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)
The Multiple Secularity Approach as a Middle-Range Cultural Theory: Interpreting the Secular State Project on Madagascar, and Beyond
Peter Kneitz (Leipzig)
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)
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.
The Multiple Secularity Approach as a Middle-Range Cultural Theory: Interpreting the Secular State Project on Madagascar, and Beyond
Peter Kneitz (Leipzig)
The Multiple Secularity Approach has added a very valuable perspective for the interpretation of my empirically oriented ethnological research project. In other words: It has worked for me as a middle-range cultural theory, allowing to arrange my understanding of the cultural phenomena studied in a heuristically meaningful way.
In my contribution, I would like, first, to consider some of the positive consequences for the understanding of my data. Studying the meaning, and the development of “Malagasy solidarity” (fihavanana gasy) as a central normative concept within the present Republic of Madagascar, it seemed a long time given that the basic idea was all about mutual understanding, about the value of consent, of conflict solution, of living in harmony, and peace. Slowly, though, a very different reading evolved, leading to an interpretation of Malagasy solidarity as deep conservative impetus, as a way, to valorize a new kind of Malagasy identity, and to develop a critical theory of modernity. Looking to my data through the prism of the Multiple Secularity Approach allowed me, among other, to unveil how the idea of “the” religion arrived on Madagascar, and to embed the process towards the elaboration of present normativity within the greater, and unknown picture of the negotiation of secularity in Madagascar, and on the African continent.
In a second step I will aim to broaden the horizon, and to reflect on the position of secularity within the greater cultural process. How to understand the complex intellectual journey leading, roughly, from religious practices, to religion, to secularity, and moving at present further on? And how to describe the characteristic, and changing aspects of secularity within a process stimulated, quite paradoxically, by an always increasing emphasis on rationality, and the logos? Such questions can serve as a starting point for developing prospects for an extension of the Multiple Secularity Approach.
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.
