Modes of Secularity: Performativity, Materiality, Affectivity
Saturday, 14 October, 10 a.m. - 12 p.m.
From Gestural Communication of the Religious and Secular to Functional Amalgam of the Religious and Secular
Augustine Agwuele (Texas State University)
How to make a Zulu King
Magnus Echtler (KFG "Multiple Secularities")
Materiality and Secularity
Birgit Meyer (Utrecht University)
An Affective Material Approach to Multiple Secularities
Nur Yasemin Ural (KFG "Multiple Secularities")
Chair: Marian Burchardt (Leipzig University)
From Gestural Communication of the Religious and Secular to Functional Amalgam of the Religious and Secular
Augustine Agwuele (Texas State University)
Modes of communicating religiosity are integral to the spread of religion; the ability of the religious to captivate is inextricably linked to the place of culturally relevant ‘visible bodily actions’ such as paralanguage, proxemics, physical appearances, and use of material items of signification and symbolization involved in secularism and the appressentation of associated values.
I set out from a linguistic perspective to observe and document how actors of two bible based Yoruba Movements have positioned nonverbal elements to bear their message, rather, I am confronted with a vast area of discourse on multiple secularities, the exploration of which unveil multiplicities of modalities that in interaction with core elements of culture generate empirically observable habitual responses that effaces the dyad of religion and the secular and iterate the very cultural imperatives that these movements initially identified as secular. While not a religious scholar, a perspective shift ensued from the interaction afforded by the fellowship at the Centre that now compels a strongly emerging collaboration between linguistics, religious- and socio-cultural studies with colleagues Magnus Echtler and Asonzeh Ukah. The dyad, religion and secular, it seems, are utilitarian objects through which Yoruba people contend with everyday life and that can be explored theoretically and ethnographically to understand how and why. This initial interaction laid for me a strong foundation to further this new idea.
The diverse case studies, cultural and disciplinary perspectives that the Centre brought together uniquely and collectively expounded consequentially the theme of secularization unfurling for me, from an emic vista, the enveloping context through which Yoruba people apprehend and respond to life persistent questions. I therefore will circumscribe (a) the manner in which my research has been influenced by the fellowship through the interactions afforded by being at the Centre in Leipzig, and (b) the possibilities for follow-up trans-disciplinary projects.
How to make a Zulu King
Magnus Echtler (KFG "Multiple Secularities")
After having analyzed power relations in the Nazareth Baptist Church, an African Indigenous Church that promotes Zulu cultural identity, working at the CASHSS “Multiple Secularities” provided me with the opportunity to study performances of African culture outside the church, and hence arguably outside the religious field. I hold that in the South African context secularity was shaped through the customization of African discourses and practices, that is, their secularization by codification in Native Law, and that these customs were subsequently mobilized in the political and religious spheres. In my paper, I illustrate the argument with the public performances that make a Zulu king.
On October 29, 2022, Misuzulu kaZwelithini received a certificate of recognition from Cyril Ramaphosa, president of South Africa, and he was anointed by Referent Dr. Thabo Makgoba, the Anglican archbishop of Cape Town. The event, commonly referred to as ‘coronation’, took place at Moses Mabhida Stadium in Durban. While the ceremony was criticized as neo-colonial, it effectively installed Misuzulu as the new Zulu king, although two of his half-brothers still contest his succession in court. On August 20, 2022, Misuzulu had performed the ‘entering the kraal’ (ukungeni esibayeni) ritual at the kwaKhangelamankengane Royal Palace in Nongoma. This ritual ‘really’ made him king according to Zulu proceedings, but he was not the only one to perform it, although he mobilized more supporters than his brothers. In my presentation, I look at these public events from a performative angle, analyzing how they negotiate the boundaries between religion, politics and culture.
Materiality and Secularity
Birgit Meyer (Utrecht University)
In my work, materiality and secularity have long formed important research lines. My fellowship at the KFG Multiple Secularities prompted me to think them together. In my presentation I will offer a reflection from the interface of the strands of scholarship associated with these lines, explaining why it is productive to relate work on materiality and secularity in the study of religion to each other. Firstly, I will offer some general thoughts, tying into the last phase of the Multiple Secularities project in which materiality was foregrounded as a prime conceptual focus, and take stock of the insights gained during my fellowship in the KFG (April-June 2023). Secondly, I will try to demonstrate the conceptual and methodological gains of a combined materiality-secularity approach with regard to a particular case-study which is occupying me currently and which formed the focus of my work during my fellowship: the translocation of a missionary collection of legbawo and dzokawo – items mistranslated as “idols” or “fetishes” – from the Ewe in the “mission field” on the West African coast (the current South east of Ghana and South of Togo) to the Städtisches Museum in Bremen (now Übersee-Museum Bremen). I will point our that research on this collection can benefit from the theorization of the materiality-secularity nexus, while at the same time it offers important reflexion points to refine our understanding of the complex relations between categories as art, heritage and religion in our entangled, post-colonial world.
An Affective Material Approach to Multiple Secularities
Nur Yasemin Ural (KFG "Multiple Secularities")
“Religious feelings” and the way they were conceptualised from the end of the 18th century to the beginning of the 20th century – exemplified in the writings of Schleiermacher and Otto, two important German Protestant theologians – play a prominent role in the representation of religion as immaterial, textual and personal. Religion was and still is predominantly seen as a personal feeling/experience, thus a private matter and should remain between the individual and God, we are told. The public display of “ostentatious” religious signs continues to disrupt the European public sphere, because it renegotiates the boundaries between the private and the public, as well as the place of religion, as in the case of the headscarf/burkini affairs, and the controversies about crosses in public institutions (Göle 2013). While religion is seen to belong to the private sphere, where the personal, emotional and intimate takes place, its definitional opposite – the secular – sustains an exclusively public, impersonal and rational character. But as recent research through material turn has aptly shown, religion has never been exclusively immaterial, personal and textual. Along the same lines, the secular is also not a free-floating ideology, completely detached from personal interests, bodily sensations or historical dispositions. The secular is not free of emotions, it feels a certain way (Jacobsen & Pellegrini 2008). Under the premises of the affective turn, we can understand these secular feelings of empathy, joy and moral superiority or of frustration, anger and fear not as personal, individual experiences of singular human bodies, but as relational affects that go beyond and under our skin (Ahmed 2005). Following this line of inquiry, I will address the affective politics of laïcité (French secularism) in the last decade using the example of food, particularly pork in public spaces and public schools. I argue that the we can only understand Multiple Secularities Paradigm (Wohlrab-Sahr & Kleine 2021), which in its plurality based on the historical conditions of their emergence, through the affective bonds, joys and anxieties that do not emerge in single individuals but occur relationally, contingently and arbitrarily. It is precisely this affectivity that forms the basis for the constitution not only of individual human bodies, but also of the collective body of a group, a people or a nation.
