Secularism was a hot topic in 2010. In July of that year, CSSH published an issue made up entirely of articles about secularism. We did so not as a solicited “special issue,” but using only manuscripts we’d accepted in the normal flow of submissions. There were that many, and they were that good. Here’s an overview of the issue:
Editorial Foreword. Comparative Studies in Society and History. 2010;52(3):489-494.
Today, we publish fewer essays on secularism, but a recent spike of fresh work shows how fascinating the topic still is. We’ve invited Isaac Friesen, Aymeric Xu, and Usmon Boron to discuss their work on the relations between state and religious actors in Egypt, China, and Kyrgyzstan. Secularism is a key and contested term in their essays, and each case suggests a logic – of state opportunism, power politics, transcendence, new forms of non-observant religious belief and practice, or the threat of foreignness – that helps us think differently about what secularization, as a cultural and historical process, can explain.
Friesen I. Flexible States in History: Rethinking Secularism, Violence, and Centralized Power in Modern Egypt. Comparative Studies in Society and History. 2024;66(2):369-391.
Xu A. Typologies of Secularism in China: Religion, Superstition, and Secularization. Comparative Studies in Society and History. 2024;66(1):57-80.
Boron U. “And I Believe in Signs”: Soviet Secularity and Islamic Tradition in Kyrgyzstan. Comparative Studies in Society and History. 2024;66(2):342-368.
Gregg Starrett, a contributor to the 2010 issue, kindly agreed to comment on the commentaries, adding his own reflections on how the study of secularism has evolved and drawing our attention to some roads less traveled by. If you find his thoughts here tantalizing, then you should (re)read his 2010 essay.
Starrett G. The Varieties of Secular Experience. Comparative Studies in Society and History. 2010;52(3):626-651.
To jumpstart the conversation, we asked our authors what has changed in the study of secularism over the last decade or so, and what remains the same. What can we say today that we couldn’t say, or see, in 2010? Are “secularism” and “religion” concepts that enable comparative analysis? If so, what are we comparing? If not, what alternative concepts, what other contextualizations, would work better?
For answers, read on.
On Contingency, Material Interests, and Empire
Isaac Friesen
In first reflecting on the questions provided by CSSH, my mind immediately went to Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr’s quip: “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.” That is, despite the many developments in the rich interdisciplinary literature on secularism, politics, and colonialism since 2010, many of the key contentions around secularism remain. The same could obviously be said about political dynamics in the Mashriq region where my research—like so many anthropological works on secularism—is situated. On the one hand, and as Usmon Boron’s article beautifully illustrates, the secular arguably remains as much a part of modern life as ever. On the other hand, this pervasiveness in a still endlessly diverse, complex, and contested world raises questions about secularism’s value as an analytical category.
My article is the result of research begun in Egypt in early 2011, less than a year removed from the publication of CSSH’s special issue on secularism, and amidst the turbulence of the Egyptian Uprising. The twists and turns of that revolutionary period, and my provincial Egyptian interlocutors’ interpretations of them, reinforced for me, first and foremost, the cynical, opportunistic, and flexible nature of national and international politics. The contingent interests that were shaping political developments most profoundly, however, seemed curiously absent in some of the prominent anthropological works on Egypt, which instead foregrounded the concept of secularism. As a result, my article, at its core, highlights the discrepancy between how secularism is portrayed by some scholars in the Western academy, and how my interlocutors understood the ways religion and secularism intersected with local, national, and global flows of power in their everyday lives.
In addition to exploring, ethnographically, the “complexity of real lives” (Starrett 2010: 649), my article engages with recent works in the historiography of modern Egypt to capture the unpredictability, inconsistency, and particularity of historical change. Interestingly, the editorial forward from the 2010 special issue demonstrates a clear awareness of history’s ability to trouble intellectualist theories of secularism, noting, for instance, how state intervention in religious life is as old as state formations themselves, and that “comparisons across historical periods could be revealing” (2010: 493). Aymeric Xu’s detailed examination of secularism in Chinese history, in many ways, functions as a response to the 2010 feature’s call to study secularism in different historical contexts. Among the numerous strengths of Xu’s article, is how it illuminates the “ad hoc” way secularism was produced in China for the state’s own political ends. Rather than understanding secularism as an autonomous force acting on the world, Xu documents the pragmatic considerations and calculations of Chinese policymakers across a shifting political context.
