Anthropology of the Secular
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ziasudraFormations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity
Talal Asad, Stanford University Press, 2003.
"What is the connection between 'the secular' as an epistemic category and 'secularism' as a political doctrine? Can they be objects of anthropological inquiry? What might an anthropology of secularism look like? This book attempts, in a preliminary way, to address these questions." (p. 1)
Introduction: Thinking about Secularism, pp. 1-17
"[Charles] Taylor takes it for granted that the emergence of secularism is closely connected to the rise of the modern nation-state, and he identifies two ways in which secularism has legitimized it. First there was the attempt to find the lowest common denominator among the doctrines of conflicting religious sects, and second, the attempt to define a political ethic independent of religious convictions altogether. It is this latter model that is applicable throughout the world today, but only after we have adapted to it the Rawlsian idea of an overlapping consensus, which proceeds on the assumption that there can be no universally agreed basis, whether secular or religious, for the political principles accepted in a modern, heterogeneous society." (p. 2)
"In today's liberal democracies a strong case can be made for the thesis that there is less and less of a direct link between the electorate and its parliamentary representatives -- that the latter are less and less representative of the socio-economic interests, identities, and aspirations of a culturally differentiated and economically polarized electorate." (p. 4)
The lack of directness attributed to: (p. 4)
- Pressure groups
- Opinion polls
- Mass media
Thus: "The modern nation as an imagined community is always mediated through constructed images."
"So what does the idea of an overlapping consensus do for the doctrine of secularism? In a religiously diverse society, Taylor claims, it allows people to have different (even mutually exclusive) reasons for subscribing to the independent, secular ethic. For example, the right to life may be justified by secular or religious beliefs -- and the latter may come in several varieties that belong to different traditions. This means that political disagreements will be continuous, incapable of being authoritatively resolved, and that temporary resolutions will have to depend on negotiated compromise." (p. 6)
~ The compromise to generate consensus, according to Taylor, comes in the forms of persuasion and negotiation.
"If secularism as a doctrine requires the distinction between private reason and public principle, it also demands the placing of the 'religious' in the former by the 'secular.'" (p. 8)
"Now some reflection would show that violence does not need to be justified by the Qur'an -- or any other scripture for that matter.... Nor has any government (and rebel group), whether Western or non-Western, needed to justify its use of indiscriminate cruelty against civilians by appealing to the authority of sacred scripture. They might in some cases do so because that seems to them just -- or else expedient. But that's very different from saying that they are constrained to do so." (p. 10)
On agency: (p. 11)
- Religious reader: active (interpreter)
- Religious text: passive (interpreted)
"Modernity is a project -- or rather, a series of interlinked projects -- that certain people in power seek to achieve. The project aims at institutionalizing a number of (sometimes conflicting, often evolving) principles: constitutionalism, moral autonomy, democracy, human rights, civil equality, industry, consumerism, freedom of the market -- and secularism." (p. 13)
~ Is there such a "modern project"?
"What practical options are opened up or closed by the notion that the world has no significant binary features, that it is, on the contrary, divided into overlapping, fragmented cultures, hybrid selves, continuously dissolving and emerging social states?" (p. 15)
"For it is precisely the process by which these conceptual binaries are established or subverted that tells us how people live the secular -- how they vindicate the essential freedom and responsibility of the sovereign self in opposition to the constraints of that self by religious discourses." (pp. 15-16)
"It is a major premise of this study that 'the secular' is conceptually prior to the political doctrine of 'secularism,' that over time a variety of concepts, practices, and sensibilities have come together to form 'the secular.'" (p. 16)
"What is distinctive about modern anthropology is the comparison of embedded concepts (representations) between societies differently located in time or space. The important thing in this comparative analysis is not their origin (Western or non-Western), but the forms of life that articulate them, the powers they release or disable. Secularism -- like religion -- is such a concept." (p. 17)
Some of Asad's questions regarding an anthropology of secularism: (p. 17)
- How do attitudes to the human body (to pain, physical damage, decay, and death, to physical integrity, bodily growth, and sexual enjoyment) differ in various forms of life?
- What structures of the senses -- hearing, seeing, touching -- do these attitudes depend on?
- In what ways does the law define and regulate practices and doctrines on the grounds that they are "truly human"?
- What discursive spaces does this work of definition and regulation open up for grammars of 'the secular' and 'the religious'?
