Dr. Daniel Witte

The project to be worked on during the fellowship is dedicated to the development of the theoretical figure of “neutral zones” in the context of comparative differentiation and secularity research. From the beginning, the discourse on secularization and secularity has been characterized by the basic idea of a binary oppositional relation, which currently often takes the form of a relation between the religious sphere and "non-religion" (or the provinces of meaning designated as “religious” in concrete socio-cultural contexts and their respective “others”); these and related dichotomies typically act as research-guiding two-sided distinctions. Against this background, empirical studies then deal with questions of the demarcation between religion and its “others”, with processes of boundary shifting (classically, for example, in the form of a loss of social influence by religious actors and institutions), with social conflicts that ignite at and over these boundaries, and so on.

From the perspective of social theory, the project will take various empirical irritations from recent literature as an opportunity to question the scope of sociological distinctions such as “sacred” vs. “profane” or “religion” vs. “non-religion” in their binarity and to ask about the significance of “neutral zones” in the sense of third spaces. The guiding idea here is the heuristic assumption that social boundary conflicts between religion and non-religion can often only be permanently contained if a space is inserted between these two spheres that is, as it were, kept open to interpretation, that is withdrawn from manifest conflicts over interpretational sovereignty and in which expectations of ambiguity are institutionalized. The analytical starting point of these considerations is a model of attribution practices, in which actors, practices, objects and tempo-spatial arrangements are distinguished as objects of social attributions. This raises questions, for example, about the congruence of attributions of these different entities, about their respective exclusivity or graduality, and about possible forms of “legitimate indifference” to unambiguous attributions. Over the course of the fellowship, these theoretical figures will be further elaborated and their analytical fruitfulness will be explored in confrontation with different empirical case studies.