Outline of a Relational Approach to ‘Nonreligion’

Quack, Johannes

doi:10.1163/15700682-12341327

Cited by 90 publications

(43 citation statements)

References 46 publications

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“…Terms like religion, spirituality, secularism, and non-religion are discursive, relational constructions contingently articulated in particular locations at specific times for particular purposes (Swatos, 2003: 50;von Stuckrad, 2003;Knott, 2010;von Stuckrad, 2010;Day, 2011;Day, Vincett, & Cotter, 2013;Knott, 2013;von Stuckrad, 2013;Huss, 2014). For this reason, it is helpful to examine my "non-religious" subjects' self-articulations as demarcating a specific positionality within a particular "religion-related field" (Quack, 2014).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“‘Need a Minister? How About Your Brother?’: The Universal Life Church between Religion and Non-Religion”

Hoesly

2015

Secularism and Nonreligion

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“‘Need a Minister? How About Your Brother?’: The Universal Life Church between Religion and Non-Religion”

Hoesly

2015

Secularism and Nonreligion

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“…Although some people in the study emphasized the permeability of the boundary between religion and non-religion, or argued that there is no divide at all, for others an opposition to cultural classification operated alongside a firm sense of being located outside of the religious 'field'. The corollary of this is that these people were placing themselves inside a non-religious one (Quack 2014), whether they recognized this or not. In this way, many people who eschewed category labels and cultural affiliations did not want to go so far as to communicate ambivalence about whether they were located in or out of the religious field.…”

Section: Inauthentic Ambivalencementioning

confidence: 99%

“…This open, relational approach to understanding atheist subjectivity and identity (Lee 2012c;Quack 2014) looks beyond the rejections of theism and religion that have also governed engagements with the non-religious. In some ways, this approach is broader than the already pliant framework provided for this special issue.…”

Section: Beyond Organized Atheismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ambivalent Atheist Identities: Power and Non-religious Culture in Contemporary Britain

Lee¹

2015

Social Analysis

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In Britain, most non-theists and atheists do not identify themselves as such in explicit terms, yet non-theistic cultural threads are interwoven through everyday discourses. This article calls for more extensive ethnographic engagement with these more diffuse-and therefore less visible and less commonly researched-forms of non-religious culture. Based on exploratory fieldwork conducted in South East England, it draws attention to one set of these indistinct non-religious forms: 'authentic' and 'inauthentic' ambivalent atheist and non-religious self-understandings and self-representations. It demonstrates how these identities may be subjectively meaningful and culturally significant and how they may be simultaneously empowering and disempowering. Scrutiny of ambivalent atheist identities points to complicated dynamics between non-religion and power and the value of attending to poorly or unmarked non-religious cultures through ethnographic work.First and second waves of research into secularism, non-religious atheism, and other non-religious 1 cultures have been biased in their interest toward the organized expressions of these cultures. There are two sensible reasons for this. Firstly, organized non-religion (e.g., humanist associations, identifiable cultural movements like New Atheism, or anti-theist governmental policy) is empirically and theoretically significant, increasingly so in some regards (see Engelke 2015). Secondly, part of this significance relates to the high visibility of these forms. This prominence shapes their impact in society and also makes them readily identifiable as subjects for social research. In all likelihood, however, these organized forms present the 'tip of the iceberg' when it comes to social and cultural expressions of non-religion in contemporary societies. There are, for example, several indications that the number of people involved with overt, Ambivalent Atheist Identities | 21 representational modes of atheism is vastly overshadowed by the number associated with implicit, non-representational modes (Lee, forthcoming).In this article, I consider the scope for ethnographies of non-religion and non-religious atheism beyond the most centralized or codified expressions of these phenomena. Drawing on exploratory fieldwork conducted in South East England, I focus on issues of representation and identity, concentrating on the more ambivalent non-religious identities that are easily lost from view. Like other forms of self-representation, these identifications reveal, enable, and determine subjective experiences. Representation makes something of the self available to multiple audiences, subjecting it to the interpretation and interests of others. The diffuseness of these representations, however, prevents them from being recognized and therefore restricts their direct influence in public discussion and space. At the same time, it prevents others from understanding and interpreting these subjectivities-and from misunderstanding and misinterpreting them. Thus, ambivalent identities are ...

