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Beyondthe West,
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Leipzig
University,
3–5
November
2021
Leipzig University, 3–5 November 2021

Religion as an Object of Historical and Social Scientific Study: Global Perspectives; Leipzig University, 3–5 November 2021

Religion as an Object of Historical and Social Scientific Study: Global Perspectives

ConvenorProf. Dr. Florian Zemmin
Institute of Islamic Studies
Freie Universität Berlin
Fabeckstraße 23–25
14195 Berlin
florian.zemmin@fu-berlin.de
Associate Member, HCAS „Multiple Secularities – Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities“, Leipzig University
Venue
StrohsackNikolaistraße 8–10
04109 Leipzig

In recent decades, the category of ‘religion’ has been increasingly
problematised as a concept for comparative, trans-regional andtrans-historical research. This category, a main objection goes, wascoined in a particular context and retains a normative bias, either ofa Christian or of a modern Western nature. Some attribute a special
relevance to the modern academic study of religion in shaping
or even creating the category of ‘religion’. At the same time, andsomewhat paradoxically, ‘religion’ has become a meaningful
category globally. This historical process of globalisation cannot
be attributed solely to the influence of Western hegemony.
Neither does it amount to homogenisation. While historical andsocial scientific approaches to religion do seem to be most firmly
and widely established in European and North American academic
settings, their establishment and differentiation from theology
is more recent than is often assumed. Equally, the historical andsocial scientific study of religion is not confined to Europe andNorth America, but has also become institutionalised in otherregions and contexts.
This workshop will bring together case studies and theoreticalreflections on the study of religion as an object of historical andsocial scientific inquiry in different academic contexts in theAmericas, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. We are especiallyinterested in the global presence and characteristics of religion as an
object of study in the most pertinent academic disciplines: History
of Religion; Comparative Religious Studies; Sociology; Anthropology

and Political Science (excluding Theology and Philosophy). Central
questions concern the place, status and history of research on
religion in these disciplines: What are the main authors, theories
and topics? Do academics within these disciplines understandtheir approach to be secular, and how do they distinguish it fromtheological approaches? How do they conceptualise ‘religion’ anddo they address the question of universality and particularity,or the issue of (de-)colonisation in this regard? In the respective
disciplines, which canons and genealogies of the study of religion
are constructed? What connections, but also barriers are there
between research on religion in different academic contexts? What
are the institutional, political and societal conditions facilitating or
hindering the establishment and development of the mentioned
disciplinary approaches to religion?
We will be discussing these and related questions over thecourse of three days, bringing together expertise from various
disciplines and on different regions: whether in presence orvirtually, we are excited to welcome contributors from Austria,
Canada, Germany, Great Britain, India, Italy, Japan, Mexico,
Lebanon, and the United States; and we much look forward toboth the individual case studies on our common topic as well as tothe conversations across the disciplines of Anthropology, History,
Islamic studies, Study of Religions, Sinology, and Sociology.

1Programme Overview

Programme Overview

Wednesday, 3 November 2021

Thursday, 4 November 2021

Strohsack | room 4.55

Strohsack | room 4.55

11.30 a.m. – 1.00 p.m.

Registration and lunch

12.00 a.m. – 1.00 p.m.

Lunch on premises

1.00 p.m. – 1.30 p.m.

Opening remarks by Christoph Kleine (Director HCAS „Multiple Secularities“) and Florian Zemmin (Convenor)

1.00 p.m. – 3.00 p.m.

PANEL III ( see pp. 11–13) Discussant: Sushmita Nath1.30 p.m. – 3.30 p.m.

PANEL I (see pp. 5–7)

Discussant: Christoph KleinePeter Beyer

Religion in the 21 Century: Disciplinary Critique, Global Restructuring, Categorical Diversity

Steven Sutcliffe

A (Meta) Case Study in Disciplinary Formation: ‘Religious Studies’ in the UK

Jens Kreinath‘Object’ Formations in the Anthropology of Islam: Why to Study Muslims Ethnographically?

st

Is Islam a Religion? Conceptualizing Islam in Southeast Asia (1930s–1940s)

Anindita Chakrabarti
Mujeebu Rahman

Religion as an Object of Social Scientific Study: The Case of Islam in India

Julian Strube

Bengali Contributions to a Global History of “Sciences of Religion”

3.30 p.m. – 4.00 p.m.

Coffee break

3.00 p.m. – 3.30 p.m.

Coffee break

4.00 p.m. – 6.00 p.m.

PANEL II (see pp. 8–10) Discussant: Markus Dreßler

3.30 p.m. – 6.00 p.m.

PANEL IV (see pp. 14–17)

Discussant: Adrian Hermann

Yunus Doğan Telliel ‘Religious Language’ as a Comparative Category

Christian Meyer

Negotiating Religion as zongjiao in the Academic Field in Late Imperial and Republican
China (1890s–1949)

Indrek Peedu

Hierarchies of Disciplinary Approaches and Research Practices in the Study of Religion

Elisabeth Marx

Sari Hanafi

The Protracted Misunderstanding between the Secular versus the Religious: A Convivialist
Perspective

Talking about Religion by Talking About Its Other: Conceptions of the Secular in Japanese
Academic Networks of the 1970s and 1980s

Roohola Ramezani

Recent Approaches to the Sociology of Religion in Iran: Introduction and Pathology

Olga Odgers-Ortiz

Religion as a (Changing) Object of Social Scientific Study in Latin America

7.00 p.m.

Joint dinner for all invited participants
7.00 p.m.

