Paper short abstract:

The secular nature of social knowledge becomes problematic in understanding populations whose lives are experienced as interactions with forms of the divine. Can these lives be meaningfully translated in a scientific idiom, whose historical pedigree is constructed on excluding those very lives?

Paper long abstract:

The possibility of something called "culture", or "society" and its place in the fundamental patterning of human experience and organisation of collective life was once the founding problem of the social sciences. But the various disciplinary branches came, eventually, to take this object for granted as an underlying principle of intelligibility, and turned to study different micro-sociologies or micro-anthropologies, understood as manifestations of the underlying whole - functioning as an ontological and epistemological principle in the same time.

In many fields of study, however, the concept of the cultural has been reexamined. Anthropology, in its experiential (As in V. Turner's works), postmodern, interpretative and historical turn has been on the cutting edge of social theory in this respect.

This paper wishes to examine - using the tools of the sociology of knowledge (Bourdieau, Latour, Lepenies etc) but also historiography (Koselleck, Pocock etc.) - the effects of the commitment to the secular nature of social knowledge. I wish to stress the problems this position entails for a comprehensivist sociology of knowledge in understanding populations whose lives are experienced as interactions with the divine or other forms of supra-human agency. The idea of variable ontologies is being used in an attempt to deal with the problem of how to meaningfully represent, or translate, this kind of implicit knowledge in a scientific idiom, whose historical pedigree is constructed on excluding various forms of that very knowledge. Can we use "social" or "cultural" outside the historical formation of the scientific discourse of the social sciences?

Various discourses can construct various subjectivities, the hybridization of knowledge happening at the border between scientific and non-secular is giving birth to ambiguous and apparently fragile identities having tough a high capacity of reinvention and being a privileged area for an ethnography of conflicting "systems of knowledge".