Regarding context, the 2010 special issue crucially specifies the larger circumstances (the War on Terror and “longer histories of colonial encounter between Muslim populations and European power”) which give Asadian works on secularism their “critical” and “polemical” character. Even in this respect, global politics have seemingly changed little. While the American military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan have (mostly) concluded, the arms of Western Empire continually bombard sites in Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, the Sahel, and Palestine, among other places. Each of these contemporary wars might serve as a Rorschach test for scholars’ attachment, or lack thereof, to the essentially contested concept of secularism. To echo Starrett once more: is the conflict in Israel and Palestine primarily rooted in secular nationalism, or has ethnoreligious inequality (whether antisemitism in nineteenth and twentieth-century Europe or the discrimination and violence Palestinians face today) most determined ongoing processes of war and ethnic cleansing?
Many contemporary conflicts (the case of Israel-Palestine is no exception) also reflect, like so much of the literature on secularism, the centrality of statehood. Yet, while we can still see, following Asad, how secularism’s emergence was intimately tied to “the rise of a system of capitalist nation-states” (2003: 7), my article asserts the need to complicate narrowly state-based explanations of political change. Contemporary Middle Eastern history makes plain the way in which Western empire, among other actors, has made a mockery of the sovereignty, laws, and rights of the region’s citizens and states. Hence, I argue that global and national flows of power, while obviously hierarchical, are also sufficiently fluid, flexible, and opportunistic to necessitate political analyses that move beyond the state and beyond other formal concepts in isolation. Ultimately, a renewed emphasis on material circumstances, imperial interests, and history can help explain, for instance, Israel’s ongoing bombardment of Gaza as much as any thesis about the supposedly secular and/or religious nature of the conflict (though the two perspectives are not mutually exclusive).
In closing, I want to briefly mention Timothy Mitchell’s “McJihad: Islam in the US Global Order” (2002). Written over eight years before the CSSH special issue—yet another example of continuity amidst historical change—Mitchell’s thesis about the inconsistent and illogical nature of imperial economic interests rings as true as ever today. Any satisfactory account of a current political situation calls for a sustained consideration of these interests. Having said that, and as one of my anonymous reviewers noted, the true motivations of powerful institutions and individuals are often difficult to discern. On this point, mirroring Asad, I hope my article has shown how there is much understanding to be found “in the shadows” (2003: 16) of national, imperial, and economic networks of propaganda and power. I refer here to ethnography, and the ability of ordinary people to interpret national politics, economics, and empire. And then, of course, there are the insights to be found in the context-specificity and contingency of history.
References
Asad, Talal. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003.
“Editorial Forward,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 52(3): 489-494, 2010.
Mitchell, Timothy. “McJihad: Islam in the US Global Order,” Social Text, 20(4): 1-18, 2002.
Starrett, Gregory. “The Varieties of Secular Experience,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 52(3), 626-651, 2010.
The Evolution of State Control and Religious Expression in China
Aymeric Xu
Isaac Friesen’s citation of Alphonse Karr resonates with me. Unlike the contributors to this special feature who are anthropologists, I am a historian by formation, and one of the questions historians tend to ask when discussing current affairs is, what has truly changed from a historical perspective? My article, published earlier this year in CSSH, delves into the historical developments of secularism and secularization in China. Although these concepts were not prevalent in most parts of the imperial cultural context, the study ultimately leads to an examination of the political sources and cultural experiences that the Communist regime utilized to regulate religion in contemporary China. The timeframe of my article concludes around 2008, a period that many China specialists consider relatively open compared to the present day, both in terms of engagement with the outside world and domestic affairs. What distinctions have emerged in the regime’s methods of disciplining and sanctioning religion?
For lay Buddhists and Taoists, perhaps not many changes have occurred. Worship and offerings at temples continue as usual, with some Buddhist and Taoist ceremonies and rituals receiving support from the government as part of China’s cultural heritage and to enhance local tourism. Attending temples in China does not necessarily indicate observant religious beliefs, as it is customary to visit temples on certain dates or occasions, primarily to pray for fortune and health, often without an understanding of Buddhist sutras or Taoist classics. Similarly, although the regime maintains its anti-superstition policy, it is not illegal to consult fortune tellers or fengshui masters, as long as superstition remains a private matter and does not organize followers into a “sect” that challenges the state’s authority, as seen with Falun Gong. This political stance also extends partially to religion. However, unlike superstition, religion, despite being a private matter, cannot be practiced entirely in private. Religious activities and places of worship are legally mandated to be affiliated with their respective official supervisory bodies (the China Islamic Association, the Buddhist Association of China, the Chinese Taoist Association, the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association, and the Three-Self Patriotic Movement).
