Prof. Dr. Armando Salvatore, PhD

This project is part of a wider research approach to the embeddedness of religion in local and translocal circulation (of goods, peoples and ideas). The general hypothesis is that multiple grammars of secularity are produced within a variety of cultural and religious traditions. These grammars usually facilitate (rather than hinder) circulation since they are not the external other of religion. The modern European, Westphalian configuration of secularity as bound to state sovereignty and organic solidarity is, accordingly, an extreme and quite exceptional outcome of the wider process, within the wider Afro-Eurasian ecumene, from which varieties of the secular originate. The Westphalian regime of political sovereignty and social solidarity demarcates secularity as external to religion. Therefore, Western secularity cannot provide a universally valid benchmark for capturing the socio-political significance of the global variety of secular grammars.

The more specific work hypothesis is that in the historic Afro-Eurasian civilizing process and particularly within the Islamic ecumene, secularities are generated at the unstable intersection between communitas and immunitas, Communitas should not be identified with the conventional understanding of community (that is often collapsed into religion tout court). It should be intended in its original, Latin meaning: as the sharing and circulation of gifts (munus= gift, yet also burden/obligation). Immunitas is the reverse process of the interruption of the circulation of the gift. The mechanism is namely the exemption from returning the gift (munus) as an obligation, the type of obligation that has innervated most religious traditions (and practices) since the Axial Age. Such exemptions are enacted through a variety of formal and informal ways that are sometimes integral to religious discourses and injunctions, but are often built (like within Western models of secularity) as external exceptions to it. Immunitas represents the moment of dispensation from the obligation to return the gift: thus, it amounts to establishing prerogatives, and with them a first kernel of both sovereignty and subjective rights.

The research path to be followed has the potential to embrace case studies of discursive and institutional articulations of the tension between communitas and immunitas from Islamic and interreligious, historic as well as contemporary, fields stretching from the West to Southeast Asia. Research on concepts matching this tension can both expand and deepen the socio-political significance of secularity beyond the boundaries of the West and modernity. It can facilitate the recognition of a variety of grammars of the social which unsettle the mutual demarcations between the “religious” and the “secular” fields.