Events

CHAIRPERSON

Prof Prasenjit Duara, Asia Research Institute, NUS

ABSTRACT

The comparative study of religions and civilizations, including the sociology of religion and the crucial theoretical reflections it has inspired, is moving through a stage when the classic, Weberian “East-West” comparison is giving way to a more interactive, connective and circulatory view of the original problematique of the purported difference between Eastern and Western modes (and more particularly of the hegemony of the Protestant kernel of the Occident). One hundred years after Weber’s seminal essay on The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, the weight of orientalist categorizations on the mutual significance (and the inner characterization) of the cultures, religions and civilizations of East and West, of Asia and Euro-America is still being felt. We are at best half-way through the orientalist tunnel, with its kaleidoscope of categories, and underlying power relations.

A recent milestone in this difficult transition has been represented by Robert Bellah’s reconceptualization of the significance of the Axial Age, the epoch that supposedly saw the onset of transcendence across a wide spectrum of societies and cultures in the East and West of the Afro-Eurasian landmass. Unlike the neo-Weberian (represented by Shmuel N. Eisenstadt) and the post-Weberian (led by Johann P. Arnason) versions of the paradigm of comparative axial civilizations, the importance of Bellah’s work, though Weberian in its own way, is primarily signaled by its direct engagement with non-Western religious traditions, first of all Japan, but also, through an important parenthesis of his career, Islam.

Sharing in this interest to sociologically engage with non-Western religious traditions in a (at least) post-orientalist perspective (with an angle comparable to Bellah’s, though with inverted priorities as far as the world of Islam and Japanese civilization are concerned), I will offer a constructive criticism of Bellah’s proposal to exit the grip of orientalism (including its Weberian side) through a type of neo-Darwinian evolutionism matched to what himself termed a “desperate Hegelianism”. I will also try to avoid its opposite hazard, namely a fall into the “perennialism” explicitly or implicitly popular in the ubiquitous propositions that all historical world religions share in a common kernel of human wisdom: an idea which, symptomatically, gained steam during the 19th century in parallel with evolutionism and the conceptualization itself of “world religions”.

My initial and very tentative sketch of a “third way” is rather derived from views of religions (not absent in Bellah’s elaboration) as intermittently, yet powerfully resetting the stage of human development by activating a meta-institutional “x-factor” that is most of the time latent, folded into the functioning of a tamed religious field of sector, yet never fully, as intended by Weber, “routinized”. Provisionally, let us call this x-factor the capacity to re-align the culture of elites and the commoners via powerful momentums of collective ekstasis. While sociology (most notably with Durkheim) has reiterated the attempt to pinpoint “structural” underpinnings of the x-factor and a corresponding evolution of models of cultural realignment via solidarity, it remains evanescent as a factor—yet historically, anthropologically and sociologically tangible as a quest or venture.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Armando Salvatore is a sociologist of religion, culture and communication who has taught at Humboldt University, Berlin and at the Oriental Studies University, Naples – L’Orientale. He earned his PhD from the European University Institute, Florence, in 1994 and his professorial habilitation from Humboldt University, Berlin in 2006. He has held research fellowships at the Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World, University of Leiden, the Institute for the Advanced Study in the Humanities, University of Duisburg-Essen, and the Humboldt Center for Social and Political Research, Humboldt University, Berlin.

Salvatore’s work emphasizes theory, comparison and connectedness. His current project focuses on the notion of the “civilizing process” in inter-Asian and global perspectives, within the background of debates on axial civilizations and the underlying transformations and interactions of faith traditions. He is completing the book The Sociology of Islam. A Theoretical, Historical and Comparative Introduction, which is intended to be the first volume in a trilogy and will be published by Wiley-Blackwell. He is also editing the Wiley-Blackwell History of Islam, a new reference work condensing historical, comparative and sociological perspectives in the study of Islam.

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