In contrast to Buddhism and Taoism, Christianity, Tibetan Buddhism, and Islam encounter escalating oppression from the regime, particularly following the “Sinicization” religious policy in 2015 and the enactment of the Regulation on Religious Affairs in 2018 (Madsen 2021). While crackdowns on so-called “house churches” not registered with the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association or the Three-Self Patriotic Movement are not unprecedented, some Christian churches and Tibetan Buddhist establishments are now mandated to replace portraits of Jesus and statues of Buddha with photographs of Xi Jinping (Zenz 2019). Islam and Uyghur Muslims endure even more severe persecution, manifesting particularly in mass incarceration within concentration camps (Roberts 2020). While Han Buddhism and Taoism are not immune to institutionalization and selective interpretation for political purposes, they are considered by the regime as Chinese religions, distinct from Christianity, Tibetan Buddhism, and Islam. The latter traditions are associated either with the West or with strong ethnic and cultural identities susceptible to being politicized; they challenge the “Chinese nation” that unifies all the 56 recognized ethnicities, constituting therefore a formidable force to be reckoned with.
What changes have occurred in the Chinese state’s religion policy since the early 20th century, when the first Chinese republic was established and religious identity became a tolerated yet rigorously disciplined element of national identity? “Bureaucratic control of religion, assimilation of political ideology into the religious discourse, anti-ritual rhetoric, national unification,” as noted by Vincent Goossaert, have been characteristic of the “long process of religious institutionalization under state control” since 1912 (Goossaert 2008: 229). As during the Republican period, the regulation of religion in Communist China does not entail the state’s active role in its eradication. Even during the 1950s and 1960s, China did not emulate the Soviet religion policy due to the irrelevance of the Russian and Soviet religious situation: no single religion was dominant or prevalent in China (Marsh 2011: 161). As a result, Chinese Communist leaders were convinced that religion would vanish in the course of socialist construction – a perspective “based upon a more authentic reading of Marx and Engels than that which formed the basis of Soviet religion policy” (March 2011: 165) – while the propagation of atheism targeted superstition rather than religion. Although religion and the religious were harshly persecuted during the Cultural Revolution, my argument in the article suggests that it was not religion per se, but rather its associations (with Western imperialism, Buddhist landowners profiting from peasants, superstition, etc.) that were subject to purging. This purging was not directly carried out by the state, but rather by the masses (Marsh 2011: 177).
Therefore, the policy of the Communist regime has consistently been the regulation of religion until it naturally fades away. The question is how the state should facilitate this process and to what extent “secularization” should prevail for religion to be considered extinct. Is “secularization in the absence of secularism” (Starrett 2010: 640), wherein belief itself never completely wanes but is too apolitical to challenge the authority and its political agenda, sufficient? The situation of Han Buddhism and Taoism today might provide an affirmative response to this question. However, these two religions are fundamentally distinct from Islam, Christianity, and Tibetan Buddhism, which are subject to the most persecution and control. Neither of them makes separatist political claims nor do they pledge loyalty to anything that threatens a secularizing state or is associated with the West. Protestants, who consider religion an apolitical and private affair and therefore refuse to register with the Three-Self Patriotic Movement, always risk facing legal sanctions for the foreign nature of their creed (Dunch 2008: 177). Han Buddhism and Taoism are deeply ingrained in Chinese culture and do not impose strict codes of conduct and observance on lay believers. In contrast, what remains of Christianity and Islam in China if they are reduced to non-observant forms? Usmon Boron asks similar questions in his study of Islam in contemporary Kyrgyzstan.
The secularization process might never end, not because belief never dies out, but rather because the fundamental interests of the Communist regime dictate the fate of religion. However, these core interests are changing. The suppression of Muslims today, who arguably suffered the least during the Cultural Revolution (Marsh 2011: 184), exemplifies the unpredictability of the regime’s policies. What remains unchanged is China’s millennia-old political tradition of regulating and subordinating all beliefs to the state ideology.
References
Dunch, Ryan. 2008. “Christianity and Adaptation to Socialism.’” In Chinese Religiosities: Afflictions of Modernity and State Formation, edited by Mayfair Mei-hui Yang, 155–78. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Goossaert, Vincent. 2008. “Republican Church Engineering: The National Religious Associations in 1912 China.” In Chinese Religiosities, 209–32.
Madsen, Richard, ed. 2021. The Sinicization of Chinese Religions: From Above and Below. Leiden: Brill.
Marsh, Christopher. 2011. Religion and the State in Russia and China: Suppression, Survival, and Revival. New York: Continuum.
