Introduction: Thinking about Secularism

I

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.

The contemporary salience of religious movements around the globe, and the torrent of commentary on them by scholars and journal­ists, have made it plain that religion is by no means disappearing in the modern world. The “resurgence of religion” Jias been welcomed by many as a means of supplying what they see as a needed moral dimension to sec­ular politics and environmental concerns. It has been regarded by others with alarm as a symptom of growing irrationality and intolerance in everyday life. The question of secularism, has emerged as an object of aca­demic argument and of practical dispute. If anything is agreed upon, it is that a straightforward narrativ^of progress from the religious to the secu­lar is no longer acceptable. But does it follow that secularism is not uni­versally valid?

Secularism as political doctrine arose in modern Euro-America. It is easy to think of it simply as requiring the separation of religious from sec­ular institutions in government, but that is not all it is. Abstractly stated, examples of this separation can be found in medieval Christendom and in the Islamic empires—and no doubt elsewhere too. What is distinctive about “secularism” is that it presupposes new concepts of “religion,” “ethics,” and “politics,” and new imperatives associated with them. Many people have sensed this novelty and reacted to it in a variety of ways. Thus the opponents of secularism in the Middle East and elsewhere have re­jected it as specific to the West, while its advocates have insisted that its particular origin does not detract from its contemporary global relevance.

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. Taylor agrees with Rawls that the political ethic will be embedded in some understanding or other of the good, but argues against Rawls that background understandings and foreground political principles need not be tightly bound together as the latter maintains. This model of secularism is not only intellectually appealing, it is also, Taylor believes, one that the modern democratic state cannot do without.

Taylor likes Benedict Andersons thought that a modern nation is an “imagined community” because it enables him to emphasize two features of the modern imaginary that belongs to a democratic state. These are: first, the horizontal, direct-access character of modern society; and second, its grounding in secular, homogeneous time. Direct access is reflected in several developments: the rise of the public sphere (the equal right of all to participate in nationwide discussions), the extension of the market princi-

i.

Is this account persuasive? Some doubts arise at this point. Surely, the payment of taxes and induction into the army depend not on self­enforcement but on enforcement by the state? “Some degree” of partici­pation in governance (by which Taylor means taking part in elections once every four or five years) explicitly refers to a statistical measure of the entire population and not to a measure of how strong'individual motiva­tion is. It depends, therefore, on the political skill with which large num­bers are managed—including the organization and financing of electoral campaigns—rather than on the ethics of individual self-discipline. The distinctive feature of modern liberal governance, I would submit, is nei­ther compulsion (force) nor negotiation (consent) but the statecraft that uses “self-discipline” and “participation,” “law” and “economy” as ele­ments of political strategy.

2. Ibid., p. 43·.

sponsive to the governed, and when the state security apparatuses are grossly inefficient. Policing techniques and an economy that avoids disap­pointing too many in the general population too seriously are more im­portant than' self-discipline as an autonomous factor.

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. And the absence of a direct reflection of the citizen in his political representation is not com­pensated for through the. various extra-parliamentary institutions con­nected to governance. On the contrary. The influence of pressure groups on government decisions is more often than not far greater than is warranted by the proportion of the electorate whose interests they directly promote (for example, the Farmers Union in Britain; AIPAC and the oil lobby in the United States). Opinion polls, continuously monitoring the fragile col­lective views of citizens, keep the government informed about public sen­timent between elections, and enable it to anticipate or influence opinion independently of the electoral mandate.

The modern nation as an imagined community is always mediated through constructed images. When Taylor says that a modern democracy must acquire a healthy dose of nationalist sentiment^[4] he refers to the na­tional media—including national education—that is charged with culti-

Introduction 5 vating it. For the media are not simply the means through which individ­uals simultaneously imagine their national community; they mediate that imagination, construct the sensibilities that underpin it.⁵ When Taylor says that the modern state has to make citizenship the primary principle of identity, he refers to the way it must transcend the different identities built on class, gender, and religion, replacing conflicting perspectives by unify­ing experience. In an important sense, this transcendent mediation is sec­ularism. Secularism is not simply an intellectual answer to a question about enduring social peace and toleration. It is an enactment by which a politi­cal medium (representation of citizenship) redefines and transcends partic­ular and differentiating practices of the self that are articulated through class, gender, and religion. In contrast, the process of mediation enacted in “premodern” societies includes ways in which the state mediates local iden­tities without aiming at transcendence.

