This article is available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license as part of Berghahn Open Anthro,a subscribe-to-open model for APC-free open access made possible by the journal’s subscribers.

Introduction
An Anthropology of Nonreligion?
Mascha Schulz and Stefan Binder◾ ABSTRACT: This introduction engages with recent scholarship on what has been dubbed‘lived’ forms of nonreligion. It aims to profile the anthropology of the secular and nonreligion, no longer treating it as a subdiscipline or ‘emerging trend’ but as a substantial contribution to general debates in anthropology. Drawing on the ethnographic
contributions to this special issue, we explore how novel approaches to embodiment,materiality, moral sensibilities, conceptual distinctions, and everyday practices signal
new pathways for an anthropology of nonreligion that can lead beyond hitherto dominant concerns with the political governance of religion(s). Critically engaging with thenotion of ‘lived’ nonreligion, we highlight the potential of ethnographic approaches
to provide a uniquely anthropological perspective on secularism, irreligion, atheism,
skepticism, and related phenomena.

◾ KEYWORDS: atheism, embodiment, ethnography, lived, materiality, nonreligion,
secular, situated practice.

An arrival takes time, and the time that it takes shapes ‘what’ it is that arrives.
— Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology

While religion has long been a central topic in anthropology and other social sciences—whether
understood as ritual, mysticism, or organized forms of piety—irreligion, secularism, or nonreligion have only recently emerged as explicit objects of empirical study. This is especially the casein anthropology, as a result of the discipline’s history and changing self-understanding as well as
its own entanglement with secularization narratives. As Fabio Vicini suggests, “anthropologists
have long excluded the secular from their analysis much like sociological explorations havetended to neglect the resilience of religion in Europe” (Vicini 2020: 127). But what does it mean
to understand the anthropology of nonreligion as a ‘latecomer’, and how does the belated arrival
shape the questions we ask, the places where we look for answers, and the resources we deem
suitable for finding them? If the anthropology of nonreligion has arrived after the anthropologyof religion, what—if anything—does that imply for the nature and relationship of religion andnonreligion as ethnographic, historical, and theoretical themes of anthropological inquiry?
With this special issue, we intend to intervene into both anthropological and larger social
scientific debates on secularism and nonreligion by exploring what it means for an anthropology of nonreligion to emancipate itself from its ‘late’ arrival. In this introduction, we argue
that this ‘emancipation’ can be observed in recent ethnographic studies on what may be called
lived, embodied, situated, or everyday forms of nonreligion. By exploring atheist, rationalist,
Religion and Society: Advances in Research 14 (2023): 1–14 © The Author(s)doi:10.3167/arrs.2023.070301

2 ◾ Mascha Schulz and Stefan Binder

humanist, and other nonreligious commitments, as well as ambivalent and less readily identifiable forms of nonreligion, the contributions to this special issue move beyond a mere critiqueof binary distinctions of the secular and the religious—or reiterations of their mutual entanglement and cultural specificity; instead, they investigate ethnographically how such distinctions
and their possible translations become relevant or, conversely, fail to do so in a diverse range ofregional and historical contexts as well as concrete situated practices and interactions. They also
pay attention to instances where such conceptual distinctions do not significantly shape the roleof nonreligion in people’s everyday lives or what it means to live nonreligiously. We suggest thatby doing so, anthropological studies of nonreligion no longer form an emerging field of scholarship, another specialized subdiscipline organized around a discrete object of study; rather, theytake diverse and possibly disparate forms of nonreligion or modes of nonreligiosity as a starting
point for ethnographic investigations into more general themes and anthropological debates. In
other words, the maturation of the field we seek to profile does not manifest as a concise, consolidated definition of nonreligion nor as a unique methodological approach but as a commitment
to probing how ethnographic attention to the shifting and sometimes elusive nature of nonreligion yields substantial contributions to general anthropological debates regarding, for example,
political practice and hegemony (Hecker, Zwissler), moral experience (Binder), personhoodand belonging (Quack and Schulz), the making of distinctions (Hagström and Copeman), or
the embodied and emotional textures of everyday life (Richter).

The Study of Nonreligion: Moving beyond
the Legacy of the Secularization Thesis
About a decade ago, several review and programmatic articles on the anthropology of secularism were published, seemingly independently of each other (Cannell 2010; Scherer 2011;
Schröder 2011; Starrett 2010).1 At that time, few ethnographies focusing on secularist, rationalist, or nonreligious people and positions existed. Nevertheless, the timing of these essays was
not coincidental but spoke to broader shifts in public and academic debates as well as changing
global power dynamics. The articles problematized the secularization thesis and engaged withtheoretical debates inspired by the seminal publications of Talal Asad (especially 2003) andanthropologists who pursued related approaches (Hirschkind and Scott 2006; Mahmood 2005,
2006), as well as philosopher Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age (2007). Some of these review essays
documented an increased ethnographic interest in secularism since the early 2000s, including
studies on ‘secular sentiments’ inspired by Talal Asad’s work (which we discuss below), ethnographies of secularism as state ideologies in places where it was highly contested, such as Turkey(Navaro-Yashin 2002; Özyürek 2006; Tambar 2009) as well as other countries (e.g., Bangstad
2007 on South Africa), and investigations of state atheism, religious revival, and secularity in
post-Soviet contexts (Hann 2000; Luehrmann 2011; McBrien and Pelkmans 2008).2
Early anthropological debates on ‘the secular’ were characterized by a critical—and sometimes oppositional—stance toward theories of secularization, particularly those that posit the
decline or privatization of religion as a constitutive, necessary, or inevitable aspect of modernization. The work of Talal Asad (1993, 2003, 2018) in particular has inspired a large body of critical scholarship on how different colonial and postcolonial regimes of power and government
rely on notions of ‘secular’ reason, liberalism, or neutrality to not only regulate but also produce,transform, exclude, and marginalize different forms of ‘religion’. While anthropological scholarship within this framework has produced important critiques of supposedly Western ideologies
and political regimes of ‘secular’, ‘liberal’ modernity, it did not investigate the identities, prac-

