by Talal Asad
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Product Description
Opening with the provocative query “what might an anthropology of the secular look like?” this book explores the concepts, practices, and political formations of secularism, with emphasis on the major historical shifts that have shaped secular sensibilities and attitudes in the modern West and the Middle East.
Talal Asad proceeds to dismantle commonly held assumptions about the secular and the terrain it allegedly covers. He argues that while anthropologists have oriented themselves to the study of the “strangeness of the non-European world” and to what are seen as non-rational dimensions of social life (things like myth, taboo, and religion),the modern and the secular have not been adequately examined.
The conclusion is that the secular cannot be viewed as a successor to religion, or be seen as on the side of the rational. It is a category with a multi-layered history, related to major premises of modernity, democracy, and the concept of human rights. This book will appeal to anthropologists, historians, religious studies scholars, as well as scholars working on modernity.
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Average Customer Review:
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
 An erudite and praiseworthy albeit easily misunderstood attempt at uncloaking the Secular disguise. , 2007-01-29
There is more here than an Anthropology of the Secular and mostly because a full appreciation of the concept can never arise from a direct response to the question "what is the secular?". And so Asad continues throughout to offer examples and elements of alterations in human thought which may have opened up a new space, creating suitable conditions and allowing 'the secular' to mark its territory and flourish. Asad makes clear that he does not equate or associate individual intentions (in the writings analyzed) with wider structural developments, the method preferred in standard historical accounts. In his chapter on the secular transformation of Egypt for example, it is made clear how reformers unwittingly muddle two sets of grammars (classical Islamic and modern secular) and thereby construct an ambiguous third set of concepts with significantly 'secular' significations.
That is ultimately the essence of this study. An attempt to trace transformations in the grammar of our language (the genealogy of concepts) And as such there is hardly one single discovery that this book can impress upon us. As readers, we can not be passive receivers but rather engage with Asad's suggestions and appreciate that this multi-faceted concept known to us as the 'secular' takes on different forms in different places as it homogenizes distinct temporalities into one singular history. Our desire for a simple linear solution, a direct "anthropology of the 'secular'" in the vein of so many "anthropologies of 'religion'" is itself an entailment of a secular mindset.
Although 'Human Rights', 'agency' and 'pain' may seem like distractions for someone focusing on secularism, they are evidence of the presence of 'modernity' and the 'secular' in our world. They are tools which the secular uses to maintain its neutral stance, and finally they are the site of conflict and contradiction which the insightful scholar can expose.
Finally, I must mention that there are sections of this work which do seem a little meandered and complex but these are few and often mulling over these areas or even inquiring into quoted texts should clarify. Some of the negative comments made in other reviews only further highlight misunderstandings or expectations of a traditional anthropological approach. In a sense, Asad's indirect, and for some, vague and incoherent method is ironically the evidence of what he is up against!
13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
 Great for A Graduate Students' Seminar--But a Confused Reading, 2006-10-19
Perhaps the best way to introduce this book is to stress what it is not. People won't find in it clear-cut definitions of the secular and the religious, or a story of the former's triumph over the later. Nor will they find an analysis of the persistence of faith-based worldviews or a depiction of modern societies' resistance to secularization. Although Talal Asad is interested in the contribution of sacred myths and metaphors to the formation of modern historical knowledge and poetic sensibility, he doesn't claim that a religious core still inhabits secular norms and practices, nor that some apparently secular institutions are really religious outfits in disguise. For instance, to those who claim that "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", he replies that the rhetoric of the axis of evil is "entirely compatible (indeed intertwined) with secularism in a highly modern society."
Asad starts by borrowing from Rawls the idea that "there can be no universally agreed basis, whether secular or religious, for the political principles accepted in a modern, heterogeneous society." Rather than trumpeting the "triumphalist history of the secular" or prophetizing religion's return with a vengeance, he is more interested in understanding the positions from which such narratives originate and what makes them possible at one particular time and place. His research agenda can be summed up as follows: "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?"