- How do all these sensibilities, attitudes, assumptions, and behaviors come together to support or undermine the doctrine of secularism?
~ On the whole, as a study of secularism linked with nation-states, Talal Asad's chapters would focus a lot on religious vs. secular anthropology within politicized contexts. It would be national rather than transnational, with nation states being the entities that grant subjects agency, whether faith-based or secular.
Chapter 1: What Might an Anthropology of Secularism Look Like? pp. 21-66
"What I want to do here is to trace practical consequences of its [myth] uses in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries in order to investigate some of the ways the secular was constituted." (p. 23)
~ Asad spends the bulk of this chapter tracing the history of the formation of the concept of the "secular."
"What follows is not a social history of secularization, nor even a history of it as an idea. It is an exploration of epistemological assumptions of the secular that might help us be a little clearer about what is involved in the anthropology of secularism. The secular, I argue, is neither continuous with the religious that supposedly preceded it (that is, it is not the latest phrase of a sacred origin) nor a simple break from it (that is, it is not the opposite, an essence that excludes the sacred). I take the secular to be a concept that brings together certain behaviors, knowledges, and sensibilities in modern life." (p. 25)
"The analyses that I offer here are intended as a counter to the triumphalist history of the secular." (p. 25)
Homo sacer as lineage of sacred and profane, the paradox:
"Thus while the sacredness of property dedicated to a god made it inviolable, the sacredness of homo sacer made him eminently subject to violence." (p. 30)
~ c.f. Georgio Agamben, which then also ties into the concept of politicized life and agency from within a nation-state context.
"What facilitated the essentialization of 'the sacred' as an external, transcendent power? My tentative answer is that new theorizations of the sacred were connected with European encounters with the non-European world, in the enlightened space and time that witnessed the construction of 'religion' and 'nature' as universal categories." (p. 35)
"It may therefore be suggested that 'profanation' is a kind of forcible emancipation from error and despotism. Reason requires that false things be either proscribed and eliminated, or transcribed and re-sited as objects to be seen, heard, and touched by the properly educated senses. By successfully unmasking pretended power (profaning it) universal reason displays its own status as legitimate power. By empowering new things, this status is further confirmed." (pp. 35-36)
"A secular critique developed, accidentally as it were, out of a concern with the apparent unviability of Christian traditional practice and that in itself helped to constitute the field of written secular history. The result was a clearer split between 'scientific' history (including ecclesiastical history) that depended on an attitude of skeptical inquiry in pursuit of authenticity, and 'imaginative' literature (or religion and the arts generally) that depended on setting aside the question of propositional validity. This growing split was what consolidated 'secular history' -- history as the record of 'what really happened' in this world -- and in the same moment, it shaped the modern understanding of 'myth,' 'sacred discourse,' and 'symbolism.'" (pp. 42-43)
~ The secular did not emerge without the religious. In defining one, the other is also given a modern set of definition. As Asad said earlier, he is not looking into the secular as the absence of the religious, or the "next stage" in the evolution of human spirituality/secularism.
"...the secularization of pain signals not merely the abandonment of a transcendental language ('religious obsessions') but the shift to a new preoccupation -- from the personal attempt at consoling and curing (that is, inhabiting a social relationship) to a distanced attempt at investigating the functions and sensations of the living body." (p. 48)
~ In this, the body is secularized. It is no longer a mystery of creation in all its functions, but has become something that is clinically studied, with repeated experimentation and investigation through testing of animals, for example.
Adonis, Arabic poet:
"'The sacred (al-muqaddas) for atheism (ilhad) is the human being himself, the human being of reason, and there is nothing greater than this human being. It replaces revelation by reason, and God by humanity.' But an atheism that deifies Man is, ironically, close to the doctrine of the incarnation. The idea that there is a single, clear 'logic of atheism' is itself the product of a modern binary -- belief or unbelief in a supernatural Being." (p. 55)
~ The non-Western emergence of the concept of atheism also shows that the secular did not emerge without also redefining the sacred.
