Pilot Project A - The Politics of Secularism
Pilot Project A:
The Politics of Secularism and the Emergence of New Religiosities
Funding period (2013-2015)
Principal Investigators:
Prof. Dr. Rupa Viswanath (Centre for Modern Indian Studies, University of Göttingen).
Dr. Dan Smyer Yü (Max Planck Institute for Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Göttingen).
Prof. Dr. Axel Schneider (Centre of Modern East Asian Studies, University of Göttingen).
Prof. Dr. Matthias Koenig (Institute for Sociology, University of Göttingen).
Postdoctoral Researchers: Dr. Neena Mahadev, Dr. Jeremy F. Walton
Project Summary
Secular governance is globally represented as the quintessential harbinger of the new, the means by which societies attain freedom from the alleged intolerance of "tradition.” Our research begins with the observation that secular projects in fact variously redefine, criminalise and incorporate into new forms of legal-administrative regulation a host of religious practices and institutions. Working under the auspices of CETREN, an international team of scholars is engaged in identifying the most significant of these processes in Asia and Europe, collectively mapping new languages and practices of religion, new relations between structures of authority and citizen-subjects, new forms of religious and secular personhood, as well as the — often violent — means by which secularisation is enforced by state and non-state actors.
All the scholars engaged in this project share a dissatisfaction with the two primary methodological assumptions that have animated most studies of the relationship between religion and secularity hitherto. The questions we are asking have been most often posed with reference to putatively universal processes of secularization and modernisation, a teleological approach that, moreover, invariably takes Europe as the model for studies of the non-Western world; in this paradigm the non-European world is represented as deviating to differing degrees from the European norm. Some scholars have expressed dissatisfaction with this approach, noting instead what has been called a global “resurgence” of religious activity in recent decades, and on this basis, judging secularization a failure. Yet this alternative, we argue, does little to productively further academic inquiry, for it continues to posit religion and secularity as alternatives, rather than as fundamentally mutually constitutive. Our own research will at once recognize the novelty of secular regimes while observing how, when and in what respects actors self-identifying as religious are mobilized in and by them, and radically alter them in the process. Both secular projects and new forms of religiosity will be treated in the same analytical frame, and furthermore, the analysis will be enriched by the comparative dimension of our research, which will allow us to pinpoint what makes some aspects of secularity socio-culturally unique, and conversely, what aspects have travelled well and animate transregional channels of communication. Indeed, it is the unprecedented global reach of secularist conceptions that has given rise to the very political struggles we will examine, and also make a transregional account of secularism’s discursive and practical mobility, such as the one we are proposing, necessary.
The processes on which we will focus have been central nodes of social, political and ideological conflict in colonial and postcolonial India, in modern China, and in modern Europe. In India central examples include the criminalization of religious conversions out of mainstream Hinduism (and the simultaneous state-sponsored surveillance of minority religious communities), and the banning of "low” caste practices such as animal sacrifice and the dedication of temple women on the grounds of immorality. By these and other means, India’s secular state endeavors to produce an elite Hindu- normative citizenry. India’s governing classes for the most part are proud bearers of a secular tradition, though some will concede that Indian secularism differs from its European counterparts; by focusing our comparative research on concrete mechanisms of secularization and religious movements, we expect to be able to specify where these differences lie, and also to uncover hitherto unconsidered points of conceptual and practical contact across the regions of inquiry, asking about the specific legal and political conditions of Indian secularism rather than assuming the existence of an overarching national culture that is determinative of religious life and secular sensibilities.
