Multiple Trajectories
Friday, 13 October, 2 - 4 p.m.
Multiple Secularisms in Colonial India
Vanya Vaidehi Bhargav (ICAS:M.P., New Delhi)
What Does “Religio-Political” Even Mean? The Diachronic Perspective on Bhutan as an Empirical and Theoretical Case Study
Dagmar Schwerk (Leipzig University)
Secularization and Doubt in Buddhist Societies
Sven Bretfeld (Norwegian University of Science and Technology)
Chair: Johannes Duschka (KFG "Multiple Secularities)
Multiple Secularisms in Colonial India
Vanya Vaidehi Bhargav (ICAS:M.P., New Delhi)
My post-doctoral research agenda involves unearthing multiple conceptions and narratives of secularism in colonial India. The Multiple Secularities (MS) framework distinguishes between ‘secularity’, as an analytical category connotating the modality of distinction-making between religion and non-religion, and ‘secularism’ as a normative category, signifying the ideological project of separating the two. My project aims to capture different forms of secularisms envisioned by historical actors as evident in the different extents to which they conceived separation, and the different value-based reasons and justifications they gave for this separation. Since the project is concerned with normative ideological visions, it uses the category of secularism rather than secularity. However, the normative-ideological aim of separation was preceded on the act of making distinctions between religion and the state/politics. And so, in unearthing multiple secularisms in colonial India, the project is in effect unearthing multiple Indian secularities. The conceptual framework of multiple secularities allows me to excavate multiple secularisms in India. In particular, my project agrees with MS’ attempt to navigate a path between scholarship that assumes the universality of one form of secularism born in the West, and scholarship that rejects secularism as a Western concept alien and unsuitable to non-Western contexts. It aligns with MS’ commitment to recover the agency of regions beyond the West, uncover forms of distinction-making in these regions, and its attention to particular historical experience and cultural imprint of these regions. My project seeks to uncover how the specific and astounding religious diversity of British India, and the challenges and conflicts these generated, resulted in different actors across the political spectrum – Congressmen like Gandhi and Nehru, on one hand, and the Hindu politician Lajpat Rai, on the other – articulating different conceptions and narratives of secularism. The MS framework permits me to explore and reveal the ‘reference problems’ colonial Indian actors sought to address and the different ‘solutions’ they offered. Equally, while the distinctiveness of Indian secularism has been theorised and noted, my project raises an important question for the MS framework: do multiple secularities exist not just across different regions but also within a single country?
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.
What Does “Religio-Political” Even Mean? The Diachronic Perspective on Bhutan as an Empirical and Theoretical Case Study
Dagmar Schwerk (Leipzig University)
In this talk, I will first provide a brief overview of how I integrated the multiple secularities approach into the analytical framework of my research. As a background, directly after my Ph.D. in 2017, I choose a new research focus in my fellowship here at the CAHSS, eventually leading to the work on my second monograph about identity- and nation-building in Bhutan in the 18th century now. How to possibly adapt the concept of multiple secularities in my research about the spheres of religion and politics (partially: law/economics) in Bhutan from the 17th to 20th centuries was, back then, sketched out in a working paper (2019).
In brief, Bhutan’s development path is unique as Bhutan, never colonized, is the only country in the Tibetan cultural area that still possesses a premodern structural continuity in the form of the “Joint Twofold System of Governance” embodied today in a constitutional monarchy and sustainable development model (Gross National Happiness). The concept of multiple secularities was immensely helpful to identify and describe systematically and diachronically—in that depth, for the first time in Tibetology—not only institutional differentiations but also corresponding underlying “epistemic structures” (in the beginning called “conceptual distinctions”) and boundary negotiations. Here, I will highlight aspects that were essential for me and that repeatedly resurfaced in discussions about secularity/modernity within my disciplines of Tibetology/religious studies in Europe and North America. Second, personally, I am interested in discussing some “open” questions regarding the multiple secularities approach and possible future research collaborations. For example, how can we further develop the analytical approach of epistemes (my research interest lies in environmental humanities/climate crisis research)? What unresolved issues in the trans-disciplinary academic discourse about multiple secularities should be addressed? And, finally, did we succeed in establishing less Anglo-European perspectives/terminologies in modernity/secularity studies in the German academy?
Secularization and Doubt in Buddhist Societies
Sven Bretfeld (Norwegian University of Science and Technology)
Religious and scientific modes of knowledge production are commonly perceived as one of the major differences marking a borderline between the religious and the secular spheres. Religions deal with ‘revelations’ and transmitted ‘beliefs’, sciences with ‘discoveries’ and experiment-tested ‘models’. From the mid-1800s Buddhist authors have disputed that these dichotomies applied also to Buddhism. Buddhism was rather promoted as the one exceptional religion in full compatibility with modern science, or, even itself a form of science. This still widespread and ongoing discourse has absorbed some of the shocks modern scientific findings may have caused for religious world-views in other cases.
The history of this rhetorical device and its echoes in Asian societies illustrate how secularities can develop in multiple ways. Indeed, in Buddhist cultures secularization seems to be driven by science-induced doubt to a lesser degree than, for example, in Christian Europe. On the contrary – be it relativity, quantum or evolution theory; the cosmological standard model, psychoanalysis or, recently, neuro-scientific brain research – Buddhist interpreters have always found ways to reiterate and popularize the idea that modern sciences confirm traditional Buddhist knowledge. More extreme formulations even claim that secular scientists have now started to discover what Buddhists have been knowing for ages. Yet, despite this quite successful strategy of immunization against scientific challenges, other forms of religious doubt have caused many Buddhists, for example in Sri Lanka, to turn their backs on religiosity.
The paper will focus this alternative source of doubt, what it tells us about the distinctive mechanics and organization of the religious fields in Buddhist countries, how secularization processes can be conceptualized within this context, and what this all has to do with scholarly debates on how to translate Pāli into English.
