Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Cultural Memory in the Present) - Softcover

Asad, Talal

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0804747687 ISBN 13: 9780804747684

Verlag: Stanford University Press, 2003

Inhaltsangabe

Opening with the provocative query “what might an anthropology of the secular look like?” this book explores the concepts, practices, and political formations of secularism, with emphasis on the major historical shifts that have shaped secular sensibilities and attitudes in the modern West and the Middle East.

Talal Asad proceeds to dismantle commonly held assumptions about the secular and the terrain it allegedly covers. He argues that while anthropologists have oriented themselves to the study of the “strangeness of the non-European world” and to what are seen as non-rational dimensions of social life (things like myth, taboo, and religion),the modern and the secular have not been adequately examined.

The conclusion is that the secular cannot be viewed as a successor to religion, or be seen as on the side of the rational. It is a category with a multi-layered history, related to major premises of modernity, democracy, and the concept of human rights. This book will appeal to anthropologists, historians, religious studies scholars, as well as scholars working on modernity.

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Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Talal Asad is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the author of Genealogies of Religion.

Talal Asad is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the author of Genealogies of Religion.

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Opening with the provocative query “what might an anthropology of the secular look like?” this book explores the concepts, practices, and political formations of secularism, with emphasis on the major historical shifts that have shaped secular sensibilities and attitudes in the modern West and the Middle East.
Talal Asad proceeds to dismantle commonly held assumptions about the secular and the terrain it allegedly covers. He argues that while anthropologists have oriented themselves to the study of the “strangeness of the non-European world” and to what are seen as non-rational dimensions of social life (things like myth, taboo, and religion),the modern and the secular have not been adequately examined.
The conclusion is that the secular cannot be viewed as a successor to religion, or be seen as on the side of the rational. It is a category with a multi-layered history, related to major premises of modernity, democracy, and the concept of human rights. This book will appeal to anthropologists, historians, religious studies scholars, as well as scholars working on modernity.

Aus dem Klappentext

Opening with the provocative query what might an anthropology of the secular look like? this book explores the concepts, practices, and political formations of secularism, with emphasis on the major historical shifts that have shaped secular sensibilities and attitudes in the modern West and the Middle East.
Talal Asad proceeds to dismantle commonly held assumptions about the secular and the terrain it allegedly covers. He argues that while anthropologists have oriented themselves to the study of the strangeness of the non-European world and to what are seen as non-rational dimensions of social life (things like myth, taboo, and religion),the modern and the secular have not been adequately examined.
The conclusion is that the secular cannot be viewed as a successor to religion, or be seen as on the side of the rational. It is a category with a multi-layered history, related to major premises of modernity, democracy, and the concept of human rights. This book will appeal to anthropologists, historians, religious studies scholars, as well as scholars working on modernity.

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FORMATIONS OF THE SECULAR

Christianity, Islam, ModernityBy Talal Asad

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2003 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-4768-4

Contents

Acknowledgments............................................................ixIntroduction: Thinking about Secularism....................................11 What Might an Anthropology of Secularism Look Like?......................212 Thinking about Agency and Pain...........................................673 Reflections on Cruelty and Torture.......................................1004 Redeeming the "Human" Through Human Rights...............................1275 Muslims as a "Religious Minority" in Europe..............................1596 Secularism, Nation-State, Religion.......................................1817 Reconfigurations of Law and Ethics in Colonial Egypt.....................205Index......................................................................257

Chapter One

What Might an Anthropology of Secularism Look Like?

Sociologists, political theorists, and historians have written copiously on secularism. It is part of a vigorous public debate in many parts of the world—especially in the Middle East. Is "secularism" a colonial imposition, an entire worldview that gives precedence to the material over the spiritual, a modern culture of alienation and unrestrained pleasure? Or is it necessary to universal humanism, a rational principle that calls for the suppression—or at any rate, the restraint—of religious passion so that a dangerous source of intolerance and delusion can be controlled, and political unity, peace, and progress secured? The question of how secularism as a political doctrine is related to the secular as an ontology and an epistemology is evidently at stake here.

