FOR 2344: Multiple Secularities - Beyond the West, beyond Modernities

人文科学高级研究中心调查不同时代和地区宗教和其他社会领域、实践、解释框架、制度和话语之间差异的形式和安排。我们用启发式术语“世俗性”来指代这种经常引起争议的安排。基于宗教与非宗教之间界限的划定不是现代性或“西方”的专属标志这一假设，我们探索了相应的主分类、社会分化形式和划分模式。这些都将在其内部发展以及与现代“西方”社会秩序概念的关系中进行分析。通过这种方式，我们希望解释当前不同地区世俗主义的形式，以及随之而来的关于解释力和有效性主张的冲突。这个项目的特殊性质在于，它超越了现代化理论，以及进化、种族中心主义和规范观点，这些观点往往是关于世俗化和世俗主义的辩论所特有的，无论它们是肯定的还是批判的。因此，我们正在开辟一个跨学科的全球研究视角，否则它似乎被当前辩论的狭隘所扭曲。我们汇集了宗教研究和社会学，不同地区的研究，以及历史和人类学的观点。系统地包括前现代文化是另一个新颖的元素。最后，我们通过关注“宗教”和“世俗”或相关区分的区分过程，超越了“宗教”一词的跨文化适用性这一孤立问题。在其工作的头四年里，人文中心将把重点放在“伊斯兰世界”和亚洲的不同地区——如果要讨论世俗、世俗主义和世俗主义，人们可能首先想到的不是欧洲或美国，而是有意不从这些国家开始。

The Humanities Centre for Advanced Studies investigates forms and arrangements of differentiation between religious and other social spheres, practices, interpretive frameworks, institutions and discourses in different eras and regions. We refer to such arrangements, which are often contentious, with the heuristic term “secularities”.Based on the hypothesis that the drawing up of boundaries between the religious and non-religious is not an exclusive sign either of modernity or of the “West”, we explore corresponding emic taxonomies, forms of social differentiation and modes of demarcation. These are to be analyzed in their internal developments as well as in relation to modern “western” concepts of social order. In this way, we hope to explain current forms of secularity in different regions and the concomitant conflicts about the power of interpretation and claims to validity.The particular nature of this project is that it transcends modernization theory, as well as the evolutionary, ethnocentric and normative perspectives, which are often peculiar to debates on secularization and secularism, may they be affirmative or critical. We are therefore opening up an interdisciplinary, global research perspective, which otherwise appears distorted by the narrowness of current debates. We bring together the perspectives of religious studies and sociology, different area studies, as well as history and anthropology. The systematic inclusion of premodern cultures is another novel element. Lastly, we transcend the isolated issue of the transcultural applicability of the term “religion” by focusing on the processes of differentiation between “the religious” and “the secular” or related distinctions as such.In the first four-year-period of its work, the Humanities Centre will focus on different regions of the “Islamic world” as well as of Asia – deliberately not starting with Europe or the US as the countries that might first enter one’s mind if the secular, secularism and secularity are being dealt with.