China presents a critical example for the analysis of secularism’s relationship to forms of religiosity: on one hand, it has a committed policy of non-religion, a state- mandated atheism that is distinct from most forms of secularity. On the other hand, it shares with secular states a fundamental interest in the close regulation of its citizens’ religious lives, coupled with an ideological commitment to the superiority of secular reason over forms of religious thinking; these commitments have given rise, for instance, to the state-led, forced transformation of Confucian temples into schools, and to the targeting of redemptive cults and meditational practices for "dissidence”. At the same time, China has experienced an unprecedented "return” of religious traditions and the proliferation of new popular religious practices and discourses among a large swathe of the population—a fact of which the atheist state is aware, but which it sometimes ignores. What forms of religious subjectivity have flourished in the particular sociocultural and legal-political conjuncture of the past twenty years? And what determines the circumstances under which official legal or administrative intervention is pursued or forsworn?
This question will be applied as well to modern Western European society, where, arguably, the legal field has become the arena in which these tensions are being most heatedly expressed. The regulation of new, largely migration-induced forms of religious diversity has become a contested public policy concern throughout Europe (Koenig 2010). Much of the scholarly literature on the topic has attempted to describe and explain policies at the national level, assuming their internal coherence and national comparability, contrasting French laïcité with Indian secularism, for instance. Our research in Europe, however, by focusing on specific legal and administrative processes, and on agents identifying as both religious and secular, will answer recent calls to move beyond such stylized comparisons by better disentangling the logics of contention in distinctive social fields and thus capturing the specific mechanisms of institutional secularization. Research will focus primarily on contests over the limits to be placed on expressions of religious diversity in Europe, analysing the discursive repertoires of religious litigants and their national as well as transnational network alliances with professional lawyers. We will also consider the justificatory rhetoric and geopolitical considerations underlying constitutional and international court decisions, and the effects of judicial disputes on public discourse and religious life.
In short we will comparatively analyse secular governance and the production of religion in the three regions of inquiry by attending to the justificatory discourses and counter-discourses used by regulatory powers and religious actors, the forms of coercion and punishment imposed, and the relationships among surveilled practices and institutions and both formal and local politics. In so doing this project will reconceptualise the processes of defining and implementing, as well as resisting and subverting what has become known as secular modernity outside the national frameworks that have long-dominated research on this topic in the humanities and social sciences. Our process-oriented transregional analysis of contention over religion in the secular regimes promises to capture the precise consequences of various actors’ references to "secularism” and to understand the emergence of new modes of state regulation of religion and religiously-identified agents.
Postdoctoral Projects
Neena Mahadev, CETREN Postdoctoral Fellow
Bridge-Burning and Boundary-Crossing:
Transnational Evangelism, Conversion, and Nativist Religious Commitment among Minorities of Sri Lanka and Singapore
Comparing cases of Sri Lanka and Singapore, I propose to investigate how transnational and local flows of religosities, and incitements to convert or resist conversion, fashion the experiences of belonging among ethnic minorities. My dissertation research examined the impassioned rivalries between Buddhists and Christians who act upon different constructions of the ethics of religious propagation, and details how such tensions are generative of transformations in the realm of ritual, soteriology, and religious experience. Strikingly, these varieties of Christianity originate not only from the West, but also from Asian metropoles. The transnational flows of Christianity in Asia which connect the Sri Lankan “periphery” to “Asia’s Antiochs” of Singapore and Seoul have received little scholarly attention. Through my postdoctoral work I intend to transform the dissertation into a book manuscript, and to commence a new project that tracks flows of religious influence, and which compares experiences of belonging under different Asian political milieus. I will add a new dimension to my study of Sri Lanka by examining ethnic and religious boundarycrossing and bridge-burning. I also hope to develop a comparative component on Christian conversion and Hindu apostasy among Singaporean Tamils.
