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...
Opening with the provocative query -what might an anthropology of the secular look like?- this book explores the concepts, practices, and political fo...
In Geneologies of Religion, Talal Asad explores how religion as a historical category emerged in the West and has come to be applied as a universal concept.
The idea that religion has undergone a radical change since the Christian Reformation--from totalitarian and socially repressive to private and relatively benign--is a familiar part of the story of secularization. It is often invokved to explain and justify the liberal politics and world view of modernity. And it leads to the view that -politicized religions- threaten both reason and liberty. Asad's essays explore and...
In Geneologies of Religion, Talal Asad explores how religion as a historical category emerged in the West and has come to be applied as a un...