Introduction ◾ 3

tices, and aspirations of ‘nonreligious’ people ethnographically. It remained focused on religious
individuals—in most cases pious Muslims (e.g., Agrama 2012; Hirschkind and Mahmood 2002;
Hirschkind and Scott 2006; Mahmood 2006; Pool 2016). A major concern of studies within thisframework was to show how secularism as a discursive tradition and political regime functions
to exclude Muslims in Euro-American contexts (Amir-Moazami 2016; Fadil 2009; Göpffarthand Özyürek 2020). However, by persistently juxtaposing Islam and a supposedly secular West,and by placing disproportionate emphasis on piety in the study of the lives of Muslims, anthropologists have tended to reinforce the very binary they had set out to deconstruct (see also
Bangstad 2009; Gholami 2015: 29–56; Schielke 2012).
More recently, a growing body of scholarship has attempted to move beyond the paradigmof the anthropology of secularism, mainly through ethnographic studies that foreground thediverse experiences and lives of humanists, rationalists, atheists, secularists, or others who identify, or are identified, as secular, irreligious, nonreligious, or entirely indifferent toward religion(e.g., Binder 2020; Blechschmidt 2020; Bradbury 2019; Copeman and Quack 2015; Engelke
2012, 2015a; Fader 2020; Gholami 2015; Quack 2012; Quack and Schuh 2017; Schielke 2019;
Schulz 2021). The articles in this special issue continue this effort by bringing together complementary perspectives on what may be called lived forms of nonreligion in diverse regional
contexts.
Ethnographic studies such as Johannes Quack’s (2012) monograph on organized rationalists
in India or Matthew Engelke’s (2012, 2015a) research on the British Humanist Organisation are
pioneering works in this context. At the same time, categories such as ‘nonreligion’ or ‘nones’
have become more widely used in sociology and religious studies to capture practices, identities, or phenomena that are related to but different from religion (Lee 2015; Quack 2014). The
special issue “Being Godless” edited by Ruy Llera Blanes and Galina Oustinova-Stjepanovic(2015) is the first publication to develop a more explicitly anthropological agenda for exploring
diverse nonreligious convictions and people’s attempts to disengage from religion. The contributions to that special issue sought to move beyond intellectual or philosophical commitments
to irreligion, introduced themes such as materiality, doubt, and uncertainty, and reconsideredanthropology’s methodological atheism. The present special issue continues this effort, but it
also seeks to rethink some of the premises that have so far limited the scope and direction ofanthropological engagements with nonreligion.
In “Being Godless,” Blanes and Oustinova-Stjepanovic positioned their intervention withreference to a general “ethnographic silence around godless experiences” and a “lack of nuanced
ethnographic and historical studies” (Blanes and Oustinova-Stjepanovic 2015: 3), which made itdifficult to find articles based on long-term ethnographic research on godlessness. Against thisbackdrop, they found it necessary to substantiate that “‘being godless’ is an important empirical reality” (ibid.: 1) and therefore an appropriate object of anthropological investigation. Thisframing profoundly shaped their overall approach, which remained tethered to the anthropology—and category—of religion (see Engelke 2015b). Practices of religious (self-)cultivation
remained the foil against which godlessness, as a process of disengagement, gained salience asa mirror image, analogue, or dialectic antipode. Furthermore, the constitutive entanglement ofbelief and doubt—or, put differently, the equal impossibility of either complete religious devotion or total godlessness (Blanes and Oustinova-Stjepanovic 2015: 2)—continued to be a central
focus, just as the notion of godlessness continued to be grounded mainly in a European conceptual history of atheism.
Perhaps because anthropology was a latecomer to these debates, many anthropologists
felt the need to legitimize their interest in nonreligion as being an appropriate and significant
field of study. This may also be why earlier anthropological studies tended to focus on explicit4 ◾ Mascha Schulz and Stefan Binder

articulations of nonreligious commitments, organized groups, or contested state secularisms.
More recent ethnographies—including the contributions to this special issue—indicate a further diversification of methodological approaches, themes, and research questions, whichbring more ambivalent, hidden, or situational forms of nonreligion into focus. Therefore, it has
become possible to address not only the continuing need for nuanced ethnographies on thevariety of experiences and modes of nonreligion but also to explore how such ethnographies
contribute to broader anthropological debates as more than a specialized subfield within, or
addendum to, the anthropology of religion.
Thus, the heterogeneous studies that have emerged in the anthropology of nonreligion overthe last two decades indicate a gradual diversification and broadening of research perspectives.
With the emergence of ethnographic approaches to diverse configurations ranging from state
secularism (e.g., Navaro-Yashin 2002) to organized forms of rationalism or atheism (e.g., Blechschmidt 2020) to more ambivalent, subtle, and hidden forms of nonreligion (e.g., Fader 2020,
Gholami 2015), there has been more focused attention on social dynamics at the micro-levels
of interactions and actors’ views. This contrasts with the macro-perspectives on national ororganizational discourses, which have often been the dominant frame of reference for otherdisciplines like sociology or political science. It has also contributed significantly to rethinking how anthropologists working on nonreligion situate themselves in wider debates. Arguably,
they have at least partially emancipated themselves from a primary preoccupation with secularization theories and the problematization of categories and definitions. Approaches that emerge
from ethnographic engagements have raised different and more diverse questions. As such, theanthropology of nonreligion no longer needs to be called for and profiled as an ‘emerging trend’
but, we contend, constitutes a research field that offers substantial contributions to a wide range
of debates in anthropology.
For example, several articles in this special issue contribute new insights to debates on morality and normative orders. Stefan Binder’s contribution on moral exemplarism among South
Indian atheists explores how narratives of idealism indicate a distinct register of moral experience unfolding through the affective texture of concrete personal relationships and a reflexive
policing of the boundary between religion and nonreligion. Paying attention to this moral register of idealism adds to our understanding of exemplarism as one among a range of ethical frameworks that may also be relevant for people who do not happen to self-identify as atheists. Other
contributions highlight the ways that moral conceptions of personhood and normative orders,which posit religious belonging as primordial, are crucial for understanding how self-identifications as nonreligious are obviated, strategically circumvented, conditioned by specific legal andhistorical trajectories, or only situationally salient. In their research in India and Bangladesh,
Johannes Quack and Mascha Schulz examine how people’s identification with different forms
of non/religion—or whether they understand ‘atheism’ to be progressive or transgressive—isshaped by moral orders, life trajectories, secular imaginations, interactional dynamics, and concepts of personhood informed by doxic understandings of jāti (‘religious’) belonging.
Such doxic and normative orders are shaped by complex historical trajectories, political projects, and nationalist discourses. This is also elucidated in the contribution by Pierre Hecker,
who draws on the concept of hegemony to retrace how a state-enforced regime of pious conservatism in contemporary Turkey registers in biographic narratives of nonbelievers. And yet, asLena Richter shows in her article on nonbelievers in Morocco, lived nonreligion can also unfold
below the threshold of discursive or categorical identification—or even unequivocal visibility—
when it is constitutively entangled with bodily dispositions, feelings, or mundane practices likeeating at fast-food restaurants, walking a dog, dating in a specific manner, or wearing certain
clothes. Hence, nonreligion comes into view not only as a question of ideology, conviction, orIntroduction ◾ 5identity; it is also a potentially unstable, situational, and situated practice, one that is interrelatedwith more general theoretical issues pertaining to ethics and normativities, performativity,
materiality, personhood, social conflict, or nationally hegemonic discourses.
While it may seem counterintuitive at first, we argue that it is precisely by not limiting itself
to studying specific categories (secular, atheist, godless, etc.)—or the people who explicitly identify with them—that the anthropology of nonreligion can make valuable contributions to thecritical debate on those categories, their presumed Eurocentrism, and their fraught relation to‘religion’. As these have been central topics in scholarship on the secular within the hitherto
dominant disciplinary frameworks of philosophy, sociology, history, and political science, it isworth revisiting the troubled relationship of anthropology with categories like ‘the secular’ or‘nonreligion’ and explaining why we have chosen the latter as a suitable umbrella term for thisspecial issue.