So much for questions of space in modern secular society—the al­leged absence of hierarchy and supposed dependence on horizontal soli­darity. What about time? Here, too, the reality is more complex than Tay­lor’s model suggests. The homogeneous time of state bureaucracies and market dealings is of course central to the calculations of modern political economy. It allows speed and direction to be plotted with precision. But there are other temporalities—immediate and mediated, reversible and nonreversible—by which individuals in a heterogeneous society live and by which therefore their political responses are shaped.

In short, the assumption that liberal democracy ushers in a direct- access society seems to me questionable. The forms of mediation charac­teristic of modern society certainly differ from medieval Christian—and Islamic—ones, but this is not a simple matter of the absence of “religion” in the public life of the modern nation-state. For even in modern secular countries the place of religion varies, Thus although in France both the highly centralized state and its citizens are secular, in Britain the state is linked to the Established Church and its inhabitants are largely nonreli­gious, and in America the population is largely religious but the federal state is secular. “Religion” has always been publicly present in both Britain and America. Consequently, although the secularism of these three coun­tries have much in common, the mediating character of the modern imag-

5. See Hent de Vries, “In Media Res: Global Religion, Public Spheres, and the Task of Contemporary Comparative Religious Studies,” in Religion and Media, ed. H. de Vries and S. Weber, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001.

inary in each of them differs significantly. The notion of toleration between religiously defined groups is differently inflected in each. There is a differ­ent sense of participation in the nation and access to the state among reli­gious minorities in the three countries.

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. But given that there will be quarrels about what is to count as core political principles and as background justifications, how will they be re­solved? Taylor answers: by persuasion and negotiation. There is certainly a generous impulse behind this answer, but the nation-state is not a generous agent and its law does not deal in persuasion. Consider what happens when the parties to a dispute are unwilling to compromise on what for them is a matter of principle (a principle that articulates action and being, not a principle that is justifiable by statements of belief). If citizens are not reasoned around in a matter deemed nationally important by the govern­ment and the majority that supports it, the threat of legal action (and the violence this implies) may be used. In that situation negotiation simply amounts to the exchange of unequal concessions in situations where the weaker party has no choice.^[6] What happens, the citizen asks, to the princi­ples of equality and liberty in the modern secular imaginary when they are subjected to the necessities of the law? It emerges then that although she can choose her happiness, she may not identify her harms.

Or to put it another way: When the state attempts to forcibly estab­lish and defend “core political principles,” when its courts impose a partic­ular distinction between “core principles” and “background justifications” (for the law always works through violence), this may add to cumulative dis­affection. Can secularism then guarantee the peace it allegedly ensured in Euro-America’s early history—by shifting the violence of religious wars into the violence of national and colonial wars? The difficulty with secu­larism as a doctrine of war and peace in the world is not that it is European (and therefore alien to the non-West) but that it is closely connected with the rise of a system of capitalist nation-states—mutually suspicious and grossly unequal in power and prosperity, each possessing a collective per­sonality that is differently mediated and therefore differently guaranteed and threatened.

Thus a number of historians have noted the tendency of spokesper­sons of the American nation, a tendency that has dramatically resurfaced since the September n tragedy, to define it as “good” in opposition to its “evil” enemies at home and abroad. “It is an outlook rooted in two dis­tinctive American traditions,” says Eric Foner, a historian at Columbia University. “The country’s religious roots and its continuing high level of religious faith make Americans more likely to see enemies not just as op­ponents but as evil. Linked to that is the belief that America is the world’s last best hope of liberty, so that those who oppose America become the en­emies of freedom.”^[7] Included in this pattern, these historians tell us, is the tendency to denounce public dissent as treason and to subject various im­migrant groups to legalized suppression. The historians have traced this re­curring pattern of American nationalism (where internal difference, espe­cially when it is identified as “foreign,” becomes the focus of intolerance) from the end of the eighteenth century—that is, from the foundation of the republic—to the present. Is it to be understood in relation to its reli­gious origins? But in the twentieth century the political rhetoric and re­pressive measures have been directed at real and imagined secular oppo­nents. Regardless of the religious roots and the contemporary religiosity that historians invoke in explanation of this pattern, America has—as Tay­lor rightly observes—a model secular constitution. My point is that what­ever the cause of the repeated explosions of intolerance in American his­tory—however understandable they may be—they are entirely compatible (indeed intertwined) with secularism in a highly modern society. Thus it seems to me there has been scarcely any sustained public debate on the sig­nificance of the September n tragedy for a superpower-dominated world. On the whole the media have confined themselves to two kinds of ques­tion: on the one hand the requirements of national security and-the danger to civil liberties of the “war on terror,” and, on the other, the responsibility of Islam as a religion and Arabs as a people for acts of terror. (A number of thoughtfid articles on the September tragedy Have been published, but they do notfappear to have affected the dominant intellectual discourse.) This absence of public debate in a liberal democratic society must be ex­plained in terms of the mediating representations that define its national personality and identify the discourses that seem to threaten it.

