Sacred Laïcité and the Politics of Religious Resurgence in France: Whither Religious Pluralism?

This article contributes to the current scholarly discussion by inviting us to look at secularism not as a static model of religious governance, but as a formation that shifts with time and that is deeply related to our contemporary understanding of religion. As such, it investigates the recent transformations of French secularism. In 2004 France passed a law banning visible religious symbols in public schools. Since then French secularism has increasingly become a sacred – non-negotiable – element of collective life. Drawing on Kim Knott's concept of the ‘secular sacred’, the article investigates, through an analysis of policy reports, law proposals and laws, how this discursive usage of secularism has been used to set apart particular spaces from others: secular spaces that carry the ‘supreme’ values of secularism. In this process, the role of public servants and citizens has been changing, as they have been invested with the responsibility of policing the boundaries of these spaces. New tools, such as charters of secularism, laws and regulations, and state bodies are being imagined to consolidate these boundaries. The article also explores how ‘religious resurgence’ (and more specifically ‘Islamic resurgence’) has been essential to this ‘sacred-making’ activity: to give substance to values that are non-negotiable and need to be separated from those that are not. Overall, the piece posits, in line with other recent works, that sacred-making is not reserved to the ‘religious’, but can become a central component of how secularism gets articulated and deployed. In so doing, it underscores the importance of documenting how meanings given to secularism shift to grasp the politics that underpin discourses on religious resurgence.     

Discovering a sense of well-being through the revival of Islam: profiles of Kazakh imams in Western Mongolia

Throughout Central Asia, the end of communism has been marked by a significant change in the management and influence of local mosques. In many rural areas, small underground mosques operated by informally trained, elderly moldas have been supplanted by newly constructed mosques led by younger, foreign-educated local imams and financed by governmental and private donations from Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and other countries. From several perspectives, this ‘revival’ of Islam is characterized in a way that implies that increased religiosity and piety is somewhat problematic. In this essay, based on six months of ethnographic fieldwork in Western Mongolia, we argue that such an approach prevents an understanding of how religious changes are enhancing the social and material well-being of certain actors. We explore the utility of the concept of well-being by focusing on the everyday lives of Kazakh imams in Western Mongolia. Approximately 100,000 ethnic Kazakhs live in the Western Mongolian province of Bayan-Ölgii, where they comprise about 80% of the population. Although a significant portion of the population has been migrating to Kazakhstan in the post-socialist period, the Kazakhs who choose to remain in Mongolia have experienced a significant increase in religious freedom. In this context, the new cohort of imams is playing an important mediating role as members of the local population reinterpret and renegotiate their identity as Muslims. In addition to finding spiritual well-being through their knowledge of Islam, these imams are acquiring social status and economic security from their local roles as religious leaders and through their transnational connections with a broader Muslim community.     

Relations made over tea: reflections on a meaningful life in a Central Asian mountain village

Narratives of hardship and suffering found in portrayals of life in Central Asia elicit policy responses that attempt to remedy the situation through humanitarian or development interventions intended to enhance local well-being. This framing obfuscates a network of relationships and interactions that are instrumental in the making of meaningful lives in Central Asia. I explore the comfort of family and friends, the hope of possibility (real and imagined), and the happiness (even if fleeting) in the sharing of stories. Furthermore, even in the most trying of times, the communal sense that emerges in sharing concerns helps mitigate the stresses and strains of many social situations. Seeing these relationships as moments of well-being is essential to understanding everyday life and contextualizing hardship and suffering, and thus to conveying a fuller sense of what is understood as ‘a meaningful life’ in Central Asia.     

Primary,secondary and metamagical constituents of Lithuanian identity

Abstract

Three versions of Lithuanian identity are presented: the first is constructed of primary constituents and is based on official symbols of national identity. This version offers a homogenous view of identity. The second version is derived from the primary life experiences of different segments of the Lithuanian population, and offers a heterogeneous fragmented version of identity. A third, metamagical version of identity is offered which is not based on shared content, experiences or a shared vision of Lithuanian identity, but on understanding the differences in perspectives among the different social groups. In particular the differences between older and younger generations are described.     

The emergence of prophetic ministries in Botswana: self-positioning and appropriation of new media

ABSTRACT

In the past two decades or so, Botswana has witnessed a spectacular growth of prophetic Christianity and experienced a media revolution through the emerging use of new media. While studies have generally focused on either the growth of Pentecostal Charismatic Christianity or the new media revolution, little attention has been paid to the characteristics of emerging prophetic ministries, entailing the appropriation of new media and how this has accelerated the development of religious practices in Botswana. In light of positioning and mediatisation theories, this paper examines the ways in which prophetic ministries position themselves and shape the religious landscape of Botswana and how prophetic ministries have adopted and appropriated the use of new media technologies. It argues that the synergy between prophetic ministries and technological developments of new media opens a new space for cultural production of religious practices and experiences as well as religious imagination, experience and identity.     