For Asad, the secular is best approached indirectly, and anthropology can provide tools toward this approach. However, he offers a somewhat contentious definition of the discipline: "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'." As a result, he gleans through research materials and ethnographic studies gathered by other social scientists, without much consideration for disciplinary boundaries or intellectual coherence.
For instance, thinking about the body and how an agent engages with pain and suffering allows him to consider situations when a passive state is actively pursued and results in a paradoxical engagement with the world. The examples analysed in the chapter span from early Christian martyrs converting their suffering into a victory over society's power, to contemporary North American Evangelical women enduring the pain of childbirth as an empowering act, or Egyptian female participants in the Islamic piety movement cultivating a virtuous self through modesty and submissiveness. Each story makes a fascinating case, but many questions are left unanswered: how do religious and secular norms inscribe themselves onto the suffering body? What do those paradoxical cases of agency tell us about the delineation of the religious realm? Does this challenge to our vision of agency as progress towards empowerment and decreasing pain also question or assumptions about secularization?
My impression is that Talal Asad surely is a great teacher: his encyclopaedic knowledge, his challenge to commonly held assumptions, his ability to look at a topic from various and unexpected angles certainly force students to think hard and come up with their own ideas. But his ability to spark debates and stimulate thinking falters when his thoughts are couched on paper and when they leave the stimulating environment of the classroom. Besides, without prior knowledge of most of the texts on which he bases his analysis, I felt like the graduate student who hasn't read the required course material prior to the seminar and who sits through the discussion with a sense of confusion and frustration.
72 of 76 people found the following review helpful:
Almost an Anthropology of the Secular, 2003-05-24
Asad, an anthropologist, is one the most interesting minds working on the concept of secularity vis à vis modernity and its tendentious universality. The entire work is loosely an examination of the secular as an epistemè and secularism as a political doctrine respectively as well as the interrelation between the two. Asking what an anthropology of secularism might look like, he avoids being bold and shuns an attempt to actually construct one. It's a concept that he's flirted with before in GENEALOGIES OF RELIGION, but any attempt to construct a magisterial theory are absent. As a work overall, the end result is a disjointed collection of previously published articles inter-mixed with new ones; however, it is worthy mentioning that even the previously published articles that reappear in this work we significantly revised from the original-at least the ones I was familiar with. Nevertheless, this doesn't detract from the collective value of the book. All the ideas he puts forward are cogent, probing, and provocative. His leading contribution is in the area of how secular discourse is perceived from the periphery of the modernization process-a periphery that `doesn't fit' into the metanarrative of Amero-European modernity since the Enlightenment. Thus, the conluding essay on the transformation of law and social ethic in colonial Egypt is alone worth the price of admission. His treatments of human rights, agency and pain, cruelty and torture, and Muslims in Europe best demonstrate the feasibility of employing anthropology as a disciplinary lens through which to scrutinize modernity and its `essential' components [esp. secularism]. Asad crosses the barrier of viewing the secular simply as the mere `separation between church and state' and enters into territory where questions can be posited such as `what created the historical moment which made possible the thought of secularism?' As such, he rolls back the shiny veneer of modernity to unravel the threads of it inner fabric. Thus, he facilitates the process whereby we can shed facile questions like: "when will Muslim societies secularize?"-moving on to questions that inquire into the historical processes that formed the secular/human subject of normative modernity in Europe. Localizing European/Western experience in such a way, a more lucid account of the advent modern society, state, religion, etc. in its non-European manifestations becomes increasingly attainable. Though rhetorically convincing, there are parts of the book that remain tendentious at best. In particular, this goes for his arguments for secularism origins lying in the modern cleavage between private morality and public law. Systematic delineation of the two spheres is actually quite old whether one refers to the Christian or Islamic tradition-just to mention a few examples, one could take the ETYMOLOGIES of Isidore of Seville or the various Muslim jurists extrapolations of the principle of "al-amr bi'l-ma'ruf wa-l-nahy `an al-munkar" (i.e., commanding the good and forbidding the wrong). Hopefully, fuller elucidation will more fully distinguish these pre-modern conceptualizations from their distinctly modern (and secular?) configurations.
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