Roberts, Sean R. 2020. The War on the Uyghurs: China’s Internal Campaign against a Muslim Minority. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Starrett, Gregory. 2010. “The Varieties of Secular Experience.” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 52(3): 626–51.
Zens, Adrian. 2019. “You Can’t Force People to Assimilate. So Why Is China at It Again?” New York Times, July 16, 2019.
Religion, Secularism, and the Historical Grammar of Concepts
Usmon Boron
Delving into critical secularism studies some ten years ago altered the trajectory of my academic journey. There, I encountered profoundly illuminating vocabularies for thinking about modernity in general and Soviet history in particular. I also recognized that the peculiarities of the Soviet state offered an invaluable perspective for reassessing and expanding on some of the theoretical premises in this literature. I was intrigued. So much so that I dropped my fieldwork in Egypt and embarked on a research trip to Kyrgyzstan.
Of course, I wasn’t new to post-Soviet Central Asia. I was born there and had spent most of my life in the region. My formative years were marked by the significant social transformations that Uzbekistan, my home country, experienced after the fall of the Soviet Union. One notable change was an increase in the public visibility of pietistic forms of Islam in the 1990s: more people began participating in Eid and Friday prayers, some relatives had committed themselves to the five daily prayers, and, occasionally, men with Islamic beards and veiled women could be seen. But what I remember most vividly is not the change itself—admittedly, in Tashkent and its suburbs, where I lived, visibly devout Muslims were a small minority then—but how people around me reacted to it. Mainstream reactions were rarely positive or indifferent. In fact, it seemed to me that skepticism and hostility towards new forms of Islam were more salient than their public visibility.
As the years went by, Uzbekistan began to control and severely restrict public displays of Islamic piety. In contrast, neighboring Kyrgyzstan pursued a different path, allowing several Islamic piety movements to operate relatively freely. Initially, such movements affected only a tiny fraction of society. As in Uzbekistan, however, the majority reacted negatively to those who embraced a more “orthodox” Islam. As the influence of the Islamic movements continued to grow, by the 2000s, the tension between “observant” and “non-observant” Muslims became a significant point of contention in the country.
Some scholars in the West viewed the popular antagonism towards pietistic forms of Islam in Central Asia as paradoxical, given that throughout the Soviet period, most local Muslims remained loyal to their identity as Muslim and were committed to a range of devotional practices, especially the main Islamic life cycle rites. A common theory suggested that communist secularization hollowed out the religious content of Islam, reducing it to a mere cultural phenomenon—a marker of ethnic identities, a sense of communal belonging, an aspect of national heritage. As I scrutinized the literature, I found this argument unconvincing. The essentialized notions of culture and religion it was based on struck me as dissatisfactory; something more complex was involved in the Soviet project. Critical secularism studies, I thought, would help me identify and explore this complexity.
Certainly, I was not the first to consider bringing the Soviet case into conversation with this field. An ethnographic monograph, an edited volume, and several articles on Soviet secularism had already been published. Many more publications on communist secularisms, covering countries from Eastern Europe to East Asia, would follow in the years to come. Despite their diverse perspectives, most of these works shared a major premise: that no definition of “religion” is ideologically neutral and that the modern state has historically been invested in defining and regulating “religion.” Accordingly, these studies dismantled the Cold War image of communism as antithetical to secularism, expanding our understanding of secularism as a global form of governance. I found this literature immensely helpful; what intrigued me most, however, was its residually essentialist use of the term “religion.”
Consider, for example, the edited volume Atheist Secularism and its Discontents: A Comparative Study of Religion and Communism in Eurasia. While the introductory chapter states that religion is a power-laden concept, throughout the book “religion” also figures as a malleable essence. The volume’s divergent takes on communist secularisms explore, for instance, how despite state attempts at “defining, co-opting, and appropriating religion,” the latter “can never be entirely contained by a secularist frame” (Ngo and Quijada 2015: 19), how a communist regime can engage in “imitation of religious activity” (Ji Zhe 2015: 108), how Chinese “apologetics of science-focused atheism appear religious” (Smyer Yu 2015: 156), and how Soviet communism was inherently non-religious (Luehrmann 2015: 141-146). True, the editors emphasize the importance of not essentializing religion. Yet in the absence of a systematic discussion of what exactly not essentializing religion should entail—theoretically and methodologically—a singular assumption colors their main arguments: no matter how pliable and undefinable it might be, religion is a phenomenon that can be identified. I suggest that this assumption informs debates about secularism far beyond studies of communism.
