Globalization can be interpreted as a dialectical process of de- and re-territorialization. The challenges to existing borders that limit economic, socio-cultural, and political activities, and the establishment of new borders as the result of such activities, bring about certain consolidated structures of spatiality, while at the same time societies develop regulatory regimes to use these structures for purposes of dominance and integration. Global history in our understanding investigates the historical roots of those global conditions that have led to modern globalization and should therefore focus on the historicity of regimes of territorialization and their permanent renegotiation over time. There is, at present, a massive insecurity about patterns of spatiality and appropriate regulatory mechanisms. This article begins with a sketch of this current uncertainty and of two further characteristics of contemporary globalization. The second part examines discussions in the field of global history with regard to processes of de- and re-territorialization. In the third part, we suggest three categories that can serve both as a research agenda and as a perspective according to which a history of globalization can be constructed and narrated.

Multiple Secularities beyond the West: An IntroductionFor more than two decades, theorists of modernity have grappled with the new visibility of religion in many parts of the world. Scholars have made efforts to accommodate phenomena such as religious resurgences, new forms of public religion and new religious movements within conceptualizations of modernity in order to move beyond the linear and deterministic narratives of modernization that dominated the social sciences in their formative period in the twentieth century (Casanova 1994;Hervieu-Léger 2000). In response to the same observations, and in a sometimes very general way, theories of secularization have become subject to intense criticism and have given way to notions of 'de-secularization' (Berger 1999). Very recently, yet another set of studies, in many ways inspired by Charles Taylor's path-breaking book A Secular Age (Taylor 2007), began to interrogate and question monolithic understandings of secularism, broadly construed in terms of the institutional arrangements specifying the relationships between, and often the separation of, religion and the state. The majority of these studies, however, were either focused on a relatively narrow set of questions related to challenges to secularism posed by migration-driven religious diversity in Europe and North America, or explored the trajectories of a few cases of secularity imposed by modernist state projects in the context of existing religious pluralism, as in India and Turkey (Cady and Shakman Hurd 2010; Kuru 2009).This book moves beyond these limitations and breaks new ground by exclusively exploring formations of secularity beyond the West. Analysing scenarios of secularity in East Asia, the post-Communist world, the Arab Middle East, Africa and India, it takes into consideration a set of regions that have largely been ignored in sociological and anthropological debates on the relationships between religion and the secular in modernity thus far. Importantly, while in virtually all of the existing literature religion is readily construed as a marker of cultural difference and identity (of countries, regions, communities), the secular is still peculiarly seen as homogenizing, as something outside culture.With this interdisciplinary volume we propose to move beyond such conceptualizations and explore the social constructions of the religious-secular divide, including their institutionalized practices, in five different world regions. With a strong conceptual focus on comparative research, we examine how shared but also contested forms and practices of distinguishing religious and secular spheres of society acquire cultural meaning, and how they shape and define Brought to you by | Cambridge University Library Authenticated Download Date | 8/8/15 3:23 PM

No abstract

No abstract

The European community that is in the process of being created is still searching for its history. For a few years now, the publishing market, which has been attempting -under the heading of 'European history' -to construct a shared past for a present that we now have in common, has been mushrooming. This communal experience is indisputably gaining ground (though more slowly and controversially than some well-known optimists hoped): it is promoted by freedom of movement within the European Union, by the effect of tourism, which some time ago ceased being reserved only for the elite, by the availability everywhere of products that, a few years back, typically represented a certain type of national styles of consumption, and finally by the unifying influence of the media. To the extent that closer relations between the inhabitants of the 'old world' run in parallel with the attempt to create institutions to regulate these common goods, and to protect against movements of people from other areas with their own sets of values, a combination of powerful ingredients is in place that leads one to anticipate a strengthening of 'European' identity.' It is well known in research into identity that history plays an important part in its construction.' And indeed historians from European countries have set themselves the task of jointly putting together a school textbook in which presentations that might otherwise focus on national character and be likely to offend neighbours will be harmonized. Others are looking at ways of celebrating memory (places of memory) that are intended to stimulate European rather than national memory. In addition, German and French historians met a while ago, in the little place of Genshagen near Berlin, with the intention of identifying events that would be suitable for European celebrations, in that they would not be connected with events that one of the participants might be ashamed of, or refer directly to a victory of one over another. But to anyone who studies the history of the two neighbours separated only by the Rhine, it quickly becomes clear that there is not a lot of space left in the calendar for activities that would found a common tradition.The difficulties are obvious, and historians' efforts to overcome them are still at an embryonic stage.4 And meanwhile books on national history fill the bookshop windows. As a general rule, research is still influenced by close familiarity with the archives of one's own country, whereas the historical tradition of another country is understood more or less superficially. However, things are starting to change. Student mobility is continually expanding, and the unilateral connection between young people's careers and their country is fast disappearing. For doctoral students, a knowledge of the relevant languages is also increasing in a way that can only be pleasing. Research grants make it easy to travel to another country to study its history in more detail, just as links between universities are no longer restricted to exchanges of letters or ...