In Secular Translations, the anthropologist Talal Asad reflects on his lifelong engagement with secularism and its contradictions. He draws out the ambiguities in our concepts of the religious and the secular through a rich consideration of translatability and untranslatability, exploring the circuitous movements of ideas between histories and cultures. In search of meeting points between the language of Islam and the language of secular reason, Asad gives particular importance to the translations of religious ideas into nonreligious ones. He discusses the claim that liberal conceptions of equality represent earlier Christian ideas translated into secularism; explores the ways that the language and practice of religious ritual play an important but radically transformed role as they are translated into modern life; and considers the history of the idea of the self and its centrality to the project of the secular state. Secularism is not only an abstract principle that modern liberal democratic states espouse, he argues, but also a range of sensibilities. The shifting vocabularies associated with each of these sensibilities are fundamentally intertwined with different ways of life. In exploring these entanglements, Asad shows how translation opens the door for—or requires—the utter transformation of the translated. Drawing on a diverse set of thinkers ranging from al-Ghazālī to Walter Benjamin, Secular Translations points toward new possibilities for intercultural communication, seeking a language for our time beyond the language of the state.
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 ...
Soviet efforts demonstrate that successful conversion to atheism or secularism is not merely the elimination of religion or even simply ... Talal Asad uses “translation” to refer to movement across discourses, in Secular Translations.
Jakobson , " Linguistics and Poetics " ; Michael Silverstein , " Shifters , Linguistic Categories , and Cultural Description , " in Keith H. Basso and Henry A. Selby , eds . , Meaning in Anthropology ( Albuquerque : University of New ...
This is especially true in the digital age as online cultures have transformed how information is spread, how we imagine our communities, build alliances, and produce shared meaning.
See also LGBT rights Hontiveros, Risa, 167 Humanist Association of Ireland, 71 humanists, 45, 64 Huntington, Samuel, 16 Iglesia ni Cristo (INC), 137, 141, 147, 168, 227n41 Indonesia, 3, 86, 198 institutional replacement, 14, ...
On Suicide Bombing is an original and provocative analysis critiquing the work of intellectuals from both the left and the right.
But since 2001, Habermas’s thought has taken an unexpected turn. This book is the first full-length treatment of Habermas’s postsecular political philosophy, and critically analyses his new direction of thought.
This volume interrogates settled ways of thinking about the seemingly interminable conflict between religious and secular values in our world today.
Writing initially for secular clergy at Metz Cathedral, this work shows how Chrodegang's rule borrowed much from the Benedictine tradition, dealing with many of the same concerns such as the housing, feeding and disciplining of members of ...
Brilliantly alternating between intellectual and methodological approaches, this volume fosters a greater engagement with the phenomenon across disciplines.