Committed to Religions’ Others?
As an emerging subfield since the early 2000s, the anthropology of the secular has been characterized less by the study of phenomena such as unbelief, religious doubt, or atheism than by asustained critical and genealogical attention to the category of the secular as well as its cognatesand derivatives (although there were predecessors in philosophy and the history of ideas sincethe 1960s, e.g., Blumenberg 1985; Lübbe 1965). This has entailed analyses of the historicity,
instability, and inadequacy of binary and substantialist distinctions between the religious andthe secular as well as their implication in political and ethical projects. Talal Asad’s (2003) seminal intervention suggested that the proper object of an anthropology of the secular ought to be
the conceptual grammar that regulates how such distinctions, and the power relations throughwhich they emerge, become institutionalized and cohere in complex “formations” of the secular.
Consequently, the secular has largely been abandoned as an analytical category.
The problematic nature of ‘the secular’ has become what Matthew Engelke (2019: 200) calls“accepted wisdom,” which resonates with anthropological commitments to anti-essentialism
and a focus on the historical embeddedness of academic concepts and agendas in socio-politicalcontexts. Yet, despite apparently being common wisdom, analyses of the instability of the secular or its co-constitutive relations with religion frequently continue to be delivered as gesturesof exposure (for discussions of the relationship of the secular and exposure, see Binder 2019a;
Copeman 2018). It seems that the problematization of the secular not only bears but also requires
repeated reiteration and, thereby, presents a particularly irksome challenge for approaches that
seek to grasp the secular in its material, embodied, affective, sensual, and aesthetic dimensions.
As Engelke cautions in his reflections on the debate on secular bodies, affects, and emotions,“We need to be wary . . . of making the secular into a black hole” (Engelke 2019: 207).
However, the category of the secular is of course not unique in this regard. Its problematization merely extends the long debate about religion as an entity sui generis, which has demonstrated the pitfalls of making disciplinary identities and methodologies contingent on thepresumed uniqueness and historical constancy of a specific object of research. Like religion,
the secular is neither simply given as a substantial entity sui generis, nor is it purely a secondorder, generic concept that is “created by scholars for their intellectual purposes and therefore. . . theirs to define” (Smith 1998: 281). It is not simply one or the other because the secular, andrelated concepts like irreligiosity, atheism, secularism, rationalism, nonreligion, or godlessness,
exist beyond anthropological theory. Our interlocutors and research participants may—or may
not—use these concepts, define them, and argue about them in various ways and contexts. As6 ◾ Mascha Schulz and Stefan Binder

