Theorizing Secular Sensibilities Through Ethnography

In recent years, anthropologists of secularism -- itself a contested and variously defined term, sometimes conflated with non- and/or areligion -- have debated the contours of the “secular body”. Most scholars submit that the modern project of secularism is not simply a matter of separating religion from secular institutions in governments. Rather, what is distinct about secularism is “that it presupposes new concepts of ‘religion’, ‘ethics,’ and ‘politics,’ and new imperatives associated with them” (Asad 2003: 14). In short, secularisms relate tautologically and non-neutrally to these and other modern and a/nonreligious concepts.

This panel takes up and extends these discussions of subtle ways that secularism(s) shape social life, including bodies, to consider “secular sensibilities.” In Formations of the Secular, Talal Asad distinguishes secularism from “the idea of the secular” (2003: 21). So too Alessandro Ferrari (2009: 333) delineates narrative secularism as separate from legal secularism. Narrative secularism reflects how official/legal reports and parliamentary debates and media reproductions enter the public discourse and impact normative power. Secular sensibilities and their body fall under the parameters of narrations of secularism.

Numerous anthropologists have argued that secular norms are powerful because they often remain unstated, ubiquitous or banal (Hirschkind 2011; Asad 2011; Connolly 2011; Oliphant 2021). Nadia Fadil (2009, 2011)’s conceptualization of “dominant sensibilities” latent in liberal-secular regimes capture the range of dispositions and responses invoked in a supposedly secular social context (see also Amir-Moazami 2016, 2022; Jouili 2015). These sensibilities are what emerge in habitus-like expressions on people’s bodies and in their lives, relationships and imagined rituals. Other scholars who engage this notion include Talal Asad (2018: 2-3), who defines secular sensibilities as “ways of feeling, thinking, talking,” Saba Mahmood (2009: 861), who asks how a “secular affect,” in contrast to religion, is disciplined into formation, and in her analysis of controversies involving Muslims in Europe, and Nulifer Göle (2015), who introduces what she calls the “habitations of the secular,” more directly invoking Bourdieu’s (1977) work on habitus. Göle (2015: 48) shows that these “habitations” are socially constructed, as does Schirin Amir-Moazami (2016) in her description of “secular embodiments” within how an idealized secular sexuality is constructed in contrast to undesirable and harmful Jewish-Muslim sexuality in debates in Germany.

The four proposed papers build extend and critique this scholarship to consider how – from an ethnographic perspective – we can think more spectrally about “secular sensibilities,” all while drawing from ethnography. In other words, as ethnographers, how can we capture the sensorial, bodily and affective dimensions of secularism?

The first paper by Oliphant situates secular sensibilites in two carnivals in France, pointing to local and contextual theorization. She argues that by opposing hegemonic Catholic claims over space and memory that these carnivals may be understood as aimed at the cultivation of secular sensibilities.The second paper by Selby and Barras takes up ethnography with French nonreligious immigrants to Montreal and Toronto, Canada and compares their emotional engagements with the secular sensibilities they encounter in public schools. Selby and Barras problematize how these immigrants’ French "secular" backgrounds invoke these sensibilities and emotions . The third paper by Mossière draws on fieldwork with energy-based movements in Montréal, Canada to consider her participants' cultivation of secular sensing bodies as part of a scientifically informed "psychologization" of society.  The panel concludes with a paper by Amir-Moazami, who takes up secular sensibilities in contemporary Europe through her fieldwork and anthropologically informed discourse analysis of securitization. She shows how the politics of prevention are based on hegemonic, mostly unspoken and unproblematized understandings of Islam as proper “religion”, and Islamism as its improper politicized deviation. 

Bibliography

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Amir-Moazami, S. 2016. “Investigating the secular body: The politics of the male circumcision debate in Germany.” ReOrient 1 (2): 147-70.

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