In a nutshell:
"I began this chapter with the view of radical anthropologists who criticize the modern liberal state of pretending to be secular and rational when in fact it was heavily invested in myth and violence. I then proceeded to problematize the secular as a category by investigating its transformations. I now conclude with a contemporary liberal political theorist who argues that a secular, liberal state depends crucially for its public virtues (equality, tolerance, liberty) on political myth -- that is, on origin narratives that provide a foundation for its political values and a coherent framework for its public and private morality." (p. 56)
~ This makes me think of the similarities in idealization shared between a faith-based organization, in which the ideal is clearly stated as adherence to the practice/teaching of whatever faith the organization was founded upon, and "secular" groups such as the army and Peace Corps, in which the ideology is not religious per se, but intensely "nation myth-based" in its perpetuation of national ideology (and maintainence of a good national image). Both possess elements of mythos, and the work of both can also be intensely secular.
On intervention:
"The thought that the world needs to be redeemed is more than merely an idea. Since the eighteenth century it has animated a variety of intellectual and social projects within Christendom and beyond, in European global empires. In practice they have varied from country to country, unified only by the aspiration toward liberal modernity." (p. 61)
"But the similarity of these projects to the Christian idea of redemption should not, I submit, lead us to think of them as simple restatements of sacred myth, as projects that are only apparently secular but in reality religious. For although the New Testament myth may have assisted in the formation of these secular projects it does not follow that the latter are essentially Christian. They embrace a distinctive politics (democratic, anticlerical), they presuppose a different kind of morality (based on the sacredness of individual conscience and individual right), and they regard suffering as entirely subjective and accidental (as bodily damage to be medically treated, or as corrective punishment for crime, or simply as the unfinished business of universal empowerment)." (p. 61)
~ In terms of child sponsorship programs, this would be the difference between the ideologies of Compassion International, World Vision, etc., and of organizations such as the one I spoke with Duke about, a secular child sponsorship program that he advocates for.
So, anthropology of the secular, what is it? (pp. 63-65)
- Paul de Man, "The Rhetoric of Temporality," secular as "the real" that is discovered when romanticism is shattered. Source from early Romantics.
- Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, subject vs. object as opposition between humans, secular in that it is no longer an allegory of Christianity. Source from Baroque.
Chapter 2: Thinking about Agency and Pain, pp. 67-99
"In this chapter I explore it [the secular] through the concept of agency, especially agency connected to pain. Why agency? Because the secular depends on particular conceptions of action and passion. Why pain? For two reasons: First, because in the sense of passion, pain is associated with religious subjectivity and often regarded as inimical to reason; second, because in the sense of suffering it is thought of as a human condition that secular agency must eliminate universally." (p. 67)
On "body":
"Even in the growing field of medical anthropology, where innovative work has given us a cultural understanding of health and disease, the standard meaning of agency is taken too much for granted. The sick body is often represented no differently from the healthy body in that for both resistance to power is the form that agency typically takes." (pp. 69-70)
"The anthropological use of the notion of 'resistance' has rightly been criticized for underestimating the strength and diversity of power structures. I am worried less by what has been called 'the romance of resistance' than by the more inclusive category of 'agency' presupposed by it." (p. 70)
"The tendency to romanticize resistance comes from a metaphysical question to which this notion of 'agency' is a response: Given the essential freedom, or the natural sovereignty, of the human subject, and given, too, its own desires and interests, what should human beings do to realize their freedom, empower themselves, and choose pleasure? The assumption here is that power -- and so too pain -- is external to and repressive of the agent, that it 'subjects' him or her, and that nevertheless the agent as 'active subject' has both the desire to oppose power and the responsibility to become more powerful so that disempowerment -- suffering -- can be overcome." (p. 71)
~ Asad is against this assumption. Note: I'm not primarily dealing with the manifestation of agency through resistance in my paper. For reference only.
"Assuming that agency need not be conceptualized in terms of individual self-empowerment and resistance, or of utopian history, how should it be understood? One might begin by looking at usages of the term... in different historical contexts. This would indicate not merely that agency is not a natural category, but that the successive uses of this concept... have opened up or closed very different possibilities for acting and being. The secular, with its focus on empowerment and history-making, is merely one of those possibilities." (p. 73)
Agency also means representation.
"The idea of representation underlying agency is rooted in a paradox: that who or what is represented is both absent and present at the same time (re-presented). Theatrical representation, where the actor's body makes present someone who is absent, exemplifies in a different way the same paradox." (p. 75)
More on agency:
"Agency both increased the desire for self-transcendence and made self-transcendence more difficult to attain. For women as well as men, the problem was not in finding the authority to speak and act; it was in remembering that the authority didn't belong to them." (p. 78)
"Thus 'agency' is a complex term whose senses emerge within semantic and institutional networks that define and make possible particular ways of relating to people, things, and oneself." (p. 78)
~ Here, intention is a main element for detecting the presence of agency -- empowerment and taking the given empowerment.
