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Introduction
Stefan Binder is postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the Department of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies (ISEK) at University of Zurich. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Modern Indian Studies (CeMIS) at University of Göttingen and holds a Ph.D. degree from Utrecht University (Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies). Stefan does research in Cultural Anthropology and Comparative Religion with a focus on South Asia (India).
Publications
Publications (23)
Drawing on theories of moral exemplarism and ethnographic research with an atheist movement in South India, this article explores how narratives of idealism and the Telugu concept of ‘ādarśam’ signal a distinct register of moral experience. By foregrounding the role of concrete interpersonal and affective relationships, the article complicates meth...
This introduction engages with recent scholarship on what has been dubbed ‘lived’ forms of nonreligion. It aims to profile the anthropology of the secular and nonreligion, no longer treating it as a subdiscipline or ‘emerging trend’ but as a substantial contribution to general debates in anthropology. Drawing on the ethnographic contributions to th...
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 concept...
This article compares the different styles in which an Atheist movement in the South Indian states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana and a community of Twelver-Shia Muslims in Hyderabad, the capital city of Telangana, engage with emotions of heroism and grief respectively. Heroism and grief are not approached as clearly defined or ‘felt’ mental entit...
This contribution places public religious rituals of Shia Muslims in the South Indian city of Hyderabad within the context of Indian secularism as a historically specific instance of the secular sacred. Secularism in India is often understood as a socio-political formation in which public and communal forms of religious identity are foundational fo...
Exploring lived atheism in the South Indian states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, this book offers a unique insight into India’s rapidly transforming multi-religious society. It explores the social, cultural, and aesthetic challenges faced by a movement of secular activists in their endeavors to establish atheism as a practical and comprehensive...
This chapter examines multimodal and transmedia practices of storytelling among organized atheist activists in South India (Andhra Pradesh and Telangana). Based on the content and structural features of the narratives that atheists produce about their past, namely a story of the cultural distortion and destruction of Indian atheism, they place prac...
This chapter explores how an aesthetics of religion approach offers a way to study hitherto neglected aspects of “lived secularity” in the specific sense of claims to and practices of being “other-than-religious.” As a first step, the article briefly reviews why a focus on aesthetics is crucial to enlarge the methodological setup of scholarship on...
This article examines so-called Miracle Exposure Programs conducted by Atheist activists in South India as a performance of secular difference. It retraces how activists use the sociopsychological properties of conjuring for performing an Atheist epistemology of the production, maintenance, and eradication of “superstition.” In debunking miracles a...
This chapter retraces a discursive reconfiguration of the relationship between the state and popular religion in the recent movement for a separate federal state of Telangana in South India. By analyzing contested interpretations of a local festival called Bathukamma, I argue that the growing political importance of identity movements and their inv...
A particular formation can be observed in the discourse of spiritual healing and complementary and alternative medicine (CAM). Explanations of the effectiveness of spiritual healing by medical doctors and psychologists sometimes include ideological and non-scientific conclusions and concepts, which are similar to but also different from New Age sci...
Against the background of current sociological theorizing on events
the article demonstrates how the II. Ökumenische Kirchentag, held in Munich in
2010, generates the integrative experience of a religious event. Furthermore, it
explores and analyses the concrete mechanisms of (1) mediatization/hybridization,
(2) simultaneity/densification and (3) s...
Warum ist der Buddhismus so attraktiv im Feld zeitgenössischer Spiritualität? Als eine Antwort auf diese Frage rekonstruiert dieses Buch anhand von Meditationspraktiken in der Tradition des vietnamesischen Zen-Lehrers Thich Nhat Hanh buddhistische "Technologien des Selbst". Dabei wird eine spezifische Art von Subjektivität beschrieben, die im Konte...