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Dear friends and colleagues,

With this newsletter we would like to kick off the new semester and from now on regularly provide you with news from our KFG. We want to share with you what is new at our Centre, what is currently happening, and what we are working on. Accordingly we would like to provide you with information about our upcoming events and keep you up to date with the latest publications by our members.

From October onwards, our workshops will again take place as on-site events. Our KFG was, is, and will remain a place of lively exchange and we would like to initiate discussions and engage in conversation with you in our workshops. During the pandemic, the KFG has also stepped up in terms of digital event formats, which is why we are able to offer our workshops in a hybrid format. We are looking forward to resume face-to-face encounters with colleagues and at the same time are excited about the great opportunity to use new digital ways of coming together.

Let's stay in touch, we look forward to the next opportunity to exchange with you and wish you a good start into the new semester.

Monika Wohlrab-Sahr and Christoph Kleine
Directors of KFG

KFG Workshop: “Enshrining the Past: Religion and Heritage-Making in a Secular Age” | 27–29 October 2021

Convenors: Marian Burchardt and Nur Yasemin Ural

As the intensity of the politics around cultural identity is growing across the world, the notion of heritage-making, or “heritagization”, has acquired new political urgency. At the same time, these politics have animated far-flung controversies over the religious and secular sources of belonging along with the values of ethnic, religious and racial majorities, minorities and the states that are supposed to represent them. This raises an intriguing set of questions: Under what conditions and with what consequences are certain religious artefacts, rituals and worldviews framed as heritage? Whose religious heritage is considered worthy to be selected, canonized and ennobled as elementary for nations’ collective memory? Who is systematically excluded and left to oblivion in the politics of religious and secular heritage? Which social groups are central to these processes?

Date: 27–29 October 2021

Hybrid event format: on-site event at Leipzig University and online via Zoom.

KFG Workshop: “Religion as an Object of Historical and Social Scientific Study: Global Perspectives” | 3–5 November 2021

Convenor: Florian Zemmin

The workshop will bring together case studies and theoretical reflections on the study of religion as an object of historical and social scientific inquiry in different academic contexts in the Americas, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. We are especially interested in the global presence and characteristics of religion as an object of study in the most pertinent academic disciplines: History of Religion; Comparative Religious Studies; Sociology; Anthropology and Political Science (excluding Theology and Philosophy). Central questions concern the place, status and history of research on religion in these disciplines.

Date: 3–5 November 2021

Hybrid event format: on-site event at Leipzig University and online via Zoom.

Workshop: "The Relationship between State and Religion in the Arab and Islamicate Contexts: Civil State, Secular State, Religious/Islamic State" | 9–10 December 2021

Conveners: Housamedden Darwish and Markus Dreßler

The workshop aims at understanding the concepts of ‘civil state’, ‘secular state’ and ‘religious/Islamic state’ and their relation to (the concept/ideal of) democracy in Arab and Islamicate contexts. It starts from a political and philosophical perspective and addresses from there normative and descriptive questions concerning the actual and/or potential forms of the relationship between (democratic) state and/or politics and religion.

Date: 9–10 December 2021

Hybrid event format: on-site event at Leipzig University and online via Zoom.

If you wish to attend the workshop, please send a short inquiry to multiple-secularities@uni-leipzig.de.

Screening Religion

In September, we concluded the summer programme of our Screening Religion film series with the film "The Judge". We very much enjoyed being able to show the last two films on site at the Cinémathèque Leipzig again and to discuss them with the audience afterwards.

We will continue the series from November onwards. Every two months we will screen documentaries and movies rarely seen in German cinemas. Religion features in every film, be it as a catalyst for negotiation processes or a source of conflict, a marker of identity or a constitutive element of social background. Thus, we seek to screen films on religion whilst simultaneously screening for “religion” as a cinematic object. Some of the films are presented by their directors, others are introduced by KFG scholars.

The programme planning for the winter semester is in its final stages and will soon be published on our homepage. Stay tuned!

For now, we can already reveal this much: On 24 November we will be screening the documentary film “Dealing with Death” (NL, 2020, doc, 74 min, directed by Paul Sin Nam Rigter). Check out the trailer here.

The work of the research group finds expression in various publication formats. In addition to monographs, edited volumes, and articles by individual members of the research group, we also make (preliminary) research results available for academic discourse in the form of working papers.

Other recent KFG publications:

Working Paper Series of the Centre for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences (KFG) “Multiple Secularities – Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities”

• Gudrun Krämer. “Religion, Culture, and the Secular: The Case of Islam.” Leipzig University, 2021.
• Christoph Kleine and Monika Wohlrab-Sahr. “Preliminary Findings and Outlook of the CASHSS ‘Multiple Secularities – Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities’.”Leipzig University, 2020.

