الشَّــــــــاذّ

"The development of nation states around the world over the last two centuries has been accompanied by violent attempts to overlook or erase national diversity within the boundaries of the state. The natural diversity of human culture has been manipulated and condemned by state leaders and by politicians seeking re-election, narrowing the limits of belonging and attempting to draw lines to distinguish those who are a part of “us” and those who are “not."

A “Persian” Iran?: Challenging the Aryan Myth and Persian Ethnocentrism

— 1 year ago with 77 notes

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#nation-states #modernity #I like this quote because it points out that all nation-states and nationalism work this way #GPOY

- Weeb Kean (2007) Christian Moderns: Freedom & Fetish in the Mission Encounter (p. 84).

The author tracks a genealogy of what Religion is, how we have come to understand the category in “The West” came to be, by looking at Dutch Calvinist missionary work in Indonesia. The Enlightenment also brought us the splitting of life into public and private sphere, and then relegating religion to the latter. The missionaries had to not only bring and teach religion to “the natives”, they had to create the category, along with the categories of public and private spheres. All this has become part and parcel of what being a “Modern” subject is.

— 1 year ago

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#webb keane #Christian Moderns #missionaries #modernity #secularism #power #Religion #Christianity

- Webb Kean (2007) Christian Moderns: Freedom & Fetish in the Mission Encounter (p. 91-92)

— 1 year ago with 1 note

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#webb keane #Christian Moderns #modernity #Religion #secularism

"The purposeful effort to become “modern,” as a moral project, can resemble that of religious conversion in certain respects. Both projects often propose to transform people by disabusing them from earlier errors and abstracting them from the constraints of former social entanglements. An examination of how this is supposed to happen, and the risks this project may involve, offers insights into some practices by which human subjects are, and are not, constituted."

Webb Keane (2007) Christian Moderns: Freedom & Fetish in the Mission Encounter. (p. 197)

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#webb keane #Christian Moderns #modernity #colonialism #Religion #secularism

"By the end of the nineteenth century, the decision of what to salvage in colonial societies commonly hinged on whether the practice of idea in question could be defined as culture, and therefore more or less harmless, or as false religion. In much of the colonial world, where the institutional distinctions among religious, juridical, and political domains familiar to Europeans did not exist, this decision required the active creation of conceptual categories."

Webb Keane (2007) Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter (p. 85).

I love this quote because it exposes one of the more subtle ways that colonialism (in this particular case Dutch missionaries in Indonesia) worked. They would carve the existence of the colonized into “culture” (i.e. things that didn’t offend Euro-Christian sensibilities) and those that did fell into “false religion.” In order to do so, the coloniser had to 1) create, then 2) impose the concepts of “religious, juridical, and political domains” onto the colonized. Creating concepts and domains in non-European societies that are based on European standards.

Think of this quote the next time you hear/read “political Islam,” a term used to indicate the (seemingly anomalous) political involvement of religion… two conceptually separate domains in Euro-Christianity, but that aren’t necessarily so in other societies.

— 1 year ago with 9 notes

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#Religion #colonialism #missionaries #modernity #webb keane

"The conceptual compartmentalization of religion accompanied the well-known political and institutional processes in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that produced the formal separation of church and state in the United States and Europe. Religion, in these narratives of modernity, does not necessarily disappear, but it finds its proper place, confined to the private sphere of interior belief, individuals, and the congregations they voluntarily form. For religion to maintain its proper place requires a vigilant policing of conceptual and, often, juridical boundaries. This policing, in turn, contributes to the configuring of religion as a knowledgeable entity, an object in the world, both for those who are religious and those who are not"

Webb Keane (2007) Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter (p. 84)

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#Calvenists #Christian Moderns #Indonesia #Missionaries #Religion #Webb Keane #modernity #secularism