problems.
Working Paper Series of the HCAS "Multiple Secularities - Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities", 2019
Debates about the usability of the concept of ‘secularity’ in academic research are not merely theoretical. Standpoints are also politically informed and arguments are sometimes emotionally charged. To some, merely using the term ‘secularity’ seems to inflict violence upon certain objects of research or even upon themselves. Others object to applying the concept beyond a particular arrangement of secularity, lest that defense-worthy arrangement be undermined. Taking a step back, however, the actual hermeneutical problem and historical question still seems rather clearly to be this: is it possible to uncouple the link between secularism as a political regime and secularity as an analytical concept with broader historical purchase? In this paper, I argue that the basic approach of Multiple Secularities is indeed the commendable way forward, but could be refined and improved, also by learning from the valid points of its critical alternatives. Thus, this paper aspires to shed light on two basic questions, namely, how to take ‘secularity’ beyond the modern West, and, as a logical prior, why take ‘secularity’ beyond the modern West in the first place?