It is now conventional to state that critical secularism studies have complicated the boundary between religion and secularism. An oft-cited line from Talal Asad’s Formations of the Secular, a work that shaped the field in significant ways, says just that: “the ‘religious’ and the ‘secular’ are not essentially fixed categories” (2003: 25). I find it noteworthy that this and similar arguments are sometimes interpreted as suggesting that “the religious” and “the secular” constantly interpenetrate and overlap with each other, lacking stable identities and bearing a multiplicity of meanings. What worries me here is that the trope of interpenetration and overlap invokes the imagery of an ahistorical substance, inadvertently falling into the very essentialism it aims to avoid. The above-quoted statements concerning communism’s “religious” undertones are some of the most straightforward examples of this problem. I am drawn to Asad’s work precisely because it offers a different kind of anti-essentialism. Using Wittgenstein’s notion of grammar, Asad highlights the importance of focusing on the historically changing practical consequences of a concept’s use. In other words, throughout Formations of the Secular, he emphasizes that tracing the practices and sensibilities through which “religion,” “the secular,” and related categories become historically entangled—that is, exploring their historical grammars—is more fruitful than ascribing to them essentialist qualities.
This approach enabled me to think of Islam beyond the essentialist sense of religion as a complex yet recognizable phenomenon; it also opened space for considering how Soviet governmentality introduced a particular grammar of “religion” that has since inflected the lives of Central Asian Muslims. I’m not referring to the well-known Marxist notion of religion as a mode of class domination, though its influence during the Soviet era should not be dismissed. Rather, what I have in mind is the global process whereby “religion” becomes a universal ethnographic characteristic, transcended and regulated through the standardized institutions of the modern state. Whereas in pre-Soviet times Islam was one of the key ethical, legal, and material frameworks for life, the Soviet state’s transcendence turned it into a folklorized element of local “histories” and “cultures” and a private answer, inherited from one’s ancestors, to perennial existential concerns. To say that Islam became “privatized” or “domesticated” (Dragadze 1993) is not enough. It became entangled with a new public/private dichotomy and new practices, categories, and sensibilities—in other words, its grammar was transformed.
My CSSH article is part of a larger project that explores how some of these practices, categories, and sensibilities create and articulate cleavages between “religious” and “secular” Kyrgyzstani Muslims. I pursue this analysis mostly by working with ordinary people and trying to understand their everyday life experiences. Incidentally, the notion of the everyday has lately become salient in the anthropology of Islam and secularism. As Isaac Friesen notes, several scholars have used it to argue that Asad’s work overlooks the contradictory, contestable, and heterogeneous nature of both secularity and lived Islam. Echoing the structure versus agency debate, which was once integral to anthropology, this literature posits “everyday,” “ordinary,” or “real” life as experiential sites undermining the organizing, or hegemonic, concepts that Asad has focused on. I have tried to diverge from this framing by combining an inquiry into organizing concepts with an exploration of how such concepts mediate (not define) the life trajectories of ordinary people. By focusing on mediation, I suggest, one can approach everyday life, with all its unpredictability, while also attending to the landscapes of power that make it livable.
I find it helpful to remind myself that every approach illuminates certain aspects of life while overshadowing others. Personally, I have always gravitated toward inquiries that scrutinize the discursive and material entanglements sustaining our increasingly interconnected world. I am amazed, for instance, by how categories that seem unstable and contestable are routinely mobilized in specific ways to inflict systemic violence and destroy particular forms of life—in Central Asia and beyond. And as Gaza is being wiped off the face of the earth, I find that wrestling with the destructive grammars of global concepts should be one of anthropology’s primary tasks today.
References
Asad, Talal. 2003. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press
Dargadze, Tamara. 1993. “The Domestication of Religion Under Soviet Communism.” In C.M. Hann, ed., Socialism: Ideas, Ideologies, and Local Practices. London: Routledge.
