Multiple Secularities beyond the West: An Introduction

Abstract

Multiple Secularities beyond the West: An IntroductionFor more than two decades, theorists of modernity have grappled with the new visibility of religion in many parts of the world. Scholars have made efforts to accommodate phenomena such as religious resurgences, new forms of public religion and new religious movements within conceptualizations of modernity in order to move beyond the linear and deterministic narratives of modernization that dominated the social sciences in their formative period in the twentieth century (Casanova 1994;Hervieu-Léger 2000). In response to the same observations, and in a sometimes very general way, theories of secularization have become subject to intense criticism and have given way to notions of 'de-secularization' (Berger 1999). Very recently, yet another set of studies, in many ways inspired by Charles Taylor's path-breaking book A Secular Age (Taylor 2007), began to interrogate and question monolithic understandings of secularism, broadly construed in terms of the institutional arrangements specifying the relationships between, and often the separation of, religion and the state. The majority of these studies, however, were either focused on a relatively narrow set of questions related to challenges to secularism posed by migration-driven religious diversity in Europe and North America, or explored the trajectories of a few cases of secularity imposed by modernist state projects in the context of existing religious pluralism, as in India and Turkey (Cady and Shakman Hurd 2010; Kuru 2009).This book moves beyond these limitations and breaks new ground by exclusively exploring formations of secularity beyond the West. Analysing scenarios of secularity in East Asia, the post-Communist world, the Arab Middle East, Africa and India, it takes into consideration a set of regions that have largely been ignored in sociological and anthropological debates on the relationships between religion and the secular in modernity thus far. Importantly, while in virtually all of the existing literature religion is readily construed as a marker of cultural difference and identity (of countries, regions, communities), the secular is still peculiarly seen as homogenizing, as something outside culture.With this interdisciplinary volume we propose to move beyond such conceptualizations and explore the social constructions of the religious-secular divide, including their institutionalized practices, in five different world regions. With a strong conceptual focus on comparative research, we examine how shared but also contested forms and practices of distinguishing religious and secular spheres of society acquire cultural meaning, and how they shape and define Brought to you by | Cambridge University Library Authenticated Download Date | 8/8/15 3:23 PM

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“…Philip Gorski and Ateş Altınordu maintain that we must 'firmly renounce any pretenses to fixing a correct meaning [of the secularization concept] once and for all ' (2008, p. 75). These approaches, and the concept of 'multiple secularities'analogous in some ways to 'multiple modernities'which addresses the manner in which secularity is variously negotiated in specific historical and social settings (Burchardt et al, 2015), provide the backdrop for my argument in this paper. However, even though my starting point is that secularity and secularization (and secularism, though this is not my subject 1 ) follow diverse paths across history and around the world, my argument ultimately highlights similarity rather than difference across societies and world regions within the modern condition.…”