2

Giovanni Maltese

Joint dinner for all invited participants3

Programme Overview

Panel I | Wednesday, 03.11.2021 | 1.30 p.m. – 3.30 p.m. | Strohsack | room 4.55

Friday, 5 November 2021

Religion in the 21st Century: Disciplinary Critique, Global Restructuring, Categorical Diversity

Strohsack | room 4.55
10.00 a.m. – 12.00 p.m.

4Peter Beyer
PANEL V (see pp. 18–20)

Discussant: Monika Wohlrab-Sahr

Roberto Franceso Scalon

The Sociological Study of Religion and Religiosity in Italy as a Utopian-ideologicalSelf-fulfilling Prophecy of the “Italian Happy Secularization”

Marco Papasidero

The Canonization Processes of the Catholic Church: A Meta-study Approach

Liudmila Nikanorova

What does Shamanism do for the Academic Study of Religion?

12.00 p.m. – 1.30 p.m.

Lunch on premises

1.30 p.m. – 3.30 p.m.

PANEL VI (see pp. 21–23)

Discussant: Florian Zemmin

Armando Salvatore
Kieko Obuse

ReOrienting Religion: For a Hermeneutic Sociology of East-West Engagement

Rushain Abbasi

Doing Away with Religion: From Protestant Heresy to Post-Colonial Orthodoxy

Andrea Pintimalli

Other History of Religion? An Islamic Case Study

3.30 p.m. – 4.00 p.m.

Coffee break

4.00 p.m. – 5.30 p.m.

Concluding discussion and plans for publication

7.00 p.m.

Joint dinner for all invited participants

Emeritus Professor of Religious Studies, University of Ottawa
pbeyer@uottawa.ca
Religion as a category and object of study in (Western) academia
has undergone a sequence of upheavals over the last several
decades, in part in response to significant transformations in the
global social world, in part as a reflection of internal disciplinary
developments. This paper focuses on such transformations
and developments principally within the disciplines ofreligious studies and the sociology of religion. In both, recent
decades have seen serious challenges to formerly dominant
approaches to both category and object of study. These include
the attempted undermining of secularization theory and its
replacement with, among others, religious economy theory(e.g. Stark, Bibby, Berger); the critical religion approach (e.g.
McCutcheon, Nongbri, Masuzawa, Asad) with its critique of‘religion’ as a Western, Christian, colonialist, and theologicalcategory; the lived religion debate (e.g. Orsi, Ammerman,
McGuire) with its insistence that institutional religion is too
narrowly conceived; the nonreligion debate (e.g. Lee, Quack,
Burchardt) which seeks to break the religion/nonreligion binary;
the spiritual revolution debate (e.g. Heelas, Woodhead) whichseeks to relocate religion in non-institutionalized forms; and thecultural religion debate (e.g. Beaman, Jopke) which sees a similar
displacement of the centre of gravity for the category awayfrom institutional religion. In all these, however, institutionalreligion is still the explicit or implicit foil, or standard, by whichthese new directions are presented and defined. The proposed
paper summarizes these transformations and debates, and thenpresents three interrelated arguments: a) Both transformations,in the disciplines and in the larger social and global context, arethe latest versions of a very long discussion and developmentthat have their roots in the 19th and 20th century foundationof religion as an analytic category, in the imperial/colonial
spread and glocal appropriation of the category, and in the‘Westphalian’ institutional modeling of religion with the modern
nation-state. b) The current transformations in the ‘religious
field’ are a reflection of a decline in that modeling, yielding
uncertainty as to how, if at all, religion should be conceived. c)
The idea of religion (and secularization as the decline of said
religion) should not be discarded because it is misconceived
or too narrow/wound up in power relations, but should becontextualized in a broader diversity of categorization that goesbeyond the binary modeling of religion/nonreligion (or secular).
A systems-theoretical approach informs all three arguments.

5Panel I | Wednesday, 03.11.2021 | 1.30 p.m. – 3.30 p.m. | Strohsack | room 4.55
A (Meta) Case Study in Disciplinary Formation: ‘Religious Studies’ in the UK‘Object’ Formations in the Anthropology of Islam: Why to Study Muslims Ethnographically?

Steven Sutcliffe

Jens Kreinath

Senior Lecturer in the Study of Religion, University of Edinburgh
S.Sutcliffe@ed.ac.uk

Associate Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Wichita State University
jens.kreinath@gmail.com

The debate on ‘religious studies’ as a disciplinary formation in
the humanities and social sciences remains a constant featureof the late modern field. In this paper I explore the problemof the epistemological-sociological emergence of ‘Religious
Studies’ in the UK from the late 1960s as a case study in theformation of an inter/disciplinary scientific paradigm.
RS in the UK developed as an (Anglophone) variation ofa wider transnational modernist project of ‘Comparative
Religion’. Local institutional pragmatics, plus continuing‘fudged’ religion/state political relationships, encouraged
the assimilation in the UK of the hybrid administrative rubric‘Theology and Religious Studies‘ (TRS), from the early 1990s,
which soon came to determine the UK research audit (now the
Research Excellence Framework/REF).
On the one hand, the comparative study of religion/s had
been independently pursued in the UK since 1954, under the
auspices of a local/national academic society with its own
regional ancestry, linked to the International Association for theHistory of Religions (est. 1950). On the other hand, since 1992,‘Religious Studies’ in the UK has been incorporated into a wider
administrative rubric which contains an unresolved tension

6

Panel I | Wednesday, 03.11.2021 | 1.30 p.m. – 3.30 p.m. | Strohsack | room 4.55

between ‘study of’ (in which religion/s is unambiguously theobject) and ‘religious’ studies (in which the method remains
ambiguous).
This paper explores the contemporary and recent contention
and prognosis of these disciplinary (meta) issues in the UK
context.

