Comparative Secularities: Tracing Social and Epistemic Structures beyond the Modern West (original) (raw)
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Revisiting Secularism in Theory and Practice, Seda ÜnsarÖzgür Ünal Eriş (eds.), Springer, 2020
Inspired by the seminal work of Talal Asad, important studies, both within and outside anthropology, have pointed to secularism as a modern ideology resting on a distinction between “secular” and “religious” domains whose genealogy can be traced back to specific developments within early modern European history. Instead, emerging new sociological scholarship suggests investigating “multiple secularities,” namely the many ways in which the boundary between these secular and religious spheres has been marked in non-European settings. After exploring these two scholarly approaches to secularism, the chapter relies on a few studies in historical sociology to single out the emergence of a separated “secular” sphere within bureaucratic culture in the Ottoman Empire beginning in the sixteenth century. It will be argued that although the “religious” and the “secular” were certainly intertwined within the Empire, a distinction between the two existed largely before European expansion in the MENA region. In this way, the chapter questions the common view that sees secularization as being mainly a Western import and points to the Ottoman state’s administrative and economic machine as a fruitful domain for exploring the secular/religion distinction in Muslim-majority contexts.
Fashioning a Post-Colonial Sociology of Religion
This article describes two alternatives to standard approaches to the sociology of religion, both based on non-Western ideas. The first stems from Confucian approaches to the sacred, which emphasize the maintenance of holy relationships instead of beliefs or church organizations. The second is based on the writings of Ibn Khaldun, a 14th-century Arab scholar who used the same concepts to understand ethic and religious solidarities. Standard sociologies of religion, in contrast, grow directly out of the core concerns of Western Christianity. In a post-colonial era, every intellectual discipline needs to expand its concepts beyond the West. This article begins a practical conversation about how to do so.
Sociology of Religion, Secularization and Social Theory
observe that secularization theory, and more recently empirical and conceptual debates about its birth, death and possible resurrection have been at the heart of theorizing and debates within the sociology of religion. Much of this debate revolves around two key issues. First, there is contention as to whether secularization can be an appropriate social-theoretical concept if it is accepted that it is inevitably contaminated by the normative investments surrounding its invention. Secondly, on a more prosaic but not unrelated level, it is argued that in any case secularization fails as theory due to a putative return or resurgence of the religious in postmodernity. This paper seeks to argue that secularization and its other, desecularization, are themselves embedded in and inescapably marked by theological metaphors of teleology. This is because of the stakes involved in the emergence of differentiation in modernity (driven initially by a normative secularization between the political and the theological). This tale of origins cannot escape the simultaneous invention of the polar concepts of the religious and the secular in early modernity. What this paper seeks to do is review aspects of the genealogy of secularization paying particular attention to the theological ghosts which continue to haunt sociology's emancipatory self conception as a scientific discipline. The paper will then review some of the arguments against the secularization thesis in light of these themes. The aim of this argument is to suggest that social theorists of religion can still employ secularization as a normative analyticwhen understood reflexively and as itself a social construction -in order to measure aspects of the specificity of the imbrication of the religious with the cultural and political at the turn of the new millennium. The argument will be grounded and illustrated with brief reference to empirical studies of Wicca (Bahnisch 2001) and religion as a cultural resource for political mobilization in both the culture wars of the American 1990s and recent conflicts represented as a "clash of civilizations" between the West (coded as Christian) and its Islamic other (Bahnisch 2003a).
Multiple Secularities: Toward a Cultural Sociology of Secular Modernities
s For more than two decades sociological debates over religion and secularization have been characterized by a confrontation between (often American) critics and (mostly European) defenders of secularization theories. At the same time, there was a remarkable rise in public debates about the role of secularism in political regimes and in national as well as civilizational frameworks. Against this backdrop this paper presents the conceptual framework of " multiple secularities " with a view to refocusing sociological research on religion and secularity. We will demonstrate that it can stimulate new ways of theorizing the relationship of religion and secularity in a variety of modern environments. Arguing for a reformulation of this relationship within the framework of cultural sociology, we conceptualize " secularity " in terms of the cultural meanings underlying the differentiation between religion and non-religious spheres. Building on Max Weber we distinguish four basic ideal-types of secularity that are related to specific reference problems and associated with specific guiding ideas. Finally, we illustrate the use of the concept with regard to selected case-studies. For more than two decades sociological debates over religion and secular-ization have been characterized by a confrontation between (often Ameri-can) critics and (mostly European) defenders of secularization theories. At
Working Paper Series of the HCAS "Multiple Secularities - Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities", 2017
For the last few decades, sociological debates about religion and secularisation have been characterised by confrontation between (often American) critics and (mostly European) defenders of secularisation theories. There has also been a remarkable rise in academic and public debates about the role of secularism in political regimes and in national as well as civilisational frameworks. These debates are shaped by the context of the changing position of the West in world politics, Islamist terror and the war on terror, struggles of religious minorities for recognition and influence, and the concomitant negotiations over the place of religion in the public sphere, as well as the emergence of post-national citizenship. Contributions from political theory, social anthropology and religious studies that emerged from this context have enriched the debate, but also contributed to fragmenting existing theories on the relationship between religion and modernity. Whereas scholars previously aimed to develop ‘general theories’ of secularisation that included deviations from the general model, newer approaches tend to highlight the specificity of Western European developments as opposed to those in the rest of the world, and sometimes even highlight their incomparability.
This essay explores how the concept of the secular, particularly as it has pertained to the state, went from being capacious enough to accommodate what we would today call religion within its sphere to being a sphere whose definition increasingly involves the entire absence of religion. The question is how the secular was secularised, or went from what we may call the ‘sacral-secular’ (Hudson 2016) to become what Jose Casanova calls ‘secularist secularity’ (Casanova 2011: 60). Perhaps a better expression is the post-Christianisation of the secular, but even here we must keep in mind that the ideologies that shape the secular in the West today are themselves to a large extent products of historical Christianity (Holland 2019). The following is not an exhaustive answer to this question and will not discuss material factors such as the 19th and 20th century expansion of the state—and thus the contraction of the church’s role in social service provision—in response to social problems generated by industrialisation, or post-WWII demographic shifts, or the influence of technology on social secularisation. The focus will be on intellectual history, with the suggestion that the openness of secularity to religion is to a significant degree informed by the extent to which prevailing religion is held to be compatible with notions of reason and human flourishing (moral normativity). Consequently, the extent to which prevailing views of reason and normativity diverge from traditional Christianity, the more alienated Christianity and secularity will become in popular thinking and in civic institutions.
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".