泰南四府民族分裂主义的由来、演变与出路

在当今世界上,民族与宗教问题往往是引发地区骚乱或局部战争的导火线,而且往往与政治、经济问题交织在一起.泰南四府马来族穆斯林民族分裂主义的性质也基本如此.近百年来它始终困扰着泰国政府,尤其是二战以后,泰南穆斯林地区由于宗教、民族矛盾的发展,政治上的不平等和经济上落后等因素,导致要求独立自决的运动一直延绵不断,并由政治斗争发展到武装斗争.特别是在2001年"9·11"事件发生后,泰南四府原来积存的矛盾被重新激活,民族分裂主义分子公开采取了暴力恐怖手段与政治对抗,企图谋求独立,且愈演愈烈,引起了世人的广泛关注. 综观泰国历届政府的政策,笔者认为,为了打击南部民族分裂主义势力,仅靠法律手段和政治措施是远远不够的,武装镇压或同化政策也是难以奏效的.为了实现民族团结,社会和谐,国家稳定,首先要承认民族文化、宗教信仰等社会发展的多元性,尊重和保护宗教信仰自由,用政治对话代替武力对抗,用改革政策取代同化政策,加快经济发展,缩小贫富差距,增加人民收入,提高生活水平,做到社会公平、分配公正.青年是国家的未来,要重视和加强对青少年的教育和培养.政府要通过诚意来逐步取得绝大多数穆斯林的理解与支持,不给少数顽固的穆斯林分裂主义者以可乘之机.只有这样,才能逐步铲除南部的民族分裂主义势力,真正实现民族和睦、社会和谐和国家的稳定.     

Protecting the Sacred: Tunisia's Islamist Movement Ennahdha and the Challenge of Free Speech

Since the 2011 uprising, Tunisia's Islamist movement Ennahdha has proposed a political project based on reclaiming the nation's Arab-Islamic identity. At the heart of this is the issue of ‘protection of the sacred’, which seeks to define limits to freedom of expression to protect religious symbols from criticism. This is part of Ennahdha's post-Islamist evolution. The movement has drawn away from its earlier ambitions to Islamise the state and now seeks to reconstruct the role of Islam by asserting a cultural Islamic identity, which recasts religious norms as conservative values and which has yet to determine the precise limits of new individual freedoms. The result was to propose a new set of rules for the community under which Tunisians would freely express their religious belief in a way denied them under the former regime, but would also live under a state that defended and guaranteed their religious values.     

LAND,LIVELIHOODS, AND REMITTANCES

This article seeks to draw connections between a political ecology of global investment in resource sector development and a culturally informed understanding of rural out-migration across the Lao–Thai border. The author highlights how the departures of rural youth for wage labor in Thailand and the remittances they return to sending villages are becoming important for understanding agrarian transformations in Laos today. In the first section the author introduces the contemporary context of cross-border migrations across the Lao–Thai Mekong border. The second section shifts focus to a village in Laos's central Khammouane Province, where extended field research was conducted between 2006 and 2009. In this village, youth out-migration to Thailand has become a widespread phenomenon, with nearly every household involved. The segmented cultural and gendered features of this migration and its salience for understanding contemporary transformations in this locale invite a broadening of agrarian studies analysis. The final section expands upon how political ecology can provide such a broader analysis by drawing attention to how extractive resource projects affect local tenure rights and livelihoods, with significant rents captured by the state and resource firms. By making these connections, the author argues there are coercive underpinnings to contemporary Mekong migrations, which may be linked to governance problems in the Lao resource sector.     

‘The state starts from the family’: peace and harmony in Tajikistan's eastern Pamirs

Based on anthropological fieldwork between 2008 and 2011, this article focuses on how people in Tajikistan's eastern Pamirs conceptualize well-being through the establishment of peace and harmony. An exploration of the interactional use of the terms ‘peace’ and ‘harmony’ in Kyrgyz and Tajik (tynchtyk, yntymak, tinji, and vahdat) makes manifest that the meanings of these terms are connected to the fields of ‘family’, ‘leadership’, and ‘state’. Basing their reasoning on the officially promoted analogy between family and state, people in the eastern Pamirs distinguish between social spaces that are related to well-being and those that are not. As a factor of distinction, and crucial to the establishment of peace and harmony, the moral quality of leadership plays an important role. Positive experiences of such leadership as balanced and morally pure are mainly identified and witnessed within families and neighbourhoods and only occasionally in state institutions. This discrepancy raises the question of where to locate boundaries between good and bad, moral and immoral, harmonious and conflictual. Thus, this article contributes not only to the study of local concepts of well-being in Central Asia but also to the study of local concepts of ‘ill-being’ which challenge them.     