The field of an Anthropology of Islam (envisioned by Geertz,
el-Zein, and Asad) provides an interesting venue to discuss thetheme of this conference. Not only is Islam currently practiced
and studied on a global scale but it is also challenged as a unified
object of study by leading scholars of religion and Islam. A metadisciplinary approach to an Anthropology of Islam provides a
relevant case for analyzing institutional research practices andrelationships between theology, anthropology, and the scienceof religion, by focusing on what methods are used and what
concepts are formed to configure the respective field of study.
Aside from the problem among early historians of religion ofwhether and how to present Islam in the genealogy of religions;
neither Islam nor its varied interpretations were challenged intheir status as an ‘object’ of historical and social scientific study.
However, first-hand colonial encounters with traditions andinterpretations of Islam not only led to the institutionalizationof Oriental scholarships in the ‘Mother Countries’ by ‘Othering’colonized people and their religions and cultures, but also laid

the foundation for challenging the very conceptualization ofIslam through ethnographic research.
The aim of this paper is to trace the institutional genealogyof the Anthropology of Islam – and particularly its category
formation and research objective – through distinctions likethose between ‘great’ and ‘little’ traditions and dichotomies
like those between ‘orthodox’ and ‘heterodox’ Islam. Based on
first-hand accounts of saint veneration rituals at shared sacredsites across the Mediterranean and their often conflicting
conceptualization, this paper develops a relational approachas configured through the concept of ‘interrituality’ andtraces processes of ‘object’ formations through the lens ofdifferent conceptualizing practices within varied disciplinary
frameworks.

7

Panel II | Wednesday, 03.11.2021 | 4.00 p.m. – 6.00 p.m. | Strohsack | room 4.55
‘Religious Language’ as a Comparative Category?

Hierarchies of Disciplinary Approaches and Research Practices in the Study of Religion

Yunus Doğan Telliel

Indrek Peedu

Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Rhetoric, Worcester Polytechnic Instituteydtelliel@wpi.edu

Post-doctoral Research Fellow, Center for Religious Studies, Ruhr-University Bochum;
Research Fellow in Religious Studies, University of Tartu
ipeedu@gmail.com

Postcolonial scholarship has shown that the comparative studyof religion emerged out of colonial structures of power, andwas founded on Western and Christian preconceptions. Whatis the predicament of anthropological analysis beyond thisproblematic legacy? Webb Keane and other anthropologists
located in North America, whose writings contributed
significantly to the construction of religious language as a
distinct anthropological topic, have taken up this challenge.
While they are deeply aware of religion’s problematic legacy,
they claim that ‘religious language’ presents an opportunity
for reviving anthropological theorizing as a comparative
enterprise. Focusing on Keane and other anthropologistsof religious language, I first discuss how linguistic practices
in religious and spiritual contexts have come to be seen as
building blocks of a new comparativism at a time when, as theconference organizers put it, “the concept of religion has been
increasingly problematised as a concept for comparative, transregional and trans-historical research.” In the second part, I
move to a discussion of a Turkish divinity school context wheresome Muslim scholars have been thinking about ‘religious
language’ (din dili) as a universal theological category. Despite
their shared interest in religious language and its prevalence8

Panel II | Wednesday, 03.11.2021 | 4.00 p.m. – 6.00 p.m. | Strohsack | room 4.55

across human communities, North American anthropologists
and Turkish theologians tend to operate with different
ontological presumptions regarding linguistic mediation.
I argue that Turkish theologians‘ comparative framework
is—in some ways—as comprehensive as North American
anthropologists’. Reflecting on this point, I ask: is it possible toreimagine comparativism beyond the duality of universalism
and particularism, or essentialism and nominalism?

This paper will focus on ways how acquiring reliable knowledge
about religion as a phenomenon is understood in the different
research approaches within contemporary study of religion. I willapproach this issue by analysing how knowledge-production
and the interrelationship of different disciplinary practices
is understood in two distinctly different approaches in thecontemporary study of religion – the historical and comparative
study of religion on the one side and the evolutionary-cognitive
study of religion on the other. Both of these research approaches
rely on their own distinct understandings of the supposed proper
hierarchy of academic disciplines, ideals of scientificity andcriteria for assessing the methodological self-positioning of thescholar – and these understandings are in many respects verymuch in conflict with each other. For example, they rely on very
different understandings of what counts as empirical research
and what kind of knowledge should be considered primary andthus centrally important for all subsequent research activities.
However, in often overlooked ways they also rely on each other.
The interrelatedness of these two research approaches
forms a particularly interesting case study because researches
on both sides continue to conceptualize their main research‘object’ (religion and everything that comes with it, so to say)in noticeably similar ways, thus very much understanding bothsides as studying the same phenomenon. Thereby a shared(even if occasionally disputed) ‘conceptual territory’ is createdthat enables communication, continuous attention on eachother’s research as well as the occasional rather significant
reliance on the research of the other side (whether admitting
this or not!). In my paper, I will analyse these aspects in detail toexemplify how historical and comparative study of religion on
the one side and the evolutionary and the cognitive study ofreligion on the other (and their interrelationship) is understoodin the contemporary study of religion and what a closer lookat this situation can mean for the study of religion as a whole.