Ji Zhe. 2015. “Secularization without Secularism: The Political-Religious Configuration of Post-1989 China.” In Tam T.T. Ngo and Justine B. Quijada, eds., Atheist Secularism and its Discontents: A Comparative Study of Religion and Communism in Eurasia. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Luehrmann, Sonja. 2015. “Was Soviet Society Secular? Undoing Equations between Communism and Religion.” In Tam T.T. Ngo and Justine B. Quijada, eds., Atheist Secularism and its Discontents: A Comparative Study of Religion and Communism in Eurasia. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Ngo, Tam T.T. and Justine B. Quijada. 2015. “Introduction: Atheist Secularism and Its Discontents.” In Tam T.T. Ngo and Justine B. Quijada, eds., Atheist Secularism and its Discontents: A Comparative Study of Religion and Communism in Eurasia. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Smyer Yu, Dan. 2015. “Apologetics of Religion and Science: Conversion Projects in Contemporary China.” In Tam T.T. Ngo and Justine B. Quijada, eds., Atheist Secularism and its Discontents: A Comparative Study of Religion and Communism in Eurasia. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Equivocations
Gregory Starrett
The editors of CSSH have asked us what’s changed and what hasn’t in anthropological work on the secular since 2010 or so. It’s a hazardous question. I come down on “la même chose” side of Friesen’s citation. But that reminds me of how Clifford Geertz began his famous meditation on “Religion as a Cultural System,” claiming that the anthropology of religion “has made no theoretical advances of major importance” in the two decades following the Second World War. He wrote of it “living off the conceptual capital of its ancestors, adding very little, save a certain empirical enrichment, to it,” and stagnating into “minor variations on classical theoretical themes.” This was in 1965. In the following year Mary Douglas published Purity and Danger, and a bit later Victor Turner published The Forest of Symbols. Both authors developed subsequent bodies of work that reignited the field in ways Geertz’s broad redefinition of religion as a system of symbols that drapes the cosmos in meaning never really did. You never know what’s under review when you make big claims about the state of scholarship.
Much of what we do in every field is to explore the half-life of existing theory by holding new field materials up against it to see if a concept still has the power to make them glow. The work Talal Asad and his students have done on the secular as a form of political and cultural suspicion – a Taylorist immanent frame wary of outmoded forms of social enchantment (Asad himself); a fraught entanglement rather than a benign separation between state and religion (Saba Mahmood); or even a problem-space in which the attempt is made to distinguish between religion and the political as such (Hussein Agrama) – still lays out a research agenda for scholars in many fields, even those who are skeptical of the way this work has been deployed. Friesen and Xu demonstrate how discourses of secularism and religion provide flexible frameworks for changing state projects; Boron touches on the personal and deeply visceral experiences that structure the interactions of different forms of Muslim identification and practice.
A couple of things surprise me about what else might have happened, but mostly didn’t. While Geertz traced the alleged stagnation of the postwar anthropology of religion to its insularity–its alleged avoidance of contemporary philosophy and aesthetic criticism and information theory, for example—the continued Asadism of “critical secularism studies” appears to bypass other potentially useful theoretical frameworks that have pervaded other areas within anthropology. I’m thinking specifically about Latourian science and technology studies and certain elements of the “ontological turn” associated with Eduardo Vivieros de Castro and others. And perhaps also insights from critical feminist theory descending from Susan Harding and Donna Haraway and Judith Butler. Each of these might have fueled further work on “the secular” that might clarify why we continue to try to find in “the secular” a thing in the world rather than an optical illusion or a figment of our own desire and fear.
Asad criticized Geertz for focusing on symbols and meanings at the expense of institutions and power. But as anthropology’s culture hero Franz Boas argued in his own reaction against rival approaches to social comparison, what we need is a standard by which to demonstrate the comparability of the things we compare. Masks don’t all belong in the same museum cabinet; they do different things for people on the ground. Likewise, the debris of totemic classifications that look like the evidence of common primitive psychology are instead the results of disparate social processes.
If the secular is about power and institutions, it matters a great deal which institutions and what kinds of power are at stake. After all, “states” are not the only nodes of power in our lives, and not always the most effective ones. States are not the only entities that argue about and attempt to shape, deploy, or regulate religion (or, to widen our sample to include China and Japan, Xu’s “rituals,” “teachings,” and “superstitions.”). Churches do this as well. So do families. So do American country and western singers who sponsor the publication of Bibles bound together with patriotic song lyrics and American political documents as appendices (or perhaps as commentaries?). So do the celebrities who shill for them, and the clergy who remind their congregations that politics is about this world and religion is about the eternal, and forcing them together is blasphemous. So does the Kyrgyz woman in Boron’s narrative who dismisses her parents’ outmoded manner of being Muslim. Why call “the secular” a state attempt to distinguish between religion and politics when our interlocutors see it as worldliness, or as a transformation of spiritual lifeways into visible ethnic markers, or as god-rejection pure and simple?