Challenging Institutional Denial: Psychological Discourse,Therapeutic Culture and Public Inquiries

ABSTRACT

The damaging effects of abuse in childhood were repeatedly emphasised in public hearings and in media coverage of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. Testimony from earlier Australian inquiries, which documented widespread experiences of child maltreatment, particularly in institutions, also underscored the ongoing and often intergenerational impact of abuse. Taking institutional child abuse inquiries as a case study, this article examines how psychological and therapeutic concepts have been mobilised politically. It argues that therapeutically oriented and psychologically informed cultural narratives of childhood trauma and its ongoing effects have provided a framework for making sense of long-term experiences of adversity and suffering and have enriched attention to “the question of justice” for survivors of historical institutional child abuse.     

Landmarks of Old Livonia – Church Towers,Their Symbols and Meaning

Church towers are among the most prominent features of landscape and contain both significant architectural and symbolic value. Religion and its various beliefs and ideologies bring symbolism and meaning into the everyday lives of people. This geographical study deals with the iconography of church towers, looking closer into their regional distribution pattern and analyzing their connotation within the former territory of Old Livonia (now encompassed by present-day Estonia and present-day Latvia, except for Latgale) and within the European religious context. The analysis of the distribution pattern of church tower symbols in Estonia shows significant regional variance. In the former Province of Estonia, governed by Tallinn, the cross is a dominant symbol on church towers, whereas the use of the cockerel is more widespread in the former Province of Livonia, the historic capital of which was Riga. A third historical region of Livonia, Kurland (governed by Jelgava), shares similarities in church tower symbolism with the Province of Estonia. We believe that the variance in distribution could be due to the influence of urban centers (Tallinn and Riga) in shaping the use of symbols throughout their administrative borders.     

Markets at sacred sites: the globalized mobility and informality of the Armenian religious fairs

ABSTRACT

Along with other globalizing forces such as migration and proselytism, religious markets have played a key role in the transformation of religious practices in Armenia. This article focuses on the intersection of mobility and markets through mobile fairs, which are temporarily organized at shrines on pilgrimage days. Market vendors tend to travel from shrine to shrine across Armenia throughout the year, each following his or her own trajectory. In this article I examine how such markets are organized, how and by whom they are run and controlled, how small-scale mono-confessional markets become part of transnational globalization processes, and how the marketplace is embedded in the pilgrimage ritual, changing and modernizing its traditional meanings and structure.     

Más allá de la representación y del clientelismo: hacia un lenguaje de la intermediación política

This paper proposes rethinking conceptual scopes of the term “political mediation”, in order to illustrate the analytical scope of indirect politics, whose range of possibilities has usually been thought of as if contained between the extremes of political representation and patronage. An analytical exercise is offered as one possible and tentative path to specify not only a vocabulary which is more sensitive to the demands of the present but to –in the words of Bunge– allow the initial reinterpretation of old symbols of our political vocabulary. To this end, in addition to a linguistic and conceptual journey of the term “intermediation”, three analytical dimensions of indirect policy are developed; thus facilitating dialogue with theories of representation, and leading to an analytical model that we call “cube of indirect politics”. We conclude with a brief case classification exercise intended to show the displacements produced by this model in understanding certain indirect political experiences.     

The ‘European Turks’: identities of high-skilled Turkish migrants in Europe

Using exceptionally rich qualitative data coming from the FP7 EUCROSS project on the ‘Europeanization of the Everyday Life’, this paper focuses on high-skilled and highly transnational Turkish migrants who reside in the UK, Romania and Italy. The article analyses participants’ discursive constructions of Europe and Europeanness and shows how specific images and symbols of Europe and Turkey influence their own relationship to Europe. We argue that understanding Turkish migrants’ identification with Europe requires a comprehensive analysis of the development of a Westernization discourse in Turkey that has framed people’s identities. This discourse symbolizes the desire for being part of the Western world, and especially Western Europe, but, at the same time, the fear of being dominated by the very same world. We show that we need to grasp the values, images, symbols and discourses that underline transnational practices to understand the making of European identity among migrants.     