Dipesh Chakrabarty has argued for other supposedly Western analytical concepts, categories
like ‘the secular’ or ‘nonreligion’ are “at once indispensable and inadequate” (Chakrabarty 2000:
16; see also Copeman and Quack 2019; Schulz 2021).
While many scholars have shown why these categories are problematic, some of this special
issue’s articles demonstrate why they are indispensable. Hecker’s analysis of biographic narratives of Turkish nonbelievers, for instance, shows that Turkey’s complex history, with both
Kemalist state secularism and Sunni religious nationalism, makes any explicit commitment tocategories such as ‘irreligious’ (dinsiz) or ‘atheist’ (ateist) an inherently political act. It is thispolitical salience and functionality that makes these categories indispensable within the empirically observable dynamics of nonreligion in contemporary Turkey despite their arguable inadequacy as analytical categories. From an ethnographic perspective, it is not only crucial whichterms are employed, but rather how, when, and with which implications.
Our contributions certainly recognize but also seek to move beyond existing critiques of thepresumably Western origins of concepts by ethnographically examining how power structures,social dynamics, and local traditions contextually shape the significance (or lack therefore) ofterms such as ‘religious’, ‘secular’, or ‘atheist’ as well as their various translations in other languages. Rather than streamlining our categorical apparatus to generate a universalist comparative perspective, we seek to highlight and dwell in the diverse ways in which categories are used,reflected upon, rejected, ignored, or displaced in concrete ethnographic contexts. By retracing
why people are committed to certain categories and not others, this special issue analyzes thenormative force and work performed by categories, and their implications in domains such aspolitics, ethics, activism, or everyday life. Hence, the contributors to this issue work with different understandings of secularism, atheism, nonreligion, or secularity precisely because they are
speaking from different ethnographic contexts and to different theoretical questions. Therefore,
we do not advocate for a specific taxonomic or conceptual innovation or refinement of existing
nomenclatures; instead, we take it as given that categories are contingent, historically shifting,porous, and possibly inconsistent, and that this is a general feature of most if not all analytic
categories as well. We thus approach the discursive and contextual nature of categories as aninevitable premise and starting point for concrete ethnographic or historical inquiries rather
than—at this point in the debate—a (particularly exciting) result of research.
We choose ‘nonreligion’ as an umbrella term for the special issue without presupposing
a coherent definition of an object of research and without limiting possible methodologicalapproaches. The category ‘nonreligion’ is certainly not without its own difficulties (Engelke
2015b), but it is less overdetermined than ‘the secular’, and its current usage in scholarly debates
better indicates the position we take in this special issue. We have consciously adopted a nonhyphenated spelling to stress that in some historical or ethnographic contexts nonreligion canbe approached ‘on its own terms’ whereas the word’s morphological structure—the privative‘non’—simultaneously allows us to retain a critical awareness that, in other contexts, relations toreligion may be constitutive. While ‘being nonreligious’ can mean that people label and imagine
themselves as either religion’s Other or certain religions’ Other, it is not necessarily the case.
For example, in discussing the cases of a nonbelieving Hindu in Bangladesh, who refuses tobe labelled an atheist, and an Indian interlocutor, who identifies simultaneously as an atheist andas a Muslim, Quack and Schulz highlight how social location and situational dynamics shapewhen and how people identify as ‘atheists’ in South Asia. They show that categories like ‘Hindu’and ‘Muslim’ are often more polyvalent than a rending of them as markers of ‘religious’ identity
would suggest; they are constantly being reiterated and inscribed into the body through everyday actions such as naming, addressing or greeting, through food conventions, and other habits.
For instance, as Muslims and Hindus in Bangladesh tend to use different words for ‘water’ (pāniIntroduction ◾ 7

and jal respectively), the mundane communication involved in buying a bottle of water makes
the community belonging of the speaker visible to others. This results, along with its political,
social, and legal significance, in a quasi-ethnic usage of these categories. Within concrete situations of interaction, to identify as atheist may therefore entail both more and less than claiming
a position of otherness vis-à-vis specific religions or religion as such—and differently so in India
and Bangladesh.
The contribution by John Hagström and Jacob Copeman demonstrates that practices ofmaking distinctions are themselves an important theme of research, which links the historyof anthropological theory with ethnographies of nonreligion. They show how ideas about thekind of practices and symbols that can be retained or must be discarded to live a nonreligious
life are contested and inherently linked to moral discourses and claims about what it means
to be ‘human’. Accordingly, diverging interpretations among humanists and rationalists about
whether certain practices and symbols—such as wearing a turban as a Panjabi—are ‘religious’or ‘cultural’ lead to contestations and heterogeneity and also to moral policing among activists.
This question of morality and categorical boundaries is also central to Binder’s article, albeit in adifferent way. In his article, he shows that atheist activists in South India use the religion / nonreligion binary not only as an analytical tool to make distinctions but also as a moral judgment
to evaluate them: a practice that is deemed morally problematic can be classified as religious
regardless of whether it is linked to any historically recognizable religious tradition.
The meaning, function, and nature of nonreligion—as well as related categories like atheism,
secularism, disbelief, and so on—varies in different contexts and research projects. It is precisely
by refusing a priori judgments about the applicability, coherence, and cultural (in many cases‘Western’) specificity of certain categories that ethnographies can explore the varying ways that
nonreligion figures in, shapes, and constitutes specific situated social practices. Our choice ofnonreligion as an umbrella term to encompass heterogeneous phenomena is thus not only pragmatic but also programmatic; we use it to convey the diversity of themes and approaches thatcan be pursued within an anthropology of nonreligion.
While early ethnographies have mostly researched explicit forms of nonreligion, such as
humanist and atheist organizations or state secularism, this special issue brings also ambiguousor less explicitly articulated forms of non-religiosity into view. Laurel Zwissler’s article on the‘nontheistic’ but ‘religious’ critique of the dominance of religion in the USA by The Satanic Temple illustrates how forms of nonreligion can be elusive or even disavowed. The concrete historyof secularism in the USA and pervasive privileging of notions of religious freedom by social
and legal institutions form the background for an ambivalent texture of ‘serious parody’ thatmakes The Satanic Temple’s activism intelligible as ‘religiously nonreligious’ precisely becauseof its adamant claim to being recognized as ‘religious’. Yet, there are also other examples where
nonreligion in everyday life is hard to grasp, fuzzy, or implicit. Attitudes of religious indifference(Quack and Schuh 2017), for instance, may entail such a fundamental disengagement fromreligion that even forms of critique or explicit commitment to a nonreligious alternative may
appear superfluous or beyond the scope of everyday relevance. Some staunch atheists, by contrast, may not disclose their commitment publicly and even participate in ‘religious’ rituals,
like Christmas or Eid celebrations—and this for different reasons that can and need to be studied ethnographically. There are also complex but elusive affective dynamics of nonreligion, as
when a rationalist parent feels uneasy singing a lullaby with religious content but, because of thebeauty of their own childhood memories, does it anyway.
If the term ‘nonreligion’ defines some of our objects of inquiry only indirectly or in negative
terms, we consider this as part of its analytical strength, because a certain resistance to definition, labeling, or public naming is at times a constitutive aspect of what is empirically observ-

8 ◾ Mascha Schulz and Stefan Binder

able about those phenomena as a ‘lived’ reality. This is not specific to nonreligion but rather ofsignificance for anthropology more broadly. As such, the anthropology of nonreligion sharescommon ground with other fields of ‘late arrivals’ such as the anthropology of ignorance and‘non-knowledge’ (Chua 2015; Dilley and Kirsch 2015), reflections on the significance of ‘minor
gestures’ (Manning 2016), or the broad field of affect studies (e.g., Mazzarella 2017; Singh 2018).
The articles of this special issue demonstrate the value of researching and theorizing from thein-between and the fuzzy.