9Panel II | Wednesday, 03.11.2021 | 4.00 p.m. – 6.00 p.m. | Strohsack | room 4.55
The Protracted Misunderstanding between the Secular versus the Religious:
A Convivialist Perspective

Is Islam a Religion? Conceptualizing Islam in Southeast Asia (1930s – 1940s)

Sari Hanafi

Giovanni Maltese

Professor of Sociology and Chair of the Islamic Studies Program, American University of Beirut
sh41@aub.edu.lb

Assistant Professor of Global Christianity and Religious Studies and Director of the Institute for Missiology, Ecumenical Studies andReligious Studies, University of Hamburg
giovanni.maltese@uni-hamburg.de

Religion is often understood as a separate social sphere. I belong
to anti-utilitarian and convivialist sociology that refuses to see
society as differentiated into separate compartments, one ofthem being religion. The spheres of religion, culture, politics,
social and economy are traversed by common logics that allow agiven society to be encompassed in its totality, exactly as Marcel
Mauss and Karl Polanyi did. Due to this differentiation approach,there is so much misunderstanding between the secular versus

10

Panel III | Thursday, 04.11.2021 | 1.00 p.m. – 3.00 p.m. | Strohsack | room 4.55

the religious and the religious and the other spheres. In thispaper, I will proceed with two highlights: first, I will deconstructrigid secularism, as one of the sources of this misunderstanding;then, I will provide an example from the Arab world scrutinizing
the relationship between the religious and the political.

The usefulness of ‘religion’ as analytical category has beenquestioned not only by scholars of religious studies but also
by Islamicists. Building on the assumption that the categoryof ‘religion’ universalizes concepts particular to contexts
dominated by Christians (e.g. the religious/secular divide) and,hence, reifies the idea of a ‘Western’ superiority, these Islamicists
have called to dismiss ‘religion’ as a conceptual tool in favor ofthe ‘Qur‘ānic term’ dīn. A similar argument can also be found ‘onthe ground.’ Da‘wa groups in Malaysia, for example, maintainthat the category of religion serves a ‘Western, neo-colonialist
agenda’ and reject to be called ‘religious.’ Analyzing debates
about ‘Islam’ and ‘religion’ conducted in the 1930s/1940s in
Southeast and South Asia, I argue that it is misleading to view
Muslims referring to Islam as religion (both within and outsideacademia) as mere reproducers of so-called Western categories.
I contend that a study of how Muslims conceptualized
Islam vis-á-vis ‘religion’ and ‘West’ in this context offers fresh
perspectives in tackling questions of Eurocentrism in anddecolonization of academic research. Thus, I propose that an
approach that views the current use of and debates about Islamand religion as products of globally entangled history is more
conducive for a scholarship that aims at critically questioning its
generic terms along with global asymmetries and the epistemic
violence they entail.

11Panel III | Thursday, 04.11.2021 | 1.00 p.m. – 3.00 p.m. | Strohsack | room 4.55
Religion as an Object of Social Scientific Study: The Case of Islam in India

Bengali Contributions to a Global History of ‘Sciences of Religion‘Anindita Chakrabarti

Julian Strube

Associate Professor, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur
aninditac@iitk.ac.in

Assistant Professor in Religious Studies, University of Vienna
julian.strube@univie.ac.at

Mujeebu Rahman

Friedrich Max Müller considered the origins of ‘comparative
religion,’ not in Europe but in India, regarding the Bengali
Rammohan Roy (1772–1833) as its ‘founder.‘ Rammohan, who
is also credited with introducing the notion of ‘Hindooism,‘ iswell known, not only as the ‘father of modern India‘ but also as
an outstanding actor within global debates about the origin,meaning, and future of ‘religion‘ or, as many contemporaries
would have had it, dharma. His interactions with North
American and European Unitarians in the early 1800s will allow
for exploration of two aspects: first, the Bengali developmentof a ‘science of religion‘ in close entanglement with the
emergence of its ‘Western’ counterpart; and second, theestablishment and shifting of disciplinary boundaries against
a shared historical background.
I will focus on the vernacular Bengali context in which
Rammohan’s comparative religion was shaped and further
developed towards the end of the nineteenth century,
following a trajectory from Rammohan’s activities to a ‘rivalry’
about the meaning of ‘science of religion’ between Müller,
Unitarians, and members of the hugely influential Bengali
reform society, the Brahmo Samaj. In light of examples such

Doctoral Student, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur
mujeeb@iitk.ac.in
It is hard to locate religious studies as a separate academic
discipline in the Indian context. In contrast to the divinity
schools and theology departments in the west, there is acomplete disconnect between academic disciplines andreligion as an object of enquiry in the subcontinent. Indologists‘
textual engagements and administrator’s accounts during
the colonial period led to the construction of a particularunderstanding of pan-Indian civilization, which advanced thestudy of Hinduism. Because of this established paradigm, otherreligions are often explored through the categories employed
to study Hinduism. It appeared that the significant aspect of
non-Hindu religions was their syncretic (or liminal) element. For
instance, in the case of Islam, much of the works on syncretism
investigated practices associated with customs and beliefs inIslam and their accounted entanglement with Hindu customs.
In post-independent India, the question of religion surfaced inrelation to the partition of British India along the line of religious
identity and its offshoots: communalism and fundamentalism.
12