Another instructive example is India, a country that has a secular constitution and an outstanding record as a functioning liberal democ­racy—perhaps the most impressive in the Third World. And yet in India “communal riots” (that is, between Hindus and various minorities—Mus­lim, Christian, and “Untouchable”) have occurred frequently ever since in­dependence in 1947. As Partha Chatterjee and others have pointed out, the publicly recognizable personality of the nation is strongly mediated by rep­resentations of a reconstituted high-caste Hinduism, and those who do not fit into that personality are inevitably defined as religious minorities. This has often placed the “religious minorities” in a defensive position.^[8] A secu­lar state does not guarantee toleration; it puts into play different structures of ambition and fear. The law never seeks to eliminate violence since its ob­ject is always to regulate violence.

II

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.” Private reason is not the same as private space·, it is the entidement to difference, the immunity from the force of public reason. So theoretical and practical problems remain that call for each of these categories to be defined. What makes a discourse and an ac­tion “religious” or “secular”?

A book entitled The Bible Designed to Be Read as Literature, published in England before the Second World War,^[9] has a format that does away with the traditional double columns and numbered verses, and through

Introduction 9 modern page layout and typography aims to produce the effect of a con­tinuous narrative with occasional breaks for lines of poetry. As the Intro­duction explains: “although a great part of the Bible is poetry, the poetry is printed as prose. The prose, on the other hand, instead of being printed continuously, is broken up into short ‘verses,’ and arbitrarily divided into ‘chapters.’ The Bible contains almost all the traditional types of literature; lyric poetry, dramatic and elegiac poetry, history, tales, philosophic trea­tises, collections of proverbs, letters, as well as types of writing peculiar to itself, what are called the Prophetic Books. Yet all these are presented in print as if, in the original, they had the same literary form” (page vii). The changes in layout certainly facilitate a reading of the Bible as “literature.” But as the passage quoted implicitly acknowledges, “literature” has an am­biguous sense—at once “art,” “texts dealing with a particular subject,” and simply “printed matter.”

If the Bible is read as art (whether as poetry or myth or philosophy) this is because a complicated historical development of disciplines and sensibilities has made it possible to do so. Hence the protest the Intro­duction makes to the effect that a concern for literary reading is no dero­gation of its sacred status (“And indeed, to make a rigid division benveen the sacred and the secular is surely to impoverish both”) is itself a secular expression of the text’s malleability. An atheist will not read it in the way a Christian would. Is this text essentially “religious” because it deals with the supernatural in which the Christian believes—either a text divinely revealed or a true record of divine inspiration? Or is it really “literature” because it can be read by the atheist as a human work of an? Or is the text neither in itself, but simply a reading that is either religious or literary— or possibly, as for the modern Christian, both together? For over the last two or three centuries it has become possible to bring a newly emerging concept of literature to the aid of religious sensibilities. However, until someone decides this question authoritatively, there can be no authorized allocation of what belongs to private reason and what to “a political ethic independent of religious belief” (a public ethic that is said to be sub­scribed to for diverse private reasons—-that thus become little more than rationalizations).