Ethnographic Perspectives: Nonreligion as Situated Social Practices
What Nathaniel Roberts diagnoses for the anthropology of religion applies in equal if not greatermeasure to nonreligion:
Relatively few [anthropological studies of religion] look seriously at what people do whenthey’re not “doing” religion, or what they talk about when they’re not talking about it. . . .
Fewer still have attempted to grasp the systematic connections between religion and everyday
life, or to show how what goes on in the street and in the home gives meaning to religion—and not just the reverse, as commonly supposed. (Roberts 2016: 4)

Roberts’ critique of a too-narrow focus on religion in the anthropology of religion is very close
to what we propose for the anthropology of nonreligion, not because nonreligion is necessarily like religion, genealogically or theoretically derived from it, or functionally equivalent to it(see also Hagström and Copeman, this issue). Instead, like any other anthropological theme ofinquiry, nonreligion can be studied most fruitfully by placing it within the specific historical andethnographic contexts of whatever else may be going on in people’s lives.
Most of the articles of this special issue engage with nonreligion in the context of what we call‘situated practices’. The argument that humanism, atheism, secularist stances, or critical engagements with certain aspects or forms of religion(s) should not be analyzed in isolation or only ata cognitive and ideological level is probably an obvious point for most anthropologists. While it
may nonetheless be worth restating, given the history of the study of nonreligion, we also want
to go one step further by specifically highlighting situatedness.
Our understanding of situatedness is inspired by Donna Haraway (1988). When she coined
the term ‘situated knowledge’, she did not just mean that knowledge is socially situated andreflects social locations. Her essay on science and feminism was a more fundamental intervention into debates about objectivity in science. While Haraway argues that all knowledge
regimes are situated and thus partial, she emphasizes that only some of them, like feminism(s),are rhetorically marked as such. This allows her to reflect on the power dynamics implicated in
the production of ‘objectivity’ and the role of feminism in science:
So, not so perversely, objectivity turns out to be about particular and specific embodiments
and definitely not about the false version promising transcendence of all limits and responsibilities. The moral is simple: only partial perspective promises objective vision. (Haraway
1988: 583, emphasis added)

Rather than suspending the ideal of objectivity altogether and embracing relativism, Haraway
advocates for privileging partial perspectives, that is, for considering the conditions in whichknowledge is produced and taking responsibility for epistemic claims. Building upon the fundamental point that knowledge reflects the conditions in which it is produced, she can makefar-reaching claims about the legitimacy of feminism(s) and the scientific concept of objectivity.

Introduction ◾ 9Haraway’s insights serve as a model for our approach to nonreligion because they show how
an emphasis on social situatedness and ‘specific embodiments’ nevertheless allows us to makearguments whose significance extends beyond specific cases or to ask comparative questions.
This special issue brings together articles focusing on North Africa, Europe, South Asia, andNorth America, but we do not claim that they are comparable in a direct or “lateral” (Candea
2018: 17) sense. In contrast to existing comparative approaches (e.g., Bilgrami 2016; Cady and
Hurd 2010; Kleine and Wohlrab-Sahr 2021; Künkler et al, 2018; Vliek 2018), which tend to be
grounded in frameworks of methodological nationalism or multiple modernities, we do not consider each contribution as a ‘case study’ representing a particular geographical or cultural location as the relevant unit of comparison. In other words, we do not posit nonreligion as a fixedor quasi-objective meta-concept that guarantees direct comparability. We focus instead on the
different configurations of nonreligion that emerge in specific ethnographic research situations.
We propose that ethnographic analyses of nonreligion as situated practices allow for newquestions addressing the different ways in which nonreligious positionalities and their concomitant social dynamics are shaped by the contexts in which they are embedded. Thus, new orhitherto neglected axes of comparison and criteria for assessing the scope of arguments derived
from concrete ethnographic analyses may emerge. Consequently, many contributions in thisspecial issue address nonreligion in ways that offer comparative perspectives on how specificdispositions, sensibilities, and expressions—including those of everyday, ambivalent, or lessobvious forms of lived nonreligion—are linked to specific social configurations and imaginaries, power structures, and transnational entanglements. They examine not only what people
doubt or disbelieve—or how these positions are shaped by particular intellectual traditions—butwhen, how, and why criticisms of religion, skepticism, or unbelief emerge in specific embodied
and situated practices to begin with.
That people choose to disclose nonreligiosity situationally is particularly apparent in Hecker’s as well as Quack and Schulz’s contributions. Both articles stress that people’s reluctance toself-identify as ‘atheist’ in certain contexts—even if they claim this label in other contexts—is
not merely a question of not believing in god(s), but is contingent on how specific situations are
structured by power dynamics, national discourses, and normative orders. Similarly, Richter’s
article highlights the importance of embodied practices such as clothing, consumption patterns,social relations, and emotions for how people navigate and inhabit nonreligion. The form thatcriticism of religion takes, the aspects that are focused on, and the language and symbols thatare mobilized reflect social locations and local contexts. This becomes particularly apparent inZwissler’s article on The Satanic Temple, which promotes critical engagement with religion byclaiming to be a nontheistic religion. Her analysis reveals that Temple members critically reflect
on the cultural and political purchase of the category of religion itself. Their ‘religious’ secular
activism and its commitment to moral values like reproductive rights or antiracism challenge
not only the privileged status of the category ‘religion’ in the US legal system but also its conflation with Protestant ‘Christianity’ in US-American legal and moral frameworks. However, it
thereby also reinforces certain premises of public discourses on religion and runs up against thediversity of Christianities—Protestant and otherwise—in ways that threaten to undercut The
Satanic Temple’s progressive agenda and self-understanding.
By focusing on situatedness and aesthetic practices concerning clothing, taste in music,
media usage, material things, or affective sensibilities, several articles in this special issue engage
with recent calls for aesthetic (Binder 2019b; Gholami 2015) or material approaches (Copeman
and Quack 2015; Engelke 2015a), which have challenged a narrow focus on intellectual andverbal articulations of nonreligion. Furthermore, they highlight interactions and performativity
to show how nonreligion is navigated, made in/visible (esp. Quack and Schulz), and shaped in10 ◾ Mascha Schulz and Stefan Binder