"Although various usages of agency have very different implications that do not all hang together, cultural theory tends to reduce them to the metaphysical idea of a conscious agent-subject having both the capacity and the desire to move in a singular historical direction: that of increasing self-empowerment and decreasing pain." (p. 79)
On pain:
"When we say that someone is suffering, we commonly suppose that he or she is not an agent. To suffer... is, so we usually think, to be in a passive state -- to be an object, not a subject. One readily allows that pain may be a cause for action... but one does not normally think of it as action itself." (p. 79)
~ Asad points out that this is the common assumption/perception.
"The agent suffers because of the pain of someone she loves -- a mother, say, confronted by her wounded child. That suffering is a condition of her relationship, something that includes her ability to respond sympathetically to the pain of the original sufferer. The person who suffers because of another's pain doesn't first assess the evidence presented to her and then decide on whether and how to react. She lives a relationship.... Only in law does the mother stand as an individual agent with responsibility toward the child regardless of her actual feelings." (p. 82)
~ The compassion/relational emotion of the agent toward the subject. Though one can never truly assess the ability of the sufferer to convey his/her pain, the relational aspect of the agent-subject connection prompts action from the agent, seen as a legitimate move for some form of (re)solution.
Paradox: embracing of suffering in religious context.
~ What Asad calls "the role of pain in the economy of action," this defies the commonly held perception that the sufferer lacks agency. Here, pain is a conscious choice -- welcomed and accepted. Asad also mentions sadomasochism (secular), which he discusses in the next chapter.
"The self-subjection of these Christians to pain (at least as represented in the martyrologies on which Perkins draws) was itself a form of agency not because of their active intention... nor primarily because of the symbolic significance of suffering. It was a form of agency because, as part of an emerging tradition, their public suffering made a difference not only to themselves (to their own potential actions) as members of a new faith but also to the world in which they lived: it required that one's own pain and the pain of others be engaged with differently." (p. 87)
Asad closes with a study of Oedipus as agent and sufferer of pain.
Should nationalism be understood as secularized religion? pp. 187-194
"I am arguing that 'the secular' should not be thought of as the space in which real human life gradually emancipates itself from the controlling power of 'religion' and thus achieves the latter's relocation. It is this assumption that allows us to think of religion as 'infecting' the secular domain or as replicating within it the structure of theological concepts." (p. 191)
"The concept of 'the secular' today is part of a doctrine called secularism. Secularism doesn't simply insist that religious practice and belief be confined to a space where they cannot threaten political stability or the liberties of 'free-thinking' citizens. Secularism builds on a particular conception of the world ('nature' and 'social') and of the problems generated by that world." (pp. 191-192)
"Nationalism, with its vision of a universe of national societies (the state being thought of as necessary to their full articulation) in which individual humans live their worldly existence requires the concept of the secular to make sense. The loyalty that the individual nationalist owes is directly and exclusively to the nation." (p. 193)
"To insist that nationalism should be seen as religion, or even as having been 'shaped' by religion is, in my view, to miss the nature and consequence of the revolution brought about by modern doctrines and practices of the secular in the structure of collective representations. Of course modern nationalism draws on preexisting languages and practices -- including those that we call, anachronistically, 'religious.' How could it be otherwise? Yet it doesn't follow from this that religion forms nationalism." (p. 194)
At the core, the value and emergence of the sacred vs. the secular are different. When the sacred is religion and the secular is the state, the differences should continue to be acknowledged.
Talal Asad, Stanford University Press, 2003.
