Secularities: Beyond Modernity?
Friday, 13 October, 4:30 - 6:30 p.m.
Situating Medicine and Religion in Asia
Michael Stanley-Baker (Nanyang Technological University)
History of Religious Coexistence in India
Rajeev Bhargava (Parekh Institute of Indian Thought)
Signs of Secularity in Latin America
Roberto Blancarte (El Colegio de México)
Chair: Katja Triplett (Leipzig University)
Situating Medicine and Religion in Asia
Michael Stanley-Baker (Nanyang Technological University)
During the period of the KGF research group, I produced two related works, an edited volume titled Situating Medicine and Religion in Asia, which should be out by the time of the conference, and a monograph in progress, titled Situating Practice: Medicine and Religion in Early Imperial China. The unimaginative lack of difference between the titles indicates that they hinge on, or obsess over, the same basic idea, of examining how religion and medicine come to be situated in relation to each other in specific contexts. Whereas the broadly-scoped Multiple Secularities project has compared many different contexts and forms in which religion becomes bordered, these two works examine one particular kind of bordering, that between medicine and religion. They focus on the contexts, genres, social forms, historical and personal moments bring to bear different kinds of issues and contours.
Concepts put forward by Killinger, Triplett and Kleine in their Asian Medicine introduction have been particularly useful and easy to apply. One insight that drew out patterns in the Asia volume was the role of meso-level social forms — primarily institutions — and how definitions of religion versus medicine could be seen as contours of social and inter-institutional power negotiation. This could be seen in the strong role the state played in various chapters, whether Japan, Tibet, India or Myanmar. The China monograph performs a close analysis of records of a fourth-century gentry family, to tease out how healing practices situate knowledge, and organise religion and medicine. Here, Killinger, Kleine and Triplett’s typology of modes of distinction is brought to life and appears repeatedly in different guises: ends and purposes, means and methods, framing, competence or charisma, and forms of authority. It becomes clear that even within a single community we cannot capture a singular snapshot of this moving tableau, but rather need to observe clusters of methods or repertoires of practice — an approach foreshadowed by their introduction.
History of Religious Coexistence in India
Rajeev Bhargava (Parekh Institute of Indian Thought)
Deep religious diversity in India has remained a fertile topic of discussion among scholars and public intellectuals. Some have claimed that in pre-colonial India, religious diversity was not only openly acknowledged but politically endorsed and that India offers an interesting model of peaceful religious coexistence. It has also been claimed that one of the distinctive features of modern Indian secularism as distinct from other secularisms is that it responds morally and politically to religious diversity. Others have claimed that the Indian case is no exception and has followed the trajectory of religious conflict found in other parts of the world. The present essay examines these claims. Its main conclusion is that there was an enviable degree of religious coexistence in India in the past, though this was neither due to explicitly formulated doctrines of religious pluralism, nor a result of a practical, social, and political arrangement, a bare modus vivendi. Instead, South Asia in the past had collectively imagined a particular way of living together, a common moral understanding of the significance of religious pluralism, and it is this that accounts for peaceful religious coexistence in pre-modern India. This claim is substantiated by historical evidence of conflict and accommodation until the arrival of the modern idea of religion. This moral imaginary was severely challenged by the impetus given by colonial modernity to some morally troubling features in both Hindu and Islamic thought. It also had much to do with the globalization of the modern, Western idea of Religion. Modern Indian secularism is a fragile response to modern religion and the forms of religious strife it generates. It is an attempt to resurrect in a new form the core elements of a much older pluralist imaginary and to prevent forms of inter-religious and intra-religious domination (caste and gender related hierarchies).
Signs of Secularity in Latin America
Roberto Blancarte (El Colegio de México)
The purpose of this paper is to answer a central question regarding Latin America and particularly Mexico: Was there some seed of a secularization process in what we now call Latin America and particularly Mexico before the arrival of the Spaniards and Portuguese to the American continent? And if it’s the case, when and where can we find those elements? The current research on secularity in Latin America takes for granted that efforts of secularization in the region began only with the independence of the new republics, after the fall of the colonial dominion, in 19th Century. But a closer look reveals us a more complex situation. Not only Pre-Hispanic cultures (Aztec, Incas, and so forth) could have develop some signs of distinction and separation between the “religious” and the “non-religious”, but also the Colonial period (XVI-XVIII Centuries), known for the importance of the Catholic church and catholic culture in society, could show many signs of separation of affairs, distinction of spheres and other elements of eventual seeds of secularization. The paper will introduce a discussion about the influence of the concept of multiple secularities, its usefulness in the research, exploring at the same time the limits and reach of the whole approach related to the theory of secularization.