Let me pursue this point briefly with reference to what is described in our media, and by many of our public inrellectuals, as “the Islamic roots of violence”—especially since September 2001. Religion has long been seen

as a source of violence,^{[10] [11] and (for ideological reasons) Islam has been repre­sented in the modern West as peculiarly so (undisciplined, arbitrary, singu­larly oppressive). Experts on “Islam,” “the modern world,” and “political philosophy” have lectured the Muslim world yet again on its failure to em­brace secularism and enter modernity and on its inability to break off from its violent roots. Now some reflection would show that violence does not need to be justified by the Qur’an—or any other scripture for that matter. When General Ali Haidar of Syria, under the orders of his secular president Hafez al-Assad, massacred 30,000 to 40,000 civilians in the rebellious town of Hama in 1982 he did not invoke the Qur’an—nor did the secularist Sad­dam Hussein when he gassed thousands of Kurds and butchered the Shia population in Southern Iraq. Ariel Sharon in his indiscriminate killing and terrorizing of Palestinian civilians did not—so far as is publicly known—in­voke passages of the Torah, such as Joshua’s destruction of every living thing in Jericho.11 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 sòme 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. One need only remind oneself of the banal fact that innumerable pious Muslims, Jews, and Christians read their scriptures without being seized by the need to kill non-believers. My point here is simply to emphasize that the way people engage with such complex and multifaceted texts, translating their sense and relevance, is a complicated business involving disciplines and tra­ditions of reading, personal habit, and temperament, as well as the per­ceived demands of particular social situations.}

The present discourse about the roots of “Islamic terrorism” in Is­lamic texts trails two intriguing assumptions: (a) that the Quranic text will force Muslims to be guided by it; and (b) that Christians and Jews are free to interpret the Bible as they please. For no good reason, these assumptions take up contradictory positions between text and reader: On the one hand, the religious text is held to be determinate, fixed in its sense, and having the power to bring about particular beliefs (that in turn give rise to particular behavior) among those exposed to it—rendering readers passive. On the other hand, the religious reader is taken to be actively engaged in con­structing the meaning of texts in accordance with changing social circum­stances—so the texts are passive. These contradictory assumptions about agency help to account for the positions taken up by orientalists and oth­ers in arguments about religion and politics in Islam. A magical quality is attributed to Islamic religious texts, for they are said to be both essentially univocal (their meaning cannot be subject to dispute, just as "fundamen­talists” insist) and infectious (except in relation to the orientalist, who is, fortunately for him, immune to their dangerous power). In fact in Islam as in Christianity there is a complicated history of shifting interpretations, and the distinction is recognized between the divine text and human ap­proaches to it.

Those who think that the motive for violent action lies in "religious ideology” claim that any concern for the consequent suffering requires that we support the censorship of religious discourse—or at least the prevention of religious discourse from entering the domain where public policy is for­mulated. But it is not always clear whether it is pain and suffering as such that the secularist cares about or the pain and suffering that can be attrib­uted to religious violence because that is pain the modern imaginary con­ceives of as gratuitous. Nor is it always clear how a “religious motive” is to be unequivocally identified in modern society. Is motivated behavior that accounts for itself by religious discourse ipso facto religious or only when it does so sincerelyi But insincerity may itself be a construction of religious language. Is it assumed that there is always an unconscious motive to a reli­gious act, a motive that is therefore secular, as Freud and others have done? But that begs the question of how to distinguish between the religious and the secular. In short, to identify a (religious) motive for violence one must have a theory of motives that deals with concepts of character and disposi­tions, inwardness and visibility, the thought and the unthought.¹² In mod­ern, secular society this also means authoritative theories and practices—as

iz. Two excellent conceptual investigations appeared in 1958: G. E. M. Ans- combe, Intention, Oxford: Blackwell; and R. S. Peters, The Concept of Motivation,

in law courts, or in the hegemonic discourse of the national media, or in parliamentary forums where the intentions of foreign friends and enemies are assessed and policies formulated. ¹ '

It would be easy to point to innumerable “secular” agents who have perpetrated acts of great cruelty. But such attempts at defending “religion” are less interesting thah asking what it is we do when we assign responsi­bility for “violence and cruelty” to specific agents. One answer might be to point out that when the CIA together with the Pakistani Secret Service en­couraged, armed, and trained religious warriors to fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan, when the Saudi government facilitated the travel of volun­teer fighters from Arabia to that country, we had an action with several part-agents, networks of actors in an evolving plot. There was no single or consistent motive for that complex action not only because there were sev­eral part-agents but also because of the diverse desires, sensibilities, and self-images involved. But beyond this recognition of agentive complexity we can press the question further. When do we look for a clear motive? When we identify an unusual outcome that seems to us to call for justifi­cation or exoneration—and therefore for moral or legal responsibility. As I said above, there afe theories as to how this attribution should be done (the law being paradigmatic here), and it is important to understand them and the circumstances in which they are applied in the modern world. In brief although “religious” intentions are variously distinguished from “secular” ones in different traditions, the identification of intentions as such is espe­cially important in what scholars call modernity for allocating moral and legal accountability.

