Inter-area/Border Crossing

A024: New Directions in the Study of Comparative Secularity Across Asia

Organizer(s)

• 

  Mirjam Künkler

  NIAS, Sweden

Chair(s)

• 

  Mirjam Künkler

  NIAS, Sweden

Discussant(s)

• RH

  Robert Hefner

  Boston University, United States
• MY

  Mayfair Yang

  Religion
  University of California, Santa Barbara, United States
• RB

  Rajeev Bhargava

  CSDS, India
• ES

  Edith Szanto

  Religion
  University of Alabama, United States
• WH

  Wang Hui

  Tsinghua University, China

For a long time, comparative sociological research on secularism was mostly limited to the Western world as well as a few paradigmatic non-Western cases such as Turkey and India. Recent years, however, have seen increasing interest in the political and cultural articulations of secularism and secularity in other parts of the world. This roundtable shall discuss leading contributions that have been made in this field of study in recent years and point to new directions in researching secularity outside the West in comparative ways. Discussions shall focus on three questions:

• How central are colonial legacies to local notions and locally practiced forms of secularity?


• How important were regional entanglements and streams of borrowing ‘models’ or understandings of the secular within the Global South? Extant studies still tend to focus on North-South relations of  “institutional borrowing” when it is increasingly clear that local intellectual debates in the colony were also often highly informed by models from, and comparable debates in, the Global South, particularly from Turkey, India, China, and Japan.


• How can the comparative study of secularity achieve a better bridging between local (area studies) expertise and the social sciences? At present the literatures on notions and practices of the secular are highly compartmentalized, with studies of secularity in Asian societies being conducted predominantly in area studies departments, while theory-driven sociological works are produced in departments of sociology where scholars often lack the language and other methodological tools to conduct research outside the Western hemisphere. As a result, theory-building in comparative secularism studies is still often highly inflected by Western experiences and as such in effect provincial. Works produced in area studies departments, on the other hand, often fail to latch on to the major concepts and debates in the sociological discipline, thereby failing to inform mainstream theory-building.

The multidisciplinary panel shall discuss these questions provocatively and with an eye towards creating a lively and pluralistic exchange between panellists and with the audience