300227 Religion and Democracy: Anthropological Perspectives (S) (SoSe 2016)

The rise of democracy as the paradigm of governance for the modern world is historically connected to what Talal Asad has characterized as the political doctrine of secularism. According to this doctrine, the proper space of religion is in the private sphere, and the feasibility of democratic politics depends on the willingness of all social actors to suspend certainties derived from their faith, at least where they interfere with rational deliberation and the rights of others (e.g. Jürgen Habermas's theory of communicative action). The meta-historic narrative implied by secularism suggests that the disappearance of religion from public and political life is a natural consequence of the joint advance of science, democracy, and the capitalist economy. However religion has proven remarkably resilient not only in “non-western” parts of the world, and the recent increase in religiously motivated violence has cast a renewed spotlight on the “power of religion in the public sphere” (quoting the book title of a recent contribution by Habermas, Butler, and others).

In this seminar, we will first establish some of the theoretical foundations and then ask what social anthropological perspectives suggest about the relation between religion and democracy. We will look around the world to unsettle some of our certainties regarding the historic relations between democracy and religion(s). We will moreover explore what ethnographic descriptions at the intersection of political and religious practice can contribute to our critical understanding of the categories of democratic theory.