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的宗教和其他社会领域、习俗、解释框架、机构和话语之间的区别形式和安排。基于宗教和非宗教之间的界限划分既不是现代性的唯一标志，也不是西方的唯一标志的假设，我们探索了相应的主位分类、社会分化的形式和划分模式。这些将在其内部发展以及与现代“西方”社会秩序概念的关系中加以分析。通过这种方式，我们希望解释不同地区当前世俗化的形式，以及伴随而来的关于解释权和有效性的冲突。这个项目的特殊性质是它超越了现代化理论，以及进化、种族中心和规范的观点，这些观点往往是关于世俗化和世俗主义的辩论中特有的，它们可能是肯定的，也可能是批判的。因此，我们正在开辟一种跨学科的全球研究视角，否则，这种视角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的观点，不同领域的研究，以及历史和人类学。对前现代文化的系统包容是另一个新颖的元素。最后，我们超越了“宗教”一词的跨文化适用性这个孤立的问题，重点研究了“宗教”和“世俗”或相关区别的过程。在其工作的第一个四年期间，人文中心将专注于“伊斯兰世界”以及亚洲的不同地区--故意不从欧洲或美国开始，因为如果处理世俗、世俗主义和世俗，那么欧洲或美国可能是最早进入人们脑海的国家。

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.