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- Convenors:
-
Anja Kirsch
(NTNU Trondheim)
Dirk Johannsen (University of Oslo)
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- Chair:
-
Anja Kirsch
(NTNU Trondheim)
- Discussant:
-
Alexandra Grieser
(Trinity College Dublin)
- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- Alfa room
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 6 September, -
Time zone: Europe/Vilnius
Short Abstract:
Do religious and secular people experience the world differently? The case studies of this panel discuss the epistemic affordance of modern Western conceptual binaries as emerging from prior shifts in regimes of attention.
Long Abstract:
Do religious and secular people experience the world differently? This panel discusses the epistemic affordance of modern Western conceptual binaries as emerging from prior shifts in regimes of attention. In identifying moments in history during which narrative cultures were decoupled or merged, we analyze narrative techniques, aesthetic scripts, and attentional protocols that formed new cultures of perception. Connecting conceptual history with cognitive (predictive processing) and discursive approaches, the presentations discuss three case studies that represent three stages of nineteenth-century conceptual differentiations and the nascent religious/secular episteme: (self-)mappings of utopian emigrants in the US and an emerging conceptual uncertainty regarding the nature of their endeavors before the religious/secular binary was epistemologically established; the entrenchment and subsequent naturalization of secularity as an encompassing cultural identity in the early Freethinker Movement; and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints' negotiations of religion and politics, resp. medicine documenting how conceptual differentiation became the foundation of practical politics at the turn of the century. The presentations are framed by a response that conceptualizes shifting plausibilities from the perspective of the aesthetics of religion.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 6 September, 2023, -Paper short abstract:
Based on the case of early 19th-century European emigrants in the US, this paper discusses how emigration can be seen as a paragon to study the emergence and formation of shifting plausibility structures in periods of fundamental reorientation.
Paper long abstract:
This presentation locates the emergence of the religious/secular divide in the swampy hinterlands of 1825 South-Western Indiana where encountering emigrant groups from Europe were puzzling over each other's worldviews and convictions. Their classificatory uncertainty was shared by the daily press that, fascinated by the colonies as models for the success or failure of future societies, soon started to argue about the true nature of the emigrant settlements. The interpretative spectrum was wide and featured many voices uttering conceptual uncertainty and confusion. These senses of ambiguity—a breach in expectation and sensed mismatch with former perceptions—announced semantic changes in the epistemological field in which existing terminologies were felt to be no longer sufficient.
Based on the case of early 19th-century European emigrants in the US, I will discuss how emigration can be seen as a paragon to study the emergence and formation of shifting plausibility structures in periods of fundamental reorientation; how people differentiated "religion" from "its other" before the modern religious/secular binary was available to them; and what vernacular classifications and classificatory uncertainties tell us about how modern taxonomies evolve and become plausible.
Paper short abstract:
The paper discusses the Scandinavian freethinker movement of the 1860s and 1870s. Constituted by the socialist workers' movement and the radical intelligence, the paper explores the rapidly changing plausibility structures by which secularity became a "modern" cultural identity.
Paper long abstract:
By the second half of the nineteenth century, the term «freethinker» which had denoted adherents of a «rational religion» or alternative faith was repurposed to denote proponents of radical secularism. In the Scandinavian countries, this radical secularism emerged at the interface of the socialist workers' movement and the radical intelligence. What it means to be secular was defined through socio-political opposition as much as through new literary aesthetics. By the early 1870s, the movement created a narrative culture that provided detailed scripts of how free thought was to be embodied, enacted, and used to engage with the world in a new way. Here, religious and secular people were presented as belonging to different species, marked by irreconcilable perceptions of the world. Using a cognitive history framework to approach the descriptive freethinker narratives presented in tabloids, literary works, polemics, and treatises as prescriptive attentional protocols, this paper explores the rapidly changing plausibility structures that allowed secularity to be developed into a decidedly "modern" cultural identity that "came natural."
Paper short abstract:
Drawing on the case of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, this paper analyzes conceptual negotiations of "religion" and "politics" resp. "medicine" at the turn of the 20th century and discusses the demarcation and intermingling of epistemic domains as relational processes.
Paper long abstract:
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (aka the "Mormons")—today a global and highly successful Christian denomination—was created in Upstate New York in the 1830s and settled in the Salt Lake region of modern Utah in the mid-1840s. Mormon mode of life and organizational structures in the Far West can be regarded as a social experiment at the crossroad of Christian restorationism and American utopianism. Yet, at the latest with the completion of the transcontinental railway in 1869, the Church was confronted with increased contact with "outsiders." Interaction at the local and national level forced its members to rethink their collective mode of living in view of new categories and distinctions, leading in some cases to tensions within the Church itself. Focusing on the political and medical domains, this paper discusses conceptual negotiations of "religion" and "politics" resp. "medicine" at the turn of the 20th century when compulsory vaccination became an issue of government policy, and the Mormons were challenged to legitimize their participation in national politics. On the theoretical level, the paper discusses the demarcation and intermingling of epistemic domains as relational processes.
Paper short abstract:
This response takes the concept of plausibility structures as a starting point to reflect on the case studies and approaches this panel presents. It asks how combining approaches may change how we think about the link between thinking and sensing and how individuals and social structures interact.
Paper long abstract:
The critique of secularization theories has challenged how we study the changes once subsumed under the heading of “modernization process”. Diverse attempts have been made to include body practices, perceptual orders, and cognitive models of how humans engage with the world. This response takes the concept of plausibility structures as a starting point to reflect on the case studies and approaches this panel presents, and asks what we can learn from them to understand better how the religious/ secular divide became part of what is possible to think, feel and sense in a given moment in history.