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6 Secularism and the Argument from Nature
... For Asad, violence is "embedded" in the very concept of liberty, which stands "at the heart of liberal doctrine" (2007: 59). Asad's conceptualizations of the "secular" and the "religious" are not without problems (see Brittain 2005;Das 2006;Bangstad 2009). ...
In recent decades, secularism has emerged as one of the most studied concepts in sociocultural anthropology, and Egypt a primary site of its analysis. This article considers trends in Egypt’s modern and contemporary history in order to complicate the great explanatory power some anthropological works have granted to secularism. Above all else, it interrogates the manner in which the state’s regulation of religion (which is the defining feature of Asadian conceptions of secularism) has unfolded in recent Egyptian history. First, I survey the different ways scholars have portrayed secularism in Egypt, focusing in particular on the insights and limitations of Asadian theories. A second section employs ethnographic data to uncover how ordinary Egyptians in the provincial capital of Beni Suef have experienced state power, religion, and secularism in their everyday lives. Contextualizing these ethnographic perspectives alongside several prominent instances of state violence between 2011 and 2013, I elucidate how, rather than typifying a secular state, Egyptian politics, above all else, have been driven by an opportunistic realpolitik. My final section brings historical and ethnographic perspectives into sustained conversation to argue that the state regulation anthropologists sometimes frame as secularism is better conceptualized as a form of state centralization. I conclude, in turn, that political developments in modern Egypt have most often been shaped by flexible national and imperial interests.
Jaspreet Singh's Helium, a novel concerning 1984's anti-Sikh pogroms, seeks to archive the impunity on which sovereignty is based. This basis remains indelible. Impunity's unconscionability contaminates conscience as we know it and as it allows us to know. The cruelty that imbues impunity impacts all social formations and compromises our ethics and politics in practice and in theory as we practice it. At stake in reading sovereign impunity, then, is its very readability. It may be unreadable or readable as unreadable. Fathoming how we are marked by what we resist, Singh writes about the (un)readable in the archive of 1984.
O artigo procura discutir a forte associação entre guerra e religião, inspirando-se na obra de Talal Asad, autor que reconfigurou os estudos da religião ao explorar os vínculos constitutivos desse campo de estudos com a modernidade secular. Trata-se de interrogar as formações do secular, o modo de sua produção e suas funções no Estado moderno. Considerando o caráter epistemológico das questões do presente, procura-se compreender as aporias do Brasil contemporâneo e, mais especificamente, o sentido moral e religioso da ação política no país e no Rio de Janeiro, nos quais o uso da violência como prática justificada e a promoção da guerra para a destruição dos inimigos, configuram-se como norte de defesa e de construção do estado-nação.
This chapter analyzes religious pluralism as the normal condition of life in which religious traditions encounter each other. Stepping outside the framework of comparative world religions in which traditions such as Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism are juxtaposed as fully constituted religions as they confront each other, the paper shows how the interactive processes at different scales of social life have constituted Islam, Christianity, and Hinduism historically and in contemporary India. The chapter examines how religious differences figure in theological reflections, how these differences are managed through statecraft, and how religious differences create attractions and antagonisms at the level of local community, kinship, and family.
If, following Masuzawa, Fitzgerald and others we assume that “the religious” is a category produced by Western colonial regimes in tandem with that of “the secular,” then consequently the post-secular would need to be post-religious, as well. Here I demonstrate how in one metropolitan case, Germany, the religious and secular divide is evoked to produce a particular exclusivist narrative of national identity. A substantial part of German civil society, media, and legal establishment mobilize an imagined culturally Christian vision of Germany in order to exclude from public visibility and political participation German born Muslims of Turkish descent. The colonial twin categories of secular-religious still operate in the shaping of the German polity. Decolonizing it would thus require not only to enter a post-secular dialogue with religious presentations in the public sphere, as Habermas contends; rather a post-secular polity would require the post-religious.
Bruno Latour's understanding of different modes of existence as given through prepositions offers a new approach to researching "secularism," taking forward attention paid in recent scholarship to its historically contingent formation by bringing into clearer focus the dynamics of its relational and material mediations. Examining the contemporary instauration of secularism in conservative evangelical experience, I show how this approach offers a new orientation to studying secularism that allows attention to both its history and its material effects on practice. This shows how Latour's speculative realism extends and provides a bridge between both discursive analysis of religion and secularism and the recent turn towards materiality in empirical study of religion.
This essay deals with the influential anthropological work of Prof. Talal Asad on Islam, secularism and the secular. I argue that the binary `Western—non-Western' which is constitutive for Asad, the relative absence of ethnography in Asad's work, and the state-centred nature of Asad's approach to secularism and the secular has contributed to an anthropological impasse whereby the complex engagement of Muslims living in secular and liberal `Western' contexts with the secular has become difficult to conceptualize. I argue in favour of the conceptualizations in a nascent body of works which transcend some of these binaries, most notably those of Marsden and Soares and Otayek, and in favour of investigating the secular as a vernacular practice.
In 2004, the authors convened a session entitled ‘Public Anthropology’ at the Australian Anthropology Society's annual conference. The session examined the development of a specific stream of public anthropology in the USA and Britain and its articulation by writers such as Robert Borofsky in the aftermath of the Yanomami controversy and Richard Werbner in the African context. In pursuing this discussion, we identify three key characteristics that distinguish public anthropology: the broader application of ethnography to urgent and political social issues in a way that shows the profoundly relational nature of current crises to historical, political and local events and forces; a focus on this approach as a central aspect of training, particularly at the postgraduate level; and an active and accessible engagement in public discussion and debate. We present a short case study from Skidmore's research on disease, suffering and the health system in Burma to illustrate ways in which a public anthropology approach could represent the current health crisis in Burma in an effective manner. Drawing also on the work of our fellow panellists, we argue for the timeliness of the development of a public anthropology stream in Australia and for the deliberate inclusion of public anthropology in the Australian Anthropology Society's mandate.
One of the most contentious political issues in postcolonial India is the unfulfilled project of a ‘uniform civil code’ which would override the existing ‘personal laws’ or religion-based laws of domestic relations, inheritance and religious institutions. If the personal laws are admitted to be preserved (if somewhat distorted) remnants of ‘religious laws’, then the legitimacy of state intervention is called into question, especially since the Indian state claims to be secular. This paper, by discussing the history of the lesser-known Christian personal law, demonstrates that this conundrum is of considerable heritage. From the earliest days of British imperial rule in India, the quest to establish a universal body of law conflicted with other legal principles which upheld difference: that of religion, as well as race. It was the historical role of Indian Christians to occasion legal dilemmas regarding the jurisdictions of British and ‘native’ law, and concurrently about the identity of people subject to those different laws. In trying to discover who the Indian Christians were, and what laws ought to apply to them, British judges had perforce to reflect on who the ‘British’ were, whilst also dealing with conflicting collective claims made by Hindus, Muslims, Parsis, and Christians themselves about their own identity and religious rights. The Indian Christian personal law was an unintended by-product of this process, a finding which throws light both on the dynamics of colonial legislation, and on the essentially modern nature of Indian personal laws.
Recent debates on this topic have been heavily shaped by two paradigms: Asad's deconstructivism and Taylor's Catholic/Hegelian revisionism. This article outlines the arguments of each but frames them within the longer history of arguments that make claims for the reality of secularization and alternate sources for claims that “the secular” is a historically constructed category, including arguments from radical theology and (differently) in the anthropology of India. It is argued that implicit claims for the hierarchical ordering of reality in modernity, in which the political is seen as more real than the religious, continue to create disjunctures in the range of debate that new ethnography has the opportunity to address.
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