“Women will keep the household’

The transition into married life for rural-urban female migrants in Bangkok impacts their gender identities in unexpected ways. This article uses the experiences of a married migrant woman as a case study to explore and discuss how migrant women mediate the loss of autonomy and the added familial expectations that arise from this transition. The author suggests that given their prior migration experiences as independent income-earners women in this particular community enter marriage with broadened gender identities that fracture under marital gender norms. This places significance and value solely upon their nonpaid homemaking duties. The double burden of work inside and outside the home expands the roles of migrant women as wives and mothers, but at the same time it reinforces existing inequities within the conjugal relationship. Nonetheless, migrant women continue to actively participate in the construction of their conjugal contract and in decision-making within their households. In sum, this case study illustrates how conflicting desires, gender role norms, and particular migration situations are meaningfully mediated by women and how this negotiation affects decision-making regarding family organization and future mobility intentions.     

Appropriating and contesting ‘traditional Islam’: Central Asian students at the Russian Islamic University in Tatarstan

ABSTRACT

Based on an ethnographic case study of an Islamic university in Russia, I examine how the state-implemented and bureaucratized traditionalization of Islam in Russia affects the everyday life of Central Asian students and how this project ‘from above’ is entangled with their coping strategies. I show how religious education has become a resource for the state as well as for young students and their parents. The Russian state uses these official religious institutions to control the Muslim population by creating and promoting a state-approved version of ‘traditional Islam’ and producing official religious specialists. For the young Muslim students, however, Islamic education provides, in addition to religious knowledge, access to networks, social security and new economic opportunities. It thereby offers a way to cope with the uncertainty caused by high unemployment rates and other socio-economic difficulties among young people.     

International Tobacco Politics and the Question of Social Movements in the Middle East: A Comparative Analysis of Ottoman and Iranian Cases

A proliferation of scholarly works offering a variety of modernization experiences facilitated an understanding of social protests in non-western settings. Focusing on the initial stages of modern social movements in Iran and the Ottoman Empire, this study makes a comparative analysis of the tobacco protests at the turn of the twentieth century. The social protests against foreign tobacco monopolies are regarded as a key moment for the emergence of modern social movements in these countries. Scrutinizing the negotiation strategies, social value systems and political structures of these countries, it is suggested that these tobacco protests played a catalytic role in the process of capitalist incorporation and adaptation to the accompanying value systems of modernism and liberal democracy.     

Can spirits play a role in peace and reconciliation projects? Perspectives on traditional reconciliation in Zimbabwe

ABSTRACT

There is a long history of spirit-oriented systems of reconciliation and healing in Zimbabwe. However, under white rule, this work was marginalised and driven underground. In Zimbabwe today, diverse views on reconciliation, reparation, justice and national healing are producing rich but frequently conflicted initiatives around ‘traditional’ and ‘community’ reconciliation. The article considers contradictions and pressures facing the National Peace and Reconciliation Commission and different approaches to ‘spirit-led’ trauma healing work from three grassroots organisations: Heal Zimbabwe; Tree of Life; and the Centre for Conflict Management and Transformation. It indicates how religious, cultural and political affiliations influence participants’ openness to traditional and spirit-led forms of reconciliation; and how this, in turn, constrains how perpetrators, victims and reparation are defined by those working in this field. Rather than identifying specific practices as ‘authentic’ traditions, the article suggests that a continuity of community/cultural approaches can inform contemporary national healing initiatives in Zimbabwe.     

Islamic political activism among Israel’s Negev Bedouin population

This paper examines Islamic political activism among the Bedouin Arab citizens of Israel who reside in the Negev/Naqab (southern Israel). It describes how a religious-political movement became the dominant political force among the non-Jewish communities of the Negev, in doing so, this paper explores the link between religious-political ideology, represented by the Islamic movement, and tribalism, the dominant social-cultural influence among this population. While this paper is a first cut at trying to understand these linkages, I suggest that Israeli Islamist political leaders have mobilized support in two interconnected ways. First, they have attracted support through dawa (religious education), social-welfare activities, and mobilizing symbols. Second, Islamic political activists have worked within and exploited one of the most salient features of Bedouin life, tribalism, by recruiting support from the lower-status, largely urbanized, and landless tribes. These activities have taken place within the broader context of a changing landscape of identity within these communities of the Negev.     

The Africanisation of Children's Rights in South Africa: Quo Vadis?

The article seeks to demonstrate how traditional African approaches to justice pervade the Child Justice Act 75 of 2008 (CJA) in ways that provide young offenders the possibility to have their dignity restored, by affording them an opportunity to take responsibility for their wrongful conduct. The article argues that this approach to justice underscores African values of Ubuntu and restorative justice in addressing offending in terms of the CJA. In the final analysis, the author argues that the successful implementation of these approaches will depend partly on how innovative officers in judicial proceedings are in using African models of justice, the values of the Constitution, and the lived experiences of children in conflict with the law.