Conceptual Explorations of the Multiple Secularities Framework
Friday, 13 October, 11 a.m. - 1 p.m.
Multiple Secularities Conceptual Framework and the Study of Islamic Secularities: Conceptual and Critical Considerations
Housamedden Darwish (Cologne University)
Reflexive Secularity: A Conceptual Exploration
Hubert Seiwert (KFG "Multiple Secularities")
Using and Rethinking Multiple Secularities in Latin America: Analyzing and Historicizing the Secular Subject/s.
Edgar Zavala-Pelayo (El Colegio de México)
Chair: Daniel Witte (Bonn University / KFG "Multiple Secularities")
Multiple Secularities' Conceptual Framework and the Study of Islamic Secularities: Conceptual and Critical Considerations
Housamedden Darwish (Cologne University)
This primary objective of this paper is to assess the effectiveness and limitations of the conceptual framework proposed by the “Multiple Secularities” Centre in analyzing secularity (and secularism) in Islamicate contexts. This paper is based on my fellowship at the Centre, and its purpose is to demonstrate the significant impact of the its conceptual framework on my research concerning the formation of secularity and secularism, as well as the cognitive and normative debates surrounding these concepts in the Islamicate world(s). Firstly, it focuses on the distinction between secularity as an analytical concept and secularism as a normative concept. The Centre acknowledged that it “cannot completely wipe away the normative connotations of secularism from the term secularities.” Therefore, it aimed to “overcome this connotations through open discussions and conceptual reflection.” The paper argues that these normative connotations are inherent to the analytical concept of secularity due to the reference problems identified by the multiple secularities project. Secularity is seen as the solution to these problems, and as such, the normative connotations cannot be completely eliminated, overcome or disregarded. Therefore it is essential to explore the cognitive and normative interplay between the analytical concept of secularity which primarily encompasses the thesis of functional differentiation within secularization theory, and the remaining two theses: privatization and decline of religion. Secondly the paper examines the limitations of the binary code of religion/non-religion or religious/non-religious which serves as the fundamental basis for the concept of secularity. It explores the possibility and necessity of deconstructing this code without destroying it. Thirdly, the paper investigates the potential intersection and/or mutual exclusion between post-secularities and multiple secularities. It suggests that post-secularity could be one variant of multiple secularities while simultaneously opposing other variants of secularity. Finally the paper reflects on the potential for these considerations to inform a future project that builds upon and expands the multiple secularities framework.
Reflexive Secularity: A Conceptual Exploration
Hubert Seiwert (KFG "Multiple Secularities")
Exploring the theme of secularity within the framework of Chinese history, spanning from antiquity to modern times, has engendered theoretical problems, some of which possess broader significance. Amidst this exploration, a vexing issue surfaces: The term ‘secularity’ is used in varying meanings within academic literature. Analogous to the juxtaposition of ‘secular’ and ‘religious,’ ‘secularity’ is intuitively apprehended as the antithesis of ‘religiosity’ or ‘religion.’ Charles Taylor discerns three different forms of secularity, but in all three cases, secularity is demarcated from religion, even though the distinction takes on various forms (Taylor 2007, 15). In our collaborative project “Multiple Secularities — Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities,” a different concept of ‘secularity’ was developed, which is often perceived as counterintuitive, as it doesn’t contrast secularity with religion. Instead, ‘secularity’ is defined as a theoretical concept that designates a specific relationship between religious and non-religious or ‘secular’ forms of social action. This ideal-typical concept of ‘secularity’ is complex and theoretically demanding. Yet, its virtue lies in not essentializing religion but understanding the distinction between religion and non-religion as historically contingent and variable. In this paper, I will analyze the theoretical complexity of this concept of secularity, which I characterize as ‘reflexive secularity.’
The analysis addresses the interdependence of social practices (‘social structures’) and symbolic representations (‘epistemic structures’) and the interlocking of object-language and meta-language perspectives. It is argued that the binary contrast between ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ at the level of epistemic structures emerges as a reflexive response provoked by the practical significance of alternatives at the level of social practice. ‘Reflexive secularity’ is more than secularity understood as the absence or opposite of religion. As an ideal type, it directs attention toward specific social constellations in which religious and non-religious forms of social practice are perceived and normatively interpreted as contrasting alternatives. The concept thus can stimulate empirical research, including the question under which conditions this particular understanding of religion emerges or possibly disappears.
Using and Rethinking Multiple Secularities in Latin America: Analyzing and Historicizing the Secular Subject/s.
Edgar Zavala-Pelayo (El Colegio de México)
As part of my intervention I will reflect on the earliest version of the Multiple Secularities project that was carried out back in the first years of the 2010s. I will address the project’s conceptual and methodological elements that I could apply to a collaborative exploratory work on religious diversity and pluralism in Latin America. More specifically, I will highlight the substantial contribution of the concept of secularity and cultures of secularity in the balancing of the theoretical and empirical weight given to church-state institutional dynamics in the study of the religious and the secular in Latin America. I will point out as well the historical/historiographical vein of the project and its (trans-)regional comparative scope, observable at a greater extent in the project’s more recent version, as relevant theoretical-methodological prompts to approach cultures of secularities, and religious fields, beyond the societies of the global north. After acknowledging these strengths, I will suggest the possibilities for follow-up research that remains focused on the (re)creation of either sharp or fuzzy institutional differentiations and conceptual distinctions between the religious and the secular, while directing the analytical gaze, in a non-reductive fashion, towards the micro level of reality as well. Drawing briefly on the case of the first “secular”, “scientific”, and “progressive”, educational public institution in 19th-century post-colonial Mexico, and the rather ambivalent “secular subject” that the institution’s founder envisioned implicitly and explicitly as one of the ultimate outcomes of his educational enterprise, I will sketch the usefulness of investigating secularities comparatively through analyses focused on the historical and contemporary formations of the secular subject/s or secular subjectivity/ies.