When we speak of the secular, we may be engaged in what Vivieros de Castro calls an equivocation, a usage that disguises “the referential alterity between homonymic concepts” (2004:5). Equivocations provide a translational fulcrum we can use not to identify the equivalent meaning of different terms, but the disparate meanings the same terms hold in different experiential worlds. Instantiations of both “religion” and “the secular” are regionally and locally complex and contested. Recognizing this, Friesen’s Egyptian friends quizzed him about what he meant when he questioned them about “secularism” in the country. They defaulted essentially to a denial of the Asadian position that was largely developed with Egyptian ethnographic material in the first place. According to Boron the Soviet destruction of central traditions of virtue ethics – the cultivation of reverential dispositions through rituals such as prayer and fasting – left behind only the element of “belief” in God as a marker of Muslim identity in Central Asia. But in another reading of regional traditions (Ahmad 2016), the very center of Muslim experience might instead have revolved around drinking wine and reciting the poetry of Hafiz.
Many worlds, many possibilities. Boas would be pleased with Boron’s perception that both liberalism in the West and Bolshevik agitation in Central Asia resulted in “a characteristically secular sense that one’s relationship with God does not necessarily need to be encumbered by a tradition of theological discourse and ritualistic discipline” (Boron 2024:15). Different causes produce similar effects. But why is the object of focus a sense that appears “secular” rather than “religious”? After all, this sense is also shared by the Baptists who gather in the church across the street from my house. They would consider themselves neither liberal nor secular, but as close to the core and origin of the true Christian tradition as it is possible to be.
The world doesn’t appear to match our categorizations of it. Or perhaps the problem is that our categorizations are the principal means by which we learn to ignore the complicated social processes we’re trying to simplify. Bruno Latour (1993) pointed out that the “modern” practice of delineating categories that separate the natural, the social, and the divine – and all subsidiary levels of taxonomy, such as “economic,” “political,” “cultural,” and “religious” within the domain of the social – are mechanisms of control. These mechanisms work in two ways simultaneously. Focusing attention on the objects in any particular category elaborates our knowledge. It sharpens our methodologies and enables us to divide and subdivide infinitely, creating fractal patterns of distinction that realize complex bodies of knowledge. These might include responsible agencies, standardized methodologies, and bureaucratic structures. At the same time, this work of differentiation or purification produces hybrid objects (or even hyperobjects, Morton 2013) that emerge from our collective activity. Their complexities develop underneath and between the clean theoretical distinctions we try to maintain. The harder we work at maintaining the categories, the more the monstrous objects proliferate, and the more they proliferate, the more they begin to act like agents in their own right (think global warming, ethnonationalism, the fossil fuel economy, or media coverage of student protests). The more they begin to act on their own, the more important it becomes for us to tame them conceptually by arguing about their categorical home, and thus specifying who’s responsible for dealing with them.
So what can we do if the religion/secular dichotomy becomes too difficult to maintain or too far along in its process of radioactive decay to warm up our data?
Perhaps we can shift the nature of our analysis. Instead of arguing about whether an institution, sentiment, tradition, movement, or event is “religious” or “secular,” or thinking about these two categories as mutually constitutive (either practice emphasizes difference and antagonism), perhaps we can think about them in aesthetic terms, as matters of style or genre, as alternative choices within a single productive process rather than as warring institutions or sensibilities.
We can think of them, in other words, as shorthand for certain narrative or dramatic conventions, elements of character or stage design, the cut and color of our protagonists’ costumes, or the pace and tone of a script. The stylistic and narrative conventions of movie genres such as the western, the road trip, the romantic comedy, the buddy comedy, the haunted house, the space adventure, the triumphant-underdog sports competition, the war epic, and so on, are not opposites. They neither contradict nor necessarily co-constitute one another. They share numerous features while remaining distinct. The integrity of distinct formal conventions can be enjoyed through particularly skilled performances (Butler 1988). The creativity displayed in the skillful combination, ironic juxtaposition, and narrative inversion of formal conventions is not only common, but deeply satisfying.
Or, we could do something even more radical. We could dump the dichotomy altogether. Recently, Paul Johnson, Pamela Klassen, and Winnifred Sullivan (2018) suggested a version of this strategy in their short volume Ekklesia: Three Inquiries in Church and State. (It may owe something to Rousseau’s “civil religion,” theorized in 1762, with William Robertson Smith (1889) and Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges (1864) providing empirical cases a century later). Johnson and his colleagues argue that the shared etymology of the Greek ekklesia links the ancient citizen assemblies of pagan Athens with the newer social bodies of the Christian church (2018:1). “Church and state,” they write, “are analytical markers or pivots around which cluster distinct but overlapping techniques of convening the people. They name institutions and disciplinary conventions of converting human beings into self-conscious collectives. . . It would be difficult to specify whether [collective public ceremonies and pilgrimages] were religious or political, church or state. Who could say? They were both” (2018:3).