Ill

Many critics have now taken the position that “modernity” (in which secularism is centrally located) is not a verifiable object.^{[12] [13] [14] [15] They argue that contemporary societies are heterogeneous and overlapping, that they con­tain disparate, even discordant, circumstances, origins, valences, and so}

Introduction 13 forth. My response is that in a sense these critics are right (although the heuristic value of looking for necessary connections should not be forgot­ten) but that what we have here is not a simple cognitive error. Assump­tions about the integrated character of “modernity’’ are themselves part of ^T practical and political reality. They direct the way in which people commit­ted to it act in critical situations. These people aim at “modernity,” and ex­pect others (especially in the “non-West”) to do so too. This feet doesn’t dis­appear when we simply point out that “the West” isn’t an integrated totality, that many people in the West contest secularism or interpret it in different ways, that the modern epoch in the West has witnessed many arguments and several irreconcilable aspirations. On the contrary, those who assume modernity as a project know that already. (An aspect of modern colonialism is this: although the West contains many feces at home it presents a single fece abroad.^[16]) The important question, therefore, is not to determine why the idea of “modernity” (or “the West”) is a misdescription, but why it has become hegemonic as a political goal, what practical consequences follow from that hegemony, and what social conditions maintain it.

It is right to say that “modernity” is neither a totally coherent object nor a clearly bounded one, and that many of its elements originate in rela­tions with the histories of peoples outside Europe. Modernity is 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. It employs proliferating tech­nologies (of production, warfare, travel, entertainment, medicine) that generate new experiences of space and time, of cruelty and health, of con­sumption and knowledge. The notion that these experiences constitute “disenchantment”—implying a direct access to reality, a stripping away of myth, magic, and the sacred—is a salient feature of the modern epoch; It is, arguably, a product of nineteenth-century romanticism, partly linked to the growing habit of reading imaginative literature¹⁵—being enclosed within and by it—so that images of a “pre-modern” past acquire in retro­spect a quality of enchantment.

Modern projects do not hang together as an integrated totality, but they account for distinctive sensibilities, aesthetics, moralities. It is not al­ways clear what critics mean when they claim that there is no such thing as “the West” because its modern culture has diverse genealogies taking it outside Europe. If Europe has a geographical “outside” doesn’t that itself presuppose the idea of a space—at once coherent and subvertible—for lo­cating the West? In my view that is not the best way of approaching the question. Modernity is not primarily a matter of cognizing the real but of living-in-the-world. Since this is true of every epoch, what is distinctive about modernity as a historical epoch includes modernity as a political- economic project. What interests me particularly is the attempt to con­struct categories of the secular and the religious in terms of which modern living is required to take place, and nonmodern peoples are invited to as­sess their adequacy. For representations of “the secular” and “the religious” in modern and modernizing states mediate peoples identities, help shape their sensibilities, and guarantee their experiences.

But what evidence is there that there is such a thing as “a modern project”? In a review article on the new edition of The Communist Mani­festo,^ political scientist Stephen Holmes recently claimed that “the end of Communism has meant the collapse of the last world power officially founded on the Hegelian belief in capital-H History, loudly echoed by the Manifesto. The end of the Cold War means that, today, no single struggle spans the globe.”¹⁶ Yet this attribution of a universal historical teleology solely to a defeated Communism is less than convincing. Leaving aside neo-Hegelian apologists for the New World Order such as Francis Fuku­yama, Holmes’s disregard of U.S. attempts to promote a single social model over the globe is puzzling. Especially over the past fifteen years, the

15. Benedict Andersons discussion of “print-capitalism” focuses on the sig­nificance of newspaper reading for imagining the nation as a community (1983), but he does not consider the simultaneous growth of serialized novels published in periodicals and the enormous expansion in the market for imaginative “litera­ture”—both prose and poetry—that mediated people’s understanding of “real” and “imagined.” See Per Gedin, Literature in the Marketplace, London: Faber and Faber, 1982 (Swedish original 1975).