"What is the connection between 'the secular' as an epistemic category and 'secularism' as a political doctrine? Can they be objects of anthropological inquiry? What might an anthropology of secularism look like? This book attempts, in a preliminary way, to address these questions." (p. 1)
Introduction: Thinking about Secularism, pp. 1-17
"[Charles] Taylor takes it for granted that the emergence of secularism is closely connected to the rise of the modern nation-state, and he identifies two ways in which secularism has legitimized it. First there was the attempt to find the lowest common denominator among the doctrines of conflicting religious sects, and second, the attempt to define a political ethic independent of religious convictions altogether. It is this latter model that is applicable throughout the world today, but only after we have adapted to it the Rawlsian idea of an overlapping consensus, which proceeds on the assumption that there can be no universally agreed basis, whether secular or religious, for the political principles accepted in a modern, heterogeneous society." (p. 2)
"In today's liberal democracies a strong case can be made for the thesis that there is less and less of a direct link between the electorate and its parliamentary representatives -- that the latter are less and less representative of the socio-economic interests, identities, and aspirations of a culturally differentiated and economically polarized electorate." (p. 4)
The lack of directness attributed to: (p. 4)
- Pressure groups
- Opinion polls
- Mass media
Thus: "The modern nation as an imagined community is always mediated through constructed images."
"So what does the idea of an overlapping consensus do for the doctrine of secularism? In a religiously diverse society, Taylor claims, it allows people to have different (even mutually exclusive) reasons for subscribing to the independent, secular ethic. For example, the right to life may be justified by secular or religious beliefs -- and the latter may come in several varieties that belong to different traditions. This means that political disagreements will be continuous, incapable of being authoritatively resolved, and that temporary resolutions will have to depend on negotiated compromise." (p. 6)
~ The compromise to generate consensus, according to Taylor, comes in the forms of persuasion and negotiation.
"If secularism as a doctrine requires the distinction between private reason and public principle, it also demands the placing of the 'religious' in the former by the 'secular.'" (p. 8)
"Now some reflection would show that violence does not need to be justified by the Qur'an -- or any other scripture for that matter.... Nor has any government (and rebel group), whether Western or non-Western, needed to justify its use of indiscriminate cruelty against civilians by appealing to the authority of sacred scripture. They might in some cases do so because that seems to them just -- or else expedient. But that's very different from saying that they are constrained to do so." (p. 10)
On agency: (p. 11)
- Religious reader: active (interpreter)
- Religious text: passive (interpreted)
"Modernity is a project -- or rather, a series of interlinked projects -- that certain people in power seek to achieve. The project aims at institutionalizing a number of (sometimes conflicting, often evolving) principles: constitutionalism, moral autonomy, democracy, human rights, civil equality, industry, consumerism, freedom of the market -- and secularism." (p. 13)
~ Is there such a "modern project"?
"What practical options are opened up or closed by the notion that the world has no significant binary features, that it is, on the contrary, divided into overlapping, fragmented cultures, hybrid selves, continuously dissolving and emerging social states?" (p. 15)
"For it is precisely the process by which these conceptual binaries are established or subverted that tells us how people live the secular -- how they vindicate the essential freedom and responsibility of the sovereign self in opposition to the constraints of that self by religious discourses." (pp. 15-16)
"It is a major premise of this study that 'the secular' is conceptually prior to the political doctrine of 'secularism,' that over time a variety of concepts, practices, and sensibilities have come together to form 'the secular.'" (p. 16)
"What is distinctive about modern anthropology is the comparison of embedded concepts (representations) between societies differently located in time or space. The important thing in this comparative analysis is not their origin (Western or non-Western), but the forms of life that articulate them, the powers they release or disable. Secularism -- like religion -- is such a concept." (p. 17)
Some of Asad's questions regarding an anthropology of secularism: (p. 17)
- How do attitudes to the human body (to pain, physical damage, decay, and death, to physical integrity, bodily growth, and sexual enjoyment) differ in various forms of life?
- What structures of the senses -- hearing, seeing, touching -- do these attitudes depend on?
- In what ways does the law define and regulate practices and doctrines on the grounds that they are "truly human"?
- What discursive spaces does this work of definition and regulation open up for grammars of 'the secular' and 'the religious'?
- How do all these sensibilities, attitudes, assumptions, and behaviors come together to support or undermine the doctrine of secularism?
~ On the whole, as a study of secularism linked with nation-states, Talal Asad's chapters would focus a lot on religious vs. secular anthropology within politicized contexts. It would be national rather than transnational, with nation states being the entities that grant subjects agency, whether faith-based or secular.
Chapter 1: What Might an Anthropology of Secularism Look Like? pp. 21-66
"What I want to do here is to trace practical consequences of its [myth] uses in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries in order to investigate some of the ways the secular was constituted." (p. 23)
~ Asad spends the bulk of this chapter tracing the history of the formation of the concept of the "secular."