practices—such as creating Satanic literature or participating in a ‘pink mass’ to celebrate samesex love (Zwissler)—that cannot be reduced to their apparently ‘religious’ dimensions. Richter’s
article also illustrates that, in the context of lived nonreligion in Morocco, attitudes toward certain practices and symbols—such as veiling—depend on many factors, may change over time,and are often closely related to navigating relationships and emotions rather than religiously
grounded ethical discourses or clearly articulated arguments. Bodily habits, names, ways ofdressing, or material artifacts may reflect non/religious attitudes, but they may also express
other forms of belonging, lifestyle and milieu backgrounds, norms of propriety, tacit values,or habitus. As such, they may be symbolically related but not, therefore, reducible to ‘religion’.
By approaching nonreligion as a complex of situated practices, the contributions to this special issue provide new insights into the diverse ethical, social, and political dynamics inherent
in nonreligious positionalities. However, an anthropological commitment to situatedness andthe primacy of ethnography does not foreclose programmatic and conceptual approaches. Hagström and Copeman demonstrate this in their article, where they propose ‘clarification’ and‘disposal’ as a conceptual pair that enables comparative perspectives that are not hamstrungby the usual issues of translatability, a narrow focus on the problematization of categories, ora too-confining framework characteristic of many other comparative approaches. Moreover,their careful theoretical work on clarification and disposal brings not only ethnographic material from different contexts into conversation but, crucially, includes anthropological theorizing
itself as an important voice in that conversation.

Towards an Anthropology of ‘Lived’ Nonreligion?
In this introduction and with this special issue, we seek to contribute to recent anthropologicalstudies that emphasize ‘everyday’, ‘embodied’, ‘casual’, or ‘lived’ forms of nonreligion (e.g., Binder
2020; Fader 2020; Gholami 2015; Schulz 2021). Yet, what do we mean when we talk about ‘lived’nonreligion? From what exactly do we distance ourselves when we claim that this turn to ‘lived
nonreligion’ signals an anthropology of nonreligion that has ‘emancipated’ itself from its latearrival? Especially Richter’s contribution provides precise and extensive answers for her ethnographic case, but it is nonetheless worthwhile reflecting on these issues and the popularity of theterm ‘lived’ in this introduction as well. Why ‘lived’ or ‘everyday’?
While the term is sometimes used in praxeological critiques of ‘intellectualist’ accounts, it
hardly makes sense to imagine intellectual aspects or any other form of nonreligion as ‘dead’ or‘unlived’. We suggest that rather than designating specific ‘forms’ or ‘aspects’ of being nonreligious, the current prominence of terms like ‘lived’ or ‘everyday’ among scholars conducting ethnographic research in the field of nonreligion indicates dissatisfaction with previous approaches
and methodological legacies. Although precise understandings and usages vary, we understand‘lived’ and other similar terms as a shorthand for the kind of anthropological and ethnographically grounded approach that we aimed to profile in this introduction. More specifically, they
seem to mark a new wave of studies that have—at least partially—moved beyond the legacyof secularization theories and the disciplinary frameworks of sociology, history, and politicalscience, within which that theory had been developed and critiqued. Rather than taking core
debates of modernization theories or postcolonial criticism of categories and binary distinctions as their point of departure, these works provide new perspectives and, crucially, new questions due to their commitment to anthropological approaches, an ethnographic perspective,and ‘methodological presentisms’ (Binder 2020; Ringel 2016; Schulz 2021).
The different articles in this special issue contribute substantially to a critical attention to
the variegated effects and implications of categories and distinctions without limiting this to a

Introduction ◾ 11question of ‘the West-and-the-Rest’, which has long characterized and dominated the field. At
the same time, we do not intend to claim ‘nonreligion’ as a distinct object of research or subfieldof anthropology, which is of interest mostly to certain specialists working on or beyond themargins of religion. Instead, we seek to bring research on nonreligion into conversation withlarger anthropological debates and theoretical questions about ethics, personhood, embodiment, normativity, or social conflict. Our aim is not to isolate a distinct object of inquiry but
to ground nonreligion as an important, diverse, contextual, and sometimes elusive dimensionof the contemporary. Perhaps, the fact that ‘nonreligion’ has become in recent years a research
object that is deemed adequate and interesting for a general anthropological audience—and theabove-mentioned developments that have enabled this—reflects a change in anthropology as adiscipline more broadly.

◾ ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We would like to thank Jovan Maud, Johannes Quack, Ursula Rao, and the participants of the
Departmental Colloquium ‘Anthropology of Politics and Governance’ at the Max Planck Institutefor Social Anthropology, as well as at the workshop ‘Committed to Religion’s Other: The Anthropology of Secularism, Atheism and Non-Religion’ at the University of Zurich, for comments on
a previous version of the article. Mascha Schulz worked on this article while receiving funding
from the European Research Council (ERC, Horizont 2020, Grant Agreement No. 817959).

◾ MASCHA SCHULZ is a postdoctoral research fellow on the ERC project ‘Religion and its Others in South Asia and the World (ROSA)’ and is based in the Department ‘Anthropology of
Politics and Governance’ at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle (Germany). She is a political anthropologist currently working at the intersection of politics,
economics, and nonreligion. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research in urban Sylhet(Bangladesh), she is working on a book manuscript titled ‘Cultivating Secularity: Politics,
Embodiment and Criticism of Religion in Bangladesh’. Schulz has also published on thestate, political parties, and student politics in South Asia. ORCID: 0000-0002-9053-5134.

◾ STEFAN BINDER is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the Department of Social
Anthropology and Cultural Studies (ISEK), University of Zurich. He has published on
secular activism and lived atheism in South India as well as the aesthetic production andmanipulation of multiple temporalities in the context of Shi’i mourning rituals and media
practices in Hyderabad. He is currently working on the entanglement of ethics and time inqueer and trans* communities in India and Switzerland. ORCID: 0000-0002-2897-446X.