Panel III | Thursday, 04.11.2021 | 1.00 p.m. – 3.00 p.m. | Strohsack | room 4.55

The questions of religious minorities and the governance ofreligion also came into focus. It is impossible to study Islamand the Muslim communities without considering the politicaldevelopments of the post-colonial reformist state. Customs,
which are part of Islam, such as veiling, and issues of Muslim
personal law (especially polygamy and extra-judicial divorce),
have profoundly contributed to the stereotype that Islam isantithetical to modern India. The paper proposes to bring
together the sociological and anthropological debates focusing
on Islam in India to understand how they conceptualize Islamand deal with the question of Islamisation and syncretismor the question of universalism versus particularism. It
explores the social scientific discourse on Islam as a minority
religion negotiating reform, revival, and everyday piety in thecontext of secular democracy where a modern state is seenas the institution through which religion is administered, andsecularism is upheld.

as the famed Brahmo Rajnarayan Basu, I will demonstrate how
the notions of ‘science’ and ‘religion’ were locally contested,which demands consideration of diachronic developments
in Bengal (such as dharmaśāstra, vedānta, navya-nyāya, or
the tantras). I will offer theoretical reflections on how these
local developments relate to global debates, considering theambiguities and contradictions of the colonial context.
This will allow for a discussion of how disciplinary boundaries
were constantly re-negotiated through global exchanges.
Unitarians, Transcendentalists, Brahmos, and orientalists such
as Müller shared central assumptions, such as the pure origin
and core of ‘true’ religion (often considered ‘Aryan’), the ‘rediscovery’ of which went hand in hand with reformism andoutright opposition to established forms of religion. Upon
scrutiny, demarcations between rivalling ‘sciences of religion,’theology, or movements such as Brahmoism appear anything
but clear. Against their shared historical background, I will argue
that our own discipline, religious studies, has a global history
that awaits further research beyond its ‘Western’ institutional
structures.

13

Panel IV | Thursday, 04.11.2021 | 3.30 p.m. – 6.00 p.m. | Strohsack | room 4.55

14

Panel IV | Thursday, 04.11.2021 | 3.30 p.m. – 6.00 p.m. | Strohsack | room 4.55

Negotiating Religion as zongjiao in the Academic Field in Late Imperial and Republican China(1890s–1949)

Talking about Religion by Talking About Its Other: Conceptions of the Secular in Japanese Academic
Networks of the 1970s and 1980s

Christian Meyer

Elisabeth MarxProfessor of Sinology, Free University of Berlin
Chr.Meyer@fu-berlin.de

Junior Researcher at the HCAS “Multiple Secularities”, Leipzig University
elisabeth.marx@uni-leipzig.de

Research on religion developed in China as early as in the its development as a widely institutionalized discipline. In alate 19th and the first half of the 20th century. It was closely second step we will show how the new introductory works
connected to the introduction of a new term ‘zongjiao’ that tried to introduce religion as universal category, and thereby
was coined to translate the Western-shaped term of religion. aimed to build discursive coalitions between adherents of soHowever, even after its introduction it was object of permanent called higher religions against the background of anti-religious– academic and non-academic – negotiations and successively movements. Hereby translating and local interpretation (asadopted different layers of meaning. The paper aims at analyzing ‘translingual practice’) were going hand in hand. The paper
the shifting discursive contexts, strategies and motivations shall therefore explore and evaluate how much the Chineseof relevant agents and accordingly how meanings of ‘religion’ concept of ‘zongjiao‘ with its global influences and indigenousor the ‘religious‘ were permanently renegotiated. Altogether roots implied meanings that were both relatable to a global
it shall reveal how and under which conditions religion as an genealogy of ‘religion‘, but also compatible to local semantics.
object was treated in Chinese academic research of this time.
In a first step, based on an analysis of publications, course
curricula and scholarly networks the presentation will
demonstrate that while the field of academic study of religion(or ‘religious studies‘, in Chinese zongjiaoxue) first arose inChristian missionary colleges in the 1890s, it developed at thelatest in the 1920s into a general field of interest. However,at the same time political and ideological conditions, inparticular the anti-religious movement of the 1920s, limited

Conceptual discussions about secularization, secularism,laïcité, and secularity increased gradually over the past 60
years in Japanese academic discourse. Still, they remain rather
marginal compared to the widespread debates about theconstitutional separation of state and religion or historicalanalyses of pre-war non-religious Shinto. Although all theseconcepts address the borders of religion, religion’s relationshipwith the political seems to be of greater interest than it’s
relation to other spheres of society.
Despite a few works trying to address the historicalacademic discourse about conceptions of the secular within
the Sociology of Religion in Japan, a general overview ofconceptual distinctions of the secular and the disciplinary sites
where these are discussed is still missing. In this regard, thispaper will follow the line of asking for the borders of religion
by analysing studies during the 1970’s and 1980’s, and makean attempt to understand religion from the perspective andconceptualization of its other in a wider circle of academic
networks in Japan and beyond.
The focus will be on contributions preserved in the National
Diet Library to identify the varieties of conceptions of thesecular. This includes an analysis of respective bibliographies
concerning native and/or foreign ideas and narratives scholars
draw upon to legitimize their understanding of the secular andto constitute disciplinary canons by attributing relevance tocertain scholarly contributions.