"What follows is not a social history of secularization, nor even a history of it as an idea. It is an exploration of epistemological assumptions of the secular that might help us be a little clearer about what is involved in the anthropology of secularism. The secular, I argue, is neither continuous with the religious that supposedly preceded it (that is, it is not the latest phrase of a sacred origin) nor a simple break from it (that is, it is not the opposite, an essence that excludes the sacred). I take the secular to be a concept that brings together certain behaviors, knowledges, and sensibilities in modern life." (p. 25)
"The analyses that I offer here are intended as a counter to the triumphalist history of the secular." (p. 25)
Homo sacer as lineage of sacred and profane, the paradox:
"Thus while the sacredness of property dedicated to a god made it inviolable, the sacredness of homo sacer made him eminently subject to violence." (p. 30)
~ c.f. Georgio Agamben, which then also ties into the concept of politicized life and agency from within a nation-state context.
"What facilitated the essentialization of 'the sacred' as an external, transcendent power? My tentative answer is that new theorizations of the sacred were connected with European encounters with the non-European world, in the enlightened space and time that witnessed the construction of 'religion' and 'nature' as universal categories." (p. 35)
"It may therefore be suggested that 'profanation' is a kind of forcible emancipation from error and despotism. Reason requires that false things be either proscribed and eliminated, or transcribed and re-sited as objects to be seen, heard, and touched by the properly educated senses. By successfully unmasking pretended power (profaning it) universal reason displays its own status as legitimate power. By empowering new things, this status is further confirmed." (pp. 35-36)
"A secular critique developed, accidentally as it were, out of a concern with the apparent unviability of Christian traditional practice and that in itself helped to constitute the field of written secular history. The result was a clearer split between 'scientific' history (including ecclesiastical history) that depended on an attitude of skeptical inquiry in pursuit of authenticity, and 'imaginative' literature (or religion and the arts generally) that depended on setting aside the question of propositional validity. This growing split was what consolidated 'secular history' -- history as the record of 'what really happened' in this world -- and in the same moment, it shaped the modern understanding of 'myth,' 'sacred discourse,' and 'symbolism.'" (pp. 42-43)
~ The secular did not emerge without the religious. In defining one, the other is also given a modern set of definition. As Asad said earlier, he is not looking into the secular as the absence of the religious, or the "next stage" in the evolution of human spirituality/secularism.
"...the secularization of pain signals not merely the abandonment of a transcendental language ('religious obsessions') but the shift to a new preoccupation -- from the personal attempt at consoling and curing (that is, inhabiting a social relationship) to a distanced attempt at investigating the functions and sensations of the living body." (p. 48)
~ In this, the body is secularized. It is no longer a mystery of creation in all its functions, but has become something that is clinically studied, with repeated experimentation and investigation through testing of animals, for example.
Adonis, Arabic poet:
"'The sacred (al-muqaddas) for atheism (ilhad) is the human being himself, the human being of reason, and there is nothing greater than this human being. It replaces revelation by reason, and God by humanity.' But an atheism that deifies Man is, ironically, close to the doctrine of the incarnation. The idea that there is a single, clear 'logic of atheism' is itself the product of a modern binary -- belief or unbelief in a supernatural Being." (p. 55)
~ The non-Western emergence of the concept of atheism also shows that the secular did not emerge without also redefining the sacred.
In a nutshell:
"I began this chapter with the view of radical anthropologists who criticize the modern liberal state of pretending to be secular and rational when in fact it was heavily invested in myth and violence. I then proceeded to problematize the secular as a category by investigating its transformations. I now conclude with a contemporary liberal political theorist who argues that a secular, liberal state depends crucially for its public virtues (equality, tolerance, liberty) on political myth -- that is, on origin narratives that provide a foundation for its political values and a coherent framework for its public and private morality." (p. 56)
~ This makes me think of the similarities in idealization shared between a faith-based organization, in which the ideal is clearly stated as adherence to the practice/teaching of whatever faith the organization was founded upon, and "secular" groups such as the army and Peace Corps, in which the ideology is not religious per se, but intensely "nation myth-based" in its perpetuation of national ideology (and maintainence of a good national image). Both possess elements of mythos, and the work of both can also be intensely secular.