◾ NOTES
1. For engagement with humanism, atheism, rationalism, or irreligion by anthropologists during theearlier periods of the discipline, see contributions by John Hagström and Jacob Copeman and by
Lena Richter in this issue.
2, Unfortunately, significant scholarship on state secularism and atheism in post-Socialist contexts (seeBlanes and Paxe 2017; Ghodsee 2009; Luehrmann 2015; Pelkmans 2017) tends to be underrepresented in current debates.

12 ◾ Mascha Schulz and Stefan Binder◾ REFERENCES
Agrama, Hussein A. 2012. Questioning Secularism: Islam, Sovereignty, and the Rule of Law in Modern
Egypt. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Ahmed, Sara 2006. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press.
Amir-Moazami, Schirin. 2016. “Investigating the Secular Body: The Politics of the Male CircumcisionDebate in Germany.” ReOrient 1 (2): 147–125. https://doi.org/10.13169/reorient.1.2.0147.
Asad, Talal. 1993. Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
———. 2003. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Palo Alto: Stanford University
Press.
———. 2018. Secular Translations: Nation-State, Modern Self, and Calculative Reason. New York: Columbia University Press.
Bangstad, Sindre. 2007. Global Flows, Local Appropriations: Facets of Secularisation and Re-Islamization
Among Contemporary Cape Muslims. Isim, Leiden: Amsterdam University Press.
———. 2009. “Contesting Secularism/s: Secularism and Islam in the Work of Talal Asad.” Anthropological Theory 9 (2): 188–208. https://doi.org/10.1177/1463499609105477.
Bilgrami, Akeel, ed. 2016. Beyond the Secular West. New York: Columbia University Press.
Binder, Stefan. 2019a. “Magic Is Science: Atheist Conjuring and the Exposure of Superstition in South
India.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 9 (2): 284–298. https://doi.org/10.1086/705467.
———. 2019b. “Aesthetics of the Secular.” In The Bloomsbury Handbook of the Cultural and Cognitive
Aesthetics of Religion, ed. Anne Koch and Katharina Wilkens, 263–272. London: Bloomsbury
Academic.
———. 2020. Total Atheism: Secular Activism and the Politics of Difference in South Asia. New York:Berghahn.
Blanes, Ruy L. and Abel Paxe. 2015. “Atheist Political Cultures in Independent Angola.” Social Analysis
59 (2): 62–80. https://doi.org/10.3167/sa.2015.590204.
Blanes, Ruy L., and Galina Oustinova-Stjepanovic. 2015. “Introduction: Godless People, Doubt, andAtheism.” Social Analysis 59 (2): 1–19. https://doi.org/10.3167/sa.2015.590201.
Blechschmidt, Alexander 2020. “Collective Nonreligiosities in the Philippines.” In The Diversity of Nonreligion: Normativities and Contested Relations, ed. Johannes Quack, Susanne Kind, and Cora Schuh,
77–104. New York: Routledge.
Blumenberg, Hans. 1985. The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. Trans. Robert M. Wallace. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Bradbury, James S. 2019. “Hinduism and the Left: Searching for the Secular in Post-Communist Kolkata”(PhD diss., University of Manchester).
Cady, Linell E., and Elizabeth S. Hurd, eds. 2010. Comparative Secularisms in a Global Age. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Candea, Matei. 2018. Comparison in Anthropology: The Impossible Method. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cannell, Fenella. 2010. “The Anthropology of Secularism.” Annual Review of Anthropology 39: 85–100.
https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.012809.105039.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2000. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Copeman, Jacob. 2018. “Exposing Fakes.” In Fake: Anthropological Keywords, ed. Jacob Copeman and
Giovanni da Col, 63–90. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Copeman, Jacob, and Johannes Quack. 2015. “Godless People and Dead Bodies: Materiality andthe Morality of Atheist Materialism.” Social Analysis 59 (2): 40–61. https://doi.org/10.3167/
sa.2015.590203———. 2019. “Contemporary Religiosities.” In Critical Themes in Indian Sociology, ed. Sanjay Srivastava,
Yasmeen Arif, and Janaki Abraham, 44–61. New Delhi: SAGE Publications.