Jeremy F. Walton, CETREN Postdoctoral Fellow
Secular Geographies of Nation and Religion on the Margins of the New Europe: Mosque Communities and Civil Society in Turkey and Croatia
In recent years, the critical study of secularism, spanning a swath of academic disciplines including Religious Studies, Anthropology, Sociology, Comparative Literature and Post-Colonial Studies, has forwarded a robust, provocative model of secularism as a distinctive modality of modern state power, one which organizes and polices the relationship between politics and religion through the very process of defining the latter. My project CETREN-funded project, “Secular Geographies of Nation and Religion on the Margins of the New Europe: Mosque Communities and Civil Society in Turkey and Croatia” seeks to expand and complicate the cardinal themes of the study of secularism by plumbing the less ramified, transregional logics and processes, both legal-governmental and extra-legal, that link specific pious communities and contexts to broader discourses of belonging and civilization. The principal research for the project will involve extensive fieldwork among two mosque communities, one in Istanbul and the other in the Croatian port city of Rijeka. Above all, I will focus on how different categories of social and political belonging—e.g. nationality and ethnicity; the ummah, or universal community of Muslims; Europeanness—articulate with a cartography of transregional secular power, (perhaps) too easily glossed as “European.”
One key inspiration for this project is the parallel yet distinct trajectories of Turkey and Croatia in relation to Europe over the past decade. As I argue, the two countries’ divergent fates as European Union candidates are symptomatic of broader debates over belonging, identity, and the place of religion within the legal, political, and cultural geography of the new Europe. In spite of their vastly different positions within the political geography of the Cold War, with the dawn of the new millennium, both Turkey and Croatia yoked their respective political cultures and destinies to the EU; both nations became official candidates for membership in October 2005. In the eight years since their mutual promotion to candidacy, however, Croatia and Turkey have followed radically different paths. Croatia succeeded in quickly implementing the various Copenhagen Criteria necessary for membership, and became a full EU member in July of this year. Turkey’s path to EU accession has been decidedly more difficult. Simmering tensions rooted in the Cyprus conflict, broad-based concerns over human rights in relation to Turkey’s minorities—especially the large Kurdish population—and, above-all, a persistent, ambient anxiety over the prospect of a “Muslim-majority” EU member have all hampered Turkey’s progress toward full accession. Although the EU process has entailed massive legislative and judicial reform within Turkey itself, Turkey’s negotiations with the European Commission have stalled, and are expected to last for at least another decade, if not longer.
With this regional, geopolitical backdrop in mind, my project will interrogate how mosque communities grapple with dilemmas of nationhood and religion in these two distinct contexts. National identity in both Turkey and Croatia achieves definition in relation to a hegemonic religious identity, Sunni Islam in Turkey’s case and Roman Catholicism in Croatia’s. Put another way, in both the Croatian and the Turkish public sphere, debates over national belonging, state practice, and geopolitics inescapably provoke questions of religious identity as well. And yet, these domestic formations of religion and nationhood articulate very differently with the broader political and cultural geography of Europe. While the role of Catholicism in Croatian public life is a central matter in Croatia today, this debate is of little concern to the EU; Croatia’s “European-ness” does not depend upon the relationship between Catholicism and Croatian-hood. On the other hand, the ostensible compatibility of Turkey and Europe is inextricable from the relationship between Turkish national identity and Islam and the anxious domestic debates over this relationship. This broad contrast between Croatia and Turkey suggests a fertile context in which to explore many of the recent apical questions and themes in the study of secularism. On the basis of my comparative ethnography of Islamic practice and Muslim community in both Turkey and Croatia, I aim to pursue the following theoretical question: How do two distinct yet parallel domestic arrangements of secularism, and the modes of religiosity that they permit and foreclose, articulate with the broader “secular geographies” of contemporary Europe?
In light of the guiding themes of CETREN, my research will also emphasize the “politics of the new” in relation to transregional discourses of and about both Europe and Islam. More specifically, how does the new political-legal administrative apparatus of the EU articulate with both older and broader conceptions of “Europe” and “Islam”? This question dovetails directly with the overarching goals and themes of the pilot project “The Politics of Secularism and the Emergence of New Religiosities,” namely “to comparatively analyse secular governance and the production of religion…by attending to the justifactory discourses and counter-discourses used by regulatory powers and religious actors, the forms of coercion and punishment imposed, and the relationships among surveilled practices and institutions and both formal and local politics.