Khaled Furani

Preliminary abstract: This workshop assumes it is due time that anthropology undertook the task, as Talal Asad exhorts, to ‘grasp more fully what is required in its being at once modern and secular’ (2003: 22). Going beyond the anthropology of secularism’s literature’s overriding concern to improve the study of others’ religiosity, we aim to interrogate the foundational role of secularism, as well as explore its utility as an analytical standpoint for examining anthropology’s elemental challenge, not only to represent others, but also to know itself. This workshop thus turns the tables of inquiry whereby anthropology investigates its own secular making in the modern world of sovereign nation-states. We assume the discipline’s secularity is neither sealed nor stable. The workshop’s purview thus entails probing the complex and contradictory ways in which the secular undergirds foundational anthropological concepts (e.g., culture and otherness), practices (e.g., ethnographic immersion), and sensibilities (e.g., tolerance). Its impetus derives from a concern with the ways in which the secular as a powerful modern formation furnishes anthropology with certain ethical, political, and epistemic certainties (and uncertainties), as well as delineates investigative possibilities. We anticipate generative conversations furthering the discipline’s relentless striving for coherence and critique.