Convenor
Leonardo Schiocchet
Austrian Academy of Sciences, Institute for Social Anthropology (ISA)
CAPES, Brazil
Co-covenor
Bruno Reinhardt
Utrecht University
Christian Suhr
Aarhus University
Abstract
The scholarship of religion has undergone a paradigmatic shift in the past decades, partially a reflex of the cogent rise of “public religions” (Casanova) in the contemporary world and the ongoing debates on religion’s normative confines it has triggered. Reflexive approaches to the very concept of religion now challenge its universality. According to a key contributor, Talal Asad: “The reason there cannot be a universal conception of religion is not because religious phenomena are infinitely varied – although there is in fact great variety in the way people live in the world with their religious beliefs. Nor is the case that there is no such thing, really, as religion. It is that defining is a historical act and when the definition is deployed, it does different things at different times and in different circumstance, and responds to different questions, needs, and pressures”. Asad calls attention to the importance of tracing the very processes of defining religion in practice, applying the same logic to what he considers “religion’s twin”, secularity. Unfolding in the disputed world of everyday practice and producing “looping effects” onto what they try to articulate, definitions should be followed attentively by the student of religion, instead of simply stabilized. In consonance, this panel would like to invite potential participants to reimagine the boundary-work of religion through ethnographic and/or historical perspectives. A few themes of interest will be:
a) the passages and cleavages between religious truth regimes and sensibilities and those more intuitively belonging to other “realms” of reality, like politics, economics, art, and science;
b) the government of religious difference by the secular rule of law and juridical controversies around the proper/improper place of religion in the public sphere;
c) the dissociation and overlapping of religious and other ethnic, cultural, racial, and political belonging referents,
d) the labor of defining religion within specific religious traditions, thus the problem of authority and authenticity within a context in which regulatory notions like “heresy” and “blasphemy” have been undermined by a world that celebrates “difference” as a good in itself and an expression of freedom.