15Panel IV | Thursday, 04.11.2021 | 3.30 p.m. – 6.00 p.m. | Strohsack | room 4.55
Recent Approaches to the Sociology of Religion in Iran: Introduction and Pathology

Religion as a (Changing) Object of Social Scientific Study in Latin America

Roohola Ramezani

Olga Odgers-Ortiz

Research Fellow, Orient-Institut Beirut
r8ramezani@gmail.com

Professor and Researcher at El Colegio de la Frontera Norteodgers@colef.mx

The field of sociology of religion has been wildly accusedin Iran for being secular and Christian. Specially within thecontext of excessive debates concerning the Islamizationand indigenization of science, such accusations seem to havelargely precluded the development of the field within Iranianacademia. Yet some Iran-based sociologists have recently tried
to go against the flow, initiating different approaches to asociology of Islam, Shia Islam in particular. Certain local religious
events—such as Arbaʽeen, Ashura, and Haj—as well as certain
phenomena with significant religious implications—such as

16

Panel IV | Thursday, 04.11.2021 | 3.30 p.m. – 6.00 p.m. | Strohsack | room 4.55

the emergence of new forms of relationship and new forms ofspirituality—have thus been subjects of different studies. At thesame time, however, attempts toward theoretically grounding
such approaches have been entangled in demanding
methodological problems. In this paper I introduce theserecent approaches, offer a pathology of them by considering
the methodological problems with which they are faced, andexamine the prospect for an Iranian sociology of religion.

The study of religions in Latin America has been more closely
linked to sociology and anthropology than to philosophy or
theology. And although prominent authors from Europe and theUnited States have always had a clear influence, Latin American
scholars have also developed their own currents of thought(Blancarte 2020, Odgers 2020). These Latin American currents are
based on the analysis of empirical realities that frequently differ
from those observed in other contexts. Thus, for example, while
the theory of secularization aroused limited interest, the study ofreligious syncretism (Marzal) or expressions of popular religiosity(Parker, Suárez, Martin) have been relevant analytical axes.
In the last decade, Latin American sociologists andanthropologists have begun to displace the category ‘religion‘
with more open or fluid terms, such as ‘spirituality‘ or ‘practices
of sacralization‘.

What is the reason for this shift? Is it a reappropriation of global
academic debates? Is it related to an ongoing Latin American
societal change? Is it a reflection of the passage of an emic term
to the academic sphere? Or is it a passing fad among social
scientists? In this paper, we propose to address these questions,focusing on the case of Latin American social sciences.

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Panel V | Friday, 05.11.2021 | 10.00 a.m. – 12.00 p.m. | Strohsack | room 4.55
The Sociological Study of Religion and Religiosity in Italy as a Utopian-ideological Self-fulfilling
Prophecy of the ‘Italian Happy Secularization‘

The Canonization Processes of the Catholic Church: A Meta-study Approach

Roberto Franceso Scalon

Marco Papasidero

Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Turinroberto.scalon@unito.it

Postdoctoral Researcher in the ERC project NeMoSanctI, University of Turin
marco.papasidero@unito.it

The paper focuses on the sociology of religion in Italy
conducted at the academic level from the late 1960s to today,
concerning the religious orientations of the Italian population.
The working hypothesis is placed on the level of thesociology of knowledge and states that the configuration of
the sociology of religion in Italy has developed mainly on arationalist hermeneutic platform. It would then be articulated
by proceeding mainly along two parallel tracks, the secularist
and Marxist one and the Marxist and progressive Catholic
one, which found their meeting point in terms of a substantial
mutual legitimation.
At this regard may be important to consider, at first, theselection of the theoretical-interpretative frameworks ofreference utilized for the sociological analysis; secondly,
the personal involvement, more or less militant, of Italiansociologists of religion, within both the Italian Catholicism
and the Italian political system and civil society, prevalently on
progressive positions.
More precisely: the sociology of religion in Italy – especiallythe sociological analysis of the relationship between
Italian Catholicism and the process of modernization – has
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Panel V | Friday, 05.11.2021 | 10.00 a.m. – 12.00 p.m. | Strohsack | room 4.55

been configured as a self-fulfilling prophecy: that of theinexorable secularization of Catholic Italy by virtue of boththe modernization of Italian society in positivist terms and,hand in hand, the huge affirmation of the modernist and neomodernist demands in the Italian church.
The latent narrative of the prophecy envisages the‘utopian-ideological‘ dialogue between secular rationalism
and religious sense, between Marxist atheism and Catholic
faith, as a calculated risk for the mutual recognition and theconsequent synthesis of opposites: whose form should be the‘happy secularization‘ of Italian society as an obligatory path
for a just society, at the same time more modern-secular but noless Catholic. The epilogue seems to be a deep secularizationand the end of Italian Catholicism as confessional religion.

One of the main aspects of history of religions is the analysis of
items that have been composed for religious and theological
purposes, such as texts, prayers, etc. The historical method
is applied with the aim of approaching these sources from ascientific point of view, often through the adoption of a wide
range of disciplines. Sometimes this methodology is also utilized
by religious authorities with specific purposes.
The aim of this proposal is to analyse the canonization process(i.e. the registration of a person in the lists of the blessed or of thesaints) conducted by the Catholic Church, focusing on the Positio(position). This is a text composed by the Postulator, or proponentof a cause for the canonization of a dead person, designed topresent his or her virtues, life, miracles and fame of sanctity, sothat a commission of theologians can verify whether or not he or
she deserves to be canonized. It is a multidisciplinary procedure
combining history, theology and canonical law.
The Positio is a very useful object of study for an historianof religions, because it is characterized, at least partially, by ascientific approach (in the selection of sources, in their analysis,in the historical reconstruction), although its aim is theological,
i.e. the demonstration of the ‘sanctity’ of a person. The study ofa Positio can be conducted considering two meta-study aspects:
the procedure through which the Postulator writes and composes
the text, using historical method but with a theological purpose;the historian’s analysis of the text itself, in order to verify not only
the way in which the historical method has been applied, butalso how the Postulator has considered, for example, specificaspects while leaving others in the background. This case study,
through a meta-study approach, allows me to reflect on the way
in which historians – but also Postulators themselves – regard
and use their discipline in a scientific manner, and how they
distinguish it from a theological approach.