On intervention:
"The thought that the world needs to be redeemed is more than merely an idea. Since the eighteenth century it has animated a variety of intellectual and social projects within Christendom and beyond, in European global empires. In practice they have varied from country to country, unified only by the aspiration toward liberal modernity." (p. 61)
"But the similarity of these projects to the Christian idea of redemption should not, I submit, lead us to think of them as simple restatements of sacred myth, as projects that are only apparently secular but in reality religious. For although the New Testament myth may have assisted in the formation of these secular projects it does not follow that the latter are essentially Christian. They embrace a distinctive politics (democratic, anticlerical), they presuppose a different kind of morality (based on the sacredness of individual conscience and individual right), and they regard suffering as entirely subjective and accidental (as bodily damage to be medically treated, or as corrective punishment for crime, or simply as the unfinished business of universal empowerment)." (p. 61)
~ In terms of child sponsorship programs, this would be the difference between the ideologies of Compassion International, World Vision, etc., and of organizations such as the one I spoke with Duke about, a secular child sponsorship program that he advocates for.
So, anthropology of the secular, what is it? (pp. 63-65)
- Paul de Man, "The Rhetoric of Temporality," secular as "the real" that is discovered when romanticism is shattered. Source from early Romantics.
- Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, subject vs. object as opposition between humans, secular in that it is no longer an allegory of Christianity. Source from Baroque.
Chapter 2: Thinking about Agency and Pain, pp. 67-99
"In this chapter I explore it [the secular] through the concept of agency, especially agency connected to pain. Why agency? Because the secular depends on particular conceptions of action and passion. Why pain? For two reasons: First, because in the sense of passion, pain is associated with religious subjectivity and often regarded as inimical to reason; second, because in the sense of suffering it is thought of as a human condition that secular agency must eliminate universally." (p. 67)
On "body":
"Even in the growing field of medical anthropology, where innovative work has given us a cultural understanding of health and disease, the standard meaning of agency is taken too much for granted. The sick body is often represented no differently from the healthy body in that for both resistance to power is the form that agency typically takes." (pp. 69-70)
"The anthropological use of the notion of 'resistance' has rightly been criticized for underestimating the strength and diversity of power structures. I am worried less by what has been called 'the romance of resistance' than by the more inclusive category of 'agency' presupposed by it." (p. 70)
"The tendency to romanticize resistance comes from a metaphysical question to which this notion of 'agency' is a response: Given the essential freedom, or the natural sovereignty, of the human subject, and given, too, its own desires and interests, what should human beings do to realize their freedom, empower themselves, and choose pleasure? The assumption here is that power -- and so too pain -- is external to and repressive of the agent, that it 'subjects' him or her, and that nevertheless the agent as 'active subject' has both the desire to oppose power and the responsibility to become more powerful so that disempowerment -- suffering -- can be overcome." (p. 71)
~ Asad is against this assumption. Note: I'm not primarily dealing with the manifestation of agency through resistance in my paper. For reference only.
"Assuming that agency need not be conceptualized in terms of individual self-empowerment and resistance, or of utopian history, how should it be understood? One might begin by looking at usages of the term... in different historical contexts. This would indicate not merely that agency is not a natural category, but that the successive uses of this concept... have opened up or closed very different possibilities for acting and being. The secular, with its focus on empowerment and history-making, is merely one of those possibilities." (p. 73)
Agency also means representation.
"The idea of representation underlying agency is rooted in a paradox: that who or what is represented is both absent and present at the same time (re-presented). Theatrical representation, where the actor's body makes present someone who is absent, exemplifies in a different way the same paradox." (p. 75)
More on agency:
"Agency both increased the desire for self-transcendence and made self-transcendence more difficult to attain. For women as well as men, the problem was not in finding the authority to speak and act; it was in remembering that the authority didn't belong to them." (p. 78)
"Thus 'agency' is a complex term whose senses emerge within semantic and institutional networks that define and make possible particular ways of relating to people, things, and oneself." (p. 78)
~ Here, intention is a main element for detecting the presence of agency -- empowerment and taking the given empowerment.
"Although various usages of agency have very different implications that do not all hang together, cultural theory tends to reduce them to the metaphysical idea of a conscious agent-subject having both the capacity and the desire to move in a singular historical direction: that of increasing self-empowerment and decreasing pain." (p. 79)
On pain:
"When we say that someone is suffering, we commonly suppose that he or she is not an agent. To suffer... is, so we usually think, to be in a passive state -- to be an object, not a subject. One readily allows that pain may be a cause for action... but one does not normally think of it as action itself." (p. 79)
~ Asad points out that this is the common assumption/perception.