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“…As a rule of thumb, non-religion is defined in relation to religious phenomena. Non-religion can be understood narrowly in opposition to religion, or as a more inclusive term that encompasses the articulation of functional alternatives, such as humanism, scientific naturalism, and secular morality (Quack 2014). Nevertheless, we are not sure that this concept can act as an umbrella term for the diverse forms of cutting religious networks under discussion in this special issue.…”

Section: Being Godlessmentioning

confidence: 99%

Godless People, Doubt, and Atheism

Blanes¹,

Oustinova-Stjepanovic²

2015

Social Analysis

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Abstract:In the introduction to this special issue, we set the agenda for researching the aspirations and practices of godless people who seek to thin out religion in their daily lives. We reflect on why processes of disengagement from religion have not been adequately researched in anthropology. Locating this issue's articles in the anthropological literature on doubt and atheism, we argue for the importance of a comparative investigation to analyze people's reluctance to pursue religion.Keywords: atheism, disbelief, disengagement from religion, doubt, godless people, non-religion, unbelief Being GodlessIn the current climate of false prophecies of secularism and numerous theories of the resurgence of religions, it is rather unusual to study a way of disengaging from religion. A bulk of recent ethnographies tell stories about technologies of self and the adept cultivation of religious dispositions (Mahmood 2005), learning to discern God (Luhrmann 2007), and enacting divine presences in physical rituals, speech acts, dream visions, or materials (Engelke 2007). Rituals of presencing the transcendent, the divine, or the immaterial (e.g., Orsi 2005) and well-rehearsed arguments about the resilience of religious spiritualities in politics (Bubandt and van Beek 2012) seem to be the order of the day. Building on the growing interest in researching how people demarcate the boundaries of religion and what falls outside (Engelke 2012b(Engelke , 2014, this special issue suggests that 'being godless' is an important empirical reality that encompasses processes, aspirations, and practices that purposefully or inadvertently lead to the attenuation of one's religious life. Through ethnographies of 'godless people', we propose to explore modalities of disengagement from religion, such as aspirations to move away from one's religious tradition and attempts to maintain one's atheist sensibilities and dispositions in encounters 2 | Ruy Llera Blanes and Galina Oustinova-Stjepanovic with religious phenomena and people. The contributors to this issue illuminate several moments and movements within such processes: the materiality and bodily consequences of atheist configurations (Copeman and Quack), questions of certainty and doubt (Tremlett and Shih), problems of defining a non-religious identity (Lee), and political narratives and ontologies (Blanes and Paxe). We also interrogate the non-religious construction of scientific scholarship (Luehrmann) and the atheism of anthropology and anthropologists (Oustinova-Stjepanovic). These contributions exemplify possible questions and itineraries in the empirical study of atheism and non-religion and raise anthropological questions beyond a specific sub-disciplinary scope. As Matthew Engelke brilliantly exposes in the afterword to this issue, this exercise is conceptually uncomfortable but can be productive for both a hypothetical anthropology of non-religion and an anthropology of religion. In this introduction, we set an agenda for the study of non-religion and atheism and critically revie...

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Outline of a Relational Approach to ‘Nonreligion’

Cited by 90 publications

References 46 publications

“‘Need a Minister? How About Your Brother?’: The Universal Life Church between Religion and Non-Religion”

“‘Need a Minister? How About Your Brother?’: The Universal Life Church between Religion and Non-Religion”

Ambivalent Atheist Identities: Power and Non-religious Culture in Contemporary Britain

Godless People, Doubt, and Atheism

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