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Panel V | Friday, 05.11.2021 | 10.00 a.m. – 12.00 p.m. | Strohsack | room 4.55

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Panel VI | Friday, 05. 11. 2021 | 1.30 p.m. – 3.30 p.m. | Strohsack | room 4.55

What does Shamanism do for the Academic Study of Religion?

ReOrienting Religion: For a Hermeneutic Sociology of East-West Engagement

Liudmila Nikanorova

Armando Salvatore

Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Archaeology, History, Religious Studies and Theology, Arctic University of Trømso
liudmila.nikanorova@uit.no

Barbara and Patrick Keenan Chair in Interfaith Studies and Professor of Global Religious Studies, McGill University
armando.salvatore@mcgill.ca

In this paper, I problematize shamanism as an analyticalcategory and challenge it through critical reading ofscholarships about the area that has continuously attracted
scholars and travelers in search for Siberian shamanism – Sakha
Sire [Sa. ‘the Sakha Land’, currently known as the Sakha (Yakutia)
Republic]. Inspired by the theoretical and methodologicalwork of scholars, who challenge the universality of establishedWestern colonial knowledges (L.T. Smith, W. Mignolo, E. Said,
I. Wallerstein, B. Tafjord, M. Dressler and A.P. Mandair), I reflect
on the use of shamanism in the academic study of religion. The
term shaman entered European and then global imaginationsand vocabularies through the writings of the eighteenthcentury travelers and missionaries and was reserved to Siberian
practitioners to mark their assumed ethnic and civilizational
differences. With the added -ism, shamanism became one of
the comparative imagined commonalities of people groupedby Eurocentric thinkers into ‘tribal’, ‘primitive’, ‘aboriginal’,‘indigenous’ in English and Naturvölker (‘in contrast’ toEuropean Kulturvölker) in German. Not only Sakha oyuun weretranslated into shaman and described as ‘hysterical, crazy andwacky devil-worshippers’ (e.g. Sieroszewski 1896, Khudyakov1896), these translations towards religion and shamanism

Kieko Obuse

subjected oyuun to imprisonment and eradication as a result ofanti-religious Soviet policies (Znamensky 2001, Vasil’eva 2000).
A number of scholars urged fellow colleagues to abandon
the terms ‘shamans’ and ‘shamanism’ as analytical categories(Shirokogoroff 1935, Rydving 2011). However, not only thesecategories are still used analytically, they dominate the field tothis day partly due to the legacy of expedition ethnographiesand shamantologists Mircea Eliade (1972) and Michal Harner(1980). I discuss in this paper Horisons of Shamanism (2016)
from Stockholm University Press as one of the numerous
contemporary examples of non-critical translation of Sakha
practitioners into shaman. I argue that such translations
homogenize and shamanize Sakha practitioners and practices,which could be described in a variety of ways that might or
might not be identified as religious or secular. Moreover, I stressthat the study of shamanism tells us more about the colonial
legacies, the need for juxtaposition against the emerged
paradigm of world religions, and the role of scholarly categories
than about the practices and people who inhabit the imagined
region of Siberia.

Visiting Researcher at Kobe City University of Foreign Studies
kieko.obuse@regents.oxon.org
The critics of the Western hegemonic notion of ‘religion,’ such as
Talal Asad and his school, have often invoked the precedent of
The Meaning and End of Religion by Wilfred Cantwell Smith. This
paper explores how two scholars who closely collaborated with
Smith, namely Toshihiko Izutsu and Robert Bellah, reworked
some of his intuitions and created alternate venues of reflection
on the origin, articulation, and evolution of ‘religion.’ Based on
the analysis of the main works of Izutsu and Bellah and archival
sources documenting their dialogue with Smith, the paper
suggests how their engagement with both Islam (like Smithand Asad) and Japanese religions (unlike them) contributed tobreak the intellectual stalemate of the critique of ‘religion.’
In particular, the paper will show how Izutsu undertook thisprogram by placing Islam at the center of the Afro-Eurasianmap of circulation of religious ideas. We argue that rather thanbasing his methodology on an external scrutiny of ideas ofreligion via genealogy and discourse analysis, Izutsu focused on
how religious traditions provide resources for the unpacking of
their own overarching categories.

In addition, we explore how Izutsu’s methodology helps
transcending the stale notions of religion still entertained by
Axial Age theory also by illumining Bellah’s dictum that within
religious processes “nothing is ever lost.” This was also done by
Izutsu by turning to the teeming world of ‘inter-religion,’ i.e.,of circulation, sharing, and mutual appropriations of religious
ideas and practices, manifested through the power of vision,
sound, and the ‘magic’ of language expressivity. In conclusion,
we show how through a highly original methodology drawing
on the philosophy of language and the philosophy of mind
in combination with more traditional approaches to the studyof texts, Izutsu developed a hermeneutic sociology relying on
a radiant transcultural vision breaking through conventional
East-West boundaries. In this way, he profoundly altered themost resilient among Western misconceptions of both religion
in general and Islam in particular.

