'Religion' as an issue in political transition. Two competing secularities in Buddhist Burma (Myanmar)
Abstract
Can 'secularism' travel?" That was the question Charles Taylor asked in an afterword to Beyond the Secular West (ed. Bilgrami, 2016) as a comment on his monumental A Secular Age, published nine years earlier (2007). Akeel Bilgrami's purpose in editing Beyond the Secular West was to go beyond Taylor's formidable narrative about the category "secular" that began with the "axial age." It was to ask if the modern political doctrine of "secularism" that resulted from this long-term Western history was exportable to non-Christianized contexts. In other words, it was to question the thesis of secularization as a linear and teleological global process. It was also to extend the debate of alternative modernities with that of alternative secularities; the authors seek to move from the teleological understandings of secularization and disenchantment that presume the reproducibility of the process from its Western template to non-European trajectories of the disentanglement of transcendence and the worldly. Indeed, some of the axial age transformations had been developing in parallel outside of Christendom, such as, for instance, the soteriological rather than ritual orientation of religious practice in the case of the Indian Buddhist primitive doctrine. Also, considering more recent moments of this long history, one has to look at the complex interactions that occurred through colonization, decolonization, and globalization, in which secularism has, more or less explicitly, been an active model of the governance technologies involved.
Domains
Humanities and Social SciencesOrigin | Files produced by the author(s) |
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