Sadly, they name the substance of this insight, this space of overlap between the civil and the spiritual, “churchstateness” (2018:2), a brutalist neologism that rather spoils the charm. Nevertheless, it’s a start. Or a renewal. Some of the things Friesen, Xu, and Boron have written move in this direction, pointing to the fuzzy boundaries and shifting parallels between different conceptual systems. “Secularism,” Boron writes, “can be understood as a power of transcendence” (2024:10). And while he imagines this as a qualitatively different kind of transcendence from that of Islamic tradition, we might pause and consider why particular kinds of differences matter to us.
As for me, I’ve been arguing that we ought to abandon the pairing of “religion” and “secular” – whether conceived as complementary or agonistic – for about a quarter of a century (Starrett 1998:234; 1999; 2010), which is longer than the field of critical secularism studies has existed as such. The dichotomy is part of a twinned narrative of scientific progress and theological supersession that many scholars have abandoned. We seem to cling to it not because it helps us understand the world better, but because it helps us establish our place as partisans in a world where dichotomies help us identify who’s to blame for our troubles. It might serve us better to think not in terms of difference, but in terms of inherent and irreducible ambiguity, as in early anthropology’s concept of the sacred as a sociological intersection of admiration and terror; or of the essential duality of light, forever and indissolubly both particle and wave.
References
Ahmad, Shahab. 2016. What is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic. Princeton University Press.
Butler, Judith. 1988. Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory. Theatre Journal, 40(4):519-531
Douglas, Mary. 1966. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Fustel De Coulanges, Numa Denis. 1980 (1864). The Ancient City: A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome. Johns Hopkins University Press.
Geertz, Clifford. 1973 (1965). Religion as a Cultural System. In his The Interpretation of Cultures. NY: Basic Books.
Johnson, Paul, Pamela Klassen, and Winnifred Sullivan. 2018. Ekklesia: Three Inquiries in Church and State. University of Chicago Press.
Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Harvard University Press.
Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World. University of Minnesota Press.
Starrett, Gregory. 1998. Putting Islam to Work: Education, Politics, and Religious Transformation in Egypt. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Starrett, Gregory. 1999. Who Put the ‘Secular’ in ‘Secular State’? The Brown Journal of World Affairs VI(1), Winter/Spring, pp. 147-162.
Starrett, Gregory. 2010. The Varieties of Secular Experience. Comparative Studies in Society and History 52(3):626-651.
Turner, Victor. 1970 (1967). The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Cornell University Press.
Vivieros de Castro, Eduardo. 2004. Perspectival Anthropology and the Method of Controlled Equivocation. Tipiti: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America 2(1):3-22.
Isaac Friesen is Assistant Professor of Conflict Studies at St. Paul University, Ottowa. His research brings together anthropological and historical perspectives on political conflict, religion, and imperialism. His forthcoming book explores the Muslim attendance of Coptic spaces in provincial Egypt, where he lived for over four years. He has ongoing research on religion, migration, and politics in Egypt, Canada, and France. Prior to his position at Saint Paul University, Isaac was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Cambridge.
Aymeric Xu is a Postdoctoral Fellow (Assegnista di ricerca) at Scuola Superiore Meridionale, Naples. He holds a Ph.D. from École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris (2018). He has published several articles on Chinese conservatism, nationalism, legal transformation, and Manchukuo, as well as the English version of his dissertation, From Culturalist Nationalism to Conservatism: Origins and Diversification of Conservative Ideas in Republican China (De Gruyter 2021). His current research addresses religious policies and ideas in China, British Hong Kong, Portuguese Macau, Manchukuo, and Taiwan under Japanese rule, from the late nineteenth century to the 1940s.
Usmon Boron is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto. His research centers on the entanglement of Islam and secular modernity in Soviet and post-Soviet Eurasia. His current book project, “In the Shadow of Tradition: Soviet Secularism and Islamic Revival in Kyrgyzstan,” illuminates the rise of secularism in Soviet Central Asia and explores how Soviet secular categories continue to inform the lives of Central Asian Muslims. He received his PhD from the University of Toronto in 2022.
Gregory Starrett is Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He has conducted research on secularism, religious commodities, and public culture in Egypt; on African-American Muslim communities; on Islamophobia and multicultural education in the US; on the folklore of bioterrorism and suicide bombing; and on right-wing movements in Western democracies. His book Putting Islam to Work: Education, Politics and Religious Transformation in Egypt (California 1998) examines religious education and its connection to state politics and popular Islamic movements.
