Sociologies and the discursive power of religions (original) (raw)
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What is secularism? For many of us, the answer seems obvious: the world without religious belief, or the separation of church and state, or even the “really real” world. In recent years, scholars in number fields have begun to question these common-sense notions about secularism. In this course, we will investigate this rapidly expanding literature and the critical lines of inquiry it has opened up: Under what specific cultural and historic conditions did secularism first emerge? Is secularism experienced today in the same way throughout the world? If not, how do such experiences vary? What ways of being and living does secularism encourage or allow to flourish? Which does it stunt, block, or prohibit?
Comparative Secularities. Tracing Social and Epistemic Structures beyond the Modern West
Method & Theory in the Study of Religion, 2020
In view of the questionability of the concept “religion” as an analytical category for the investigation of pre-modern, non-Western cultures, how can one still pursue the history of religion or historical sociology of religion? Roughly speaking, scholars of religion can be placed between two poles with regard to this question: (1) those who reject the cross-cultural use of “religion” as a comparative concept and (2) those who believe they cannot do without it. We propose an approach that acknowledges the cultural dependence and historicity of concepts such as “religion” and the “secular,” while still conducting historical research on pre-colonial non-Western societies relevant to the study of both. Our approach aims to investigate the emergence of social and epistemic structures in various cultures—forms of differentiation and distinction—that have enabled the reorganisation of socio-cultural formations into religions and thus facilitated the formation of “multiple secularities” in global modernity.
Ruth Wodak & Bernhard Forchtner (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Language and Politics. London: Routledge, 587–599., 2017
This chapter explores how the modern distinction between religion and the secular has become a debated and contested discursive tool in the political organization of modern societies. This discourse is in operation in scholarly works as well as in public debates. Both are introduced and examined in this chapter. The main argument is that while important social and political issues are negotiated with the help of categories such as 'religion' and the 'secular', scholars should pay more attention to what is achieved by deploying such categories and distinctions in various locations and contexts.
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).
Religions
Some contemporary social phenomena, despite secularization, are still linked to religion. However, this same secularization seems to have accompanied a progressive process of religious illiteracy. Therefore, the capacity to address religious inspired issues is lower than the magnitude of the problems at work, be violent right-wing movement and Islamist terrorism or ethical debates on the beginning and end of life, to name but a few. Hence, this paper aims to fulfil three goals: to revisit secularism and some liberal assumptions that might prevent a correct understanding of these phenomena, to assess some of the consequences of the critique of ideologies and to propose an alternative approach to address religious inspired social phenomena.
The problem of secularism and religious regulation: anthropological perspectives
This article raises questions about the study of secularism, from an anthropological perspective. It begins by discussing some general references in the literature on secularism and its counterpart in Latin languages, “laicity”. It then discusses the approach for defining secularism that privileges models and principles, and advocates for an analysis of the devices that produce forms of regulating the religious. The study of configurations of secularism is the outcome of a consideration of all these elements (models, principles, and devices), and has a strategic focus on ways of defining, delimiting, and managing the religious. Three cases are examined in order to illustrate this approach: France, the United States, and Brazil.
Beyond Comparing Secularisms; A Critique of Religio-Secularism
The Oxford Handbook of Secularism, 2017
“Religio-secularism” denotes the tendency to understand specific cultural and political conflicts in terms an opposition between religion on the one hand and secularism on the other. Religio-secularism as a cultural-political paradigm tends to obscure the intricacies of political, socioeconomic, cultural-historical, religious, and ideological dimensions of specific situations (and often conflicts) that require complex analysis and evaluation. Religio-secularism, especially when it becomes the primary or exclusive framework for understanding cultural and political conflict, serves as an ideological barrier rather than an illuminating paradigm. Critique of the increasing grip of religio-secularism on political thinking, in contrast to the captivation with “postsecularism,” takes a reflexive attitude toward religio-secularism and its distorted lens through which to view the historical world. Other lenses should be used to survey contemporary events and situations related to religion, and this is particularly so with regard to conflicts over religion, religion in the public sphere, and secularism.
Approaches to Secularism: Anthropological and Institutionalist
At first glance we notice that discussions on secularism are under the monopoly of sociology, political science and philosophical understandings which focus on social notions. Such discourses, create arguments through some certain dichotomies: state and society, state and citizen, or state and religion. State is, as we see, at a central position, it is one of the central notions around which these discussions revolve. Dichotomies like this might confine us within the limits of dualistic notions, and prevent our discussions from exceeding the limits of our range of thinking, more importantly, they might be an obstacle on the way of discovering new areas of inquiry. One has to aim at transcending the conceptual lineages in which we are used to think. I want to put some emphasis on the notion of " formality " at this point. Some define concepts like state, citizen and democracy through formal qualifications, but in the framework I built above, one could say that secularism or religion is a social structure which has an effect beyond the formal world. In this sense, anthropology gives us a chance to look at secularism in a different perspective. Here I would like to recall Talal Asad. He says that, what formal principles propose on relations between the state and religion do not have an explanatory value, and how secularists define religion might not be the " religion " which we are trying to address: The " proper domain of religion " is distinguished from and separated by the state in modern secular constitutions. But formal constitutions never give the whole story.
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".