"The agent suffers because of the pain of someone she loves -- a mother, say, confronted by her wounded child. That suffering is a condition of her relationship, something that includes her ability to respond sympathetically to the pain of the original sufferer. The person who suffers because of another's pain doesn't first assess the evidence presented to her and then decide on whether and how to react. She lives a relationship.... Only in law does the mother stand as an individual agent with responsibility toward the child regardless of her actual feelings." (p. 82)
~ The compassion/relational emotion of the agent toward the subject. Though one can never truly assess the ability of the sufferer to convey his/her pain, the relational aspect of the agent-subject connection prompts action from the agent, seen as a legitimate move for some form of (re)solution.
Paradox: embracing of suffering in religious context.
~ What Asad calls "the role of pain in the economy of action," this defies the commonly held perception that the sufferer lacks agency. Here, pain is a conscious choice -- welcomed and accepted. Asad also mentions sadomasochism (secular), which he discusses in the next chapter.
"The self-subjection of these Christians to pain (at least as represented in the martyrologies on which Perkins draws) was itself a form of agency not because of their active intention... nor primarily because of the symbolic significance of suffering. It was a form of agency because, as part of an emerging tradition, their public suffering made a difference not only to themselves (to their own potential actions) as members of a new faith but also to the world in which they lived: it required that one's own pain and the pain of others be engaged with differently." (p. 87)
Asad closes with a study of Oedipus as agent and sufferer of pain.
Should nationalism be understood as secularized religion? pp. 187-194
"I am arguing that 'the secular' should not be thought of as the space in which real human life gradually emancipates itself from the controlling power of 'religion' and thus achieves the latter's relocation. It is this assumption that allows us to think of religion as 'infecting' the secular domain or as replicating within it the structure of theological concepts." (p. 191)
"The concept of 'the secular' today is part of a doctrine called secularism. Secularism doesn't simply insist that religious practice and belief be confined to a space where they cannot threaten political stability or the liberties of 'free-thinking' citizens. Secularism builds on a particular conception of the world ('nature' and 'social') and of the problems generated by that world." (pp. 191-192)
"Nationalism, with its vision of a universe of national societies (the state being thought of as necessary to their full articulation) in which individual humans live their worldly existence requires the concept of the secular to make sense. The loyalty that the individual nationalist owes is directly and exclusively to the nation." (p. 193)
"To insist that nationalism should be seen as religion, or even as having been 'shaped' by religion is, in my view, to miss the nature and consequence of the revolution brought about by modern doctrines and practices of the secular in the structure of collective representations. Of course modern nationalism draws on preexisting languages and practices -- including those that we call, anachronistically, 'religious.' How could it be otherwise? Yet it doesn't follow from this that religion forms nationalism." (p. 194)
At the core, the value and emergence of the sacred vs. the secular are different. When the sacred is religion and the secular is the state, the differences should continue to be acknowledged.
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(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-04 08:41 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-04 09:46 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-05 07:23 am (UTC)------
ending:
“Ma?” you begin, watching her eat like the little argument never happened. It can’t just keep going on like this, but you two have to talk before you can really talk. When she lifts her head, you say, “I’ve missed you.”
“Sit down,” she says and you find it hard (to listen). “Sit down.”
And you do.
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i suppose the "find it hard" is the difficult part. should i say it or is it implied when "you" don't sit the first time around? i think you sitting puts a resolution to it and makes the mother's words sound not quite so bad. (the original ending i sent to teh class was the mother saying: "sit".)
also i deleted the earlier two sentences about regretting that you dont listen to your mother, b/c i feel you're right, that it's implied that she does (and she does actually do that). you get a feeling for the rebellious child here coming around.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-05 08:24 am (UTC)---------
“Sit down,” she says. “Sit down and eat your dinner.”
Since it’s about trying and not having your way every time, you can do this. You can sit down and eat your dinner and maybe afterwards, when she’s ready and you’re feeling brave. You’ll jump the space that’s been separating you from her and you’ll say it’s true. You really have missed her. And maybe she'll say the same.
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it's a tempered ending, hesitant but hopeful and not too sweet b/c you really don't know what the mother is thinking. but then you're only in her POV.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-05 01:07 pm (UTC)Can't write much... I hope your class and professor like will like the revised version!
(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-05 03:50 pm (UTC)