In contrast to the salience of such debates, anthropologists have paid scarcely any attention to the idea of the secular, although the study of religion has been a central concern of the discipline since the nineteenth century. A collection of university and college syllabi on the anthropology of religion prepared recently for the Anthropological Association of America, shows a heavy reliance on such themes as myth, magic, witchcraft, the use of hallucinogens, ritual as psychotherapy, possession, and taboo. Together, these familiar themes suggest that "religion," whose object is the sacred, stands in the domain of the nonrational. The secular, where modern politics and science are sited, makes no appearance in the collection. Nor is it treated in any of the well-known introductory texts. And yet it is common knowledge that religion and the secular are closely linked, both in our thought and in the way they have emerged historically. Any discipline that seeks to understand "religion" must also try to understand its other. Anthropology in particular—the discipline that has sought to understand the strangeness of the non-European world—also needs to grasp more fully what is implied in its being at once modern and secular.

A number of anthropologists have begun to address secularism with the intention of demystifying contemporary political institutions. Where previous theorists saw worldly reason linked to tolerance, these unmaskers find myth and violence. Thus Michael Taussig complains that the Weberian notion of the rational-legal state's monopoly of violence fails to address "the intrinsically mysterious, mystifying, convoluting, plain scary, mythical, and arcane cultural properties and power of violence to the point where violence is very much an end in itself—a sign, as Benjamin put it, of the existence of the gods." In Taussig's opinion the "institutional interpenetration of reason by violence not only diminishes the claims of reason, casting it into ideology, mask, and effect of power, but [it is] also ... precisely the coming together of reason-and-violence in the State that creates, in a secular and modern world, the bigness of the big S—not merely its apparent unity and the fictions of will and mind thus inspired, but the auratic and quasi-sacred quality of that very inspiration ... that now stands as ground to our being as citizens of the world." Once its rational-legal mask is removed, so it is suggested, the modern state will reveal itself to be far from secular. For such critics the essential point at issue is whether our belief in the secular character of the state—or society—is justified or not. The category of the secular itself remains unexamined.

Anthropologists who identify the sacred character of the modern state often resort to a rationalist notion of myth to sharpen their attack. They take myth to be "sacred discourse," and agree with nineteenth-century anthropologists who theorized myths as expressions of beliefs about the supernatural world, about sacred times, beings, and places, beliefs that were therefore opposed to reason. In general the word "myth" has been used as a synonym for the irrational or the nonrational, for attachment to tradition in a modern world, for political fantasy and dangerous ideology. Myth in this way of thinking stands in contrast to the secular, even for those who invoke it positively.

I will refer often to myth in what follows, but I am not interested in theorizing about it. There are several books available that do that. What I want to do here is to trace practical consequences of its uses in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries in order to investigate some of the ways the secular was constituted. For the word "myth" that moderns have inherited from antiquity feeds into a number of familiar oppositions—belief and knowledge, reason and imagination, history and fiction, symbol and allegory, natural and supernatural, sacred and profane—binaries that pervade modern secular discourse, especially in its polemical mode. As I am concerned with the shifting web of concepts making up the secular, I discuss several of these binaries.

The terms "secularism" and "secularist" were introduced into English by freethinkers in the middle of the nineteenth century in order to avoid the charge of their being "atheists" and "infidels," terms that carried suggestions of immorality in a still largely Christian society. These epithets mattered not because the freethinkers were concerned about their personal safety, but because they sought to direct an emerging mass politics of social reform in a rapidly industrializing society. Long-standing habits of indifference, disbelief, or hostility among individuals toward Christian rituals and authorities were now becoming entangled with projects of total social reconstruction by means of legislation. A critical rearticulation was being negotiated between state law and personal morality. This shift presupposed the new idea of society as a total population of individuals enjoying not only subjective rights and immunities, and endowed with moral agency, but also possessing the capacity to elect their political representatives—a shift that occurred all at once in Revolutionary France (excluding women and domestics), and gradually in nineteenth-century England. The extension of universal suffrage was in turn linked—as Foucault has pointed out—to new methods of government based on new styles of classification and calculation, and new forms of subjecthood. These principles of government are secular in the sense that they deal solely with a worldly disposition, an...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2003
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0804747687
• ISBN 13: 9780804747684
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 269
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Mare Nostrum Group B.V.; gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk; ; Doelen 72; Breda; 4831 GR; Niederlande