ANTHR 7485 - Secularism and the Minority Question

(crosslisted) RELST 7485

Fall. 4 credits. Letter grades only.

Prerequisite: at least one sociocultural anthropology course. Co-meets with ANTHR 4485/RELST 4485.

N. Raheja.

There is a vexed relationship between secular governance and the lived struggles of religious minorities. While proponents claim that secular reason is a solution to religious strife, recent scholarship has shown how modern secular governance has actually exacerbated religious tensions and hardened boundaries in liberal democracies. To understand this problem space, this seminar will begin with overviews of the anthropology of secularism, followed by genealogies of the religious minority form as a category of governance, and then shift to reading ethnographies that focus on religious minorities in contemporary liberal democracies cross-culturally. Concluding with an intensive focus on South Asia, we will analyze the possibilities and limits of state forms of recognition that enumerate religion, as it intersects with other axes of difference, in the context of majority-minority relations and people’s everyday identifications.