Secular Bodies, Affects and Emotions: European Configurations

(Hardback)

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This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on bloomsburycollections.com Taking its cue from the study of lived religion, Secular Bodies, Affects and Emotions shows how the idea of a secular public is equally marked by a display and cultivation of affect and emotions. Whereas it is widely agreed that religion is often saturated by emotion, the secular is usually treated as a neutral background serving as the domain of public, rational deliberation. This book demonstrates that secularity and secularism are also upheld by bodily practices and emotional attachments. Drawing on empirical case studies, this is the first book to ask and explore whether a secular body exists. Building on the work of Talal Asad, the book argues that the secular is not an absence of religion, but a positive entity that comes about through its co-constitutive relationship with religion. And, once we attune ourselves to recognizing its operations as grammar which structures social practice, writing an anthropology of the secular could become a new possibility.

Reviews

This superb collection provides a powerful demonstration of the breadth of the secular as a key dimension of our feeling and acting as modern human beings. I am aware of no other volume that so amply documents what it is like, not simply to live in a secular age, but to live as a secular person. * Charles Hirschkind, Associate Professor of Anthropology, University Of California, Berkeley, USA *
Is secularism inhabitable With rich detail these studies push the discussion forward, offering new insights into the materiality and affect through which the ideas and values of the secular are made real. * Webb Keane, George Herbert Mead Collegiate Professor of Anthropology, University Of Michigan, USA, and Author of Ethical Life (2015) and Christian Moderns (2006). *
This volume offers fascinating insights into a previously unknown world of secular feelings in everyday life, ranging from Istanbul to Montreal. At the same time, it is a crucial, highly innovative contribution to the question of how to come to a theoretical framing appropriate to the study of the emotional grammar of the secular. * Rebekka Habermas, Professor of Modern History at the University Of Gttingen, Germany. *

Author Bio

Monique Scheer is Professor of Historical and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Tbingen, Germany. Nadia Fadil is Associate Professor at the IMMRC (Interculturalism, Migration and Minorities Research Centre) at the Catholic University of Leuven (KU Leuven), Belgium. Birgitte Schepelern Johansen is Associate Professor at Center for Advanced Migration Studies (AMIS), University of Copenhagen, Denmark.