Talal Asad
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Talal Asad is an anthropologist at the City University of New York who has made important theoretical contributions to Post-Colonialism, Christianity, Islam, and Ritual Studies and has recently called for, and initiated, an anthropology of Secularism. Using a genealogical method developed by Friedrich Nietzsche and made prominent by Michel Foucault, Asad "complicates terms of comparison that many anthropologists, theologians, philosophers, and political scientists receive as the unexamined background of thinking, judgment, and action as such. By doing so, he creates clearings, opening new possibilities for communication, connection, and creative invention where opposition or studied indifference prevailed" (William E. Connolly in Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad and His Interlocuters 2006: 75).
[edit] Critical thematics of Talal Asad
William E. Connolly summarizes Asad's theoretical contributions as follows:
- Secularism is not merely the division between public and private realms that allows religious diversity to flourish in the latter. It can itself be a carrier of harsh exclusions. And it secretes a new definition of "religion" that conceals some of its most problematic practices from itself.
- In creating its characteristic division between secular public space and religious private space, European secularism sought to shuffle ritual and discipline into the private realm. In doing so, however, it loses touch with the ways in which embodied practices of conduct help to constitute culture, including European culture.
- The constitution of modern Europe, as a continent and a secular civilization, makes it incumbent to treat Muslims in its midst on the one hand as abstract citizens and on the other as a distinctive minority either to be tolerated (the liberal orientation) or restricted (the national orientation), depending on the politics of the day.
- European, modern, secular constitutions of Islam, in cumulative effect, converge upon a series of simple contrasts between themselves and Islamic practices. These terms of contrast falsify the deep grammar of European secularism and contribute to the culture wars some bearers of these very definitions seek to ameliorate. (ibid. 75-76)
[edit] Further reading
- Nermeen Shaikh, AsiaSource Interview with Talal Asad http://www.asiasource.org/news/special_reports/asad.cfm
- Faculty Homepage: http://web.gc.cuny.edu/anthropology/fac_asad.html
- Talal Asad. Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. 1993. The Johns Hopkins University Press, ISBN 0801846323
- Talal Asad. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. 2003. Stanford University Press, ISBN 0804747687