Books

• Merdjanova, Ina, ed. Women and Religiosity in Orthodox Christianity. New York: Fordham University Press, 2021.
• Storm, Jason Ananda Josephson. Metamodernism, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021.
• Mauder, Christian. In the Sultan’s Salon: Learning, Religion, and Rulership at the Mamluk Court of Qāniṣawh al-Ghawrī (r. 1501–1516). Boston: Brill, 2021.
• Hreinsson, Haraldur. Force of Words: A Cultural History of Christianity and Politics in Medieval Iceland (11th-13th Centuries). Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2021.
• Otto, Bernd-Christian, and Dirk Johannsen, eds. Fictional Practice: Magic, Narration, and the Power of Imagination. Aries book series 30. Leiden, Boston: Brill, (Forthcoming).

Articles

• Hermann, Adrian. “European History of Religion, Global History of Religion: On the Expansion of a Gladigowian Concept for the Study of Religion.” In Religion in Culture — Culture in Religion: Burkhard Gladigow's Contribution to Shifting Paradigms in the Study of Religion. Edited by Christoph Auffarth, Alexandra Grieser and Anne Koch, 237–68. Universität Tübingen.
• Junginger, Horst. “Etsi deus non daretur: die Säkularität von Religionswissenschaft.” In Religion in Culture — Culture in Religion: Burkhard Gladigow's Contribution to Shifting Paradigms in the Study of Religion. Edited by Christoph Auffarth, Alexandra Grieser and Anne Koch, 119–40.
• Seiwert, Hubert. “Professionalisierung der Religionswissenschaft: Burkhard Gladigow in der Deutschen Vereinigung für Religionsgeschichte.” In Religion in Culture — Culture in Religion: Burkhard Gladigow's Contribution to Shifting Paradigms in the Study of Religion. Edited by Christoph Auffarth, Alexandra Grieser and Anne Koch, 53–68. Universität Tübingen.
• Kleine, Christoph, and Monika Wohlrab-Sahr. “Historicizing Secularity: A Proposal for Comparative Research from a Global Perspective.” Comparative Sociology 20 (2021): 287–316.
• Merdjanova, Ina. “The Kurdish Women’s Movement in Turkey and Its Struggle for Gender Justice.” Histories 1, no. 3 (2021): 184–98.
• Rodemeier, Susanne, and Edith Franke. “Digitale Inventarisierung: Chancen und Herausforderungen für die Provenienzforschung der Religionskundlichen Sammlung der Philipps-Universität Marburg.” In Digitalisierung ethnologischer Sammlungen: Perspektiven aus Theorie und Praxis, edited by Hans P. Hahn et al., 183–98. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2021.
• Laliberté, André. “How Do We Measure Secularity?” Journal of Law and Religion (2021): 1–8. Published online https://doi:10.1017/jlr.2021.21 
• Kleine, Christoph. “Menschliches Leid: Perspektive des Buddhismus.” In Menschliches Leid - Perspektiven der Philosophie und Theologie, des Buddhismus und der Medizin. Edited by Mechthild Dreyer et al., 75–90. Berlin: Springer, 2021.
• Triplett, Katja. “Putting a Face on the Pathogen and Its Nemesis. Images of Tenkeisei and Gozutennō, Epidemic-Related Demons and Gods in Medieval Japan.” Asian Medicine, no. 16 (2021): 193–213.
• Stanley-Baker, Michael, and Ronit Yoeli-Tlalim. “Asian Medicine and COVID-19: Ethnologies, Histories, Reflections.” Asian Medicine, no. 16 (2021): 1–10.
• Bhargav, Vanya Vaidehi. “Letters to Sir Syed: Lajpat Rai’s response to the Muslim refusal of minorityhood.” Global Intellectual History 33 no. 2 (2021): 1–20.

Our Bulletin gives the opportunity to comment on current political, social or cultural events and developments from the perspective of Multiple Secularities, to place them in a broader context through our expertise or to present alternative perspectives. 

We would like to point to the latest entry in our Bulletin: “Zoroastrianism and Secularity in Sinjar” by our colleague Benjamin Raßbach. In his account of recent developments in Sinjar, northern Iraq, Benjamin Raßbach analyses the (re-)construction of sacral architecture after the defeat of ISIS in the region with regard to the varying conceptions of religious, ethnic, and political identity of the involved groups and their agendas.