By Talal Asad
Establishing with the provocative question “what may possibly an anthropology of the secular glance like?” this ebook explores the innovations, practices, and political formations of secularism, with emphasis at the significant old shifts that experience formed secular sensibilities and attitudes within the smooth West and the center East.
Talal Asad proceeds to dismantle in most cases held assumptions concerning the secular and the terrain it allegedly covers. He argues that whereas anthropologists have orientated themselves to the research of the “strangeness of the non-European world” and to what are obvious as non-rational dimensions of social existence (things like fantasy, taboo, and religion),the smooth and the secular haven't been correctly examined.
The end is that the secular can't be seen as a successor to faith, or be visible as at the facet of the rational. it's a type with a multi-layered historical past, on the topic of significant premises of modernity, democracy, and the concept that of human rights. This ebook will attract anthropologists, historians, non secular experiences students, in addition to students engaged on modernity.
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Example text
Harvard University Press, 1951, p. 156. '~ Grace is conceived of as a particular state of unawareness within a relationship, not as a divine payment for ritual assiduity. 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.
In Homer, Lincoln points out, logos refers to speech that is usually designed to placate someone and aimed at dissuading warriors from combat. " Mythoi function in the context of law much as lo- What Might an Anthropology ofSuu/orinn Look Lik~? 27 goi do in the context of war. Muthos in Homer, "is a speech-act indicating authority, performed at length, usually in public, with a full attention to every detail " 10 It never means a symbolic story that has to be decipheredor for that matter, a false one.
211). 30. "C'est ainsi que ie sacn! c:n arrive ctre constituC: en objet mythique" (op. , p. 256). 31. Marett is famous for the claim that "savag.. " R. R. , Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1914, p. xxxi. He was also the authority for Fowler's venture into evolutionary anthropology \sec: above. p. 30, n. u). 32. R. R. ~ Folk, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933· p. 4· a 34 SECULAR of its being essentially a "religious psychotherapy" as Marert also puts it, is presented as having general comparative application.