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Panel VI | Friday, 05.11.2021 | 1.30 p.m. – 3.30 p.m. | Strohsack | room 4.55

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Panel VI | Friday, 05. 11. 2021 | 1.30 p.m. – 3.30 p.m. | Strohsack | room 4.55

Doing Away with Religion: From Protestant Heresy to Post-Colonial Orthodoxy

Other History of Religion? An Islamic Case Study

Rushain Abbasi

Andrea Pintimalli

Mellon Fellow in the Humanities and Lecturer in the Department of Religious Studies, Stanford University
rua957@mail.harvard.edu

La Sapienza University of Rome
andrea.pintimalli@uniroma1.it

In recent years, the validity of the category of religion has been
increasingly subjected to severe criticism across several academic
disciplines. The thrust of this critical position rests, in the main,
on one central claim, which is that the notion of religion did notexist in non-Western and premodern civilizations and is, therefore,a unique invention of the modern West. This paper seeks tounsettle this assumption by demonstrating that the critique ofthe category of religion is itself a thoroughly Western affair, one
which has wrongly precluded the possibility of both the historicaland analytical relevance of ‘religion‘ to non-Western traditions andcivilizations. I set out to achieve this goal by focusing in particularon the figure of Wilfred Cantwell Smith, the historian of religion
who first popularized the critique of ‘religion‘ in his The Meaningand End of Religion. Despite the historical nature of his work, I
argue that Smith’s theoretical premises are deeply indebted to a
distinctively Protestant genealogy which itself laid the basis forthe critique of ‘religion.‘ After briefly elaborating this theologicaltradition, I proceed to reveal the post-colonial transmutation ofSmith’s work through the writings of Talal Asad and his successors,which like its theological precursors, similarly rely on certain
ideological assumptions common to a particular tradition in the

The context that has emerged in recent decades, following
the end of colonialism and the consequent increased presenceof local cultures on the international academy, represents a
new phase in the field of religious studies. Today, the demandby those cultures for a place of equal dignity in the scientificdialogue, together with an increasingly profound questioningin Europe and North America, and with the rise of the so-called
post-secularism and the ‘re-enchantment of the world‘, haveproduced the emergence of new trends in the field of religion
studies and the consequent push to rethink the foundationsof the discipline, including the very concept of ‘religion‘ withrespect to which the debate has never been entirely dormant.
Richard King launched an appeal for the future of the disciplinein order to overcome the idea of ‘Western exceptionalism‘,attempting to trace the precedents of religious studies inother cultures. In this talk I will present an Islamic case studyof other religious traditions, that of al-Bīrūnī (973–1048?). AlBīrūnī, a polymath exponent of the Golden Age of Islamic
culture, contemporary and intellectual rival of Avicenna, witha methodology recognised as scientifically modern by several
scholars, composed two major works on religious traditions.

Western academy (in this case, the school of critical theory) rather
than a clear demonstration that ‘religion‘ never existed before
Europe. By subjecting the critique of the category of religion to its
own form of genealogical inquiry, I hope to generate the possibility
for the historical, analytical, and even theological relevance of theidea of religion to non-Western traditions and civilizations.

A work dedicated to calendar systems in which he deals witheleven religious traditions, and one dedicated to the Indian
Subcontinent in which he compared the philosophical andreligious thought of Ancient Greek, Jewish, Christian and Sufi
sources with Sanskrit tradition. According to the lexical analysis
I have conducted, in these works al-Bīrūnī uses thirteen
different Arabic expression, all rendered as ‘religion‘ in the
English translations of the two books. Al-Bīrūnī’s conceptions
expressed in his works about human condition, the searchfor knowledge, and different religious traditions hardly fit
in the Western categories of religion and its opposition tosecularity. Indeed, the vastness of al-Bīrūnī’s knowledge, his
scientific rigour and achievements urge us to rethink ‘religion‘
as an analytical category, with the aim of finding a possible
universally human concept.

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Programme Overview

Alphabetical Index
Abbasi, Rushain .................................................................................................................................................................................................... 22
Beyer, Peter ............................................................................................................................................................................................................. 5
Chakrabarti, Anindita.......................................................................................................................................................................................... 12
Hanafi, Sari .............................................................................................................................................................................................................. 10
Kreinath, Jens......................................................................................................................................................................................................... 7
Maltese, Giovanni ................................................................................................................................................................................................. 11
Marx, Elisabeth ...................................................................................................................................................................................................... 15
Meyer, Christian .................................................................................................................................................................................................... 14
Nikanorova, Liudmila .......................................................................................................................................................................................... 20
Obuse, Kieko .......................................................................................................................................................................................................... 21
Odgers-Ortiz, Olga ............................................................................................................................................................................................... 17
Papasidero, Marco ................................................................................................................................................................................................ 19
Pintimalli, Andrea ................................................................................................................................................................................................ 23
Peedu, Indrek ......................................................................................................................................................................................................... 9
Rahman, Mujeebu ............................................................................................................................................................................................... 12
Ramezani, Roohola ............................................................................................................................................................................................. 16
Salvatore, Armando ............................................................................................................................................................................................ 21
Scalon, Roberto Franceso ................................................................................................................................................................................. 18
Sutcliffe, Steven..................................................................................................................................................................................................... 6
Strube, Julian ........................................................................................................................................................................................................ 13
Telliel, Yunus Doğan ........................................................................................................................................................................................... 824

Leipzig University
Kolleg-Forschungsgruppe
Humanities Centre
for Advanced Studies„Multiple Secularities – Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities“
Nikolaistraße8–10,
8-10, 04109 Leipzig
Nikolaistraße
multiple-secularities@uni-leipzig.de
www.multiple-secularities.de