Feeling religious – Feeling secular? Emotional style as a diacritical category (original) (raw)
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Based on the first-person narratives of young born-again Muslims in mid-2000s’ Pakistan, this article points to several ways in which a renewed sociology of self-reform and faith-based activism could usefully draw more systematic attention to emotions. This empirical and inductive study first explores the role of emotions in the micro-foundations of re-Islamisation. It stresses the need to locate the emotive experiences that trigger this process, and sustain it through times and in opposition to others, in the body and the senses. It also discloses specific sensibilities, which, when linked to individual biographies, elucidate why potential followers are receptive, or not, to the various ‘sensitising devices’ deployed by Islamic organisations. In the second section, the expression of emotions is addressed in regard to its collective implications. Indeed, re-Islamisation often translates into rigid emotional boundaries separating the born-again from other communities, the ‘Muslims by...
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How, in various places across the world, do religious emotions and national sentiment become entangled? In exploring this theme, this book focuses on such diverse topics as the dynamic roles of Carnival in Brazil, the public contestation of ritual in Northern Nigeria and the culturalization of secular tolerance in the Netherlands. What binds the chapters in this volume is the focus on the ways in which sacrality and secularity mutually inform, enforce and spill over into each other. The case studies offer a bottom-up, practice-oriented approach in which the authors are wary to use categories of religion and secular as neutral descriptive terms. At this moment in time, it has become somewhat of a stale repetition to criticize the secular-religious divide. We are very much part and parcel of a world in which these boundaries overlap, are claimed, contested, reclaimed and re-contested in new and dynamic ways. If the debate on the postsecular has taught us anything, it is that the tools with which we work are implicated in these contestations. The notions ‘secular’, ‘sacred’ and ‘religion’ are as much part of our conceptual toolbox as objects of investigation. In order to illustrate how we are always in the middle of things, and in order to see how we should, if we are to understand the entanglements of sacrality, religion and secularity, think our way up from praxis, we opt for a start in medias res. We therefore open this introduction in Bangkok, Thailand, 26 October 2017 to be precise, when the mourning rituals for the recently deceased king are about to reach their apex.
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While contemporary scholars of law and religion frequently juxtapose the affective dynamics of religion against the secular logic of law, in contrast, this project explores the constitutive relationships between secular law and religious feeling. Combining a history of the legal and security practices surrounding religious emotion with a political analysis of their normative and institutional legacies, this chapter shows that articulations of religious feelings within India are often not opposed to but deeply entwined with assumptions about sovereign authority, rule of law, and religious toleration. To illuminate the otherwise invisible processes by which emotions come to be transformed and reproduced, I use an empirical strategy that examines religious emotions as social performances whose meaning and form shift in relation to their institutional and legal context. I interrogate this relationship through the archival research (roughly 200 pages of legislative debates, as well as around 70 daily newspaper articles, and other primary source texts) and analysis of India's 'religious feelings' law 295A. This chapter shifts away from the question of how religious feelings are exacerbated by disproportionate legal recognition to: how did the governance of religious emotion influence which actors and metrics became authoritative in determining legally legible religious feelings and how certain emotional practices come to be seen and felt as essentially religious? I show how policies aimed at regulating religious offense often worked to re-inscribe the underlying paradoxes of privilege and exclusion embedded within those logics of collective self-governance, and thus frequently reproduce the very conflicts that they are created to address.
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This chapter examines two cinematic representations of atheism in Bollywood cinema and probes the precarious location of atheism as an ‘impossibility’ within the framework of religious nationalism and state secularism as two interrelated aspects of Indian nationalism. The historical genesis of secularism as a political principle in India is conceptually closely entwined with religious nationalism in so far as it tends to take the religious or spiritual nature of the Indian nation for granted. While public and academic debates tend to focus on the relationship between majoritarian Hindu nationalism and various religious minorities, atheists and those who are explicitly irreligious are often ignored or considered to be too few to deserve closer attention. On the basis of popular cinematic representations of atheism and ethnographic observations among atheists in South India, this chapter argues that atheism is not ejected from the imagined community of the Indian nation but marginalized as a discursive position that may be acceptable or even desirable within limits, but ultimately impossible as a viable practical project and social identity.
Idolization mourning and catastrophe: transfiguring religious fundamentalism
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Religious fundamentalism organizes around a core set of attitudes and dispositions: exile, shame, condemnation, grandiose self-loathing, passivity, moral literalism, idolization, persecution, revenge, and violent messianic transcendence in which an abject self fuses with a vengeful spirit. This paper examines some of the sources that fuel the constellation of this set of positions-which also includes 'clash of civilizations' ideologies-in one individual whose way of being is exemplary of the confusion between violence and salvation. The concept of idolization is developed as it is the grounding attitude through which the religious fundamentalist turn of mind infl ates. Fundamentalist dispositions undergo modifi cation when the personality begins to soften through the capacity to mourn cumulative losses, violations, and traumatic abandonments. The capacity to mourn disentangles fusion with violent states of self-other linkage. A space then opens through which symbolic representations of tenderness and care enrich the self and take on more constant internal presence than does fascination with cultic ideologies.
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People in South Asia who neither believe in god(s) nor engage in religious practices nevertheless oft en self-identify as Muslims or Hindus rather than-or in addition to-identifying as atheists. Th e situational and contextual dynamics generating such positionings have implications for the conceptualization of nonreligion and secular lives. Based on ethnographic research in India and Bangladesh and focusing on two individuals, we attend to embodied and more ambivalent modes of nonreligiosity. Th is enables us to understand nonreligion as situated social practices and beyond what is typically captured with the term 'religion'. Studying nonreligion also where it is not visible as articulated conviction or identity not only contributes to accounting for the diversity of nonreligious confi gurations but also off ers signifi cant complementary insights.