Introduction ◾ 13

Chua, Liana. 2015. “Anthropological Perspectives on Ritual and Religious Ignorance.” In Routledge International Handbook of Ignorance Studies, ed. Matthias Gross and Linsey McGoey, 247–255. London:
Routledge.
Dilley, Roy, and Thomas G. Kirsch, eds. 2015. Regimes of Ignorance. Anthropological Perspectives on the
Production and Reproduction of Non-Knowledge. New York: Berghahn.
Engelke, Matthew. 2012. “Angels in Swindon: Public Religion and Ambient Faith in England.” American
Ethnologist 39 (1): 155–170. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1425.2011.01355.x.
———. 2015a. “The Coffin Question: Death and Materiality in Humanist Funerals.” Material Religion 11(1): 26–48. https://doi.org/10.2752/205393215X14259900061553.
———. 2015b. “On Atheism and Non-Religion: An Afterword.” Social Analysis 59 (2): 135–145. https://doi.org/10.3167/sa.2015.590208.
———. 2019. “Afterword: Getting Hold of the Secular.” In Secular Bodies, Affects, and Emotions: European Configurations, ed. Monique Scheer, Nadia Fadil, and Brigitte Schepelern Johansen, 199–207.
London: Bloomsbury.
Fader, Ayala. 2020. Hidden Heretics: Jewish Doubt in the Digital Age. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press.
Fadil, Nadia. 2009. “Managing Affects and Sensibilities: The Case of Not-Handshaking and Not-Fasting.”
Social Anthropology 17 (4): 439–454. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-8676.2009.00080.x.
Ghodsee, Kristen. 2009. “Symphonic Secularism: Eastern Orthodoxy, Ethnic Identity and Religious
Freedoms in Contemporary Bulgaria.” Anthropology of East Europe Review 27 (2): 1–26.
Gholami, Reza. 2015. Secularism and Identity: Non-Islamiosity in the Iranian Diaspora. Surrey: Ashgate.
Göpffarth, Julian, and Esra Özyürek. 2020. “Spiritualizing Reason, Rationalizing Spirit: Muslim PublicIntellectuals in the German Far Right.” Ethnicities. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468796820932443.
Hann, Chris. 2000. “Problems with the (De)Privatization of Religion.” Anthropology Today 16 (6):14–20.
Haraway, Donna J. 1988. ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege ofPartial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14 (3): 575–599.
Hirschkind, Charles, and David Scott, eds. 2006. Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad and His Interlocutors. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.
Hirschkind, Charles, and Saba Mahmood. 2002. “Feminism, the Taliban, and Politics of Counter-Insurgency.” Anthropological Quarterly 75 (2): 339–354. https://doi.org/101353/anq.2002.0031.
Kleine, Christoph, and Monika. Wohlrab-Sahr. 2021. “Comparative Secularities: Tracing Social andEpistemic Structures beyond the Modern West.” Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 33:
43–72. https://doi.org/10.1163/15700682-12341505.
Künkler, Mirjam, John T. S. Madeley, and Shylashri Shankar, eds. 2018. A Secular Age Beyond the West:
Religion, Law and the State in Asia, the Middle East and North Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lee, Lois. 2015. Recognizing the Non-Religious: Reimagining the Secular. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Luehrmann, Sonja. 2011. Secularism Soviet Style: Teaching Atheism and Religion in a Volga Republic.
Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
———. 2015. “Antagonistic Insights: Evolving Soviet Atheist Critiques of Religion and Why They Matterfor Anthropology.” Social Analysis 59 (2): 97–113. https://doi.org/10.3167/sa.2015.590206.
Lübbe, Hermann. 1965. Säkularisierung: Geschichte eines ideenpolitischen Begriffs. Freiburg: Alber.
Mahmood, Saba. 2005. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.
———. 2006. “Secularism, Hermeneutics, and Empire: The Politics of Islamic Reformation.” Public Culture 18 (2): 323–347. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-2006-006.
Manning, Erin. 2016. The Minor Gesture: Thought in the Act. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Mazzarella, William. 2017. The Mana of Mass Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
McBrien, Julie, and Mathijs Pelkmans. 2008. “Turning Marx on His Head: Missionaries, ‘Extremists’ andArchaic Secularists in Post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan.” Critique of Anthropology 28 (1): 87–103. https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X07086559.

14 ◾ Mascha Schulz and Stefan Binder

Navaro-Yashin, Yael. 2002. Faces of the State: Secularism and Public Life in Turkey. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Özyürek, Esra. 2006. Nostalgia for the Modern: State Secularism and Everyday Politics in Turkey. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press.
Pool, Fernande W. 2016. “The Ethical Life of Muslims in Secular India: Islamic Reformism in West Bengal” (PhD diss., London School of Economics and Political Science).
Quack, Johannes. 2012. Disenchanting India: Organized Rationalism and Criticism of Religion in India.
New York: Oxford University Press.
———. 2014. “Outline of a Relational Approach to ‘Nonreligion’.” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 26: 439–469. https://doi.org/10.1163/15700682-12341327.
Quack, Johannes, and Cora Schuh, eds. 2017. Religious Indifference: New Perspectives from Studies on
Secularization and Nonreligion. Cham, Switzerland: Springer.
Pelkmans, Mathijs. 2017. Fragile Conviction: Changing Ideological Landscapes in Urban Kyrgyzstan.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Ringel, Felix. 2016. “Beyond Temporality: Notes on the Anthropology of Time from a Shrinking
Fieldsite.” Anthropological Theory 16 (4): 390–412. https://doi.org/10.1177/1463499616659971.
Roberts, Nathaniel. 2016. To Be Cared For: The Power of Conversion and Foreignness of Belonging in an
Indian Slum. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Scherer, Matthew. 2011. “Landmarks in the Critical Study of Secularism.” Cultural Anthropology 26 (4):621–632. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1360.2011.01115.x.
Schielke, Samuli. 2012. “Being a Nonbeliever in a Time of Islamic Revival: Trajectories of Doubt andCertainty in Contemporary Egypt.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 44 (2): 301–320.
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020743812000062.
———. 2019. “Is Prose Poetry a Conspiracy Against the Noble Qur’an? Poetics, Humans, and God
in Contemporary Egypt.” Historical Social Research 44: 101–126. https://doi.org/10.12759/
hsr.43.2019.3.101-126.
Schulz, Mascha. 2021. “Convoluted Convictions, Partial Positionings: Non-Religion, Secularism, andParty Politics in Sylhet, Bangladesh” (PhD diss., University of Zurich).
Schröder, Ingo. 2011. “Preliminary Anthropological Reflections on Secularism and Secularity.” Kultūra Ir
Visuomenė. Socialiniu˛ Tyrimu˛ Žurnalas 2 (3): 37–47.
Singh, Bhrigupati. 2018. “Anthropological Investigations of Vitality: Life Force as a Dimension Distinct
from Space and Time.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 8 (3): 550–565. https://doi.org/
10.1086/701185.
Smith, Jonathan Z. 1998. “Religion, Religions, Religious.” In Critical Terms for Religious Studies, ed. Mark
C. Taylor, 269–285. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Starrett, Gregory. 2010. “The Varieties of Secular Experience.” Comparative Studies in Society and History
52 (3): 626–651. https://doi.org/10.1017/S00101417510000332.
Tambar, Kabir. 2009. “Secular Populism and the Semiotics of the Crowd in Turkey.” Public Culture 21 (2):517–537. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-2009-006.
Taylor, Charles. 2007. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Vicini, Fabio. 2020. “The Sociology and Anthropology of Secularism: From Genealogy/Power to theMultiple Manifestations of the Secular.” In Revisiting Secularism in Theory and Practice: Genealogy
and Case, ed. Seda Ünsar and Özgür Ü. Eriş, 127–143. Cham, Switzerland: Springer International
Publishing.
Vliek, Maria. 2018. “Challenging Secularities, Challenging Religion: ‘Secularist Ex-Muslim Voices’ in the
British Debate on Islam and Freedom of Expression.” Journal of Religion in Europe 11 (4): 348–377.
https://doi.org/10.1163/18748929-01104004.