16. S. Holmes, “The End of Idiocy on a Planetary Scale,” London Review of Books, vol. 20, no. 21, October 29,1998, p. 13.

ij analyses arid prescriptions by international agencies dominated by the United States (OECD, IMF, the World Bank) have been remarkably sim­ilar regardless of the country being considered. “Seldom,” observes Serge Halimi, “has the development of the whole of humanity been conceived in terms so closely identical and so largely inspired by the American model.” As Halimi notes, that model is not confined to matters of free trade and private enterprise but includes moral and political dimensions—promi­nent among them being the doctrine of secularism.^[17] If this project has not been entirely successful on a global scale—if its result is more often further instability than homogeneity—it is certainly not because those in a posi­tion to make far-reaching decisions about the affairs of the world reject the doctrine of a singular destiny—a transcendent truth?—for all countries. (That the opponents of this project are themselves often driven by totaliz­ing ideologies and intolerant attitudes is undoubtedly true. However, it is as well to stress—in the aftermath of the September n tragedy—that my point here is not to “blame America” and “justify its enemies,” but to in­dicate that as the world’s only superpower, the protection of its interests and commitment to “freedom” require America to intervene globally and to help reform local conditions according to what appear to be universal values. The reformed local conditions include new styles of consumption and expression. Whether these are best described as “freely chosen” or “imposed” is another question.)

We should look, therefore, at the politics of national progress—in­cluding the politics of secularism—that flow from the multifaceted con­cept of modernity exemplified by "the West” (and especially by America as its leader and most advanced exemplar). But should we not also inquire about the politics of the contrary view? What politics are promoted by the notion that the world is not divided into modern and nonmodern, into West and non-West? 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? As part of such an un­derstanding I believe we must try to unpack the various assumptions on which secularism—a modern doctrine of the world in the world—is based. For it is precisely the process by which these conceptual binaries are established or subverted that tells us how people live the seciilar—how they vindicate the essential freedom and responsibility of the sovereign self in opposition to the constraints of that self by religious discourses.

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.” In the chapters that follow I therefore begin with a partial genealogy of that concept, an effort aimed at questioning its self-evident character while asserting at the same time that it nevertheless marks something real. My resort to genealogy obviously derives from ways it has been deployed by Foucault and Nietzsche, although it does not claim to follow them reli­giously. Genealogy is not intended here as a substitute for social history (“real history,” as many would put it) but as a way of working back from our present to the contingencies that have come together to give us our certainties.

But precisely for this reason, because the secular is so much part of our modern life, it is not easy to grasp it direcdy. I think it is best pursued through its shadows, as it were. That is why in the first chapter I pay special attention to the notion of myth (central to the modern idea of “enchant­ment”) in some of its historical guises—and then, in Chapters 2 and 3,1 discuss agency, pain, and cruelty in relation to embodiment. From these ex­plorations of the secular, I move to aspects of secularism—to conceptions of the human that underlie subjective rights (Chapter 4), the notion of “reli­gious minorities” in Europe (Chapter 5), and the question of whether na­tionalism is essentially secular or religious (Chapter 6). In the final chapter I deal at some length with some transformations in religious authority, law, and ethics in colonial Egypt that illuminate aspects of secularization not usually attended to.

Finally: Can anthropology as such contribute anything to the clarifi­cation of questions about secularism? Most anthropologists are taught that their discipline is essentially defined by a research technique (participant observation) carried out in a circumscribed Reid, and that as such it deals with particularity—with what Clifford Geervz, following the philosopher Gilbert Ryle, called “thick description.” And isn’t secularism a universal concept, applicable throughout the modern world—capable at once of ex­plaining and moderating the volatility of cultural multiplicities?

In my view anthropology is more than a method, and it should not be equated—as it has popularly become—with the direction given to in­quiry by the pseudoscientific notion of “fieldwork” Mary Douglas once proposed that although conventional accounts of the rise of modern an- ^T thropology locate it in the shift from armchair theorizing to intensive field­work (with invocations of Boas, Rivers, and Malinowski), the real story was very different. The account of modern anthropology that she favors begins with Marcel Mauss, pioneer of the systematic inquiry into cultural concepts (“Foreword” to Marcel Mauss, The Gift, London: Routledge, 1990, p. x). Douglas herself has been a distinguished contributor to this tradition of anthropology. But conceptual analysis as such is as old as phi­losophy. 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.

An anthropology of secularism should thus start with a curiosity about the doctrine and practice of secularism regardless of where they have originated, and it would ask: 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?

Trying to formulate such questions in detail is a more important task for anthropology than hasty pronouncements about the virtues or vices of secularism.