Post-Atheist Secular Sensibilities

Abstract:
Religion is often imagined to have a sway over society, influencing everything from people's political preferences and their relations to the state and the political order, to their orientations in relation to other members of society, to their national and ethnic identities, and to modernity itself in its various dimensions.  Secularism must also have a sway of society in similar ways, and just as different religions affect society in different ways, so must different secularisms.  This talk will examine the particular attitudes or sensibilities that prevail in post-Soviet-atheist societies.  While religion has had a rising role all across the region, the secular sensibilities that became the habitus of Soviet societies play an important and developing role in the post-Soviet context.  Most studies of secularism in social science focus on the level of institutions and their impact on norms, treating the attitudes that form secularism as taken-for-granted unless they emanate from religion and are seen as opposed to the secular order.  In post-Soviet Muslim contexts (or European ones for that matter), the "secular position" is taken to be the normal one that requires no explanation, whereas if people hold to "Muslim norms" or "Christian norms" which are seen as contradicting the secular order, religion is viewed as the operative force that shapes attitudes, intruding on the default normative position.  The talk will draw on cases from different post-Soviet contexts -- mainly Muslim ones -- to consider how secular sensibilities that are rooted in Soviet society shape both the ways that people on various levels of society see religion often as needing to be limited and equally see certain manifestations of religion as acceptable, valuable and normative for their society.

Bionote:
John Schoeberlein teaches sociocultural anthropology at Nazarbayev University in Kazakhstan, where he also is Director of the Center for Eurasian Regional Studies. Before moving to Kazakhstan in 2012, he served as Director of Harvard University’s Program on Central Asia and the Caucasus, and at various times as Visiting Professor at the American University in Central Asia (Bishkek), Tbilisi State University, and the Eurasian National University (Astana). His research in Central Asia and other parts of the former Soviet Union since 1984 has focused on identity processes, cultural dimensions of conflict, national ideologies, Islam, Soviet legacies, and emerging cultural orientations.

Venue: The Department of Social Anthropology's seminar room, 8th floor, Fosswinckelsgt. 6.

All interested are welcome to all the seminars!

For the spring of 2014 the BSAS series is organized by Bjørn Enge Bertelsen. For further information, please contact Bjorn.Bertelsen@sosantr.uib.no .